OU makes e-Books available on iTunes - 10/29/2010 Friday 29 October 2010 15:55 The Open University has made 100 e-Books available on iTunes, with a further 200 to come by the end of 2010. OU eBook content comes from the OU's OpenLearn website, which contains over 6,600 hours of free course materials. Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of The Open University, said, "The way students choose to learn is changing. "When it comes to mobile learning, OU e-Books will give students everywhere more choice than ever between the formats they prefer." According to research from The British Library, by 2020 just 25% of all titles worldwide will be published only in print form. Email Alerts Register now to receive ComputerWeekly.com IT-related news, guides and more, delivered to your inbox. By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners.
The Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age by Maria Popova What legal anachronism has to do with Bob Dylan, Picasso and Family Guy. We’re big proponents of remix culture here because at the core of our mission lies the idea that creativity is merely the ability to combine all the existing pieces in our head — knowledge, memory, inspiration — into incredible new things. Last year, we featured a brilliant panel with Shepard Fairey and CreativeCommons founder Lawrence Lessig titled Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, followed closely by the excellent documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Today, we bring you Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age — a new documentary from Yale Law & Technology, offering 24 densely compelling minutes of insight into various facets of intellectual property in the age of remix. Let’s just take Bob Dylan or somebody like that, whom we take for granted. For those of us living on the remix side of things, the film’s thesis is hardly groundbreaking. Share on Tumblr
Loose ties vs. strong: Pinyadda’s platform finds that shared interests trump friendships in “social news” There isn’t a silver bullet for monetizing digital news, but if there were, it would likely involve centralization: the creation of a single space where the frenzied aspects of our online lives — information sharing, social networking, exploration, recommendation — live together in one conveniently streamlined platform. A Boston-based startup called Pinyadda wants to be that space: to make news a pivotal element of social interaction, and vice versa. Think Facebook. Meets Twitter. Meets Foursquare. Owned by Streetwise Media — the owner as well of BostInnovation, the Boston-based startup hub — Pinyadda launched last year with plans to be a central, social spot for gathering, customizing, and sharing news and information. Again, centralization. What Pinyadda’s designers have discovered, though, is that “social” news doesn’t necessarily mean “shared with friends.” The idea, in other words, was to take a holistic approach to monetization.
Facebook’s Social Inbox Wants to Take Over Your Email: Tech News « Updated. Facebook was widely expected to launch a new email service this morning, but what the company announced was much broader than email — CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it is a single “social inbox” for every kind of communication that people use online or from their mobile phones, including email, SMS, instant messaging and Facebook chat messages. Zuckerberg said that the company has tried to build what he called a “modern messaging system” that is lightweight and easy to use, and offers a number of features that blend the usability of email and the benefits of other systems such as Facebook chat, instant messaging and SMS. The three main features of the new service include: A seamless messaging system: Facebook’s social inbox handles email, but also SMS and IM. Users will be able to have facebook.com email addresses, Zuckerberg says, “but this is not email — I don’t even think email will be the primary way people communicate.” “I said ‘what do you mean, it’s instantaneous!’
Can Twitter Make You Smarter? Can using Twitter make you smarter? A new semester-long study found that college students who used Twitter for educational purposes earned GPAs a half-point higher than a non-tweeting control group. In a group of 125 students at an anonymous medium-sized public college in the Midwest, 70 students used Twitter to access information and complete class assignments; the remaining 55 students used a more typical Internet-based course-management system and billboard. Some early-adopting professors have advocated experimenting with Twitter in the classroom -- "essentially asking students to pass notes during class,” as the Chronicle of Higher Education once put it. Meanwhile, to the dismay of more traditional professors, students can point to a new justification for pulling out smartphones in class. [Image: Andrew Hur]
The Case For Social Media in Schools A year after seventh grade teacher Elizabeth Delmatoff started a pilot social media program in her Portland, Oregon classroom, 20% of students school-wide were completing extra assignments for no credit, grades had gone up more than 50%, and chronic absenteeism was reduced by more than a third. For the first time in its history, the school met its adequate yearly progress goal for absenteeism. At a time when many teachers are made wary by reports of predators and bullies online, social media in the classroom is not the most popular proposition. Teachers like Delmatoff, however, are embracing it rather than banning it. They argue that the educational benefits of social media far outweigh the risks, and they worry that schools are missing out on an opportunity to incorporate learning tools the students already know how to use. What started as a Facebook-like forum where Delmatoff posted assignments has grown into a social media component for almost every subject. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Top Trends of 2010: Social Shopping In 2010, we've seen the rise of so-called "social shopping" services. They rely heavily on technologies such as social networking, crowdsourcing and smart phone scanners. Here we present five of the main social shopping developments of 2010. The Web has of course always had an impact on shopping, from the dot.com flame and burns (Boo.com anyone?) ReadWriteWeb's 2010 In Review: Daily Deals One of the biggest success stories of 2010 has been daily deals provider Groupon. Why has social software caught on with shopping? Groupon isn't the only game in town for daily deals - we mentioned some of its competitors in September. Real-Time Social Shopping In June, Amazon bought online auction phenomenon Woot. Woot's core service is to offer one highly discounted item for sale each day, until either time or inventory runs out. Location Check-ins Location has been a big trend this year and it affected the shopping sector too (indeed, some would say that the future of location apps is shopping).
The ethics of content theft in a digital world Here’s a simultaneously wry and astute post from novelist Philip Palmer about the publishing industry’s new here-to-stay bugbear, digital piracy. What I like most about it is the blend of idealism and honesty; rather than simply stating that Piracy Is Wrong And Evil And Makes Jeebus Cry, he’s willing to objectively assess his own moral code as applied to evading cost on the media he wishes to consume. Before we get to the meat, though, I’m going to call out one item for criticism, because it’s such a well-used semantic straw man that by this point that it gets repeated as a matter of fact: … there are many thoughtful individuals out there, possessed of shitstorm-generating superpowers, who do believe that EVERYTHING SHOULD BE FREE ON THE WEB. I tend to think of this as The Doctorow Rejoinder, because it’s usually Cory that’s the target (implied or otherwise) of that complaint. I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s nothing new under the sun. Be Sociable, Share!
Use of Social Network Sites and Instant Messaging ... [Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. 2010] - PubMed result The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen published this piece in the November/December 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs. It was a notable step up from the “Cyberspace and Democracy” article in the same issue. In any case, Eric and Jared address the same core questions I am writing my dissertation on so here’s my take on what they had to say. I far prefer the term “connection technologies” over “liberation technologies”. I also appreciate the authors’ emphasis on the diffusion of power via mini-rebellions as opposed to full-out regime change and overnight transitions to democracy. Any serious student or practitioner of strategic nonviolent action knows full well that power is not monolithic but defuse—even in the most autocratic regimes. This is why power is necessarily diffuse in every single society. Manifestations of disobedience are most powerful when public, which is where mini-rebellions come in. There are two principles of strategic planning: Like this: Like Loading...