Course Hero Website

Link courtesy of AjacentIdea (Ryan):  Is this the future of education?  Can open source be a helpful, yet fair (meaning “no plagarism”) asset to higher education?  How will this add or subtract to the experience of college?  high school?  life in general?  Is this synergistic or counterproductive?  And what about its ties to Facebook?

http://www.coursehero.com/ 

Digital Rights and University Electronic Reserves

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/17/gsu

A Press Revolt Against E-Packet Practices, April 17th, Inside Higher Ed article by Andy Guess

“For all the talk of textbooks with their hefty price tags, professors have always included other sources in their teaching material, whether in the form of journal articles, newspaper clippings, individual chapters or other media. For years, such disparate resources have come packaged in bound course packets. More recently, electronic reserves have in large part taken their place, allowing students to access digital copies of the same material through course management systems or their library Web sites…”

Then read the comments.  One in particular was interesting (to me):

“We don’t need them: The publishers may think we need them for journals, but with free software packages like Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, it’s possible for an academic department or organization to produce a journal with blind peer review without a lot of difficulty, and where the results are freely available to all:  http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs .. Steve Foerster, Director, E-Learning Services at Marymount University, at 10:25 am EDT on April 17, 2008″

Copywright ala Creative Commons

Isaac was kind enough to forward me this post:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works_7

“

The law automatically grants you full “copyright” over any creative work you make, including the stories you write, the pictures you draw, the music you record, the photos you take, and the video you capture. This means that unless you say otherwise, nobody may share your work or make changes to it.”

Now, don’t confuse this for legal advice.  But can you find any other sites that hint at the law?  Or perhaps spell it out?

Pick an app, any app, and rate it for class on 4/9/08

http://www.opensocialdirectory.org/wiki/List_of_Applications

Pick one and be prepared to discuss it in class on 4/9/08.  :)KMP

Google Code Blog

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/opensocial-foundation.html

An OpenSocial Foundation
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property. This foundation, modeled after the community-led and industry-supported OpenID Foundation, will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity. The establishment of the foundation is a necessary and exciting next step toward an open model for application syndication via an increasingly socially-enabled Internet, and we invite and encourage your involvement as we complete this process over the next several months.

Additionally we are pleased to be a part of the launch of opensocial.org, the new official home for the OpenSocial specifications and developer community. While we are still in the early stages of putting the new site together, we wanted to open the site and the process immediately for community feedback and review.

So please join us, Yahoo!, MySpace, and all of the other OpenSocial containers and application providers, in extending a warm welcome to the community in a spirit of collaboration and rapid iteration, as we move forward with the establishment of the OpenSocial Foundation and look ahead to the continued growth of the social web.

NYTimes: “Putting Innovation in the Hands of a Crowd”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/technology/03ecom.html?ex=1362286800&en=9ad3cb1ccaf0bdfc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

E-Commerce Report

Putting Innovation in the Hands of a Crowd

By BOB TEDESCHI

Published: March 3, 2008

If executives are going to rely on the wisdom of the masses for business help, it’s probably time the masses get a little compensation for it….That’s the theory behind Kluster, the newest in a lineup of companies using the Web to channel the collective wisdom of strangers into meaningful business strategies. With a cash reward system for contributors and a big beginning at the TED conference last week in Monterey, Calif., Kluster hopes to attract just enough visitors with just enough business smarts to gain early momentum….

Good Post on explanation of “Open Source”

Since we will be discussing this in its abstract (not programming-implementation form), I thought this blog posting would be helpful.  Especially for those of you who find our philosophical debates lacking in core content (*a shoutout to our programmers in the class):

http://www.opensourceconnections.com/2006/07/12/trying-to-explain-what-open-source-is/

Here are a couple articles related to both open source software, as well as the culture surrounding the open source world.

Open Source in the Public Interest

An Overview of Open Source License by American Bar Association

Open source software: A short interpretive history

The Cathedral and the Bazaar