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Tuesday, December 19, 2006 |
Australia Rules Linking to Copyright Material Also Illegal. An anonymous reader writes "A recent ruling in Federal court upheld the ruling that the operator and ISP that hosted the site 'mp3s4free.net' were guilty of copyright infringement violations because they provided access to the copyright material. From the article: 'Dale Clapperton, vice-chairman of the non-profit organization Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), explained the ruling as follows: "If you give someone permission to do something that infringes copyright, that in itself is infringement as if you'd done it yourself. Even if you don't do the infringing act yourself, if you more or less condone someone else doing it, that's an infringing act."'"[Slashdot]
1:53:20 PM  Google It!.
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Opera Running on the OLPC. An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation [~] no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent [~] the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"[Slashdot]
1:51:29 PM Google It!.
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Copyright Tool Scans Web For Violations. The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a tech start-up that proposes to offer the ultimate in assurance for content owners. Attributor Corporation is going to offer clients the ability to scan the web for their own intellectual property. The article touches on previous use of techniques like DRM and in-house staff searches, and the limited usefulness of both. They specifically cite the pending legal actions against companies like YouTube, and wonder about what their attitude will be towards initiatives like this. From the article: "Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as 'digital fingerprinting,' which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used. The content owners can then try to negotiate revenue from whoever is using it or request that it be taken down. In some cases, they may decide the content is being used fairly or to acceptable promotional ends. Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to specify how."[Slashdot]
1:49:45 PM Google It!.
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Pervasive News Proximity. McLuhan called it the global village; I refer to our times as being characterized by UCaPP - Ubiquitous Connectivity and Pervasive Proximity. In contrast to Gertrude Stein's famous "there is no there there," the UCaPP concept suggests that there is no there at all, since everywhere is here, that is, what happens there affects me in a real, complex - albeit indirect - way here. In my work, I speak of a Theory of Effects that necessitates stepping out of an ego-centric standpoint to (begin to) understand the totality of effects that we each enable and bring about around us. Think of it as a digiSelf out-of-body experience, during which we step out of ourselves into a cognitive anti-environment that allows us to observe all of - or at least more or - what we contribute to our complex world.The same thought processes and principles should apply to the newsmedia, as well. Although most of us are surrounded by more news and information than we can possibly assimilate in a conscious fashion ( What is the (Next) Message?, December 19, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
1:36:30 PM Google It!.
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Scholarpedia. I use Wikipedia often, along with many other online information tools, but Scholarpedia is new to me: Linux Insider's brief note and Peter Suber's Open Access News comments provide a quicky overview. The Scholarpedia introduction by the Editor in Chief, Dr. Eugene Izhekevick, describes the similarities and differences between Wikepedia and Scholarpedia. Worth visiting and checking back to see how this resource develops for academics and students; for now, the topics covered are confined to areas of computational science. ____JH
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Welcome to Scholarpedia, the free peer reviewed encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world.
Scholarpedia feels and looks like Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Indeed, both are powered by the same program - MediaWiki. Both allow visitors to review and modify articles simply by clicking on the edit this article link.
However, Scholarpedia differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways:
- Each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public).
- Each article is anonymously peer reviewed to ensure accurate and reliable information.
- Each article has a curator - typically its author -- who is responsible for its content.
- Any modification of the article needs to be approved by the curator before it appears in the final, approved version.
Herein also lies the greatest differences between Scholarpedia and traditional print media: while the initial authorship and review processes are similar to a print journal, articles in Scholarpedia are not frozen and outdated, but dynamic, subject to an ongoing process of improvement moderated by their curators. This allows Scholarpedia to be up-to-date, yet maintain the highest quality of content.
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Will Scholarpedia Pass or Fail? Linux Insider, December 17, 2006. Excerpt:
Have we reached another milestone in the evolution of academic publishing? Scholarpedia is the first "free peer-reviewed encyclopedia," a kind of morphing of open access (OA) publishing with wiki technology.
Initial reaction may be, not another Wikipedia wannabe!, especially as the ink is barely dry on Larry Sanger's Citizendium manifesto, which he describes as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. Scholarpedia could be very different, however....
Although suffering from a few gremlins when the blogosphere took a look, Scholarpedia could disrupt publishing models.
For a start, it takes the headache out of setting up and maintaining an online publishing operation for scholars inclined to develop their own OA journal....
Anyone can suggest changes to an article, and there's an anonymous forum for initial peer review. Scholarpedia appears far more inclusive than Citizendium and less obsessed with creating something worthy of "intellectuals."
With concerns continuing to mount about errors in Wikipedia (many put there for malicious reasons) and even hackers using it to hide malware, then something more managed and controlled like Scholarpedia may well be an answer to freely available scholarship online....
[Open Access News] Comment. Two quick ones: (1) Scholarpedia launched before Citizendium, by eight months, not after. (2) If Scholarpedia is superior to Wikipedia, then let's find a way to praise it, even as "an answer to freely available scholarship online", without leaving the false impression that the large and growing body of peer-reviewed OA literature suffers from the same problems as Wikipedia. [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
10:44:14 AM Google It!.
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UCLA to adopt Moodle. http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/
Tip of the blog-tam to Michael Penney for letting me know of the recent announcement that UCLA plans to adopt Moodle as its institution-wide learning and collaboration environment, while also pledging to "continue as a Sakai Foundation member and ... to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities ... on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions." Let us hope this latter comes true too - with the behemoth increasingly playing annoying content lock-in games, (more to come on this, don't you worry!) it bodes well for us all to have an increasingly healthy set of open source alternatives that can model non-predatory, open, interoperable solutions.
This is one new year's prediction I feel pretty safe making - that we'll see more and more institutions getting behind these and other open source CMS solutions in 2007 as they will be able to take advantage of the critical mass of adoption that built up in 2006 and avoid the "enterprise un-ready" FUD that major adopters like the Open University and Athabasca (amongst many more) have helped assuage. - SW[EdTechPost]
10:41:47 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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