Great videos

Regards
James

Free, open-source alternatives are always better because they usually allow the users to be in control of their information and privacy instead of walling it off from the rest of the world without consent.

Once RDF and RDFa become more wide-spread most of the “data-silo” companies such as Facebook will likely loose many of their visitors or fall apart as the newer versions of web-services decentralize and become more user-friendly.

Also, there was an article recently mentioning how the European Union wants to declare a law giving people the ‘right to be forgotten.’ Many companies will hold on to your information; even after we leave them, and this is currently without our say in the matter.

Freedom.Fighter: The music was mentioned as “(1) The melody in GMTA”.

That means using Identi.ca instead of Twitter even though it is »ugly«, Diaspora instead of Facebook even though it is buggy, OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps even though it does not have reviews, SparkleShare instead of Dropbox even though it is in beta, …

But the free projects have their advantages; to mention only two: you can view your Identi.ca stream without logging in (useful for internet cafés etc.) and OpenStreetMap has an awesome cycle map!

And it is this fuzzy feeling that I get when I am using free projects, particularly when I contributed to them and know that if there is something wrong, I can fix it.

It really all boils down to:
»when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.«
– _why the lucky stiff, http://favstar.fm/users/_why/status/881768089

So, let’s educate others about free alternatives.

It used to be that if there were acquaintances/friends of friends that we wanted to stay in touch with, we needed to actively try and stay in touch. Now, you just look at your news feed to see if they’ve been up to anything, you don’t actually talk to them. It’s almost like… stalking. You find out news from the equivalent of the grape vine – but it someone’s important enough that you want to know about their life, they should be important enough to actually talk to in order to find out.

I took a break from facebook because I ended up single and I just didn’t want to deal with FB (and him) anymore – and it turned into my English independent study (essaying about my facebook free semester) and I’m honestly wondering why I should bother going back. I’m actually less stressed and no longer feel the need to sit and facebook and see what people are up to.

Facebook is a false sense of intimacy, hope and community. I’ve chosen to replace it with a real sense of intimacy, hope and community. That, and I no longer spend hours on Farmville.

What concerns me very much is that there is very little coordination across the globe in tackling the very real issue of grossly unfair copyright laws. Unfortunately, most counties are signatories to the 1886 Berne Copyright Convention and a much more coordinated approach is needed if ever this treaty were to be changed for the better. I’ve little idea how the problem can be approached in any really effective way.

I do my bit by posting the arguments on popular computer (IT) sites such as ‘The Register’ but these posts lose position after a day so the hits become insignificant very quickly. Moreover, such posts have to be full of hyperbole or no one will read them. What’s needed is not hyperbole a good resource site where all the solid facts and arguments about unfair copyright laws can be collated and evaluated.

If anyone is interested in why I consider copyright law is unfair then you’ll find them here (remember, these are user feedback posts to news articles so they won’t make much sense w/o the main article (but they’re available by backtracking).

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/659154
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/819107
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/797243
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/728995
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/696076
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/728995

Regards,

gw

“an initiative to increase collaboration, sharing, and openness at the level of higher education”

http://www.biomedsearch.com

The site is free, and perhaps the most comprehensive biomedical site on the web. It has all PubMed and MedLine documents, plus mililons more including full-text journal articles and a large database of theses and dissertations.

And, you don’t have to register but if you do you can use portfolios to save documents, share documents (and comment on them) between users, and set up automatic alerts.

Libraries still need to pay for materials in their collections. There isn’t an absence of scarcity as you suggest in this posting, digitalization has actually increased the scarcity of a very important thing called money. Establishing the rights to digitally provide access to materials that aren’t open works is extremely costly, and those costs are rising as publishers link more digital works into packages so that you can’t buy individual works or databases.

I understand your concern of the invasion of privacy resulting from DRM technology venders impose, but you are misinterpreting the way this market works. Your proposal serves only to weaken the position of the library. Libraries don’t hold as much financial buying power over publishers as you seem to believe they hold. Because libraries don’t increase publishers sales in any direct way, no profitable organization is going to be concerned about the embargo of an entity that is designed to provide free access to the materials they are attempting to profit from.

Where IT is being used for the business of an institution there is often no choice – sorry, not practical affordable or existing choice except to use proprietry software. Many of the business management systems used in HE only exist in HE, have a very small market, and lack the general community which is vital for OSS to be practical. So, while an institution could initiate writing their own OSS solutions, unless many of them contributed, it would rapidly become unsustainable.

I would extend that to software used for the business of the institution further too and include infrastructure, office products etc too – while OSS alternatives do exist, the skills to implement, support, and maintain tend to attract much higher salaries as they are less common in the Market place, thus making proprietry choices the only pragmatic ones for most institutions.

However, this does not need to affect the teaching and learning activities or research conducted….although, often research relies on proprietry equipment and software too simply because that’s the only source available in some niche fields.

Then there the openess of the Internet – which I hope wouldn’t include expectations to compromise security and resiliance in the drive for ‘open’ access? Clearly, one persons ‘openess’ is smothers opportunity to exploit…so systems need to be designed to protect themselves and the users, while also leaving things as open as practically possible. I just hope it’s realised just how un-’open’ to some uses things have to be though.

So, while this is an admirable aspiration and any compromises need to be justified when institutions take them, I’m not actually sure how practical it would be to get very close. We shall see I suppose.

(type on phone so not spel chekd etc)

ttfn

Open Source Education for the 21st Century

Best,

Joe Brewer
Director, Cognitive Policy Works

firstly, the government is (should be?) controlled by the population as a right, whereas Google is controlled by its shareholders as a pay-to-play;

secondly, Google only exists because government passed laws that allow corporations to exist, so any data that Google gets is data that government automatically gets if it wants anyway. If Google really upsets a goverment, it can just change the law to kill it.

Douglas Fevens
Halifax, Nova Scotia
The University of Wisconsin, Google, & Me

SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university’s potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university’s total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals’ contents are otherwise accessible to a university’s users. In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable. Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.

I also hope that SFC would be interesting in integrating into the OER movement.