Adopt a Classroom!

Posted by Danny on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 5:33 pm

I recently attended my first research meeting hosted by Clare Brett, which concluded with a discussion about the problem of sustaining online communities that form around distance education classes after they’ve ended.  It was mentioned that students often request the spaces and accounts remain open so that shared resources, links, and discussion transcripts continue to be accessible (and long-distance friendships continue to be facilitated), but inevitably and usually quickly, attendance dies away and the community effectively dissolves.

This might not be such a tragedy—these environments came into being to serve a particular purpose, as did the communities that formed within those virtual spaces, and upon completion the students who took part supposedly (hopefully) achieved the growth of skills, experience, and knowledge they came for.  Nonetheless, even if everyone was given a complete transcript of all posts, chats, documents, and perhaps even the contact information of the other students, there would be a sense of loss when the doors finally closed.  Without the physical infrastructure and associated costs necessary to maintain these virtual spaces, those doors probably could be kept open.  So why, ultimately, isn’t this successful?

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Free eBooks and Ways to Find Them

Posted by Danny on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:06 am

If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).

They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.

In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:

Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.

Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.

Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press.  I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.

SpringerLink Bonanza!

Posted by Danny on Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:38 pm

This is all Stian’s fault.

Students of the University of Toronto are probably familiar with MyAccess, a sort of meta-webpage that pops up when they want to access normally restricted and proprietary resources (journal databases like JSTOR or Eric, for example) and allows them to log into those websites using their individual UofT passwords. Essentially, we need to prove that we’re associated with the university, and then, if the university has purchased a subscription to the resource, we get access.

Normally, the process involves finding the specific resource by going through our library website, into a directory of eResources, and then navigating to the one we want. This can be particularly tiresome if we’ve found a specific article that we’d like to read through an aggregate search engine like Google Scholar, because we can sit and sadly paw at the database displaying precisely the resource we’d like to access, but in order to convince it that we’re legitimate, we need to leave, log into the UofT Library page, and then find our way back again. This annoyed Stian and inspired him to put together a dandy little bookmarklet[1] which pulls up the MyAccess interface for a web-based resource regardless of whether you’ve navigated there through the UofT library system (and gives you a plain 404 not-found error if you try to use it on a resource that we don’t subscribe to). It’s very, very convenient for snapping up articles found during broad-sweeping Google Scholar searches, and can be a fun toy to try when you find yourself in a restricted space as a result of general browsing. Read more »