Education Freedom: Growth of FOSS and Sharing (e.g. Open Access) in Educational Institutes
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-11 14:23:32 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-11 14:23:32 UTC
Education
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Responding to student interest and a growing industry demand for workers with such skills, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is launching the nation’s first interdisciplinary minor in free and open source software and free culture.
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Responding to student interest and a growing industry demand for workers with such skills, Rochester Institute of Technology is launching the nation’s first interdisciplinary minor in free and open source software and free culture.
Starting in Fall 2014, RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media will offer the minor in free and open source software (FOSS) and free culture for students who want to develop a deep understanding of the processes, practices, technologies, and financial, legal and societal impacts of the FOSS and free culture movements.
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With its continued focus on education, Google has launched Oppia (beta). The Open Source project is a free educational tool that lets anyone create online educational activities through the web interface. Interactivity is its strong suit. The interactive activities are called “explorations”.
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Whatever you may have heard about hackers, the truth is they do something really, really well: discover. Hackers are motivated, resourceful, and creative. They get deeply into how things work, to the point that they know how to take control of them and change them into something else. This lets them re-think even big ideas because they can really dig to the bottom of how things function.
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Schools in Romania are letting laptops gather dust, because the teachers don't know how to use Linux, the Romanian TV station Pro TV reports. Last year, supermarket chain Profi donated laptops running the Edubuntu Linux distributions to schools. In at least one of these schools, the laptops are still in the box and other schools have replaced the software by proprietary alternatives.
Open Access
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The Tullahoma City School system has already made a considerable investment of time and energy into developing open source textbooks, and plans are in place to expand the program in the coming months.
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Joining a herd of other scientific societies, today AAAS (publisher of ScienceInsider) announced that it will launch the organization’s first online, fully open-access journal early next year. The new journal, called Science Advances, will give authors another outlet for papers that they are willing to pay to make immediately free to the public.
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Less than a week after AAAS, Science’s publisher, announced the launch of its first open-access online journal, Science Advances, Britain’s Royal Society has done the same. Royal Society Open Science, slated for launch later this year, will “provide a scalable publishing service, allowing the Society to publish all the high quality work it receives without the restrictions on scope, length or impact imposed by traditional journals,” a statement issued today says. The journal will cover life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.
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SEVEN MONTHS ago I showed that Elsevier “open access” CC-BY papers were incompetently labelled (see http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/08/12/elsevier-charges-to-read-openaccess-articles/ and following blog posts), and under “Rights and Permissions” charging huge amounts of money.
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