Last year, we demoed DiscoverEd along with ODEPO at the Open Education Conference in Logan, Utah. CTO Nathan Yergler explained its various features and some if its issues. Since then, it’s been worked on extensively and some of its functionality has improved. We’ve even gone ahead and produced a white paper, which explains what DiscoverEd…

In New York this weekend? Head on over to NYC for the 1st Wiki-Conference.  Here are the details: The 1st Wiki-Conference New York will be held over the weekend of July 25-26 2009 at New York University, and hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City. The location for the conference is…

CIENTEC, the Foundation for the National Center for Science and Technology based in Costa Rica, has announced its XI (eleventh) annual National Science Essay contest (the second to come out in both English and Spanish). The contest is open to all high school students around the country, inviting them to write on this year’s theme,…

July 14 the Australian Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy released Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions under a CC BY-NC-ND licence. Many readers of this blog will be especially interested in the report’s section on open access to public sector information: An open access approach to the release of public sector information is…

As part of UNESCO’s World Conference on Higher Education, UNESCO hosted a session and panel discussion on open educational resources (OER). The topic of the conference was “The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research for Societal Change and Development,” and OER was considered an important dynamic in higher education. The conference took place over…

Beginning this past March, John Wood has written, recorded, mixed, and mastered an album a month. Distributed under the moniker Learning Music Monthly, the music arrives on the first of the month as CDs in subscribers’ mailboxes and MP3s in their digital lockers, all released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Offering a tiered subscription service…

President Obama announced yesterday the American Graduation Initiative, a twelve billion dollar plan to reform U.S. community colleges. The initiative calls for five million additional community college graduates by 2020, and plans that “increase the effectiveness and impact of community colleges, raise graduation rates, modernize facilities, and create new online learning opportunities” to aid this…

Museums, archives, and cultural institutions have been forced to re-examine their relationship with the digital presentation of public domain works in their collections. This has brought the issue of “copyfraud” to the forefront. Recently, the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) threatened legal action under UK law against a Wikipedia user for, among other things, copyright…

Caught an interesting NY Times post over the weekend about Riversimple, a British start-up that recently debuted a prototype of a two-seat hydrogen fuel cell car. There are several interesting things about Riversimple’s proposed business model – for instance, it plans to lease the car instead of sell it, and wants to employ a manufacturing…

Robot by genewolf CC BY-ND 2.0 After last week’s exciting announcement that Google Image search is now capable of filtering results by usage rights, we realized there is a lot of interest in how creators can signal their work as being CC-licensed to both humans and robots. Fortunately, CC has a solution for this that…