Posts by Timothy Vollmer
eSchools News reports that the state of Florida has recently added the open content reading website Free-Reading.net to its list of approved curriculum resources. Officials said Free-Reading.net is the first open instructional program granted bona fide state approval, and OER supporters see momentum building in the idea that a “public, collaborative, continuously modified online curriculum…
Congratulations to the winners of the first annual SPARKY Awards. The SPARK(IES) challenge entrants “to imaginatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas and information.” Check out the winning videos over at Blip.tv. “Share” – Habib Yazdi, CC BY “Pri Vetai: Private Eye” – Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, CC BY “An…
Cory Doctorow has completed recording an audiobook version of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. This important book captures the rise of the hacker subculture and documents the beginnings of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow spent the last year recording installments of the book, releasing incremental podcasts on his…
In December we reported on the great news that MIT’s Open CourseWare initiative had released their 1,800th course, thereby publishing the entire MIT curriculum on OCW. MIT has now released comprehensive video recordings of the celebratory event, all published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The keynote address was given by New York Times…
With the advent of more ebook reading devices, sites like Manybooks.net are providing a useful service in transforming digital materials into a variety of electronic formats that can be read by several different ebook readers and mobile devices. All of the 19,000+ ebooks on Manybooks are available for free. Many works are originally sourced from…
