Although we’ve already had a weekend plus a Monday to digest COSL’s Open Ed ’08, the events from the conference and general good feeling inspired by speakers and individual conversations still drives us forward into the week and the beginning of next month. This year’s conference featured several notable speakers; the keynotes themselves were given…

H-Net is “an international consortium of scholars and teachers…[creating] and [coordinating] Internet networks with the common objective of advancing teaching and research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. H-Net is committed to pioneering the use of new communication technology to facilitate the free exchange of academic ideas and scholarly resources.” Recently, H-Net took a step…

ccLearn has re-opened the search for a ccLearn counsel. Note that the job title has been changed from the previous search to better reflect our high priority for someone with relevant and reasonably deep experience in intellectual property and copyright law. Though we had many superlative candidates for our initial round, we found that no…

is now an entirely different process. The University of Michigan is the first university to have installed the Espresso Book Machine, also termed “the ATM of books,” in one of its libraries. The wait time is about the same, but you’re ordering books now instead of Italian coffee, and the product price is a bit…

is the new publication by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and MIT Press exploring “the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education.” Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge is a collection of thirty essays written by leaders in the open…

Emulating MIT and a host of other OCW institutions, the Stanford School of Engineering has jumped on the OER bandwagon by releasing ten of its courses online in multiple formats. The pilot open courseware portal, known as Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), is Stanford’s first move towards offering full-length course videos and other materials online for…

There’s been a whole lot of press on open textbooks lately, in addition to my own posts on the Flexbook and the Student PIRGs’ recent report encouraging open source textbooks as the right model for digital textbooks (versus the limited e-books that commercial publishers currently offer). The difference in open source and commercial e-books is…

This month, the American Society of Cell Biology’s iBioSeminars added twelve new seminars to its original repertoire of twenty. The new seminars explore in depth topics such as “Odorant and Pheromone Signaling” and “Telomeres, Aging, and Cancer.” If you didn’t know already, iBioSeminars is the ASCB’s web seminar series featuring world-class scientists’ “on-going research in…

We’ve all heard of the textbook. Some of us have read one or two in school. Others of us have stared blankly at pages filled with outdated information. Still, others of us are more resourceful and have used the bulky things to prop up rickety ends of tables. But all of us have had to…

The JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) is a JISC funded service that has long been researching educational technology and covering the field’s latest developments under a CC BY-NC-SA license. One of their latest publications is a briefing paper on open educational resources (OER) titled, “Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and…