Open Access (OA) Initiatives in Scholarly Communication
Attend a lecture on open access (OA) initiatives in scholarly communication.
Carleton University Library invites you to attend a lecture by Andrew Waller on open access (OA) initiatives. Mr. Waller is the serials librarian in the Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary
Date: Monday, May 25, 2009
Time: 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
(Coffee, tea and light refreshments will be served at 8:30 a.m.)
Place: Library Staff lounge (Room 153), Carleton University Library
Over the past few years, staff at the Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary have been increasingly engaged in activities supporting open access (OA). These activities include installing and populating an institutional repository, now the second largest university repository in Canada; establishing an open access authors fund, which is designed to pay some submission fees for University of Calgary authors who publish in open access journals that charge such fees; and, most recently, creating a OA mandate for academic staff (librarians, archivists, and curators).
Mr. Waller will be discussing the background and implementation of open access projects at the university as well as the challenges associated with these initiatives.
Andrew Waller regularly writes and speaks on topics such as open access, licensing, e-journals, the effects of the U.S.A. Patriot Act and similar legislation on Canadian libraries and researchers, electronic resource management systems, and systematic downloading. He is the convener of the Canadian Library Association Collection Development and Management Interest Group, the Licensing & Access editor for the journal The Serials Librarian, and is part of the team that produces the OA Librarian blog.
For questions about this event, please contact Anita Hui, Head of Collection Development, Carleton University Library, at anita_hui@carleton.ca.
Google Street View – Ottawa
Google Street View is a popular feature in Google Maps and Google Earth that allows users to view panoramic pictures taken from street level of many cities in the United State, Europe and parts of Asia.
A great example of Street View is its use in Washington DC. Using it you can walk/drive the streets of the US capital and explore the exterior architecture of monuments, landscaping as get a scope of the city.
Google just recently announced plans to expand the feature to Canadian cities, including Ottawa.
Privacy groups have concerns with Google Street View as images of people are often included, occasionally in unflattering or compromising situations. Google is addressing some of these concerns by removing pictures (by request) and by blurring faces and license plates of cars.
So how could Google Street View can be used in teaching and learning? Some ideas:
1) It could be used as part of an assignment; i.e. travel to a city and create a virtual field trip for classmates.
2) It can be used to build community; particularly when teaching a class with new Canadians and/or ESL learners i.e. encourage students to send you a link to the street view of their community, favorite restaurant, or have them show their community/home town in class.
3) A source for learning about city planning, landscaping, spatial relationships, and architecture.
4) Foster a discussion on privacy. Should Google be allow to do what it is doing? What are the concerns?
5) Use it to foster discussions around social issues and equity i.e. Locations for low income housing in relation to city services.
6) Tour historical areas, i.e. walk the hot spots of the French revolution in Paris.
WebCT Student Support
The WebCT Student Support site has been updated. If you find your students having difficulty navigating WebCT, you can direct them to this intuitive support site. They’ll have access to step-by-step instructions, as well as video tutorials detailing the functions of a number of the most commonly used tools in WebCT.
The site shows how students can stay organized with the Calendar tool, how to keep a constant communication link between you, their classmates and TAs using the Discussion and internal e-mailing tool, or how they can access the grades you release to them after each assignment.
Neither you or your students want to be bothered by any additional problems, which is why this one stop information site maybe invaluable. Any unanswered questions can be addressed using the available contact information on the site.
Go wireless @ 11 other Canadian Universities
If you’ve checked the available wireless connections at Carleton on your computer lately, you’ll notice that there’s been a new addition to the family. Carleton’s new wireless network called Eduroam is been appropriately named because it allows students from 12 Canadian universities (9 confirmed including Carleton, 3 finalizing details) to access each other’s wireless networks when visiting another campus. It relieves the inconvenience of having to obtain guest permissions to access the internet at another institution’s campus simply because you’re not employed or enrolled there.
On a broader level, Eduroam highlights on their website that now host 450 wireless institutional participants in 250 countries of Europe, Asia and Australia. Carleton for one offers the same industry-standard encrypted Internet access for its Eduroam network as it does for CU-Wireless, although users should still be vigilant towards online threats.
Generally the same staff and student login credentials apply as you would normally enter on any of Carleton’s other two mainstream wireless networks, except for Eduroam your entire address must be inputted: for staff, enter your entire cunet email address (username@cunet.carleton.ca) and cunet password in the following field, and for students you should enter your entire connect email address (username@connect.carleton.ca) followed by your usual MyCarleton password.
It doesn’t take much convincing to know that there are serious benefits here. By deploying a wireless Internet utopia across a dozen universities (for starters) across the country, staff and visiting professors can gain immediate access to campuses’ wireless services simply by proving their national academic status; students can also take advantage of online services offered by their sister universities to peer conference and conduct research on the fly. What better way to encourage mLearning practices than to provide accommodation for mobile learning devices, not to mention the added ability for wireless academic collaboration, web conferencing, and other ways of communicating that was not possible before.
Sketching The 3D World
If you haven’t used Google SketchUp yet, you should give version 7 a try. They have made the latest version even easier to use. Create 3D models of cars, spaceships, buildings, or even your own inventions using the intuitive program. As a first time user, it wasn’t long before I was ignoring the start-up tips and exploring the tools for myself. Compared to other graphical editing programs such as AutoCAD and ProE, which have an abundance of features that often require some form of training to use, Sketchup’s design is simple, powerful and doesn’t use an abundance of resources to run on your computer. For your first time, try making a 3D model of your house simply by importing a 2D picture of it and tracing the outline. You can even take images from Google Earth using the same method, make a 3D model of it, then export them back into Google Earth.
Aside from Sketchup being a useful tool for the average computer user, it has also been used for educational purposes. Using a downloadable ad-on to Sketchup called Sketchyphysics2, Mexico State University students created a 3D model of a Chile Cleaner. The model gave the engineers an outline of what needed to be built and developed a virtual walk through of the design so many of the problems could be worked out before construction. This video shows the capabilities of the software.
Every year Google runs an International Model your Campus competition. Using Sketchup, students from various disciplines get together and model their university’s campus. These models are then uploaded into Google Earth for anyone to see. Although Carleton University’s campus is large, it would not be impossible to design in 3D using the latest version of Sketchup. It would be a fun and engaging opportunity for design, architecture, computer science and other students who are interested in designing. Similar projects were submitted to Google’s case studies page.
Although Sketchup is already at it’s 7th version, we still have yet to see the extent of it’s capabilities as more and more people discover it. With user’s as young as 5 years old who are creating relatively complex models, it would be no suprise to find Sketchup on every computer in the near future. As Google states, “we think that SketchUp has a place in every classroom, dorm room and student laptop in the world. After all – we live in 3D. Why shouldn’t we start thinking and teaching that way?”
We will write more posts in the future on some ideas and examples of how you might incorporate Sketchup into your course. Take a look at the case studies submitted by SketchUp users whose work is representative of SketchUp in Higher Education.
Open CourseWare
In conjunction with initiatives like open source textbooks, many higher education institutions are now participating in open ‘courseware’. As with open source text books, the purpose of open courseware is to provide universally accessible course material, for free.
Two institutions leading the charge are MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Yale. The methods used by these two universities use are very different, but both share the same goal, to share the best they have to offer with the world.
MIT has perhaps the most robust open courseware program, with 1800 individual courses represented. The collection of content for each course does vary however. For the majority of courses, all resources are available, from lecture notes, slide presentation, reading materials, to exams, answer sheets, and exemplars of student work. Some course may have more or less, but every course has valuable material, which is sure to be appreciated by those interested in the content area.
While the program offered by Yale, “Open Yale Courses“, is more modest in scope, (currently only 15 courses are offered across a variety of departments, but Yale has impressive expansion plans) I believe that Yale holds the superior model. For every course they offer, a complete video archive of all lectures is available (which can be streamed in a variety of formats very similar to Carleton’s CUTV VOD service). Also, mp3 audio files of all lectures, text transcripts as well as a list of readings and exams are available.
I feel I must reiterate what will become very quickly apparent when looking at either the MIT or Yale open courseware material, that is that there no credit is available through the issuing institution of the content. While this may seem obvious to some, it is an important point, and the most frequently asked question about open courseware.
Open courseware is a great opportunity not just for education enrichment at one’s own pace, but also a great way to see what some of the top professors in two of the best universities are doing: how and what they teach their students. Myself, I am currently enjoying Yale’s Philosophy 176 – Death as taught by Shelly Kagan, a fantastic professor and author of Normative Ethics, a text book for a number of my past courses.
Check it out!
Educational Development Centres
The Educational Development Centre (EDC) at Carleton University is connected with teaching centres across the country. It is always beneficial to see what educational centres in other institutions have to offer. Most of them provide useful publications and online recourses available on their websites that may be of interest.
If you want to check their websites, the University of Kansas has provided a Web page with a list of these centers around the world categorized by continents and countries.
Here is another link that may be of interest:
Hofstra University’s webpage listing Teaching & Learning Centres only in the United States
Technology Showcase Series: Clickers!
I am pleased to inform you that the EDC is getting ready to kick off it’s second season of the Technology Showcase Series. As some of you may be aware, the Technology Showcase Series has been developed as a number of sessions, generally occurring monthly, designed to showcase new and innovative technology in relation to teaching and education. Presented by Carleton faculty, and taking place in our fantastic EDC training room, instructors will not only enjoy a light lunch, but will gather together and experience the future of teaching, gaining insight into how they may be able to incorporate what they have seen into their classrooms.
Previous showcase sessions have covered varied topics including new methods of communicating with students using social networking sites, such as Facebook and instant messaging programs such as Microsoft’s MSN. This lecture not only showed how instructors could more easily and efficiently converse with students, but also explored how learning could become more of a community event. Other past sessions have focused on the creation of group projects. Strengths and weakness of group projects were examined, and attendees were given “effective strategies for developing, organizing, and overseeing highly individualized creative group projects.” The final previous session I will mention here focused on Second Life, a multi-use virtual environment that has enjoyed massive popularity. This session explored how virtual environments could be used in education. As you can see, the possibilities for educational technology are seemingly endless.
That said, the EDC is please to begin it’s new season with Dr. David Dean, Professor of History. Dr. Dean’s presentation, “The Clicker Challenge: Using Clickers in the History Classroom” will walk you through his decision to use clickers in a second year European History survey course. Discussing the problems encountered, the solutions he found and the learning opportunities created, Dr. Dean will provide an honest and relevant case of the use of clickers in the classroom, and will, no doubt, share insights on how to incorporate this technology into your classroom. (For those of you who might not know what I am referring to when I say clickers, think of a hand-held polling device similar to what would be used in a situation similar to the “Poll the Audience” life line on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” where student are able to respond to questions asked by the instructor, the results displayed instantly. See our previous blog post “Click to Engage“)
Flatworld Knowledge – Open Textbooks
In continuation with our series on open textbooks, I am very excited to introduce you all to Flatworld Knowledge. If you have yet to hear about this organization, let me tell you, it is a BIG deal! Like other sites we have discussed before, its model is similar, to make textbooks freely available to all. What makes Flatworld Knowledge different, however, its level of organization, and ambitious goals.
Between Jeff Shelstad and Eric Frank, over 30 years of experience in higher education publishing is brought to the table. These guys know how to get information out into the world. These guys know how to find and develop content, they know the world of both the student and the writers. Jeff Shelstad and Eric Frank know how to make open source a reality.
Other open source text sites, like those we have promoted before are great, really and truly. However, it seems, at least to me, that they cannot even be considered in the same breath as what is proposed by Flatworld Knowledge. I say “proposed” because as of this point in time, Flatworld Knowledge is still setting up shop, but a little more on that later. I believe that Flatworld’s philosophy is best stated on their site, where it reads:
“We preserve the best of the old – books by leading experts that are rigorously reviewed and developed to the highest standards. Then we flip it all on its head. Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students – print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more. Our books are open for instructors to mix, mash, and make their own. Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.
Flat World Knowledge. Because great minds are evenly distributed. Great textbooks are not. Until now…”
So right from the outset, Flatworld has a clear plan or acquiring material and developing it in the same manner as it would be if it were to be made into a commercial text. This model answers a lot of criticisms of traditional Open Source thinking regarding the quality of information. Then this material is made available for free online. Here though, is were Flatworld starts to get really interesting, from the word “go” Flatworld will be able to offer on demand printing (in black and white, or color for slightly greater cost) for students who would still prefer to have a hard copy of the text. Also, Flatword has previsions for students who would like audio versions of the text. On top of this is the social networking component, which effectively links anyone, anywhere who is studying the same topic, and provides a system by which these people can share are learn from each other.
So, Christmas for student, right? If your an instructor, don’t feel left out, that big present hiding behind the tree is all yours. Two words, “Adopt It.” After you (the instructor) have searched Flatworld’s data base, and found material pertinent to your course, you can “adopt it” and from here do with it as you wish. Add, subtract, edit on a word by word basis, find all associated supplements, order print off or have your unique version sent to the printers and made into books; make it your own.
So now, like me your saying, “This is amazing, it will change everything! How do I start!” Sadly, this is were I must deliver the devastating news that Flatworld Knowledge is not open to the public. Yet. January 2009, that is when Flatworld Knowledge goes live, and the revolution begins. That said, you can be assured that we will provide a comprehensive review at that time.
Until January, I strongly encourage you to visit Flatworld Knowledge, watch the videos on the main page, explore the site, and I guarantee you will see what has me so excited, and why I think Flatworld will be like nothing we have seen before.
In the future, the world is flat.
Textbook and Technology Grant
Welcomed news for University Students!
In response to rising textbook costs on campuses across Ontario, the Provincial Government has established a new grant to help full time students pay for books and technology essential to continued success. This grant, which must be applied for through the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP), will provide students with $150 in the 2008-2009 academic year, and “will increase to $300 per year, when fully implemented.”
Please tell all the students you know about this great grant. For more information, and to apply for this grant, please click here.
