TL INFOBITS February 2007 No. 8 ISSN: 1931-3144 About INFOBITS INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning division. Each month the ITS-TL's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators. NOTE: You can read the Web version of this issue at http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/bitfeb07.php. You can read all back issues of Infobits at http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/. ...................................................................... Sharable Course Content Website New Journal on Information Literacy Higher Education Copyright Blog Launched Comic Book on Copyright Law Technology and Lifelong Learning University Press Statement on Open Access Scholarly Publishing Infobits Tag Cloud Recommended Reading ...................................................................... SHARABLE COURSE CONTENT WEBSITE Connexions is an "environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web." Connexions was founded in 1999 by Richard Baraniuk, electrical and computer engineering professor at Rice University. The website's "Content Commons" contains materials that range in levels from K-12 to college to professional. Topics are organized in small modules that can be connected into larger courses. The majority of modules are in the areas of science and technology, mathematics and statistics, and the arts. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license. You can access Connexions materials at http://cnx.org/. Connexions is just one of several sharable content collections available on the Web. For links to others, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and MERLOT, go to http://cnx.org/aboutus/relatedsites/. ...................................................................... NEW JOURNAL ON INFORMATION LITERACY The first issue of the JOURNAL OF INFORMATION LITERACY (JIL) is online. JIL is an international, peer-reviewed, academic e-journal that "aims to investigate Information Literacy (IL) within a wide range of settings. Papers on any topic related to the practical, technological or philosophical issues raised by the attempt to increase information literacy throughout society are encouraged." Papers in the inaugural issue include: "Transform your Training: Practical Approaches to Interactive Information Literacy Teaching" "Show Them How to Do It: Using Macromedia Captivate to Deliver Remote Demonstrations" "An Evaluation of an Information Literacy Training Initiative at the University of Dar es Salaam" The Journal of Information Literacy [ISSN 1750-5968] is published twice a year by information professionals from several key UK organizations actively involved in the field of information literacy. JIL is an open access title and authors retain copyright for their articles. For more information and to read issues, go to http://www.informationliteracy.org.uk/JIL.aspx. ...................................................................... HIGHER EDUCATION COPYRIGHT BLOG LAUNCHED The Center for Intellectual Property and Copyright in the Digital Environment (CIP) at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) has launched "(c)ollectanea," a new blog portal to address the cultural, political, and legal context of copyright issues and to provide timely copyright resources for the education and library communities. Each month entries are provided by a CIP "virtual scholar" and guest bloggers who have expertise in intellectual property issues. You can view and participate in the blog at http://chaucer.umuc.edu/blogcip/collectanea/. The UMUC CIP "provides resources and information for the higher education community in the areas of intellectual property, copyright, and the emerging digital environment." For more information see http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/. ...................................................................... COMIC BOOK ON COPYRIGHT LAW Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has published a comic book to teach users copyright law basics, including the distinctions between fair use and copyright infringement. The book's format and content are especially relevant to college students who are using and creating multimedia works. TALES FROM THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: BOUND BY LAW? can be downloaded for free or purchased in hardcopy; an educational discount is available for bulk purchases. For more information go to http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/. Founded in 2002, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to this side of intellectual property. Its mission is to "promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions." For more information, see http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/. ...................................................................... TECHNOLOGY AND LIFELONG LEARNING SEMINAR.NET: MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY & LIFELONG LEARNING is an international, refereed journal "dealing with research into theoretical or practical aspects related to the learning of adolescents, adults, and elderly, in formal or informal educational settings." Papers are available in both English and Norwegian and in both text and video versions. Papers in the current issue include: "When Means Become Ends: Technology Producing Values" by Bjorn Hofmann, University of Oslo and the University College of Gjovik "Interactive and Face-to-Face Communication: A Perspective from Philosophy of Mind and Language" by Halvor Nordby, Lillehammer University College and the University of Oslo "Do Students Profit from Feedback?" by Arild Raaheim, University of Bergen Seminar.net: Media, Technology & Lifelong Learning [ISSN 1504-4831] is published twice a year by Lillehammer University College. Subscriptions are free and current and back issues are available on the Web at http://www.seminar.net/. ...................................................................... UNIVERSITY PRESS STATEMENT ON OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING "The increasing enthusiasm for open access as a model for scholarly communication, which grew out of pressure to relieve the financial burden on libraries of maintaining subscriptions to STM (Scientific, Technical, and Medical) journals, presents new challenges and new opportunities for university presses. In its pure form, open access calls for an entirely new funding model, in which the costs of publishing research articles in journals are paid for by authors or by a funding agency, and readers can have access to these publications for free." The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has issued the "AAUP Statement on Open Access," which expresses concerns that these new models of scholarly publishing could cause severe economic harm for already-financially-strapped presses. The statement is online at http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/oa/statement.pdf. See also: "University Presses Take Their Stand" By Scott Jaschik INSIDE HIGHER ED, February 28, 2007 http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/28/open The article also includes reader comments. ...................................................................... INFOBITS TAG CLOUD Some Web 2.0 applications such as Google Earth and Google Maps have exciting potential in education. And some applications are just fun to experiment with. Recently, a colleague brought TagCrowd to my attention. The tool lets you input text and create a tag cloud to visualize word frequency in the text. The frequency a word appears in a text is reflected in the font size that word is displayed in. To test it out, I input the text of the combined 2006 issues of Infobits. After a little refining to remove insignificant repeated terms, I came up with results that give a viewer a quick sense of what Infobits is about. The results can be viewed at http://its.unc.edu/tl/infobits/2006cloud.php. You can try out TagCrowd at http://tagcrowd.com/. Non-commercial users can use it free of charge under a Creative Commons license. ...................................................................... RECOMMENDED READING "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column. "Envisioning the Whole Digital Person" By Jonathan Follett UXmatters, February 20, 2007 http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000171.php "As a human society, we're quite possibly looking at the largest surge of recorded information that has ever taken place, and at this point, we have only the most rudimentary tools for managing all this information--in part because we cannot predict what standards will be in place in 10, 50, or 100 years." ...................................................................... INFOBITS RSS FEED To set up an RSS feed for Infobits, get the code at http://lists.unc.edu/read/rss?forum=infobits. ...................................................................... To Subscribe TL INFOBITS is published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Information Technology Services Teaching and Learning division. ITS-TL supports the interests of faculty members at UNC-Chapel Hill who are using technology in their instruction and research. 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Because of our publishing schedule, we are not able to announce time-sensitive events such as upcoming conferences and calls for papers or grant applications; however, we do include articles about online conference proceedings that are of interest to our readers. We can announce your conference on our "Calendar of World-Wide Educational Technology-Related Conferences, Seminars, and Other Events" at http://atncalendar.depts.unc.edu:8086/. While we often mention commercial products, publications, and Web sites, Infobits does not accept or reprint unsolicited advertising copy. Send your article suggestions to the editor at kotlas@email.unc.edu. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2006, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Teaching and Learning. All rights reserved. May be reproduced in any medium for non-commercial purposes.