Lev Gonick: How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis

from the Chronicle:

"Where will higher education be the day after the current global economic crisis passes? If you think things will simply go back to the way they were once the economy recovers in a year or two, think again....

One area where I predict fundamental change is the impact of open educational resources on the textbook market. Traditional textbook publishers have held an iron lock on the industry’s model for too long, and universities have been tacitly complicit of the system. In the Web era, however, this oligopolistic business practice is imploding."

And check out this list of open and free textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses.

New York Times goes Open

From Read / Write Web:

The New York Times has gone open and developers are gathering to extend NYT content into new digital innovations.

How do we create open APIs to our stores of digital content in higher education ... to turn us into a global learning platform? We need to understand that Web 2.0 is about openness, and we need to be committed to opening up our data to outsiders. We should want to create a community of hackers around our APIs, and invite community feedback to drive future innovation.

BOSTON UNIVERSITY ENDORSES INSTITUTION-WIDE, OPEN-ACCESS RESEARCH ARCHIVE

Press Release: Research by Boston University faculty and staff will soon be freely available in an online archive, bypassing the conventional and restrictive route of publishing papers in academic journals, announced BU President Robert A. Brown.

“Open access is an irresistible tide,” said David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at BU’s School of Public Health. “The publishers see this. They’ve been trying to prevent it, but it’s impossible.”

Web 2.0 Finally Takes on Textbooks

from Campus Technology: Trent Batson: "Web 2.0 is essentially about a new way to create knowledge in human culture. We are a decade into this revolution of distributed, aggregated, and synthesized wisdom. Still, textbooks, written in the old pre-packaged way are sold by the millions. And, their cost increases each year by three times the cost of living increase. These two factors, new ways to create and keep creating knowledge, and over-the-top prices, have led to the stirrings of a revolution in how students have access to textbooks."

Collaborative Online Medical Encyclopedia Goes Live

Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia relying on user-generated content from anyone with an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a biomedical field, officially became available today. (from Chronicle)

New From YouTube: Free Downloads of College Lectures

Chronicle article: YouTube began testing a new feature that lets users download videos posted to the site from partner institutions — including colleges — rather than just watching the videos in a streaming format. That means people can grab lectures from Duke and Stanford Universities and several institutions in the University of California system to watch any time, with or without an Internet connection.

Google Unveils Cellphone Version of Digital-Book Collection

from Chronicle: Google today unveiled what could be the largest collection of digital books formatted for cellphones. The company took 1.5 million of the books it has scanned through its partnership with several major college libraries and prepped them for the small screen of iPhones or phones using Google’s Android operating system.

Read/Write Article

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

"As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning."