Google Begins to Make Public Data Searchable

Access to and visualizing public data is about to be democratized.

“Just like blogging democratized publishing, we hope that Google and other services will make enough data sets available for anyone to cross reference and visualize that analysis of public data will also become something that anyone can do. That means that a whole lot more of it will be done.” (Read / Write Web)

Gapminder (mentioned in the article) is another good example of opening up data for easy manipulation:

Watch this TED video.

What if we put higher education data into:

http://www.gapminder.org/ Upload here.

Want to see the power? Click here to try. (be sure to play with manipulating the multiple variables – video tutorial)

Think of how much more useful and accessible our system data would be to us, our students, the colleges, the legislature and the public … if it could be easily visualized and manipulated.

…. not to mention all of the unexpected mixing and creation of new tools and analyses others will do with our data if it was open and available.

Risky – sure. But remember – closed systems will slowly but surely die in the 21^st century.

The Open Forum (Dec 08 archives)

http://open-paths.ning.com/

Brilliant UK Policy on OSS

Penn State World Campus Blog:

Wow. It is not so often that you can point to truly enlightened legislation and national policy, but here is one such case. Pat Masson, just posted some links on the Educause Openness Constituency Group to a fantastic little article titled Government promotes open source for public sector, whose content strikes me as remarkable. The article provides a very cursory description of a UK government policy that promotes Open Source Software, Open Technology Standards, and Re-Use. What could be smarter? Very little, that’s what.

If you find that intriguing, you will certainly find it worthwhile to check out the government’s Action Plan on the Chief Information Officer Council web site. The CIO Council Office has published a 10-item action plan that outlines everything from educational support and standards for re-use to international benchmarking services to help ensure that the UK policy is staying relevant. Now, support of Open Source is not new to the UK government, who launched the Open Source Academy a few years ago, so perhaps I should not be so surprised, but still I am incredibly impressed with the CIO Council’s vision and resistance to taking a more reactive and “closed” approach to capacity sharing that seems increasingly endemic to government and in public higher education.

United Nations Opens World Digital Library

Great news for open educational resources!

Washington Post: U.N. Launches Library Of World's Knowledge

“A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind's accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.”

Chronicle

“In the latest and perhaps broadest effort to provide instant access to scholarly resources, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization today inaugurated its World Digital Library, a Web site that allows visitors to browse through a trove of artifacts spanning the history of civilization.”

World Digital Library

Federal OER Legislation

David Wiley is reporting on his blog about a new piece of U.S. legislation, H.R. 1464. The bill would mandate that federal agencies which spend more than $10 million on science education spend 2% of their budget on the development of related, college-level OER. The bill is sponsored by Bill Foster of Illinois and would be managed by the Secretary of Energy and the Director of the NSF.

Excellent! Excellent! Excellent!

Virginia out in Front with iTunes and Apps for Math

Virginia to use iTunes U in new education initiative

Virginia Mobile Learning Apps Development Challenge