Legal Issues Concerning P2P Exchange of Educational Materials and Their Impact on E-Learning Multi-Agent Systems

The last years have known an impressive change in the use of technologies for the sharing and dissemination of knowledge, thus affecting deeply all the traditional means used by education in all its shapes and levels. This transformation has not been fully understood by the society at large for its immense impacts and its short life. This paper describes in the question emerging from the clash of the rights to education in a wide sense and the rights derived from authorship and how that issue is affecting the design of e-learning multi-agent tools

Copyright for Creators: Bridging Law and Practice

Everyone is a publisher, a maker, or a creator in the digital age, and understanding copyright is a foundational skill. Artists, designers, and arts scholars need acute awareness of the legal landscape and fair use. To help meet this need, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries, in concert with the VCU School of the Arts, created a series of programs on the nuances of copyright for artists, designers, and art scholars

Preserving Social Media: the Problem of Access

As the applications and services made possible through Web 2.0 continue to proliferate and influence the way individuals exchange information, the landscape of social science research, as well as research in the humanities and the arts, has the potential to change dramatically and to be enriched by a wealth of new, user-generated data. In response to this phenomenon, the UK Data Service have commissioned the Digital Preservation Coalition to undertake a 12-month study into the preservation of social media as part of the ‘Big Data Network’ programme funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The larger study focuses on the potential uses and accompanying challenges of data generated by social networking applications. This paper, ‘Preserving Social Media: the Problem of Access’, comprises an excerpt of that longer study, allowing the authors a space to explore in closer detail the issue of making social media archives accessible to researchers and students now and in the future. To do this, the paper addresses use cases that demonstrate the potential value of social media to academic social science. Furthermore, it examines how researchers and collecting institutions acquire and preserve social media data within a context of curatorial and legislative restrictions that may prove an even greater obstacle to access than any technical restrictions. Based on analysis of these obstacles, it will examine existing methods of curating and preserving social media archives, and second, make some recommendations for how collecting institutions might approach the long-term preservation of social media in a way that protects the individuals represented in the data and complies with the conditions of third party platforms. With the understanding that web-based communication technologies will continue to evolve, this paper will focus on the overarching properties of social media, analysing and comparing current methods of curation and preservation that provide sustainable solutions

Linking and copyright : a problem solvable by functional-technical concepts?

Peer reviewe

Creative Commons Licences

This paper is introducing Creative Commons Licences (CCL) as an innovative model of flexible open content licences. After integrating this concept in the conflicting priorities of „intellectual property“ and „digital commons“, different applications, benefits and drawbacks of the licenses are described and discussed. The aim of this paper is to raise awareness about copyright issues among the audience and advice them how to apply and successfully utilise CCL. This paper is based on my diploma thesis “Creative Commons Licences: Chances and Risks for the Management of Non-Governmental Organisations” and points out how the CCL contribute to abolishing technical, economical and legal barriers and to creating access to information for everybody

Co-authorship in the age of cyberculture: Open Educational Resources at the Open University of the United Kingdom

Locating Open Educational Resources (OER) as a phenomenon of cyberculture, this paper presents a reflection on the possibilities of co-authorship that are entailed in OER initiatives of different natures and settings within a large organisation. A selection of OER-related projects and activities carried out at the Open University of United Kingdom (UKOU) are examined from the perspective of a comparative framework proposed by Okada (2010). The framework identifies key features and differences between ‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Education, that is, respectively, formal education, which takes place within the constraints of institutional Virtual Learning Environments, and informal education, which is gradually taking place more widely in cyberspace. The paper is introduced with a succinct discussion of the connection between cyberculture and the emergence of OER, followed by a presentation of the comparative framework adopted. The UKOU´s structure and methods are then presented, and various projects are discussed. The article concludes by proposing a brief commentary on the creative potential that is being unleashed at the very boundaries between formal and informal educational spaces that cyberculture is challenging

A standard for teaching technical competencies of physical education in Egypt according to ISTE (NETS-T) standards

Technology application and internet services are prominent developments in the field of global educational systems. These developments have imposed a change in the role and responsibilities of faculty members and the need to possess technical competencies. Faculty members must apply modern learning theories and organize their learning and evaluation plans based on interactive electronic resources. This study first aimed to suggest a standard of technical teaching competencies for faculty members in physical education under the standards of the International Society for Technology in Education for Teachers (NETS-T). Second, our purpose was to identify the degree to which faculty possess these competencies. The main study involved 812 participants. The exploratory study survey sample consisted of 200 faculty members. The data collection tool consisted of a questionnaire in the form of an opinion poll that included 90 items representing the proposed educational technology competencies within 20 fields representing 5 standards defined by the International Society for Technology in Education for Teachers (ISTE) (NETS-T), 2008. The data collection tool (questionnaire) was evaluated by experts. The exploratory and basic study were carried out using an electronic copy of the questionnaire prepared on Google Forms, and the participation link was sent via emails