This Monday, October 20 marks the first day of Open Access Week, an international event that celebrates the wide-ranging benefits of enabling open access to information and research–as well as the dangerous costs of keeping knowledge locked behind publisher paywalls.Â
What Are You Doing For Open Access Week? | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Americans need to learn how to discover.
Being dumb in the existing educational system is bad enough. Failing to create a new way of learning adapted to contemporary circumstances might be a national disaster. The good news is, some people are working on it.
Against this arresting background, an exciting new kind of learning is taking place in America. Alternatively framed as maker classes, after-school innovation programs, and innovation prizes, these programs are frequently not framed as learning at all. Discovery environments are showing up as culture and entertainment, from online experiences to contemporary art installations and new kinds of culture labs. Perhaps inevitably, the process of discovery — from our confrontation with challenging ambiguous data, through our imaginative responses, to our iterative and error-prone paths of data synthesis and resolution — has turned into a focus of public fascination.
American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist | WIRED.
Today (Oct. 14, 2014) is International Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).Â
In 1833, Lovelace met Charles Babbage for the first time. She was inspired by his Difference Engine, eager to expand upon his ideas. She and Babbage exchanged letters from June 10, 1835 to August 12, 1852. Just to give you a little perspective, it wasn’t until 1834 that the word “scientist†was coined byWilliam Whewell. Ada referred to her work as “poetical science.â€
In October 1842, Luigi Federico Menabrea published an article about Babbage’s Analytical Engine in Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve. Lovelace translated it and added her own notes, about 20,000 words, to the 8,000 word piece. Published in 1843, her notes include a much deeper understanding of the potential for Babbage’s machine, including the suggestion that it was “capable of executing not merely arithmetical calculations, but even all those of analysis.â€
Here are the top 15 news site visited by Millennials in 2014.
The newsonomics of the millennial moment » Nieman Journalism Lab.
Disappointing, Adobe:
Two independent reports claim that Adobe’s e-book software, “Digital Editions,†logs every document readers add to their local “library,†tracks what happens with those files, and then sends those logs back to the mother-ship, over the Internet, in the clear. In other words, Adobe is not only tracking your reading habits, it’s making it really, really easy for others to do so as well.