February 27, 2005
COURSES: Free Course Content
The Sofia (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets) initiative, launched in March of 2004 under the leadership of Foothill Community College, has the goal of publishing community college-level course content and making it freely accessible on the web.
Sofia is modeled after MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, but at the community college level. Courses submitted by faculty members on a voluntary basis go through peer-review, repurposing, and QA before being posted to the site.
Content for eight courses is now available online through their course gallery: Creative Typography, Elementary Statistics, Physical Geography, Enterprise Network Security, Introduction to Java Programming, Introduction to Macromedia Flash, Musicianship II, Webpage Authoring
Each course includes readings, assignments, exams/quizzes, discussion area, etc., as well as a course syllabus, including suggested grading and a suggested schedule for course delivery.
(link via cogdogblog)
Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)February 07, 2005
COPYRIGHT: Who Owns Weblog Content?
Interesting story from Information Week on copyright and other legal rights associated with employee blogs and RSS - issues that are likely to crop up more and more often as blogs become more popular.
Confidentiality, ownership, and liability are all significant questions in employee blogs. For example, when an employee is asked to maintain a blog as part of his/her job, it can be seen as a simple work-for-hire situation where the content is owned by the employer, but things get more complicated when employees maintain personal blogs that trade in some way on the employee's status with a company.
The article presents a nice synopsis of these issues, touching a bit less on issues related to RSS, such as aggregators' right to essentially "republish" content through sydication.
(link via slashdot)
Posted by Joanne Tzanis at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)