Global Information Technology Report

The Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009 appears at a difficult time for the global economic system. Thus, it is important to reaffirm the crucial role of ICT for general competitiveness and progress and the importance of continuing to invest in ICT infrastructure and related services, as well as in innovation.

Published by the World Economic Forum under the theme “Mobility in a Networked World”, this year’s Report places a particular focus on the relationship and interrelations between mobility and ICT. With coverage of 134 economies worldwide, the Report remains the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative international assessment of the impact of ICT on the development process and the competitiveness of nations. The Report stresses the importance of ICT as a catalyst for growth in the current global turmoil.

Electronic Health Records: A Primer

A Health Information Technology-Electronic Health Records: A Primer - by Lucien Wulsin and Adam Dougherty.

Health Information Technology-Electronic Health Records (HIT-EHR) is a broad term that refers to the generation, storage, and transmission of electronic health information. Information management is central to the healthcare system, and HIT-EHR is widely viewed as the necessary step to bring healthcare into the 21st century.

The benefits of health information technology are clear in theory, but adoption rates are low. While the development and wide-scale use of HIT-EHR has experienced obstacles, it is gaining ground in both the public and private sectors. This report highlights recent developments and explains various aspects of HIT-EHR, including definitions, current usage, how it can benefit healthcare quality and costs, barriers to its development, and current public and private efforts to implement and expand it. The report is based in the US, but the findings and lessons are applicable anywhere.

A Health Information Technology-Electronic Health Records: A Primer is downloadable free of charge as a PDF file here.

SOCOL@R - Index of Open Educational Resources

SOCOL@R - an index of Open Educational Resources (OER) - has been launched by China Educational Publications Import and Export Corporation (CEPIEC).

Along with the growth of network technology, open access (OA) resources achieved unprecedented development. OA journals and OA repositories provide reseachers with a new source of academic information. However, OA resources are spread in different organizations’ proxies and websites around the world, which makes full-scale search extremely difficult. Previously, the consolidation of OA resources was mainly conducted through two projects — DOAJ and OpenDOAR. Also, some similar work has been done by institutes and individuals. But none of these projects have made the majority of existing OA resource available to users in one single platform.

CEPIEC considers it is a necessity to collect and aggregate the OA journals and repositories internationally into one website in a searchable format for the convenience of end users. This is the aim of building Socolar — To provide a one stop search for all the open access information worldwide.

Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace

UNESCO releases new publication on open educational resources
26-06-2009 (Paris)

UNESCO has released its first openly licensed publication. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace brings together the background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community. Access the online edition – or buy the book! Education systems today face two major challenges: expanding the reach of education and improving its quality. Traditional solutions will not suffice, especially in the context of today's knowledge-intensive societies.

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer one solution for extending learning opportunities. The goal of the OER movement is to equalize access to knowledge worldwide through sharing online high quality content. Open Educational Resources are digitalized materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research.

Since 2005, UNESCO has been at the forefront of building awareness about this movement by facilitating an extended conversation in cyberspace. A large and diverse international community has come together to discuss the concept and potential of OER in a series of online forums.

The background papers and reports from the first three years of discussions are now available in print. Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace provides an overview of the first steps of this exciting new development: it captures the conversations between leaders of some of the first OER projects,and documents early debates on the issues that continue to challenge the movement. The publication will provide food for thought for all those intrigued by OER – its promise and its progress.

Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace is UNESCO's first openly licensed publication – an indication of the commitment of the Organization to the sharing of knowledge and the free flow of ideas.

Purchase the print edition

Access the online edition

Bridging the Knowledge Divide

Bridging the Knowledge Divide: Educational Technology for Development
Edited by: Stewart Marshall, The University of the West Indies; Wanjira Kinuthia, Georgia State University; and Wallace Taylor, The University of the West Indies.

In many international settings, developing economies are in danger of declining as the digital divide becomes the knowledge divide. This decline attacks the very fabric of cohesion and purpose for these regional societies and causes increased social, health, economic and sustainability problems.

This book, the first volume in the book series “Educational Design and Technology in the Knowledge Society”, discusses how educational technology can utilise ICT to transform education and assist developing communities to close the knowledge divide. It provides a comprehensive coverage of educational technology in development in different professions and parts of world.

The book provides examples of best practice, case studies and principles for educators, community leaders, researchers and policy advisers on the use of educational technology for development. In particular, it provides examples of how education can be provided more flexibly in order to provide access to hitherto disadvantaged and under-represented communities and individuals.

OASIS: A sourcebook on Open Access

With the growing interest in Open Access (OA) worldwide comes the increasing demand for training, knowledge development, and skills for the implementing of OA repositories and OA journals, the twin routes for making research results openly accessible.

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use.

The concept of an OA resource arose because much ‘spreading the word’ activity (currently at least) is carried out by a core set of individuals who are invited to travel to address audiences or carry out training activities on all continents. This is reasonably effective on the local level at which it operates, but is costly for both trainers/speakers and participants, and the one-size-fits-all approach that necessarily has to be adopted is not the most effective way of educating and informing. Thus the current model for disseminating reliable and authoritative information about Open Access is unsustainable, is not effective on the large scale and is overly-onerous on the individuals concerned. The information needs of the scholarly community worldwide can better be addressed by the provision of an authoritative and informative resource on Open Access, delivered in various formats that accommodate the needs of all constituencies.

Objectives

The online content is intended to provide training and resources for anyone or institutions who wish to provide open access to their research publications. The objectives are:
• to increase the number of trainers and centres of expertise worldwide
• to expand the knowledge base of open access implementation
• to share resources and best practices
• to demonstrate and record successful outcomes of OA around the world


Key Characteristics of OASIS
• Open to any users
• Open to contributions from diverse practitioners
• Modular approach for content development to enable additions
• International cooperation
• Expert coordination and editorial team

An online education resource center

AcademicInfo is an online education resource center with extensive subject guides and distance learning information. Its mission is to provide free, independent and accurate information and resources for prospective and current students (and other researchers).



AcademicInfo was founded in 1998 by Mike Madin, a librarian coordinator, and is now maintained by multiple contributors.

The site currently features over 25,000+ hand-picked resources and the website is updated on a daily basis.

Project Gutenberg

The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple:

To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.

This mission is, as much as possible, to encourage all those who are interested in making eBooks and helping to give them away. Project Gutenberg is powered by ideas, ideals, and by idealism. Project Gutenberg is not powered by financial or political power. It is powered totally by volunteers.


Project Gutenberg is not in the business of establishing standards and are happy to bring eBooks to readers in as many formats as volunteers wish to make. In addition, they do not provide standards of accuracy above those as recommended by institutions such as the U.S. Library of Congress at the level of 99.95%.

While most of the eBooks exceed these standards and are presented in the most common formats, this is not a requirement; people are still encouraged to send eBooks in any format and at any accuracy level and they ask for volunteers to convert them to other formats, and to incrementally correct errors as times goes on.

There are over 28,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. Over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

The project wants to provide as many eBooks in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible. Thus, they are continually seeking new volunteers, whether to make one single favorite book available or to make one new language available or to help us with book after book.

Everyone is welcome at Project Gutenberg.

Everyone is free to do their own eBooks their own way.

Open University (UK) new website and new units

New website on climate change

OpenLearn has seen over 4.5 million people take advantage of free education since it was launched in October 2006. Now the Open University is launching a new learning website later in 2009. They are looking for people with an interest in climate change to help test the prototype. If you'd like to help out, sign-up here.


New Units on Open Learn

Recent study units include:

Geometry

Numbers

Tapping into mathematics

Diagrams, charts and graphs

Social work learning practice

Meeting minority needs

Homelessness and need

Care transactions

Children's participation

Experiences of assessment

LETS: A community development

Health is everywhere: unravelling the mystery of health

An introduction to biological systematics

Social marketing

Effective ways of displaying information

Managing to meet service users' needs

Becoming a critical social work practitioner

Understanding cardiovascular diseases

Registered users will need to be logged in to access their personal myLearningSpace and use the free learning tools. Non-registered users will need to register. Registration is completely free and makes no future requirements of you. You can find out more information on the Getting Started page

The Open Science Directory

Access to scientific literature is very important for the scientific work in developing countries. As a result of different projects a large collection of e-journals is now available for researchers in developing countries. The number of Open Access Journals is growing steadily as we can see in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Major UNO organizations like WHO, FAO and UNEP have their specific programs for the scientific institutions in low-income countries. Finally a lot of universities, institutes and other organizations are supporting access programs.

All these programs and projects have their own website and/or search engine. IOC/IODE, with the support of EBSCO and Hasselt University Library, is creating a unique access point to all the journals contained in the different programs - the Open Science Directory.


The Goals of the Open Science Directory are:

• To create a global search tool for all open access and special programs journal titles.
• To enhance the access of these collections by creating direct links to the journals and their articlesincluded in this A-to-Z-list.
• All information about the included journal collections is available at the websites of the included projects. These websites are directly accessible from the Open Science Directory.
• The Open Science Directory will not replace these programs. Also the different programs have their own regulations and eligibility conditions. As a interested user, you or your institute will have to register on their sites if you want to make use of special programs like HINARI, AGORA, INASP-PERI, OARE, eIFL and eJDS.

Content:

• About 13000 scientific journals are now available in the Open Science Directory. When all the special program journals are included, the Open Science Directory will contain more than 20000 titles.
• Open Science Directory contains collections of Open Access Journals (e.g. Directory of Open Access Journals) and journals in the special programs (Hinari, Agora, OARE). Other programs will be added in the near future: INASP-PERI, eJDS.