Open Source

Curation Situations: Let us count the ways

July 5, 2017 by Joyce Valenza

Curation is a funny word. When my colleagues and I wrote our Social Media Curation Library Technology Report for ALA, we struggled with a definition. The folks we interviewed across library land curated in several different ways and we used the term curation differently depending on current community needs or where they were in any particular project. […]

Unpaywall: Free, legal access to scholarly articles! (and a couple of other strategies)

March 29, 2017 by Joyce Valenza

Greetings from Computers in Libraries 2017  from which I’ll be sharing a few discoveries. One exciting share from yesterday was the limited release of Unpaywall.org.  (The official release date is April 4.) High school librarians and education researchers take note! Installed as a  free browser extension for Firefox or Chrome, Unpaywall allows searchers to legally access full-text research papers from its […]

Leveraging Ideas, Experiments and other Google goodies

November 1, 2014 by Joyce Valenza

ds106 Assignment Bank

April 21, 2014 by Joyce Valenza

For years, I’ve been a fan of Alan Levine’s (@cogdog) 50 Ways to Tell a Digital Story and his groundbreaking, open kick-butt DS106 (digital storytelling) course. I recently rediscovered the DS106 Assignment Bank and I see it as a truly inspiring resource for inspiring K12 creativity. This collection presents an array of options for student […]

Shopping for online courses and other educational content

July 16, 2013 by Joyce Valenza

For the growing numbers of us searching for online courses, as well as online educational resources, the portals are quickly growing in both number and size. Finding the best or most relevant content may be a challenge.  Sites like Kayak take care of of the would-be traveler with a cross-portal search, but what’s the would-be […]

School of Open opens

March 16, 2013 by Joyce Valenza

School of Open Project Showcase from Creative Commons on Vimeo. As teacher librarians, we need to be aware of major shifts in the intellectual property arena. We need to be experts on the exciting developments in the culture of openness.  And we need to prepare classroom teachers and digital age learners for similar understandings of […]

Boundless as a free text option

October 6, 2012 by Joyce Valenza

Boundless is a new, free open source textbook replacement or alternative service designed for university students. But it may be a part of the solution for many of us in high schools unable to keep up with the rising cost of textbooks and the aging of our own limited print resources. The service connects college […]