This is just a gentle reminder to everyone interested in open access materials, and in some fashion in open access education, that there is now an easy way to search the expanding offerings: Open Courseware Search. As the site itself notes, the following offerings are searched:

1. School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins (institution:jhsph)
2. MIT (institution:mit)
3. Notre Dame (institution:nd)
4. The Open University UK (institution: openuniversity)
5. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (institution:politecnicamadrid), Spanish courses
6. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (institution:stanford)
7. Delft University of Technology (institution:tudelft), English and Dutch courses
8. UMass Boston (institution:umass)
9. The University of Tokyo (institution:utokyo), both English and Japanese OCW collections
10. Yale University (institution:yale)

My own university is, I think, moving to a more open model for its course content offerings. I see this as a real opportunity to make available content I have developed to a wider audience. I think the real value of a campus environment is not exclusivity of content but the potential for interaction.

The Apple Knowledge Base has a terrific, and easy to follow, article on how to output ePub files out of the iWork Pages application.

Open Folklore is up and running. Many thanks to Jason Jackson, Moira Smith, and Tim Lloyd for their vision and hard work. Jason Jackson has many more posts on his blog, including one entitled “What can Open Folklore help me do now?”.

When I get more of a chance to try it out, I will report my results.

This is amazing news if both want the web to succeed as a genuine communication platform and don’t want to sacrifice years of graphic design work in the print tradition.

I just spent an hour of my time creating a Google Docs spreadsheet of the NEH seminar participants so I could try my hand at some visualizations. I entered about 16 names and gave them the locations of the universities with which they are affiliated.

No luck.

But here are the help documents I consulted:

Google Earth’s Spreadsheet Mapper

Google Maps

This one never gets old:

The current list of Workshop Software (as of 07-09-2010) is below. Which ones are Mac-friendly?

• Network Workbench. Yes.
• Sci2. Yes.
• Wordij is a JAR executable. Yes.
• UCINet is a Windows EXE file. No.
• NetDraw is a Windows EXE file. No.
• Mallet is a JAVA app. Yes.
• ORA is at 2.0.8 on Windows and Linux but 1.6.9 on Mac — which requires Java 1.4 to run. I have Java SE 5 and 6 (1.5 and 1.6) on my MacBook Pro.
• AutoMap is a JAVA app. Some errors while installing.
• SoNIA is a JAR executable. (It’s on SourceForge.) JAR file could not finish.
• Weka is a DMG file. (Also on SourceForge.) Drag and drop setup.
• Netkit-SRL
• Graphviz is a PKG file with a Snow Leopard version. Easy setup.
• R
• StatNet and iGraph are both installed from within R.

This one is from the University of Illinois and is part of a video-cast series by one of their engineering faculty:

The Chronicle of Higher Education is less about education these days and more about the higher-archies associated with it. (Is it me, or is the CHE just really good at repeating and/or reporting anti-faculty agitprop?) But in their efforts to appeal to a larger audience, they do occasionally come up with some interesting stories: this is one of them: “Andy Richardson, a student at Century College in Minnesota, who a solar air furnace that he will use to heat his garage.” The furnace is made out of pop and beer cans.

I’m not really looking forward to flying at the end of this week, and Salon’s Patrick Smith, an airline pilot himself, captures exactly why in this post.