Open Source
An Open Source Environment to Construct Information Services for Children
Puppy-IR is a consortium of 8 organizations from 4 European Countries. The consortium includes 5 universities, a children hospital, a multi-disciplinary museum and an international information services company; and is coordinated by the University of Twente (The Netherlands).
The consortium represents a unique combination of outstanding researchers who can carry out the work in the project at the required level of excellence, a user group that is competent and eager to absorb the envisaged results, and a partner with an interest in the post-project exploitation of the results. Through the strong commitment to open source development, the project is likely to have a strong impact in the research communities focusing on search technology, as well as on the market in which developers of dedicated services and products operate.
In a world where Internet and technology play such an important role as it does today, it is absolutely necessary that children can assess the meaning of gathered information and can in child-friendly ways get engaged in interaction with content. PuppyIR aims to facilitate the creation of child-centric information access, based on the understanding of the behaviour and needs of children.
To achieve this goal, an open source framework will be created in which advanced functionalities can be developed, and then deployed to create information services that are tailored towards the unique information needs of children and their intuitive style of interaction.
Inspired by article 17 of the convention on the Rights of the Child that grants the child has an explicit right of access to information, this research project aims to create an open source platform that can be used to build child-friendly information services that assist children in the interaction with information, whether it is for fun and entertainment, or for learning and education.
Budapest Open Access Initiative: Guidelines for Open Access
The recommendations are the result of a meeting organized by the Open Society Foundations to mark the tenth anniversary of Budapest Open Access Initiative, which first defined Open Access. The recommendations include the development of Open Access policies in institutions of higher education and in funding agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of infrastructure such as Open Access repositories and creating standards of professional conduct for Open Access publishing. The recommendations also establish a new goal of achieving Open Access as the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country within ten years’ time.
Free eBook Library and Activities to Enjoy Online
Over 250 FREE eBooks at Oxford Owl's online library, as well as links to activities and games.
Open learning sources available at Oxford Owl's free eBook library. Browse through over 250 free eBooks, classified according to age and reading level, as well as activities, storyteller videos, and games.
Open Discovery Space event in Cyprus on October 20th
The event is organized under the auspices of the Cypriot presidency in the EU. Commissioner for Education Mrs Androulla Vassiliou will be the keynote speaker.
The Open Discovery Space project is a socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure created to boost the adoption of eLearning resources. It aims to serve as an accelerator of the sharing, adoption, usage, and re-purposing of the already rich existing educational content base.
One of its main objectives is to involve school communities in innovative teaching and learning practices through the effective use of eLearning resources. It seeks to promote community building between numerous schools of Europe and empower them to use, share and exploit unique resources from a wealth of educational repositories, within meaningful educational activities.
In addition, it also serves to demonstrate the potential of eLearning resources to meet the educational needs of these communities, supported by European Web portal: a community-oriented social platform where teachers, pupils and parents will be able to discover, acquire, discuss and adapt eLearning resources on their topics of interest.
Furthermore, the project assesses the impact and documents the whole process as a roadmap that will include guidelines for the design and implementation of effective resource-based educational activities that could act as a reference to be adopted by stakeholders in school education.