Open (and free and scholarly) resources - thx to eCornucopia conference

On Thursday, May 26, one of your Marygrove College librarians attended e-Cornucopia Conference 2011. She participated online from Marygrove's campus, and at least one other Marygrover was on site at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan: Dr. Teddi Williams of the BUS/CIS department.

The theme of this year's conference was the Open Digital University. From the conference homepage,

Open Education is a current theory that knowledge should be transparent and accessible to anyone who wants to learn. Technology and the Internet have increased the global community's access to knowledge. The hope is that openness will help create a more democratic and equitable global society, as our information networks dissolve traditional geographic and cultural boundaries. Benefits, however, must be weighed against possible complications. The public nature of this work can lead to privacy and security abuses, global communication might have to contend with local law, and democratic organizations, although they may lack the built-in abuses of hierarchies, can lead to chaos and inefficiency. This conference will examine specific examples about how openness is implemented in higher education and the resulting successes and problems. The three tracks will be about open education, open access (journals), and open source (computer code).

Open (and free and scholarly) resources abound on the internet. For your reading and scholarly pleasure, here are a few of those resources offered by the University of Michigan, which was represented at e-Cornucopia by presenters Emily Pucket Rodgers ("Open, Share, Learn: The University of Michigan's Open Educational Resources"), Alissa Centivany ("Rethinking the Relationship between Copyright, Open Access, and Scholarly Publishing"), Greg Grossmeier ("Open Research Data), and Bobby Glushko ("Empowering Access through Understanding Copyright").

• Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative dedicated to creating and sharing knowledge resources and research created at U-M with the global learning community: http://open.umich.edu/
• Search open content repositories to find content that is licensed for sharing: https://open.umich.edu/wiki/Open_Content_Search
• Create your own open content (PDF): http://open.umich.edu/sites/default/files/open.content.howto-infosheet.pdf