Vol. 13 - Issue 1 2017 - ISSN 1504-4831
Tuesday, 19 March 2024
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Sharing

Yngve Nordkvelle, editor

editorial imageSeminar.Net is approaching its 10th anniversary. The journal continues to practise a free and open access policy of no costs for contributors. We are still committed to publishing research articles to promote studies on the subject of media in education media in education. We operate in a rapidly changing environment of academic publishing. While conventional newspapers are forced to close and are recreated as online newspapers, academic publishing houses appear to survive such threats of extinction. Traditional media are seeking alternative sources to finance their activities. Academic publishing has quite rightly been accused of squeezing higher education institutions with extortionate costs for journal subscriptions. While the profits gained by the publishing houses have been enormous the costs of doing much editorial work, as well as all peer-reviewing have been graciously covered by higher institution staff without incurring expenses. Open Access publishing has gained much attention lately, and is a great deal more common now than it was in 2005, when Seminar.Net was launched. There are a number of hybrid publishing formats offered to authors, with and without a price tag forwarded to the author. For example, the Norwegian Research Council has recently established a foundation for academic writers who face the challenge of financing publication of an article. All editorial work, including reviewing, of Seminar.net is done in our free time. Copy-editing and language checks are carried out by experts, as well as the technical processing of posting videos and texts on the website. We thank you all for doing this at a reasonable price and with such enthusiastic commitment. This is our way of sharing!

The subject of sharing is at the heart of the majority of the papers in the current issue, the first four of which were presented at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013. The last paper is an investigation into the matter of how some elderly members of the public resist and refrain from using the Internet.

My Own Private Public Library

The paper titled “My Own Private Public Library”, is written by Julia Rone, who works at European University Institute in Florence, Italy. This is a fascinating and enlightening account of how new media has literally transformed the nature of Bulgarian libraries. The development of grass-roots libraries which grew out of political and cultural traditions of sharing is a tale of how sharing transforms meaning - and the world of knowledge.

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Education for All Revisited: On Concepts of Sharing in the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement

The paper “Education for All Revisited: On Concepts of Sharing in the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement”, written by Theo Hug of Innsbruck University, is an intriguing in-depth analysis of the various facets of sharing in the world of New Media. It outlines some selected understandings of sharing in educational contexts and addresses their relevance to OER development through examining contrasting and relational conceptual dimensions. Through an examination of contrasting and relational conceptual dimensions the author outlines selected views of sharing in educational contexts and addresses their relevance to our development.The intellectual undertaking of this examination and, in the final section, the approach to sketching out some future consequences of these trends are invaluable.

 

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Educational Expectations and Media Cultures

“Educational Expectations and Media Cultures” is the title of Petra Missomelius’ paper. She works at Innsbruck University. Her main topic is to examine the hopes and desires expressed in the ideologies that support the media developments leading to the development of Open Educational Resources and MOOCs. It is her contention that the educational institutions and their decision-makers need to be more informed on these matters.

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How to Gain Knowledge When Data Are Shared? Open Government Data from a Media Pedagogical Perspective

“How to Gain Knowledge When Data Are Shared? Open Government Data from a Media Pedagogical Perspective” is the title of the paper by Valentin Dander, who works at the University of Cologne, Germany. His point of departure is the vast amount of numerical data that is used by management and politics to run institutions, organizations and societies – so-called “Open Government Data”. His claim is that educational research neglects the importance of how exactly these data are accumulated, interpreted and used. He argues that “contemporary media pedagogy needs to productively and critically consider this development in research and practice, engaging with the question of how these data can be turned into knowledge”.

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Dinosaurs and fossils living without dangerous tools: Social representations of computers and the Internet by elderly Finnish and American non-users

Päivi Rasi and Christine O’Neil are the authors of the paper intriguingly titled: “Dinosaurs and fossils living without dangerous tools: Social representations of computers and the Internet by elderly Finnish and American non-users”. Dr. Rasi works at the University of Lapland and Dr. O’Neil works at the Finlandia University in Michigan, US. Their study compares the computer- and Internet-related conceptions of Finnish and American elderly people who share the particular experience of deliberately refusing to use the Internet. Since this is a comparative study the authors provide a penetrating analysis of the differences and similarities in their motives and practices. The authors concerns for their digital inclusion prompt them to suggest ways to train and support the elderly in these matters.

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