Julian Siddle, Kenyan school turns to handhelds, BBC News, Februrary 28, 2005. Excerpt: 'It is a pilot project run by EduVision, which is looking at ways to use low cost computer systems to get up-to-date information to students who are currently stuck with ancient textbooks....[Quoting EduVision's Matthew Herren:] "The E-slates connect via a wireless connection to a base station in the school. This in turn is connected to a satellite radio receiver. The data is transmitted alongside audio signals." The base station processes the information from the satellite transmission and turns it into a form that can be read by the handheld E-slates....Mr Herren says this would vastly increase the opportunities available to the students. He is currently in negotiations to take advantage of a project being organised by search site Google to digitise some of the world's largest university libraries. "All books in the public domain, something like 15 million, could be put on the base stations as we manufacture them. Then every rural school in Africa would have access to the same libraries as the students in Oxford and Harvard." ' (PS: This is a misunderstanding of the Google book-scanning project, but it's a fair assessment of the promise of OA literature in literature-poor but net-connected parts of the world.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/28/2005 09:51:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
