Competition in the Digital Age
Continuing on the MOOC discussion of this week, Tyler Cowen points me to this Inside Higher Education article about accreditation and MOOCs. The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced Tuesday that it will work with Coursera …
Continue reading "Accreditation and MOOCs: How about we just don't do it"
Two posts came out in the last day on online education. One is by Clay Shirky and the other is by Alex Tabarrok. Both are worth reading. Both make a similar point although in very different ways. They argue that critiques of massively online open courses (MOOCs) are misplaced because they are comparing them to …
These days publishers are moving towards DRM free options. This has the advantage of freeing customers from Amazon lock-in as well as just making it easier for them to control their content. So for consumers who want to pay, this makes their product more valuable and gives them a reason to pay. But for the …
Continue reading "What are publishers afraid of with device restrictions?"
The news yesterday that Disney was acquiring LucasFilm and along with it, the Star Wars franchise led many in the blogosphere, twitter and every sub-editor in the media jump for joy. Never before had so many puns become available for some many headlines in such diversity. But at the same time, there was the realisation …
Continue reading "I suggest a new strategy George. Let the mouse win."
This week saw the unveiling of Apple's iPad Mini and the launch of Microsoft's Surface. I want to focus on the latter as I think that it reveals something fundamentally important about the personal computer/mobile computing/mobile phone market that no analysts are really appreciating: the type of person you are really matters. And for that …
Continue reading "I'm a Mac. You're a PC. There really are two types of people"
The people at PHD comics have posted a video summarising the case for open access to scholarly publications. It is a good summary of the issues and particularly salient as I spent yesterday at a Workshop that was looking into the economics of these issues. One part of the video was interesting. It was about …
Continue reading "Opening up library subscriptions to scholarly publications"
Now, you might think this is all in jest but, actually, it is pretty close to something else we have already discussed on this blog: Scott Adams' plan to see if he can sell an idea. If you recall, Dilbert creator, Scott Adams actually does not believe it is possible to sell an idea (unlike …
Information Wants to be Shared focusses on business models for information content provision. But the principles behind it, that information is more valuable if it is exchanged freely, obviously extend to many other matters. One such matter is health-related information. John Wilbanks is a crusader that has taken the issue of health sharing on. As …
[HT: Scholarly Kitchen] A new paper published in Science (of course, paywalled) examines publications in biological sciences from 2006 and 2008 to see how many were accepted at first instance and how many were initially rejected (or rejected at least once prior to acceptance). 75% were accepted first time around while many otherwise went through the system quickly. Not surprisingly, …
I have written before about Twitter's new rules and how they have backed away from platform promises. One of their new rules limits the number of user tokens a third party developer can issue before effectively being 'owned' by Twitter. (I say, 'owned' because Twitter apparently can then exclude them from the platform). Now the …
Continue reading "Twitter's policies cause prices on third party apps to rise"
Digitopoly 