#uosm2008, Page 4

One of the key points I have learned from this topic is the structure that governs the production and distribution of academic journal articles. Thanks to Bartosz’s diagram (as shown below), I finally realised how the structure loosely resembles the music industry’s methods of distributing music. Whilst journal companies take the largest cut, the author takes a small fee at the expense of having his/her article reviewed and placed within a reputable journal firm. Continue reading →

Imagine you are a content producer: an academic who wrote a research paper. You did your job, now you want to share it with the World. Below, I am going to argue for one thing: make it available on the Internet for free. The free arXiv Physics archive (1991) begun a small revolution in the scientific world. Traditionally, a scientist would submit his paper to a peer-reviewed journal. Continue reading →

Have you ever just went on Google Images, searched for an image of your choice and used it, not caring who made it, how or even when? Well I guess we are all in the same boat. There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to a content producer of making their materials freely available online. The focus of this blog post is to discuss and chew over the aforementioned issue. Below is a picture collage that I made to delineate what is been discussed [1]. Continue reading →

It was ironic to begin researching this topic, only to find that most of the relevant articles I needed were not accessible for free. Such articles were only available if I searched through the university VPN, as Southampton University has paid for access to academic journals. As demonstrated in this video, Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen explain some of the issues surrounding open and closed access. Continue reading →

This week (months) topic was a lot broader than some of the other topics that we had faced in the previous weeks, allowing us to choose a specific area to target our answers. Since we had a lot more choice in the presentation of our answers, there were a lot of different conclusions that the class made on this subject. I personally focused my answer around social media being used socially and professionally by teachers in schools, colleges or Universities. Continue reading →

The Ethics surrounding Social Media for Marketing from the perspective of a Business remains a grey area. Previous to this topic I hadn’t considered the implications, or the use of Social Media in regards to Education, but to avoid this post being an explanation of how this works I will instead focus on its use by Businesses. Namat shows the problems that arise for a company when a fake account is set up. Continue reading →

Topic 4 definitely showed the most varied collection of posts to date. From the ethics behind celebrity endorsements to the relentlessness of social media, this topic proved to be tightly packed with a wealth of different concepts. Social media offers some incredibly powerful tools – we know this after completing all of the previous topics. Continue reading →

This topic was ostensibly about the ethical issues that are attached to business and educational use of social media. Oddly, at the end of the exercise, I’ve concluded that it is we, as individuals, who have the critical role in ensuring companies, individuals and educational establishments act appropriately. Continue reading →

I thought that the nature of the question asked prepared me for the wave of different issues and viewpoints presented by students, but the variety of posts surprised me once again. At that point during the module everyone seems to have a deeper awareness of the issues and possibilities created by massive use of the Internet. However, the way in which one used this information in order to identify and describe ethical issues surprised me. Continue reading →