Standards

The central concept behind Open Educational Resources (OER) is opening up the access to educational resources for stakeholders who are not the usual target user group. This concept must be perceived as innovative because it describes a general economic and social paradigm shift: Education, which formerly was limited to a specific group of learners, now, is promoted as a public good. However, despite very good intentions, internationally agreed quality standards, and the availability of the required technological infrastructure, the critical threshold is not yet met. Due to several reasons, the usefulness of OER is often limited to the originally targeted context. Questions arise if the existing quality standards for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) actually meet the specific requirements within the OER value chain, if the existing quality standards are applicable to OER in a meaningful way, and under which conditions related standards generally could support the exploitation of OER.
We analyze quality standards for TEL and contrast the life cycle model of commercial learning resources against the life cycle model of OER. We investigate special demands on quality from the context of OER and, taking the former results into account, derive emergent quality criteria for OER. The paper concludes with recommendations for the design of OER and a future standard development.

The production of biodiesel through transesterification requires numerous purification steps to remove the unreacted components and unwanted products for the biodiesel grade to satisfy the international standard specifications EN 14214 and ASTM D6751. The residual catalyst (KOH) is one of those impurities which must be removed at the end of alkali-catalyzed transesterification reaction. In this work, nine Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) based on choline chloride (ChCl) as well as another nine DESs based on methyltriphenylphosphonium bromide (MTPB) salts with different compositions were synthesized and utilized as solvents for the removal of residual KOH content from palm oil-based biodiesel. The results revealed that the removal efficiency of KOH by all used DESs increased with increase in DES:biodiesel molar ratio and the mole fraction of hydrogen bond donors (HBD) in mixture of salt:HBD apart from 2,2,2-trifluoroacetamide as HBD. The ChCl:glycerol DESs and MTPB:glycerol DESs proved their superiority in removing the KOH from palm oil-based biodiesel with an average removal efficiency of 98.59% and 97.57% respectively. These DESs fulfilled both international standards specification for KOH content at all DES:biodiesel molar ratios except for the 0.75:1 (DES1:biodiesel) ratio. The optimum molar ratio of DES to biodiesel for each DES was calculated and the decontamination factors for KOH removal at the optimum molar ratios for all tested DESs were determined. The reusability of these DESs for removing KOH from palm oil-based biodiesel was also investigated. Furthermore, it was found that the tested DESs were able to decrease the biodiesel water content to a value below that stated by the international standards. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1383586611004382/1-s2.0-S1383586611004382-main.pdf?_tid=970408e6-0ca1-11e4-b98b-00000aacb361&acdnat=1405485069_91073d372e5404e327c6aec8f9aa0376
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1383586611004382 

The concept of globalization has become ubiquitous in social science and in the public consciousness and is often invoked as an explanation for a diverse range of changes to economies, societies, politics and cultures - both as a positive liberating force and as a wholly negative one. Whilst our understanding of the politics, economics, and social resonance of the phenomenon has become increasingly sophisticated at the macro-level, this book argues that globalization too often continues to be depicted as a set of extra-terrestrial forces with no real physical manifestation, except as effects.

The essays challenge this dominant understanding of 'globalization from above' through explorations of the mundane means by which globalization has been achieved. Instead of a focus on the meta-political economy of global capitalism, the book concentrates on the everyday life of capitalism, the not-so-'little' things that keep the 'large' forces of globalization ticking over. With its eye on the mundane, the book demonstrates that a series of everyday and, consequently, all but invisible formations critically facilitate and create the conditions under which globalization has flourished. The emphasis is on concrete moments in the history of capitalism when these new means of regular reproduction were invented and deployed. Only by understanding these infrastructures can we understand the dynamics of globalization.

In short, punchy essays by distinguished researchers from across a range of disciplines, this book provides a new way of understanding globalization, moving away from the standard accounts of global forces, economic flows, and capitalist dynamics, to show how ordinary practices and artefacts are crucial elements and symbols of globalization.

This article provides an overview of digital humanities activities that relate to publishing. Digital humanities is a growing scholarly domain, definitions of which vary but which generally involves the application of computers to research questions that fall within the traditional remit of the humanities. It includes many areas of research that overlap with publishing. An important aspect of digital humanities is therefore to question assumptions that digital publishing should produce faithful visual reproductions. We argue that this cannot be the only objective of digital humanities publishing, and rather that publishing needs to be understood as a range of modelling activities that aim to develop and communicate interpretations, whether consciously or not. The article introduces a selection of digital humanities publishing standards and systems that support a flexible digital representations of objects, such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which emphasizes scholarly flexibility and collaboration.

This article proposes an improved XML standard for storing online handwritten data in Indian languages. This standard has evolved over a period of two years, and is currently being used by the Consortium for online handwritten recognition of Indian languages, for annotating about 100,000 handwritten words in each of six Indian languages, namely, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi and Bangla. In order that the huge amount of data that is being collected is useable by the future researchers, it is preferable that the data is stored in a format that is unambiguous and easy to read. The uniqueness of this refined standard is that it gives quality labels at different levels to the data, and has provision to annotate all the peculiarities of writing the script of the various Indian languages included in the current consortium project. The current format allows the use of automated and semi-automated annotation tools.

A plethora of media platforms were involved in communicating recent protests across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), though it remains unclear exactly how these interacted. This qualitative article, based primarily on interviews with British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) newsworkers, explores the networked linkages between social and broadcast media, asking how social media content moved into broadcast news, which standards shaped the interface between the two and how these standards were defined. It finds that a set of normative and practical standards caused significant friction at the interface, which is reduced as content assimilates these standards. Standards are shaped mainly in response to broadcast imperatives, but also through the mainstreaming of social media and more efficacious and practicable networked communicative practices, indicating how power may shift in the networked age. Responding to the optimistic view that networked multimedia environments enable unencumbered communication, it argues that the scope and limits of communicative affordances depend on these standards.

The article presents the characteristics and types of digital reproductions, defining the problems of creating bibliographic descriptions. For the purposes of comparison with the description model for facsimiles and micrographic reproductions, the article offers an analysis of Croatian cataloguing rules and stipulations for the ISBD(ER), ISBD(G), ISBD(M) and ISBD(NBM), listing the elements of description and the matching fields for the UNIMARC format. The article also presents the model of digital reproduction desriptions as applied in the Digitization Pilot Project of the National and University Library in Zagreb.