Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Benetech has long been a pioneer in providing innovative services to people with print disabilities. This week, Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center has announced the release of an open source web application for creating and editing crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. The Poet application developed by DIAGRAM helps level the playing field by making otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers who cannot read traditional books. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format. The DIAGRAM Center team has also created an image data content model which will provide standards to define and enhance the efficacy and interoperability of accessible images as the project evolves. DIAGRAM stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials. Our DIAGRAM ...

I just got back from the Economic Self-Reliance Conference at Brigham Young University in Utah. When I attend conferences to give a keynote, I usually try to stick around for more of the conference and listen in to the other presenters. This practice was especially awarded at the ESR conference. David Wiley's keynote was on the social returns from a new venture he helped create, Flat World Knowledge . His projection was that students were going to save more money on textbooks after three semesters of Flat World operations than investors had put into it. Not the typical SROI calculation, but the dramatic point was that Flat World is making impact the center piece of their foray into Open Educational Resources (OERs). OERs are the open source equivalent of open source software. My biggest concern about OERs has been that few people developing them have been measuring the impact: they celebrate the creation of the open content textbook or coursework, but don't collect the in...