The openlearn project makes educational resources, taken from Open University courses, freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world with access to the internet.Published under a Creative Commons copyright license, users are free to download, remix and share the material under the same license.
The Open University itself was founded in the late 1960’s with a mission to make higher education available to those who had previously been excluded.Similar to Project Gutenberg’s aim to "break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy" openlearn seeks to make its educational material globally available to those wish to use it.
The diaries of Charles Darwin’s wife have been published online, giving an unparalleled insight into the day-to-day life of the world’s greatest naturalist.
Sixty pocket books are still in existence. They cover Emma Darwin’s life from 1824, when on January 1 the 16-year-old girl records that she “played at charades”, until her death in 1896.
“These books were found in a cardboard box in an old cupboard about 20 years ago,” said the director of Darwin Online, Dr John van Wyhe. “People weren’t really interested in the day-to-day Darwin then, just the Origin of Species.”
Labourers expressed fight for social justice in thousands of lines of verse
In 1841, AW’s poem To The Sons Of Toil was first published in the radical newspaper the Northern Star, which had a circulation of 50,000 and readership of half a million:
How comes it that ye toil and sweat
And bear the oppressor’s rod
For cruel man who dare to change
The equal laws of God?
How come that man with tyrant heart
Is caused to rule another,
To rob, oppress and, leech-like, suck
The life’s blood of a brother?
Microsoft, which is boosting its efforts to catch up to Google in the search arena, used yesterday’s AAP annual meeting to make a highly charged pitch to differentiate Microsoft’s approach to creating searchable databases from that of its competitor. Unsurprisingly, the major difference articulated by Microsoft associate general counsel Thomas Rubin is Microsoft’s respect for copyright, compared to what he described as Google’s disregard for the concerns of copyright holders. All of Microsoft’s initiatives to expand search access to books are being done without violating copyright, Rubin maintained.