As Foundation Archivist, I comb through newsletters, RSS feeds, bookmarks, and emails to find items of use or interest to our consulting professors.  The lo-fi product of that research, up to now, has gone out to our team every few weeks by email.  Today, for your enjoyment and edification, we present the latest of these newsletters (below) for public consumption.

I’ve done my level best to give thanks where it is due and get the details right.  The occasional error might remain, and we welcome corrections.  If you know of  resources you’d like to see show up on a future list, let us know!

The image “Dictionary of the Frisian Language – Word Archive”  came from Flickr user Hindrik S. and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

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Open License

How to Succeed in Phyics (and reduce your workload) – Kyle Thomas, Luke Bruneaux, Veritas Tutors, OpenStax College
This companion to OpenStax College’s College Physics textbook (authored by a couple of Harvard doctoral candidates) lays out the math and physics concepts to help students get their figuring skills back in shape at the start of the semester. The guide covers items from cross-multiplication to equations for torque and is anything but frightening. A great companion to physics and engineering courses. Link will open a download dialogue for a pdf; if you wish, check it out first on the linked page above! (Physics, Mechanical Engineering)
[Link]

Chemical Reactivity Worksheet – NOAA
Now, this sounds about as much fun as watching paint dry under an electron microscope (which, hey, actually sounds pretty fun). This neat, free/open software allows the user to virtually mix up to 50 chemicals and find out what the likely results are. Developed for emergency management situations, it is available to all. Thanks to the Scout Report! (Chemistry)
[Link]

Sophia – Capella University
5,000 tutorials in Arts, Humanities, Languages, and STEM. Many (or most) are openly-licensed. Worth a serious look. (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

BRANCH – Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History (Dino Felluga, et al.)
From the homepage: “This site, an extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, provides users with a free, expansive, searchable, reliable, peer-reviewed, copy-edited, easy-to-use overview of the period 1775-1925.” Check out the timeline — it takes a little getting used to, but is a very nice addition. (English)
[Link]

Public/Private Ventures – IssueLab
229 archived research works on improving outcomes for children, youth, and families. Note that IssueLab has many other research reports from various nonprofits. Thanks to Angie B. for the connection! (Sociology, Psychology)
[Link]

Open Access/On the Web

DORAS (Dublin City University Open Access Research Service)
Openly-licensed theses in every discipline! This institutional repository (named for the Irish for “doorway”) defaults to CC BY-NC-SA, and much of it can also be found at Rian.ie’s “Pathways to Irish Research.” Ta to Dana S. for the heads-up! With Ireland getting into the Open Access/License game and the Commonwealth nations looking toward OER, it starting to look as though we’re on the right side of history here (and with some catching up to do). (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

A Companion to Digital Humanities – Blackwell Publishing
A multi-author text on all things digital humanities. Officially on my reading list. This comes via the Open Humanities mailing list from Open Knowledge Foundation, specifically from James Cummings of Oxford. (Humanities)
[Link]

Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE)
From the site: “a peer reviewed publication of ecological educational materials by the Ecological Society of America”. Not journal articles, but rather well-articulated packages for teaching and learning ecology. (Environmental Science)
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Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast (Elon University; Pew Internet Project)
The title says it all. This site has won a Webby Award. (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

Teaching American History (U. Nebraska @ Omaha; Metropolitan Omaha Educational Consortium)
Made possible in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, this site combines teaching modules, primary sources, research papers, curated links, and more. A good site for starting down the path to being info-literate as a historian.
Thanks to David T. for the link! (History)
[Link]

Tools

No Excuse List (Xuan Li)
Simple, clean, useful — a list of all the learning you wanted to start in on yesterday! Be sure to check out the blog for additional information. (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

Khan Academy – Computer Science
A new code + output side-by-side terminal is ready on KA’s computer science page! Credit: TechCrunch via EdSurge. (Computer Science)
[Link]

Educreations – Whiteboard app for iPad
At the price of free, with great ease of use, and in combination with a good quality stylus, this is one nifty app. (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

Spotflux
Free, secured, encrypted browsing. Color me intrigued (or over-cautious). There are projects like Tor that serve journalists and dissidents (and probably some unsavory folk, too), but Spotflux appears designed for ease of use. A nod to the Scout Report, already linked above. (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

Best Free Reference Web Sites 2012 (Reference and User Services Association)
Some of these were known to us, and some were not, but this easily-digested list presents a good spectrum of fun, fascinating, eductional, and just plain useful sites. (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

The World Bank Databank
The World Bank is moving toward data transparency — not just the raw data (though that too), but also quality pre-chewed items. From the site: “You can create your own queries, generate tables, charts and maps and easily save, embed and share them.” (Multiple disciplines)
[Link]

Fun

The Internet map
A map of around 350,000 websites and their relation to one another. Thanks to Stephen Downes’ OLDaily for the hook-up. (Multiple Disciplines)
[Link]

News

Mechanical MOOC: “A Gentle Introduction to Python” (P2PU, Codecademy, Open Study, MIT OCW)
MOOCs! Maybe you’ve heard of them. Maybe you’ve heard enough of them. This free, open, everybody-plays offering from P2PU Labs aims to mechanize the MOOC by offering learning materials and peer collaboration without having anyone in the driver’s seat…no professor, no TAs. It’s an experiment in combining several distinct platforms into one conglomerate course. There’s plenty of time to sign up (the course begins October 15th), but you can leave your email address at the site to be notified closer to the date. I do plan to get my programming on…Hello World! (Computer Science)
[Link]