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This week we consider the question of whether Apple and five major publishers colluded to fix e-book prices and the prospect of a Department of Justice Anti-trust suit against them. We also argue the question of whether buy-in from Blackboard will be good or bad for open source learning management projects Moodle and Sakai and join the chorus of praise lauding the online release of the 1940 U.S. Census. On the lighter side, we check in on the ongoing saga of @FakeElsevier. Finally, we celebrate our unintentional, but surely very welcome, neglect of a certain not-evil web search and services company.

Late update: Since we recorded this episode on April 4, 2012, the DOJ showed its hand and officially filed suit against Apple and its partners in the publishing industry, announcing terms of a possible settlement with at least three publishers.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Bigger Than Agency, Bigger Than E-Books: The Case Against Apple and Publishers
Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle
Fake Elsevier’s complaints about academic publishing leads to fake takedown notice
Big Day for Family History Hunters: 1940 U.S. Census Is Online

Running time: 45:38
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The clock strikes noon, and that sound might just signal the end of the bright morning for closed systems in higher education. On this week’s podcast, we discuss Coursekit, a free (for now) learning management system built by dropouts from the University of Pennsylvania; Commons-in-a-Box, a free (funded by the Sloan Foundation) academic social networking system of blogs and wikis that will be built by non-dropouts from the CUNY Academic Commons; and the Berlin 9 Open Access Conference, which seems to have convinced not only several universities but also the White House that peer-reviewed scholarly publications should be, what else, free. Our honored guest is journalist Audrey Watters of Hack Education.

Links

What Does Coursekit Say About the Future of the LMS?
“Commons in a Box” and the Importance of Open Academic Networks
Beyond the Iron Triangle: Containing the Cost of College and Student Debt
Berlin 9 Open Access Conference
Open Access Policy Adopted at Princeton
Open Access to Knowledge at Wesleyan
Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data and Scientific Publications (submit your comments by January 2, 2012)
HASTAC Annual Meeting 2011

Running time: 50:35
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If there’s one theme in this episode of the podcast, it’s content being hidden from the open web. The new social network Google+ lets you create “circles” that will allow you to post certain content to certain people and hide it from others, but just as with Facebook, it’s not at all certain that future historians will be able to see any of it, or at least not in context. Computer scientists at Old Dominion University are working to estimate how much of the open web is backed up, and we’re happy to learn that at least thirty percent of it might be available for future study. Blackboard, the original turnkey for course content, is no longer a publicly traded company, and according to the well-read Mills Kelly, that’s because Blackboard may be losing market share to free and open source software. Finally, Tom and Dan tell us a little about PressForward, the Center for History and New Media’s new publishing initiative, which is made possible precisely because so much good work is not in fact locked down, but is freely available on the web.

UPDATE: Google+ does indeed have URLs for individual posts — thanks, Stephen, for pointing that out in the comments. Also, we’d like to give proper credit to Tim Carmody for his remark on Twitter that Google+ “is the first general-purpose social network actually designed for post-collegiate grown-ups.”

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Audrey Watters, Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For?
Jeff Young, Professors Consider Classroom Uses for Google Plus
Josh Lowensohn, Google+ Access Coming to Google Apps, Eventually
Jie Jenny Zou, Old Dominion U. Researchers Ask How Much of the Web is Archived
Audrey Watters, How the Library of Congress is Building the Twitter Archive
Steve Kolowich, Blackboard Gets Bought
Dan Cohen, Introducing PressForward

Running time: 53:50
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