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The Oxford English Dictionary defines “mook” (with a ‘k’) as “An incompetent or stupid person”; apparently it’s a word that achieved notoriety from its use in the 1973 film Mean Streets. But we’re not discussing that kind of “mook,” no sir: on this episode of Digital Campus, we’re discussing Massive Open Online Courses with Audrey Watters of Hack Education. We argue that there are MOOCs and then there are MOOCs, speculate about the purpose and future of MOOCs, and (at least in Audrey’s case) relate our own experiences as MOOC students. It’s a MOOC-a-palooza. (And don’t forget that Dan predicted that 2012 would be the year of MOOC-o-mania last December: we’re proud.)

P.S. As promised at the start of podcast, Mills has now revealed the educational hoaxes perpetrated by his students in his course “Lying About the Past.” Well played, all.

Links:

• Proto-MOOC Stays the Course / Open Course “Digital Storytelling” Enjoys Modest Success
• Massive Courses, Massive Data: Harvard Joins MIT in Platform to Offer Massive Online Courses
• ‘Supersizing’ the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2670 Students
• 5 Things I’ve Learned From MOOCs About How I Learn

Running time: 44:24
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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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Returning from a post-THATCamp hiatus, podcast regulars Dan, Mills, and Tom are joined by original irregulars Amanda French and Jeff McClurken to discuss the new iPhone, a nascent course management offering from Google, and the launch of Microsoft Office Web Apps. The panel applauds the University of California/California Digital Library in its showdown with Nature Publishing Group over subscription costs and weighs in on students buying and selling course spots on Craigslist. Hat tip to our good friend Bethany Nowviskie for this episode’s inspired title.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
ProfHacker
Letter from UC to faculty [.pdf]
Nature Publishing Group responds, via Ars Technica

Running time: 57:41
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The Digital Campus crew was lucky to be joined by Bryan Alexander, the Director of Research of NITLE, on this episode. Bryan tracks emerging trends in technology and higher ed, and gives us the inside scoop on what’s up and coming for the 2008-2009 school year. Our wide-ranging discussion in that feature segment and the news roundup covers the latest in mobile technology, ebooks, digital scholarship, course-management-systems, virtual worlds, gaming, and audio, video, and image-sharing, among other topics. We also obsess a bit about the significance of Google’s new web browser, Chrome. Join us for another year of Digital Campus!

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Making the History of 1989
Synthasite
Jason Calacanis on demoing digital products, part 1, part 2
NITLE Prediction Markets
The Shadow IT Department
Google Chrome

Running time: 1:05:53
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