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In this edition of Digital Campus, Tom, Dan, and Mills (Amanda was on a beach somewhere when we were recording) ventured into strange and wild paths of the Internet previously unknown to us, thereby proving that we are, indeed, old in Internet years. After years of talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, and Wikipedia, we set aside those old school web platforms to examine Pinterest and Tumblr. How might humanists, archivists, librarians, and museum professionals make good use of these sites that had (largely) been off our radar all this time? And we wondered whether the fact that traffic on Pinterest now rivals that on Twitter and the growing evidence that young people are moving away from Facebook to services like Tumblr might mean that those of us in the digital humanities ought to be taking a much closer look at how to best utilize these platforms. We also took a look at the 2012 Digital Humanities Award winners and offered up a few favorites from among the many worthy winners and runners up for those awards.

Links:
Maine Historical Society’s Pinterest site
Alan Jacob’s Tumblr blog
2012 Digital Humanities Awards

Running time: 37:02
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What we do is news, of course (of course!), and so is what our friends do, and so is what “Friends of the Court” do. In the warm and friendly spirit of Thanksgiving, then, the four regular Digital Campus commentators (Mills, Dan, Tom, and Amanda) focus mainly on what you might call local news. First we address the decidedly non-local implications of JSTOR’s announcement that it will provide free access to a small community of Wikipedia editors, but then we get down into the news from closer to home. We’re pleased at the release of “Commons in a Box,” a turnkey open source blogging and social networking package built on BuddyPress by our buddies at CUNY Academic Commons, and we’re similarly pleased about the implementation of similar BuddyPress technology on the website for THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp. We then hear reports from pundit Mills and troublemaker Dan about the Future of Higher Education Conference that recently took place at GMU, where passions ran as high as on your average daytime talk show. Dan ends by telling us all bit about a recent contribution he made to the question of whether the Authors’ Guild can be said to speak for academic authors, and then we adjourn, headed over the river and through the woods.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

• JSTOR Provides Free Access to Wikipedia Editors
• Deconstructing Wikipedia: Collaborative Content Creation in an Open Process Platform
• CUNY Commons in a Box
• THATCamp.org
• GMU’s Future of Higher Education Conference
• Mills Kelly at EdWired on the Future of Higher Education Conference
• Brief of Amici Curiae Academic Authors

Running time: 46:29
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It’s time for a new school year and another year of news and views from the Digital Campus regulars and irregulars. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan are joined by Audrey Watters and Bryan Alexander to do a post-mortem on the “summer of MOOCs” and a pre-mortem on the Twitter-esque service App.net. (With Mills finally joining Twitter over the summer it was time for the rest of us to leave.) We also make our picks for the hardware that you’ll see everywhere on campuses this fall–if we were doing the buying.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Stefan Fatsis knows a lot about team handball
Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera’s Free Online Courses
Principles of Macroeconomics: The Online Version
App.net
Glenn Fleishman on what App.net could be
Only 250 users of App.net have generated half of the posts
Amazon to Apple: the game starts now
Microsoft Surface

Running time: 49:36
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Our friend Steve Ramsay rejoins the regulars to pore over the Facebook IPO and its fallout for the markets and the gossip pages. Reluctantly, we turn to more familiar turf with updates on the Google Books and George State e-reserves cases. We then take a moment to lament the closure of the University of Missouri press before ending the show with a discussion of the push toward minimalism and readability in digital humanities web design.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)
Judge Certifies Authors as Class in Google Book-Scanning Lawsuit
GBS: Authors Guild Goes for an Early Knockout
Publishers and Georgia State See Broad Implications in Copyright Ruling
University of Missouri Press to close, after 54 years
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Design Manifesto 2012

Running time: 38:03
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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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In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
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