Dan’s visit to the Apple Store prompts a discussion of the new iPad Pro, and just what you can and can’t do on Apple’s tablet. Are we all just too old to give up our laptops for tablets? The New York Times and Google recently teamed up to deliver another way to use your smartphone – for virtual reality, via Google Cardboard. Is this the beginning of an expansion of VR? Or is it just the View-Master of Mills’ and Stephen’s youth reborn? Finally, we discussed the recent study of media use by tweens and teens by Common Sense Media that highlighted the digital disparities facing low-income teens. In particular, although most have smartphones, they lack access to laptops or desktops on which to do the increasing amount of online homework teachers are assigning. Stephen and Dan talked about the key role of public libraries in giving teenagers access to computers and wireless Internet.

Related Links

• Apple iPad Pro, http://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/
• Google Cardboard, https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/
• “The Times Partners With Google on Virtual Reality Project,” NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/media/the-times-partners-with-google-on-virtual-reality-project.html
• “The Digital Disparities Facing Lower-Income Teenagers,” NYT, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/the-digital-disparities-facing-lower-income-teens/
• The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/research/census_executivesummary.pdf

Running time: 47:50

Download the .mp3

In this, the first episode of the new Digital Campus century, Mills, Stephen, and Amanda were joined by two new Digital History Fellows, Spencer Roberts and Anne Ladyem McDivitt. Our first story is possibly the most important in Digital Campus history: the Google Books lawsuit has ended (until the appeals). At long last, the court decided that Google’s digitizing project was within fair use law and practice, clearing the way for the digitization work to continue. In addition to the legal significance, it means we can STOP TALKING ABOUT THE GOOGLE BOOKS LAWSUIT. It’s such a shame Dan wasn’t with us to chip in his four cents on the subject. Probably because we needed a new legal topic, we then discussed policies on digital first sale, which will determine how digital content is purchased, distributed, and shared, and speculated about how the first sale policy will affect the practice of buying and reselling textbooks, especially considering recent proposals for open, online textbooks. And in case no one noticed, we reminded listeners that the recent US government shut down did, in fact, make a number of government websites that scholars depend on go dark. One government agency doing some pretty cool stuff these days is the Smithsonian, which has launched a project to digitize and then facilitate the 3D printing of artifacts in their collections. And finally, we expressed our shock and outrage that 90% of students use their mobile devices in class for non-class activities. Can you imagine?

Related Links:

Google Books court decision

Digital first sale policy discussion

Open, online textbooks

Government websites shutdown

Smithsonian digitizing and printing 3D artifacts

Digitizing heritage sites

Newsflash: Students Use Mobiles in Class

Running time: 48:30
Download the .mp3

For our hundredth anniversary episode, the digital history fellows divided up the 2007 episodes of Digital Campus and picked their favorite bits — listen to the result if you dare, and be transported back to the days when the iPhone was brand new, when Second Life was the Next Big Thing, and when you had to have an email address with a .edu TLD in order to use Facebook. Good times.

Many thanks to digital history fellows Ben Hurwitz, Jannelle Legg, Anne McDivitt, Amanda Morgan, Amanda Regan, and Spencer Roberts for choosing the clips, and many many thanks to audiovisual guru Chris Preperato for stitching them together.

Running time: 58:13
Download the .mp3

Sure, there are a few talented people who have gotten EGOTs (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), but has anyone gotten a CEGOT? Find out who the lucky recipients of Campies are this year, awarded to the best and the worst in the world of technology and academia. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan make their selections, as well as their predictions for 2013. The Digital Campus crew has often been right in the past, so be sure to tune in and know the future. (Past performance is no guarantee of future results.)

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Tumblr growth
Peter Brantley, “You Have Two, Maybe Three, Years”
Lorcan Dempsey, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention”
Calling a Quorum — for Real
Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It
Amazon Is a Great Company Because It Has the Most Generous Shareholders in the World

Running time: 56:50
Download the .mp3

Get out your sunglasses and tanning lotion, because it’s time for the spring break edition of the podcast. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan bask in the warm retina-screen glow of the new iPad and wonder if tablets are about to take over the classroom. We revisit our slightly mocking pronunciation of certain new online education start-ups, and whether their model of video instruction actually instructs. Finally, we pour libations for the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Tablet Ownership Triples Among Students
ASU Professors Sue Over Online Course Ownership
Khan Academy releases iPad app
TED, Known for Idea Talks, Releases Educational Videos
Universities Cracking Down On Social Media
Spring Break Gets Tamer
Encyclopaedia Britannica Halts Print Edition

Running time: 48:53
Download the .mp3

Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

Running time: 58:45
Download the .mp3

For our fourth annual back-to-school edition of Digital Campus Tom, Dan, and Mills invited podcast irregulars Amanda French and Bryan Alexander to join in on a discussion of what we can expect in the year ahead. Mills wondered whether news from Facebook central that the ubiquitous social networking platform was losing its grip on college students meant it might be replaced by something new, but was shot down by others on the podcast. But we did speculate on what potential competitors like Diaspora might mean for the future of social networking among students. We also wondered whether this was the year that e-books begin to really replace textbooks on campus. The sudden demise of the digital version of Rice University Press also left us wondering whether digital imprints might ever replace the bricks and mortar/paper and glue university press. To find out what we concluded about all these possible digital replacements, you’ll just have to sit back and listen.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

How not to run a university press
Clay Shirky on the future of print
Mobile textbooks

Running time: 54:04
Download the .mp3

While sitting in our offices and wishing we were outside in the beautiful spring weather, Tom, Dan, and Mills took a virtual journey north of the border to talk to Kevin Kee and Bill Turkel about their recent conference Playing With Technology in History at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Kevin is the director of the Simulating History Lab at Brock University and Bill is the guru of the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication. In addition to discussing the conference and Kevin’s and Bill’s work on the cutting edge–perhaps even bleeding edge–of digital humanities, we also debated the pros and cons of the unconference model for academic meetings and whether we thought that “play” was an appropriate objective for history teachers. Kevin also gave us a sneak preview of the mobile history app he and his team are developing to coincide with the bicentennial of the War of 1812. If you don’t have any idea what “humanistic fabrication” is or if you’ve never pondered whether or not you need a MakerBot, you definitely need to listen to the podcast.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
History Education Network/Histoire et Éducation en Réseau
CraftRobo
Arduinos
Rob MacDougall on Barely Games

Running time: 50:01
Download the .mp3

The Internet is buzzing about Google Buzz and so why should Digital Campus be any different? With Mills as host, we welcome Amanda French from our Corps of Irregulars to help us sort out the challenges to personal privacy posed by Buzz. We also considered whether Facebook rants against a teacher by a student should be considered protected speech and all four of us were more than a little shocked by a story about a school district that used security software in laptops given to students to spy on those same students by turning on the laptop webcams without anyone knowing. In an age when your movements can be tracked via the GPS capabilities of your cellphone, managing privacy is becoming more and more of an issue for universities and students. We also dipped our toes back into the eBook reader waters long enough to wonder whether or not the iPad and its inevitable imitators meant a new day for academic libraries.

Links:

Google’s response to public outcry about Buzz
Are Facebook rants protected speech?
Schools spying on their students via laptop webcams
eLibrary Economics
Tracking your movements via your cellphone

Running Time: 50:36
Download the .mp3

Jennifer Howard of The Chronicle of Higher Education joins the podcast as the regulars give Dan a rest and Tom takes a turn at hosting for the first time. On the morrow of the big Apple announcement, the Digital Campus crew offers its thoughts on the possible impact of the iPad for teaching, publishing, and research. In other news, the Cornell library asks fellow institutions to pony up to help with costs of maintaining ArXiv.org, Flickr Commons closes its doors to new members until 2011, and publishers make more money by dropping copy protection.

Also mentioned on the podcast:
Monty Python’s free web video increased DVD sales by 23,000 percent
The iPad shows up the Kindle; will Apple’s iBooks store challenge Amazon?
5 Ways the Apple iPad Could Change e-Books
The Public Domain Manifesto
Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format
Collections in the Cloud?
MuseumMobile Pocast

Running Time: 51:26
Download the .mp3