MOOCs – Digital Campus

Episode #118 – Predicting the Past – 2015 Year in Review

Stephen Robertson — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 22:30:05 +0000

In the 2015 installment of the Digital Campus Year in Review podcast, regulars Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Tom Scheinfeldt, and Stephen Robertson look back at 2015 and predict the big news of 2016. Cheers went out to the NEH/Mellon Humanities Open Book Program, Congress (c.1965), the retirement of James Billington as Librarian of Congress, and the US Court of Appeals decision in favor of Google Books. Eliciting jeers were the Ad-blocker controversy, the behavior of Proquest (with Amanda dissenting), and the news that Jennifer Howard has left the higher education beat.

Much of what the group predicted for 2015 came to pass, to some extent: universities were hacked; SHARE developed; the push to learn to code continued; and Proquest and Gale moved to provide data mining access to their collections (at considerable additional cost to libraries). And, with the FAA moving to require that drones be registered, Mills’s prediction from 2013 that an Amazon drone will be shot down over Texas looks ever more likely. If you are impressed by those predictions, then in 2016 you should expect the Wu Tang Clan album to leak, Virtual Reality MOOCs to be launched, a digital humanist to win a Macarthur Fellowship, hypothes.is not to take off (or to enjoy the same success as DPLA), and emojis to replace text as our primary form of communication.

Related Links:

NEH/Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program Grants: http://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2015-12-17
The work of the 1965 Congress:
- The National Historic Preservation Act: http://preservation50.org/about/nhpa-history/
- The National Endowment for the Arts: https://www.arts.gov/50th
- The National Endowment for the Humanities: http://50.neh.gov
The ad blocking controversy explained: http://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9351759/ad-blocking-controversy
In defense of Proquest: http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/226/448
Why Are Universities Hacked? https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-are-universities-hacked
SHARE: http://www.share-research.org
Register Your Drone: https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/
Annotating All Knowledge [hypothes.is]: https://hypothes.is/annotating-all-knowledge/

Running time: 59:23

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Episode #105–Open Libraries and Open Syllabi

Amanda Regan — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 18:20:27 +0000

In the absence of Amanda French, Dan, Tom, Mills and Stephen were assisted by only two Amandas. Tom and Stephen kicked off this podcast with a discussion of new rules for the electronic management of government records and the implications of these new rules for transparency and historical access. We then heard Dan’s thoughts on the Open Syllabus Project, which resulted in a discussion about how educators share or borrow from each others syllabi. One of the questions raised was whether or not syllabus writers can claim copyright over their content, which segued nicely into a discussion of Blackboard’s new open source policies. Our group noted open sourced does not necessarily mean open access. Finally, the group celebrated the first birthday of the Digital Public Library of America and congratulated Dan on its success.

Big Changes in Store for the Future Management of Government Records

http://blog.historians.org/2014/04/big-changes-store-future-management-government-records/#sthash.iaTcUFTk.dpuf

Blackboard’s acquisition of open source software

Open Syllabus Project

Udacity charges for certificates

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/udacity-will-no-longer-offer-free-certificates/51757

DPLA’s 1st Birthday

http://dp.la/info/2014/04/17/dpla-1st-birthday-announcement/

Running time: 41:38
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Episode #102 – Digital Campus on 2013 and the Uncertain Future of Amazon’s Drones

Amanda Morton — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 20:52:16 +0000

In this year-end roundup/predictions episode of our Digital Campus podcast, Stephen and special guest Sharon Leon jumped in on this year’s cheers and jeers, listing the best and worst stories and events of 2013, including praise for expansion of DH centers and digital collections, as well as critiques of Elsevier‘s recent actions and the impact of the government shutdown on educational institutions. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan then reviewed the successes (there were a few!) and failures (oh, MOOCs…) of their respective predictions for 2013.

Once they’d finished assigning grades and debating near-misses, the group invited Sharon and Digital History Fellow Amanda Regan to join in on putting together a set of alternately optimistic and depressing predictions for 2014. Judging from these predictions, this coming year looks good for grad students working on digital dissertations and for those interested in expanding open access, but Amazon’s drones might want to look into bulletproof casings.

Special thanks to multimedia whiz Chris Preperato for the plethora of pertinent sound effects in this episode, as well as for ongoing work on the podcast.

Links:

Cheers:

Google Books decision: https://chronicle.com/article/Judge-Hands-Google-a-Big/143059/
JSTOR Swartz documents: http://docs.jstor.org
Smithsonian 3D: http://3d.si.edu/

Jeers:

Shutdown affects research: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/03/government-shutdown-curbs-academic-research-many-levels
Elsevier takedowns: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865
Udacity moves to executive education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/academics-to-udacity-founder-told-ya

Predictions for 2013:

EBook Sales in 2013: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/59194-signs-of-stability.html

Predictions for 2014:

Affordable College Textbook Act: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1704

Running time: 50:48
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Episode #101: Fair Use and Access (Shutdown Edition)

Spencer Roberts — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 19:05:13 +0000

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?

Episode #100 — The Best and Worst of 2007

Amanda French — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:37:18 +0000

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
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Episode #98 — 500 in Podcast Years

Amanda Regan — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:14:49 +0000

Digital Campus is back! In the inaugural episode of the 2013-2014 school year, Tom, Dan, Mills, and Amanda welcomed RRCHNM’s new director Stephen Robertson and two of the Digital History Fellows, Amanda Morton and Amanda Regan. We began with the union between Google and edX, and the potential for change in the way that MOOC platforms are chosen, a discussion that included brief thoughts on Google Apps for Education and the collection of data on education. Moving on, we looked at the launch of a new platform for iPhone called Oyster, which offers a Netflix-like service for ebooks. The discussion revolved around what this new service might mean for the current state of textbook rental, deals with publishers, and efforts to combat the rising costs of textbooks. Mills suggested the possibility of a flat fee for a subscription to a semester worth of textbooks instead of students paying individually for ebooks. We dug deeper into this topic with a discussion of the current state of ebook purchase and rental, citing the Kindle borrowing program as well as libraries’ offering ebooks through the Overdrive platform, and we wondered whether ebook subscriptions could be compared to movie and television streaming through services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

Finally, we took a quick look at Topsy, an analytical service that allows users to search tweets from the earliest days of Twitter, an option that brings up interesting questions about how historians (and educators!) can use Twitter as a historical source. There was some suggestion that the release of this tool might be connected to Twitter’s IPO offering.

This episode concluded with a briefing on the state of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media by the new director Stephen Robertson, which marks the introduction of a new segment narcissistically titled “Reports from the Center.” Tune in two weeks from now (we promise) for more.
Links:

Google and EdX Press Release
Inside Higher Ed, “EdX and Google Develop Open Source MOOC Platform”
Chronicle of Higher Education, “Google and EdX Create a MOOC Site for the Rest of Us”
InfoDocket, “Oyster, a Netflix-Like Service for Ebooks, Launches
ZDNet, “Oyster Review”
The Verge, “Topsy Lets You Search Every Tweet Sent”
Google Apps for Education
Oyster
Topsy
Twitter’s IPO offering

Episode 94 – The 2012 Campies

chnmadmin — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:28:10 +0000

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
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Episode 93 — A JSTOR and Jerry Springer Thanksgiving

Amanda French — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 21:34:40 +0000

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:

Running time: 46:29
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Episode 90 – Back to School Special

chnmadmin — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:25:12 +0000

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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Episode 89 — Strategic Humanism at UVA

Amanda French — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:22:54 +0000

We’re joined this week in our last episode before our traditional summer hiatus by Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at University of Virginia Libraries and president of the Association for Computers in the Humanities. We mainly discuss what’s going on at UVA, agreeing that it’s a good thing we’re having nationwide discussions now about what universities are doing, have done, and should be doing in the digital age with regard to scholarship and learning, and wondering whether ~~the farmer and the cowman should be friends~~ academics and businesspeople can find a common language. Back by popular demand is our old “pick of the week” segment, featuring UVA’s own ongoing archive of events taking place there.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Sullivan Resigns from UVa: Complete Coverage – The Chronicle of Higher Education
reality bytes – Bethany Nowviskie
Syllabus Journal
ReadLists.com
Encyclopedia of Connecticut History
Archive of Materials Relating to the Resignation of President Teresa Sullivan

Running time: 54:36
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