In this episode, regulars Mills Kelly, Dan Cohen, and Stephen Robertson were joined by special guest Sharon Leon, the Director of Public Projects at RRCHNM, along with the digital history fellows, Amanda Reagan and Stephanie Seal.  We picked up where we left off last week with a discussion about Twitter and academic freedom after the dismissal of tenured professor Steven Salaita from the University of Illinois. Then we moved to a discussion on the future of Learning Management Systems and their role in academic institutions, as well as praise for the new online journal JSTOR Daily. Our last topic of discussion surrounded the ever ongoing question of whether or not those in the digital humanities should to learn how to code.  This conversation was spurred by the new platform Exercism that teaches users to code by encouraging more experienced programmers to provide feedback on a user’s code.   We wrapped up the discussion with news from Sharon Leon about upcoming Omeka enhancements, upgrades, and features.

Links:

Academic Freedom and Twitter

• Denial of Job to Harsh Critic of Israel Divides Advocates of Academic Freedom — Chronicle of Higher Education

Educause Learning Management Systems Report

• LMSs by the Numbers – Spring 2014 Updates
• The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives
• Where Does the LMS Go From Here?

JSTOR Daily 

• JSTOR Daily
• New Online Journal Offers Daily Dips Into JSTOR’s Deep Archive

Exercism.io

• Out in the Open: The Site That Teaches You to Code Well Enough to Get a Job

Omeka Enhancements, Upgrades, and New Features

• IMLS Funds Opening Omeka for Close and Distant Reading
• IMLS Funds Omeka Everywhere

Running time: 55:25
Download the .mp3

Stephen Robertson hosted this episode and was joined by the whole crew of Dan Cohen, Amanda French, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt, as well as the digital history fellows, Anne Ladyem McDivitt and Alyssa Toby Fahringer, as producers. Important upcoming trends in digital humanities and educational technology were discussed, as well as the ongoing struggles of utilizing technologies on campus and their value to academia. The conversation then moved to the changing nature of Twitter. The group debated the usefulness of Twitter and the purpose it fulfills in an academic environment. Dan also laments his struggles with being the go-to historian for Answers.com.

Changes in Twitter

Straumsheim, Carl. “Twitter Has the Chatter.” Inside Higher Ed. August 19, 2014.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/19/study-scholars-are-present-professional-networks-engage-twitter
Chimero, Frank. “From the Porch to the Street.” August 26, 2014. http://frankchimero.com/blog/from-the-porch-to-the-street/

Jacobs, Alan. “The End of Big Twitter.” The New Atlantis. August 31, 2014. http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2014/08/the-end-of-big-twitter.html

Priego, Ernesto. “On the Public Humanities and the Reign of Opinion.” August 26, 2014. http://epriego.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/on-the-public-humanities-and-the-reign-of-opinion/

Rybak, Chuck. “DH Toe Dip: The Serendip-o-matic” August 28, 2014. http://www.sadiron.com/dh-toe-dip-the-serendip-o-matic/

Bright, Peter. “Twitpic to Shut Down Picture Sharing Service After Trademark Dispute with Twitter.” September 4, 2014. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/twitpic-to-shut-down-picture-sharing-service-after-trademark-dispute-with-twitter/

Jim Groom of Reclaim Hosting responded via blogpost to Tom Scheinfeldt’s suggestion that digital media cannot be taught in an online capacity: “Catching Up with Reclaim Hosting”

Running time: 45:57
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

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

Related links:

• Inside Higher Ed, “After Weeks of Delays, San Jose State U Releases Research Report”
• “Power Searching with Google”
• Inside Higher Ed, “Feminist Professors Create Alternative MOOCs”

Running time: 45:49
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3