‘Twas the last podcast of 2014 and on this episode of Digital Campus, Amanda, Tom, Dan, and Stephen discussed their “Cheers and Jeers” for the year (with RRCHNM Digital History Fellow Amanda Regan filling in for Mills).  MLA, IMLS, FCC, and the lack of a government shutdown won the praise of the group, but Twitter could not stand up to the pressures of 2014.

After describing the good and the bad of the year, the group discussed their predictions from 2013.  While Mills’s prediction that an Amazon drone would be shot out of the sky in Texas did not come true, it appears that many of the predictions made by the group last year were pretty close–even though Dan gave himself a solid “B”.  With 2015 quickly approaching, everyone discussed their latest predictions for the new year and where the digital humanities are headed in the next 365 days.

Running time: 48:22

Download the .mp3

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

• http://arthistory2014.doingdh.org/
• http://history2014.doingdh.org/

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

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

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

In this edition of the podcast Tom, Amanda, Dan, and Mills considered whether recent news stories about spammers gaming the Google search engine algorithm herald the end of big search as we know it. Is it really the case that Google engineers are being out-coded by their counterparts at “content farms” and other spam generating locations? And if they are, what does that mean for educators, students, and cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and archives? We also looked at Q&A site Quora (we weren’t bowled over) and Google Art Project (everyone but Tom was bowled over).

Running time: 37:09
Download the .mp3

Bryan Alexander of NITLE joins Tom, Mills, and Dan for a spirited discussion about what this week’s news about three services used by many educators–Twitter, Facebook, and Ning–tells us about how faculty and students should approach online services. We dig into the meaning of the Twitter archive going to the Library of Congress, Facebook announcing how it will spread to the rest of the web, and Ning closing its doors to non-profits. Many questions are raised (and a few answered) about the significance of social media becoming a dominant part of our online existence.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
Pew on Social Media and Young Adults
Dan on sustainability in last section of “The Idols of Scholarly Publishing”

Running time: 52:50
Download the .mp3