Episode 20 – Open to Change
30 January, 20084 comments
Are open educational resources such as iTunes U and thought-provoking dot-coms such as BigThink.com a distraction from the mission of professors and universities, or the wave of the future? Tom, Mills, and Dan debate the merits of “open access” intellectual content in the feature story. We also follow up on Dan’s experience with buying a book from PublicDomainReprints.org, compare the MacBook Air with the small, cheap laptops discussed on the last episode of Digital Campus, and discuss the launch of Flickr Commons. Our picks of the week point to three great ways to use RSS feeds more effectively.
Links mentioned on podcast:
PublicDomainReprints.org
Flickr Commons
MacBook Air
iTunes U
BigThink.com
Berkeley’s YouTube Channel
Google Reader Sharing
ReadBurner
Yahoo Pipes
FeedJournal
Runtime: 51:15
Download the .mp3
Categorized under digital humanities, Flickr, Library of Congress, open access, public domain
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Mills Kelly
Erik Hetzner : 31st January, 2008
I enjoy your podcast, so your discussion of open access was a bit of a disappointment. It would have been nice if you have been more clear about the meaning of open access. You could, perhaps, have discussed the the Budapest Open Access Initiative, or the Bethesda statement. I’m sure that you all understand open access, and that you are all interested in moving it forward, especially in the humanities were it has lagged behind. But by mixing your discussion of open access with other issues, you give some ammunition to the opponents of open access.
Open access does not mean lawyers who only publish to their blogs. It doesn’t mean that things must be available online now instead of being available in 6 months. It does not mean articles that are not peer-reviewed. It does not mean works that are not properly copy-edited, or blog postings, or any of that. It does not even mean not publishing through the big publishers (although practically it often does). It doesn’t even mean just putting an article on your website. Like the free software movement, or the free culture movement, it is primarily about freedom, from which the other benefits flow.
Rather than discuss how historians just aren’t as up-to-date, it would have been nice to discuss the economic pressures which have partially driven open access in the sciences, and which may be less in the humanities, or the practical aspects which make open access to articles easier than to monographs. You did touch upon the idea that employees of public universities might have an obligation to provide their work to as wide an audience as possible, which was great. But otherwise, the discussion was a bit mixed up.
Apostolos K. : 4th February, 2008
I enjoyed the podcast driving to work this morning.
In terms of the technology discussed on the show (the larger iphone like device) – seems like you are describing a cross between a Nokia Internet Tablet and the Apple Newton (model 2100) – both of which I own (the newton I use less and less these days)
Tom Scheinfeldt : 4th February, 2008
Yes! That is exactly what I want! Thanks for listening.
-Tom
Amalyah Keshet : 17th March, 2008
I enjoyed the podcast driving home from work this afternoon. There – perhaps Apostolos and I have helped answer the question you guys voiced: who listens to these podcasts, anyway?
Commuters like myself are probably a representative sample; totally bored with broadcast radio, I go to the trouble of downloading podcasts, Digital Campus included, and burning them to CD because my car only has a CD player. After all, I only have so much time to read, i.e. never enough, and podcasts like this are a great way to make time work for me.
But that’s just the technology. Regarding demographics: my commute is to and from Jerusalem, Israel.