Might there be an alternative to the conventional meetings and conferences academics, librarians, and museum professionals go to every year, where papers and panels—and often bored or distracted attendees—are the norm? This episode’s feature story tackles that question by looking back at the experience of THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp, a less structured “unconference” or “barcamp” that turned everyone into active participants. The roundtable discussion of the news includes a discussion of what the iPhone 3G and iPhone apps mean for educational and cultural institutions. Picks of the week include a new site on the Soviet Gulag, a way to avoid distractions on the Mac, and an open source mapping site.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
THATCamp
GreenNote
OS X Spaces
Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives
Open Street Map

Running time: 45:19
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As Dan finally buckles under and joins in the most hyped Web 2.0 site of the moment, Twitter, Tom and Mills join him to debate the merits—and demerits—of the “microblogging” craze. Do services like Twitter merely increase the distractions and noise from the web, or might they be helpful for communication and community building in academia? In the news roundup, we cover Microsoft’s exit from book digitization and the significance of the tech layoffs at the University of Washington. Picks of the week include a podcast series from Harvard, a blog post explaining the semantic web, and a wiki for digital research tools.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Mills on Twitter
Media Berkman
Semantic Web Patterns
Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki

Running time: 47:21
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At a time when everything seems to be trending toward being freely available online, how can education and digital resources and tools for academia, libraries, and museums sustain themselves? Tom, Dan, and Mills discuss models for sustainability in the age of the free in the feature segment of this week’s podcast. In the news roundup, we cover the RIAA’s newfound love of the lawsuit and the University of Chicago Law School’s newfound hate of the laptop. Picks of the week include a proportional mapping tool, a thesis repository, and a site that helps non-techies understand and use RSS.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Mills on free education
Laura Dewis, “Money makes the world go… open?”
RSS Day
Harvard Thesis Repository
World Mapper

Running time: 43:07
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Tom and Dan are joined this week by Bill Turkel and Steve Ramsey, who provide fascinating insights into the nature of computer programming and how those in the humanities, museums, and libraries can get started with this foreign language. Bill and Steve were also kind enough to add their comments to our news roundup discussion of the launch of Google App Engine, which raises questions about outsourcing, and myLOC.gov, which raises questions about whether digital collections should have their own personalization tools. Picks for the week include two books on programming, an organizational tool for Thunderbird, and a map for browsing American history.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
The Programming Historian
Google App Engine
myLOC.gov
Network in Canadian History & Environment
Social Explorer
MIT Simile’s Seek
Beautiful Code
The Mythical Man-Month

Run time: 48:17
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In the feature story of this episode, Tom, Mills, and Dan finally get to vent about the increasing annoyances of legal restrictions and threats that face those trying to do digital work in academia, libraries, and museums. Copyright—both in its traditional form and in modern incarnations like the DMCA—has made it more difficult than ever to figure out how and when to post something online, and for those creating digital tools, the further threat of patent lawsuits awaits. In the news roundup we talk about another threat—that of online predators and a new Virginia law intended to thwart them—and note the launch of offline Google Docs, which now provides a more compelling alternative to Microsoft Office. Links for the week include a museum podcast that’s good for the classroom, a tech blog for students, and a declaration for open access to educational materials and technology.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Virginia Schools Start To Teach Internet Safety
DMCA
Fair Use
Open Access News
NIH’s Public Access Requirement
Restriction: No Text Mining of PubMed
Professor Sues Student Over Lecture Notes
Elsevier Lets MIT Use Copyrighted Materials
Patent Office Rejects Blackboard’s E-Learning Patent in Preliminary Ruling
Google Docs Launches Offline Support
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum @ iTunesU
Hack College blog
Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Running time: 47:24
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On the first birthday of the podcast, Tom, Mills, and Dan discuss how they produce the podcast and reflect on what they’re doing right, what needs improvement, and what they might do in the coming year—and ask the audience to write in with their own criticisms and suggestions. The news roundup looks at a new campus gossip website, the expulsion of a student for using a Facebook study group, and the significance of iPhones coming to campuses in the fall along with the new iPhone SDK (software development kit). Links for the week include an easy way to collaboratively markup and critique websites, a detailed description of a good web design and development setup, and one journal’s take on Web 2.0.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Audacity
Call Recorder
Twiddla
Jeremy Boggs’s Design and Development Setup
First Monday issue on Web 2.0

Runtime: 44:38
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Can print on demand shake up academic publishing, book buying, and reading habits? Another terrific guest joins us on the podcast for a feature segment on the promise and perils of print on demand: Yakov Shafranovich, a software developer who specializes in print on demand services including PublicDomainReprints.org, covered in several prior Digital Campus episodes. We spend most of the news roundup debating the impact of the Harvard faculty vote in favor of open access scholarship, while also covering Blackboard’s victory in a flimsy patent case. Picks of the week include a good new podcast, a flashy historical website, and an easy way to add images to your blog posts.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Harvard Open Access Policy
PublicDomainReprints.org
New Academia Press
European Navigator
First Monday Podcast
PhotoDropper

Run time: 58:32
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Is reading declining in the digital age, or is it simply changing? The Digital Campus team is joined by two guests in our feature segment, Sunil Iyengar of the National Endowment for the Arts and Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, to debate the future of reading—and its past. The news roundup covers Microsoft’s courtship of Yahoo and what it means (if anything) for campuses, provides an update on a problematic U.S. House of Representatives bill, and covers the new Horizon Report on digital technologies that will affect universities in the coming five years.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
2008 Horizon Report
College Opportunity and Affordability Act
Aluka
Today’s Front Pages at the Newseum
Amistad Digital Resource

Running time: 50:49
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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
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On our first podcast of the new year, we look at the rise of the small, cheap laptop and its significance for education and cultural sites. In addition to a full rundown of the latest news about the One Laptop Per Child project and its $188 XO laptop, we cover the wildly popular Asus Eee PC and the forthcoming Everex CloudBook, both costing under $400. In the news roundup we note the end of the line for Netscape, mention the darker alleyways of social networking, and congratulate ourselves for predicting the decline of Second Life. And at the end of the podcast we highlight a great new word processor for the Mac, a service to print out-of-print books, and the digitization of a gigantic medieval bible.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
One Laptop Per Child
Pixel Qi
Asus Eee PC
Everex CloudBook
Scrivener
Codex Gigas
Public Domain Books Reprints Service
THATPodcast
THATCamp

Running time: 45:48
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