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
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In an age of course wikis and blogs, is a law written in 1974 up to the task of controlling where student information might go? Why does Google want us to register on their new citation service? And can the recorded lectures of Mills Kelly be remixed to make him look foolish (or is it already too late for that)? Find out on this episode of everyone’s favorite podcast featuring a trio of people named Tom, Mills, and Dan.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Georgia Tech Invokes FERPA, Cripples School’s Wikis
University of Missouri to limit lecture recording
Google Scholar Citations Open to All
JSTOR’s Data for Research

Running time: 39:02
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Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

Running time: 58:45
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In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
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The regulars are joined this week by the great Tom Merritt of Tech News Today and TWiT fame. We discuss in depth the surprising lawsuit by the Authors Guild against five universities and HathiTrust, related to the ongoing Google Book Search legal saga. We also look at whether a “Netflix for books” is possible or desirable. And Dan gets a little too badge-happy. You’ll get a badge for listening to this week’s freewheeling podcast.

Be sure to check out Tom Merritt’s new book, United Moon Colonies, available in multiple formats for your reading (and listening) pleasure.

CORRECTION FROM AMANDA: I mistakenly said on the podcast that public domain works in Hathi Trust are not publicly available: in fact, public domain works in Hathi Trust can be *read* by the public, although not *downloaded.* Moreover, works in Hathi Trust published between 1870 and 1923 that are in the public domain in the U.S. are not available to be read outside the U.S. See Hathi Trust’s copyright FAQ for more precise information. — Amanda

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Digital Media and Learning Competition 4
Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely
Sigil, A WYSIWYG ebook editor

Running time: 1:02:50
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A few days before we recorded the latest episode of Digital Campus, Apple visionary and guru of all things cool in digital technology Steve Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO in what we assume will be the end of his adept micromanaging of the business. Tom, Dan, Amanda, and Mills mused on what Jobs’ legacy will be and how the tech world may or may not be different without him. Will we feel like orphans now that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Sphere can no longer descend upon us at times of severe tech ennui? And what about those other digital orphans — the “orphan books” we hear so much about? Amanda reviewed for us the latest on this subject coming out of the University of Michigan Library and some of us agreed that we will henceforth banish the term “orphan work” from our vocabulary. Why? Listen and learn. And from what we learned about student searching skills, someone should start teaching students more about online quests for information. That someone could be you.

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Stanford Silicon Valley Archives
Orphan Books Online
Student Searching Skills

Running time: 37:56
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Lisa Spiro and Jeff McClurken join Amanda, Mills, and Tom for a high summer episode of Digital Campus. (Dan Cohen did not join us this time, choosing instead to remain incommunicado in an undisclosed location while he writes some book or something.) There is no avoiding the story of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old Harvard researcher arrested for hacking MIT’s JSTOR subscription, which raised for our panel, among other concerns, ongoing questions about open access and the viability for libraries of “big deal,” multiple-journal subscription packages. We also mourn (or celebrate) the demise of the big box bookseller Borders, share thoughts about the next generation of operating systems (including Mac OS 10.7 “Lion” and Windows 8), and hold our collective breath as we await major cuts to humanities funding from Congress.

UPDATE 8/17: There was a stretch of dead air in the recording we first posted that we’ve gotten rid of. The corrected recording is below; in a podcast manager such as iTunes you can delete the old recording and refresh your feed to get the new, corrected one. You might need to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the feed. Also, check out this terrific article on the Swartz affair by Maria Bustillos over at The Awl.

Running time: 56:58
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If there’s one theme in this episode of the podcast, it’s content being hidden from the open web. The new social network Google+ lets you create “circles” that will allow you to post certain content to certain people and hide it from others, but just as with Facebook, it’s not at all certain that future historians will be able to see any of it, or at least not in context. Computer scientists at Old Dominion University are working to estimate how much of the open web is backed up, and we’re happy to learn that at least thirty percent of it might be available for future study. Blackboard, the original turnkey for course content, is no longer a publicly traded company, and according to the well-read Mills Kelly, that’s because Blackboard may be losing market share to free and open source software. Finally, Tom and Dan tell us a little about PressForward, the Center for History and New Media’s new publishing initiative, which is made possible precisely because so much good work is not in fact locked down, but is freely available on the web.

UPDATE: Google+ does indeed have URLs for individual posts — thanks, Stephen, for pointing that out in the comments. Also, we’d like to give proper credit to Tim Carmody for his remark on Twitter that Google+ “is the first general-purpose social network actually designed for post-collegiate grown-ups.”

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Audrey Watters, Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For?
Jeff Young, Professors Consider Classroom Uses for Google Plus
Josh Lowensohn, Google+ Access Coming to Google Apps, Eventually
Jie Jenny Zou, Old Dominion U. Researchers Ask How Much of the Web is Archived
Audrey Watters, How the Library of Congress is Building the Twitter Archive
Steve Kolowich, Blackboard Gets Bought
Dan Cohen, Introducing PressForward

Running time: 53:50
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On Friday, June 3, we live-streamed Digital Campus from the first day of THATCamp CHNM, The Humanities and Technology Camp at the Center for History and New Media. About half the live audience of seventy-five or so people said they had heard the podcast before — it was great to see the listeners in person, not to mention one another.

We discussed at some length the trial of the copyright lawsuit brought against Georgia State University by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications, agreeing that if the publishers were to win their suit, teaching faculty would certainly have to become more aware than ever before about the costs of the readings they assign. Also on the table (more briefly) were Google’s cessation of its mass digitization of newspapers, the major search engines’ support for structured data with http://schema.org, the Library of Congress’s plans to transition away from MARC, YouTube’s announcement of Creative Commons licensing, and Amanda’s alternative solution to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

Special thanks to Chris Preparato, who managed the audio recording and livestreaming. And, with proof that we’re at least as good-looking as you always imagined, here’s video of the episode 70 of Digital Campus, kindly provided in high definition by George H. Brett (whom you can also hear making a comment about parallels between the GSU case and the early days of Electronic Theses and Dissertations). Thanks so much, George, for capturing this.

Stories or projects mentioned on the podcast:

What’s at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case

Google Ditches Newspaper Archive Plan

Google, Bing & Yahoo’s New Schema.org Creates New Standards for Web Content Markup

Open Researcher and Contributor ID

Library of Congress May Begin Transitioning Away from MARC [Machine-Readable Cataloging]

Google Rolls Out YouTube Creative Commons Licenses

Running time: 50:25
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Steve Ramsay joins us on the podcast as we scratch our heads over some strange decisions by the big tech companies, namely Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype and Google’s entry into the netbook (or “Chromebook”) market. We also mourn the death of the Flip camera, killed by its similarly unlikely owner, Cisco. To end the show we return to our bread and butter of digital libraries to catch up with the Digital Public Library of America, which announced a summertime “beta sprint.” Perhaps they heard our frequent pleas for “less talk, more grok” and “less yak, more hack”?

Additional links related to the podcast:

Flip Video Vlog: A Tale of Two Formats

Digital Public Library of America: Prelim Plans for “Beta Sprint” Released

Will Chromebooks for Education be a Good Deal for Schools?

Running time: 56:14
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