Two big stories dominate this edition of the podcast: the rejection of the Google Books settlement and the request for a professor’s personal email. Tom, Mills, Amanda, and Dan discuss why the settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers didn’t pass muster, and what the ramifications of the ruling are. We also look in-depth at what it means to have an university-provided email address given the Wisconsin GOP’s request to gain access to William Cronon’s email messages. On a lighter note, the Digital Campus team tries to decide if the addition of OMG and LOL to the OED spells the end of civilization.

[Editor’s Note: We recorded this podcast on 3/31/11, before the resolution of the Cronon affair.]

Additional links mentioned on the podcast:
‘Academic Freedom’ Offers Little Protection Against New Efforts to Obtain Professors’ E-Mails
Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide

Running time: 50:05
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Joined by new podcast irregular Audrey Watters, educational technology writer for ReadWriteWeb, the Digital Campus crew discusses a whole passel o’ news for this episode. Dan Cohen gives us an eyewitness report from the first meeting of the Digital Public Library of America initiative, identifying three (only three?) chief tensions: how “public” and how “American” such a library could be; how centralized such a library should be; and how such a library could help fulfill our national yen for free Dan Brown ebooks. Tom thinks the iPad 2 shows that Apple is a little behind the curve (cough, cough, Android), but Audrey thinks that consumers are going to prefer Apple to Android (cough, cough, apps), especially since you can get Dan Brown ebooks in the iBooks store. We do all agree that the iPad 2 is a lot more classroom-friendly than the first iPad, though. Mills gives us his take on Bill Gates’s influence on education, and promises Bill that for an educational technology grant of a mere $20 million, he won’t buy an iPad 2 after all. Finally, we claim that we don’t want UniLeaks, the WikiLeaks for higher education, to degenerate into a gossip site like Juicy Campus, but we might be lying just a little bit.

Links to stories and articles mentioned in the podcast:

Dan Cohen, What Scholars Want from the Digital Public Library of America
David Weinberger, Questions From and For the Digital Public Library of America
Amanda French, Imagine a National Digital Library: I Wonder If We Can
Josh Hadro, HarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations
Marianne Takle, The Norwegian National Digital Library
Audrey Watters, Will the iPad 2 Make the Grade for Classroom Usage?
Kara Swisher, Kno Student Tablet Start Up in Talks to Sell Off Tablet Part of Business
David Rapp, Internet Archive Tests New Ebook Lending Waters: In-Library, and License-Free
Jeff Young, Professor’s Online Lecture Gets Lift from Bill Gates
Bill Gates, How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools
Bill Gates on Big History
Marc Parry, A WikiLeaks Clone Takes On Higher Education

Running time: 54:26
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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
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It’s January, and that means air travel, interviews, ball rooms, and exhibit halls. This year Digital Campus recognizes conference season with an extended discussion of digital humanities at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA). We also take time to discuss the latest tech news coming out of Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Dan Cohen, Digital History at AHA 2011
Mark Sample, Digtital Humanities at MLA 2011
Pannapacker at MLA: Digital Humanities Triumphant?
Steve Ramsay, On Building
Android at CES: strong growth as platform jumps to new devices
iPad 2 Rumor Roundup
6 Top Smartphone Apps to Improve Teaching
14-year old developer takes top spot in App Store
Lua programming language
Google App Inventor for Android

Running time: 48:04
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It’s time once again for the tuxedos, red dresses, and closely guarded envelopes as the Digital Campus team reveals the top stories of 2010. In a twist this year, each co-host unveils their biggest flop and biggest hit of the year. Amanda, Tom, Mills, and Dan also gaze into their trusty crystal balls—which we can proudly say have been incredibly accurate in years past—for their predictions for 2011. The wait is over—tune in for the cheers and jeers, the laughter and the tears.

Running time: 58:09
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What would Google eBooks do? Nothing that involves human beings, says Dan: don’t look for “staff picks” from this long-awaited “cyberinfrastructure for distributed e-book sales” (which used to be called Google Editions). Your local independent bookseller will be more than happy to give you recommendations, but Dan and Tom are still worried that Google eBooks might hurt indie booksellers and university presses — though perhaps no more than Amazon already has. Mills, meanwhile, as befits a true “podcast intellectual,” can and does give many good reasons why keeping government documents secret for twenty-five years hurts historians and public policy makers; maybe if the U.S. government declassified things earlier, there wouldn’t have been such a frenzy over the illegally downloaded diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks. In any case, the cables are pretty mundane — if you consider acute analysis of diplomatic affairs mundane — and chances are that there’ll be even less salacious gossip in government correspondence from now on. Thanks a lot, Wikileaks. Finally, Tom wonders why the heck we need Chrome OS when we have Android; Google’s announcement that they’re releasing a Google Chrome notebook seems to have missed out on the fact that we’ve had a tablet revolution. Still, maybe students will like it. Students in first grade, that is.

Oh, yes, and Amanda hosts the podcast for the first time, in which multitasking capacity she expresses few opinions about anything. That loud typing is hers. Sorry about that.

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Google Enters the E-Book Market at Last
Amazon enhances Kindle for the Web
Why Wikileaks is Bad for Scholars
Google shows Chrome notebook, Web Store

Running time: 51:11
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In this episode of Digital Campus, Dan, Amanda, and Mills (Tom was unavailable), were joined by Jennifer Howard from The Chronicle of Higher Education to discuss the latest trends in digital media, higher education, and in particular, libraries. We began by reprising a story from so long ago we could hardly remember it–college professors assigning their students to write or edit Wikipedia entries. Then we moved on to much more important topics, like Robert Darnton’s recent proposal to create a “national digital library.” We also discussed a rising trend among librarians–enthusiasm for “patron driven acquisition,” also know as PDA. Please don’t confuse this PDA with prior uses of that acronym! Amanda then chimed in with her take on Amazon’s plan to offer limited lendability for e-books. Regular listeners won’t be surprised by her take on this proposal. And we wrapped with Dan introducing us all to Omeka.net, CHNM’s newest way of making it easy for web users to create and manage archival and museum collections online.

Other links mentioned in the podcast:
Wikipedia’s Public Policy Initiative
National Digital Library proposal in The Chronicle
National Digital Library proposal in Libraryjournal.com
Patron driven acquisition in The Chronicle
Amazon.com’s ebook lending program

Running time: 52:13
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Digital Campus expands its roster to four with the addition of Amanda French as our newest co-host. It’s a busy week to start the new era, and we jump right in with news that Amazon is trying to revive the venerable pamphlet for the digital age. We turn next to three stories out of EDUCAUSE, including the Gates Foundation’s big splash, Second Life’s big flop, and Sherpa’s big promise. We applaud UVa and NARA’s announcement of open access to the Founding Father’s papers, and setting aside our iEverything for a change, we discuss some interesting new offerings from Microsoft, including Windows Phone 7 and Bing’s new Facebook-powered social search. We wrap things up with a some ideas to help you deal with the distractions of the online world.

Running time: 58:10
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Dan, Tom, Mills, and Amanda return to discuss what’s new for faculty this semester, including some welcome hiring in digital humanities. We discuss the trend of “cluster hiring” at big universities such as the one being advertised at Iowa and parallel developments at smaller colleges like Hamilton and Amherst [.doc]. Other topics include Google Instant and rumors of a Facebook phone. Oh, yeah, and something big was announced by Team Zotero.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:

THATCamp LAC (Liberal Arts Colleges)
Yahoo says we had it first
Zuck gives $100 million to Newark public schools
The Social Network, the movie

Running time: 54:04
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For our fourth annual back-to-school edition of Digital Campus Tom, Dan, and Mills invited podcast irregulars Amanda French and Bryan Alexander to join in on a discussion of what we can expect in the year ahead. Mills wondered whether news from Facebook central that the ubiquitous social networking platform was losing its grip on college students meant it might be replaced by something new, but was shot down by others on the podcast. But we did speculate on what potential competitors like Diaspora might mean for the future of social networking among students. We also wondered whether this was the year that e-books begin to really replace textbooks on campus. The sudden demise of the digital version of Rice University Press also left us wondering whether digital imprints might ever replace the bricks and mortar/paper and glue university press. To find out what we concluded about all these possible digital replacements, you’ll just have to sit back and listen.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

How not to run a university press
Clay Shirky on the future of print
Mobile textbooks

Running time: 54:04
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