Apparently our Information Technology Services here at UNC has started a Sakai Action Group, to investigate the use of Sakai as an enterprise-wide course management system. One presumes the unspoken here is: instead of Blackboard. Pam Sessoms in Davis turned me on to this, as apparently she’s in charge of the library’s efforts to pilot Sakai. So I met with Kim Eke from ITS yesterday, and I’ve officially volunteered to.. Read More
Outboard Brain
As these things often do, writing and thinking about my last post, far from closing the issue for me, led me to more on the topic. Specifically: Cory Doctorow’s 2002 essay My Blog, My Outboard Brain… …and the considerably more recent: Your Outboard Brain Knows All, from Wired Cory Doctorow’s essay is about his use of his blog, specifically Boing Boing, as external memory as background conversation. I especially like.. Read More
Just a little piece of the big mind
The Outsourced Brain, from the NY Times Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these.. Read More
A rude awakening
I’m at the ASIST conference now, and I had a realization yesterday. I attended the panel that Fred moderated, and by jove if it wasn’t the best session I’ve been to so far at this year’s conference. The research presented was interesting, the topics presented fit together in clear and logical ways, and the presenters were animated and enthusiastic, and had excellent presentation skills. I’ve been to other conference sessions.. Read More
Made completely out of goat cheese
Following up my previous post on the Wikipedia Scanner, I give you The Wiki Watcher, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Apparently chèvre is used as a building material in Gainesville FL. Wikipedia says so, so it must be true.
I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!
Librarians Protest Science‘s Departure From JSTOR, Fearing a Trend, from the Chronicle …the American Association for the Advancement of Science announced in late July that it would pull its flagship journal, Science, from JSTOR… According to the announcement, the AAAS, as the association is known, was merely joining ‘an increasing number’ of large scientific-society journals that were ‘digitizing and controlling their own content.’ … Over the last few months, several.. Read More
Slam the Boards + Yahoo Answers = frustration for your humble narrator
On September 10 there was a sort of guerilla action digital reference event, called Slam the Boards. This was “a day-long answer fest” where reference librarians would answer as many questions as they could in one day, using authoritative resources. This was quite well publicized, at least in the digital reference community, and planning had been underway for more than a month. It’s not clear how many librarians actually participated,.. Read More
That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Project of Publishers’ Association Is Criticized by Some of Its Members and Open-Access Advocates, from the Chronicle Mr. Dezenhall’s advice to the publishers’ association, says Nature, included a suggestion that it focus on messages such as “Public access equals government censorship.” That advice echoes throughout Prism’s Web site in language like this: “Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at.. Read More
None, I think, do there embrace
Scholars Embrace New Publication Modes in Theory More Than in Practice, Study Finds, from the Chronicle The report concludes that “the UC faculty largely conform to conventional behavior regarding scholarly communication, such as publishing in traditional venues, but widely express a need for change in the current systems of scholarly communication.” Well, I can’t say that’s a huge surprise to me. Everyone recognizes that the existing scholarly communication system is.. Read More
100 times the information at 85% the accuracy
Scanner Tracks Who’s Changing What on Wikipedia, from NPR See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign, from Wired Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet.. Read More