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Those machines are only upgraded, you know, once a month on Patch Tuesday, Microsoft might send out some patches or they're done by the IT department. They get a full upgrade, let's say once a summer to put new applications on it. And they might not be, the applications, not the OS, might be patched once a year. And so it just leaves these long periods of time where they're vulnerable to attack. And all of these scripts and hacks are available for weeks or months. And you just have to scan an IP range and hack into those machines. I think there's probably a big underground, you know, hundreds of millions of computers that are hacked in this way and that people just don't know about. Well, on that cheery note, we will move on to our feature story with Bill Turkle. Well, as I said at the top of the podcast, we're really fortunate to have Bill Turkle here. He's visiting from Canada, from the University of Western Ontario, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of History. And as I also mentioned, Bill has a terrific blog on digital history hacks. And he's visiting here at the Center for History and New Media. And I should mention, actually, this is our first podcast that we've actually done truly around a roundtable. We always talk about being around a virtual roundtable, but we're usually on Skype, either in our offices or from home. But this time, we're actually around a single microphone. So it'll be interesting to see what the sound quality looks like, but it gives us a chance to actually look at Bill and talk directly to his face. And indeed, that seems to be, I think, one of the interesting things that Bill is working on is sort of combining the digital with physical presence and with the advantages of what you can do with what he calls history appliances. So maybe Bill, I suppose the first thing we'd wanted to ask you is what are these history appliances and where can we get them at Circuit City or Best Buy or Fry's Electronics? Okay, well, that's a good question. First of all, I think the name history of appliances is just a terrible name, and I hope somebody comes up with something better. But the basic idea was as computing becomes kind of more ubiquitous, as it becomes more like things like literacy or plumbing or electricity, we start to stop. We stop thinking in terms of computers and we start thinking in terms of experiences. And I was trying to think of what kind of, you know, what kinds of things in our everyday life mediate our experiences? You know, what would we do so that having access to some kind of a historical experience would be like flipping on a light switch or turning on a tap or something like that. Hence this kind of rough idea of making something like a history appliance, something quotidian, something inexpensive, something that gives you access to historical, either historical data or historical experiences or something like that. And tell us a little bit about sort of what are the mechanisms involved, the hardware, the software, and the kinds of things that you would envision doing with this, maybe a concrete example or two. Okay, well, kind of an easy example might be something like if you had in your house, if you had something that was like a dial that you could set to a date, to a year, maybe you could sort of set the dial to something like 1973. And then all of your media, which would be presumably interactive and be coming up from a database, would then reflect that setting. So you might, if you had picture frames on the wall, they might set to images from 1973. If your stereo might start playing tracks from that year, you could imagine turning on the TV and seeing programs or movies from that year, that kind of thing. So that's a kind of, since it's all based on media, it's at least easy to imagine how something like that might work. But I think it could go quite a ways beyond that. It also seems like there is some interactivity with the objects as well. So, you know, I have on my XM radio, I have the 70 station as one of my presets. It takes me back to my great childhood, along with Tom and great WAAF in Worcester, Massachusetts, which you both listened to and banged our heads to what now seems to be actually pretty good music, looking back on it. But beyond the golden oldies syndrome and the sentimentality, it seems like you're really trying to get at reproducing some kind of interactivity and historical experience in a way and feedback mechanisms, these kinds of things. So a student, for instance, could not only experience something, but also interact with it. Yeah, I think that kind of providing media that's relative to a particular data or particular area is just kind of the tip of the iceberg. Really, the question would be to think in terms of more than just the way we usually interact with computers, which is we look at things that can present visual images or video, we listen to things that can present sounds, and we move a mouse or click a button. And the question is, what kinds of motions or data can we actually be feeding into the computer? And what kinds of outputs can it be providing that are kind of more tangible or peripheral or something that's not just on the screen? You should say, as you can tell, that Bill is getting over a cold or something. And we've And we've had him here all day. Yeah. And, and, and. Grilling him. Grilling him on, on all the great work he's doing. So, so, you know, I think one of the things we actually just came out of a brown bag lunch where, where Bill showed off some of these appliances, both envisioned and some of the technologies that you use, like little microprocessors and servos and feedback mechanisms like GPS and so forth to situate people in a physical environment and feedback into some kind of visualization or catalog so that you can pull up different files and so forth to, for instance, in the case of that great dial, dialing back in time and seeing different images. One of the things that we talked about was, and we haven't talked much about this on the podcast, but there's a Vogue right now, which I assume will go away in the next year or two for Second Life. And I think what's really interesting here that we talked about over lunch was sort of the differences here between that kind of immersion with an avatar and a completely virtual software environment and the kinds of things you're talking about. Yeah, that's actually, well, that's a great example. Like I think the thing about something like Second Life is that you have the flexibility to kind of create almost anything, but your interactions with that virtual world are somewhat limited to the kinds of interface technologies that we normally use. I mean, one of the things we talked about in the session today was using things like PlayStation controllers or like the new Nintendo Wii remote, things that use, that have the ability to sense more than just kind of key presses. And so they can actually sense motion and space and so forth. And I think Tom came up with a really good example. He says, imagine you can have a virtual 17th or 18th century laboratory set up, but that you could control it with one of these devices so that you could, you know, because it was hard to get things to work out in that environment and you could send some of that back to the user. So really ways of mixing reality, mixed virtual and actual. Right. I mean, one of the things that we talk about as historians is how difficult it is to, you know, the past is so different and, you know know, texts help us get a little bit of the ways there. Images, more recently in history, people have been using sound like music to try to understand and to convey to students what the past was like. But one of the things that I think History appliances brings about is experiencing a little bit more in a physical way what the past is like. And the way that people, in Tom's case, and maybe Tom, you can explain your example a little bit more, is to actually try to proceed through the way that people did things physically so you would understand, as Tom, you were saying, sort of how difficult, say, science was during the Enlightenment. Tom, do you want to mention the example that you brought up? Yeah, sure. One of the recent trends in history of science has been the trend towards experimental reconstruction. And what can we learn by recreating historic crucial experiments in the history of science using period instrumentation and what can we learn about the kinds of tacit knowledge that was required to carry out those experiments? What can we learn about the kinds of social arrangements and the numbers of people that were required to actually make these things work about the kind of expertise that was involved in doing those kinds of experiments?
And one of the things I've been thinking about is taking something like the Wii remote controller, which allows the game player to control the action on the screen using a handheld remote. Using something like that to set up virtual historical experimental reconstructions of iconic experiments like Boyle's air pump experiments and having students in let's say physics classes use this technology to kind of get a better sense of what it was like to actually do science, to practice science, rather than in the 17th and 18th centuries, rather than just learning about the theories that came out of 17th and 18th century science, which is really what they're really learning. I mean, the science students aren't learning cutting-edge science. They're learning 17th, 18th, 19th century science, in some cases, 20th century science. But certainly, you know, in high school, they're not learning 21st century science. But they're only learning the kind of the distilled theoretical product of science. They're not actually learning the practice of that science. And how can we use these physical technologies, these physical interfaces to give them a better, to historicize the knowledge that they're learning and to give them a better grounding in how that knowledge was created? I think a lot of people don't work in the history of science, and realize that much of science is, well, scientists know this, but a lot of first year students might on really had to do with setting up objects. And the way in which you set them up really changed the outcome of the experiment. And there was sort of technical knowledge and lab knowledge that was passed along from generation to generation. And it certainly, in addition to, in the history of science, speaking of trends, there's this trend now to bring in, you know, who were those people in the labs? What were they actually doing? As opposed to just, admittedly, this is more of what I do of the actual theory and mathematical theory that went along with that experimentation. Well, you were going to say something. Well, I was just thinking like in the case that Tom brought up. So, for example, some of these things you definitely want to do in the virtual world, especially the ones that are too poisonous or too potentially dangerous for your students to explore. But giving students access to physical controllers that aren't just a keypad or a mouse to allow them to actually manipulate things and find out what the consequences of particular kind of embodied knowledge are. So for example, these game controllers let you do things. You can shake something like the Wii and convey information about the velocity, the way that you're shaking it and so forth. If you know what the result would be, if that's some chemicals in a test tube or something like that, maybe you have to shake them just to get the thing to come out just right. We can kind of start to teach or start to explore some of the embodied knowledge people have. And we'll be building on skills that they're already getting, say, playing computer games or something like that. Bill, I know one of the things you've been really interested in is place-based computing. How do you see these historical appliances connecting to that area of your interest? Okay, so that's a great example. In some of the earlier work that I did, I've had either a tablet computer or a handheld computer with a GPS, and as you're standing in a particular place, it will show you, say you're standing in front of a building, you can see a picture of how that building used to look or the census records of who used to live there. GPS gives you location. But for me, one of the really interesting things about the kinds of technologies we're talking about is that it becomes possible to have as an input, say an electronic compass. So you not only know where you are, but which way you're facing. Or you could tilt the tablet or the handheld. Excuse me. And an accelerometer inside the device could tell you, it could give you information about that. So you could literally move this device around in front of you and it would know which way it was facing and which way it was tilted and give you a view into the past of that environment. For example, that's the kind of additional beyond GPS functionality that some of these other input and output devices give you. At the Center for History and New Media, we've sort of been speculating about doing something like this. The device that we've often thought about is the cell phone. And in fact, we have, I think, a grant in right now to do some historical information delivered to cell phones for a just-in-time delivery of information based on history markers, right? Tom, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We have this idea that we want to deliver the content of all the state of Virginia historical markers that are scattered around the roads of Virginia to deliver the content of those markers to people's cell phones while they're in their cars, if they're too busy to stop, or if there isn't a convenient pull-off, they can receive the text of those markers while they're in their cars by their cell phone. But they can also, I mean can also improve upon that marker content Which is usually only about 150 words We can improve upon that content with contextual resources primary source resources directions to related markers Directions to nearby markers we can kind of weave together a narrative and and create some some connections between historic sites and between historic sites and documents using this technology that people already have in their pocket. And one of the things I think I'm most interested in with the cell phone, and I think we're all interested in, is people are carrying around this piece of technology. Everybody's got one. Everybody's got one sitting in their pocket. And they're using it to make phone calls. Maybe they're using it to send text messages. Maybe they're using it to play music. But they're not using it to do anything educational, scholarly, any of the things that we're interested in. And so how can we get our work, the work of digital humanists, onto that platform, that other platform? Because as Bill says, so often we're dealing with this one platform, which is the one that sits on our desk. We're not dealing with these other platforms that may already exist in people's pockets, that may exist in their living rooms, or that we could actually build. And I think that's where Bill is doing some very interesting thinking is maybe digital humanists shouldn't just be thinking about the interfaces that people already own. Maybe digital humanists should be thinking about building new interfaces for digital humanities work. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Tom. A lot of the, to my mind, a lot of the really interesting stuff that's going on is happening in art, it's happening in electronic music and places like that where people start off with the idea not only that they want to communicate something expressive or interpretive, but also that the way that they communicate that should possibly be novel or interesting or accessible in spaces that aren't the kind of spaces where historians typically reach audiences. So we expect to reach people reading books, traditional books. We maybe expect if we're in public history to reach people in museums or heritage parks or places like that. But I think artists are really thinking there's all kinds of spaces to reach people. And so not just the cell phones that they carry around, but the places where they're waiting in line for coffee or they're sitting in their car or they're driving past something like how do we start to create interactions in those spaces that possibly aren't distracting, but might provide more meaning for people? Well, this is certainly something that we're following and we're looking forward to seeing some of your contraptions as they get built and maybe even trying a little bit of this ourselves. I don't know, Bill, if you noticed, but we're right across the hall from the Autonomous Robots Laboratory. So we'll steal some servos from them right after the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, guys. As regular listeners to the program know, we like to end each podcast with our picks of the week. These are links, resources, software, and other things that we've found around the web and off the web that we think might be useful for our audience. Tom, maybe we'll start with you this week. What have you found? Sure. I actually ran into a problem this weekend. When I got my new computer, I didn't install Photoshop CS2 on it because I'd been waiting for the Photoshop CS3. And then I ended up having to do some image work and I didn't have anything on my machine to do it with. And so I searched around the web for something free that I could use. All I needed to do was do a little bit of resizing images and things. And I found something for the Mac called Seashore. It's at seashore.sourceforge.net.
It's free. It's free and open source. And I really encourage people to take a look at it. It's a Mac-only product, but I also probably should mention, this is sort of more of a tip than a pick. In general, Photoshop is something that the new Photoshop CS3 I was just looking on Amazon costs about 650 bucks. And, you know, and it's a it's a great product, but you can also get what's called Photoshop elements. I think a lot of people don't know that Photoshop elements is out there and that's only about 75 bucks. And again, that product does probably, you know, 99 percent of what 99% of digital humanists really need to do. Now, if you're a designer or a graphic designer or print designer, you're going to want Photoshop or Illustrator, one of the more heavy-duty products. But Seashore or Photoshop Elements is great in a pinch, and I really recommend both. That's a great recommendation. I'd just add to that that there are actually now web-based photo editors and image editors that run right in your browser. They're free, and you can access them from everywhere. The one I've used before, which works great, is called Fixer, P-H-I-X-R dot com. That's a bonus link. That's not my link for this week, but I'll just throw it out there as a very handy application. Yeah, that's a great one. You're in a pinch and you just want to, you know, convert a color image to black and white or rotate something or add in some text on top of an image. It works great. Export it right to your hard drive and you're done. Mills, what do you have this week? Well, actually, since Bill Turkle is our guest this week, I have a Bill Turkle site to recommend, and that's a video podcast that Bill put up about place-based computing and work he's doing at the University of Western Ontario. So if you're interested in the idea of place-based computing using handheld devices and GPS and that sort of thing, that's a great place to go and get a succinct overview of what place-based computing is and how it can work in a teaching environment. That's at digitalhistory.uwo.ca slash pbc, place-based computing. Great. And we'll put up all these links on our show notes, as usual. The link I have for this week is actually, I'm starting to do some looking around for a class I'm teaching, a graduate class in digital history in the fall. And I've been thinking about, well, how to handle introducing students to some of the things I do, some of the things we all do, some of the things that Bill does extremely well. And Bill knows programming and all these other things that humanists don't normally know. And I really caught my eye a new program. It's actually sort of a software development tool called Scratch from MIT. It's available at scratch.mit.edu. And yes, they have a little cartoon cat, I guess, named Scratch as their mascot. And this is a sort of a visual programming environment that's, I don't know if any of you start out with Logo or any of these early programming languages that you could use and were very simple. I mean, even more simple than something like BASIC. And this is unbelievable. It's put out by a group at the MIT Media Lab. And basically, you just take little blocks or literally little colored blocks, and they snap together. So when you want to learn about programming loops or algorithms or listening for a mouse event like the user pushing down on a mouse. They're little blocks. They're colored. They fit together into little pieces. And so you make a program out of these little colored blocks, and then it runs in a separate window, and you can export it as a Scratch application. It's a really great way to start to learn about programming in a very simple way. I haven't seen an environment like this in a really long time. And so I think it's something I'm going to try to use in my class. Again, that's at scratch.mit.edu. Well, thanks for joining us once again. We'll be back in two weeks for another episode of Digital Campus. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv, where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Here it goes.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is Digital Campus, featuring Tom, for February the 19th, 2010. What's the buzz? Well, welcome back to the podcast. This is the snowpocalypse edition of Digital Campus. If you've followed the news at all about the greater Washington metropolitan area, we've had God only knows how much snow in the last few weeks. Schools were closed. Some are still closed. George Mason University even closed. I assume that means the Center for History and New Media even closed for a little bit. But we are back, and we are as good as ever. We're all stronger for all the shoveling. And I'm Mills Kelly, the third of the rotating hosts of Digital Campus, taking the place of Tom Sheinfeld, who took the place of Dan Cohen, who will take the place of me next time. And if you can follow all of that, you are a regular listener. Thank you. And Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. How's it going, Tom? Hi, everybody. I am running on a little bit of lack of sleep. I had snow plows and front-end loaders outside. I live right on Wisconsin Avenue in D.C., and they were finally clearing the third lane of traffic of snow with front- front unloaders all night long right outside our place. So if I'm a little slow on the uptake or slower on the uptake, I guess, than I usually am, please excuse me. Okay. We'll make necessary allowances. And then one of our irregulars joins us today, Amanda French, who is at amandafrench.net. How's it going, Amanda? Going well, Mills. Thanks. And Amanda comes to us from the frozen north of Albany, New York, where they have much less snow than us. This is just one of those freaks of nature, I guess. So today we're turning to a topic that we haven't spent a lot of time on on the podcast, but one that's been a lot in the news of late. One could even say there's been a lot of buzz about it, and that is the question of Internet privacy. With the launch of Google Buzz several days ago now, one might be willing to ask, does anybody at Google actually have a Facebook page? Because if they do, then they might have noticed that Facebook has gotten several bloody noses over intruding on people's privacy. But perhaps nobody at Google does have a Facebook page, or maybe they just think that they're above all of those kinds of controversies, because there has been a lot of controversy about the new... Wait, don't they have an Orcutt page? Oh, that's true. I forgot. I forgot. They're friendly with all their friends in Brazil. That's right. Very friendly with Brazilians. Yeah. So what is the controversy about Google Buzz, guys? Is anybody buzzing in Google in their Gmail accounts? I tried it a bit later, actually, than other people tried it, but I did finally get around to it, and I had a good time playing with it for a couple of days. I figured that I wasn't going to use it anyway because I'm sort of locked into my social networking habits at this point and my email habits. I don't like web mail. I prefer to use a client, so I was never going to really be in the Gmail interface as it was. But I did go into it and it was fun and whatever. And then all the privacy concerns blew up. And I actually spent some time researching exactly what the problem was and became more and more convinced that, oh, yeah, this was actually this was a problem. Google was making public information that was not public before. And their just tone deafness to that is, I think, really astonishing. Yeah, you know, I couldn't get it to turn on. And I think like Tom, I use Google Apps for your domain, which is sort of like having a business account where I do use Gmail, but it's, you know, I use dan at dancohen.org. And it's just masked through Gmail. And so it didn't automatically turn on for me as it did for others. I sort of found a backdoor to getting into it through Google Reader. And it looks like I'm sort of semi turned on in Google Reader because I think, Amanda, you're following me in Google Reader now for some reason. But I'm not following anyone because I couldn't get it to really work since I'm not using the official Gmail account, which would be an at gmail.com. I mean, I guess what this raises, the larger question is, and I think we're going to increasingly find this, and it's really scary, I think, in an academic environment where we start bringing other resources, but there's a lot of resources combining together on the web, which I guess is the nature of the web, these kind of overlapping circles of resources and tools and software. And I think what happened here is that we're starting to see is, you know, Google sort of trying to combine different realms in a way that's really clunky and, as I think correctly said sort of tone deaf you know I think just everyone as soon as it was launched I mean I can't believe that this wasn't understood inside and actually I think it probably was understood inside the more I think about it but to think that the social graph of your email is the same as your social graph for Facebook or Twitter is completely insane. And I've got to think that the thousands of PhDs at Google, even if they are lacking in emotional intelligence, as Canaletta claims, I still think at least one or two of them might have considered the fact that, you know, exposing who you email a lot is a bad idea. And that's not the same as the kind of people you follow on Twitter. Yeah. So it's just a very strange incident here. Well, I think, I mean, some of the problem, and Dan, I think you're pointing to this, is some of the problem was they actually didn't test this with anyone. You know, there was Strangely for Google, there was no beta test of this project. It was launched as a full-blown product. And all of the testing was done in-house. So people at Google, the 20,000 engineers or however many are employed by Google, have been using Buzz in-house for a while now. And in that respect, so like, and you know, and they're all using Gmail as well. So like, and they're all emailing one another because it's their work email. I mean, in that respect, I could see that it could be really, really interesting. Like for instance, at CHNM, I could see how it would be great to have all of my colleagues at CHNM on the same kind of Twitter network, on the same, and have that integrated with my email, because I'm spending all day long emailing you, Dan, and emailing Jeremy Boggs, and emailing all these other people at CHNM. And to be able to have a kind of Twitter info update system built into that, in that kind of closed system, could be really interesting. So I can imagine that the people at Google, when it was closed and it was limited to just the Google employees, said, wow, this is really great. And it was just their work network. And so in that particular use case, I think the social graphs did map onto one another very well. It's just that when they opened it up to the wider world You're right Dan like my the people I email is very very very different from the people You know, there's some overlap but but very different from the people I'm communicating with on Twitter so I think some of it was just that they the the testing regime was just really ill-conceived which is funny funny because Google is so well-known for, as you say, keeping things in beta for so long and testing things a whole lot. I actually think that some of what I understand of the Google culture does explain this snafu, which is that they were really focused, I think, on interface. So they recognized that it was going to be very useful for people to be in their Gmail interface where they already are and where they're already chatting and to integrate social networking into that. And I think that all the testing that they did, which was only internal testing, you know, probably had to do with like, is this a good interface to use rather than, gee, you know, is your email social graph the same as your public social networking social graph? They didn't think about it in that way. I do think that one of the things this shows is how important social networking is. Google, I think, kind of rushed this product out a little because they're scared of things like Twitter and Facebook.
And, you know, it didn't really work. You know, I think I've been trying to put my finger on why I've become increasingly annoyed with Google. And I don't want it to be just a black and white thing where they're a giant tech company and we have to be mad at them, just like we were mad at Microsoft in the 1990s and IBM in the 1980s. And it kind of came to me with, even before Buzz, when I started thinking more and more about Google Books, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later in the podcast, but that the reason we grew to love Google was that they were really great, not at creating things themselves on the web, but in organizing decentralized web information, right? I mean, it was search first, but it was other things as well that they weren't in the business of building centralized services. And they'll probably say, well, Buzz is not a centralized service. We're going to open source it. There will be APIs, all that stuff. But it just feels like more and more, you know, and Google Books really, I think, is the epitome of this. They're building actually a resource that we go to something.google.com, in this case buzz.google.com or books.google.com. And it seems like their core strength was they had genius computer scientists, they had million server scale network analysis, and they were the place to go when you wanted to get to other stuff or when you wanted to organize other stuff. And I just don't get, I know that they licensed data from Twitter and I think they'd like to do the same from Facebook, but maybe it's just that they were getting a brushback from Facebook and couldn't really get in there to organize the Facebook information better than the Facebook folks. But I don't know, does that make sense to you, Tom? You were saying that you agree. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I totally's sort of a related thought. I've also been increasingly thinking of, for 10 years now, I've been thinking, Google is this massively innovative company. And I'm starting to realize that actually, I don't think they are that innovative. I think they've done search better than anybody else has done it, but they didn't invent search. I think they've done, you know, I think Gmail is great. I think they've done webmail better than anybody else has done it, but they didn't invent webmail. They've done, you know, online sharing of documents and collaborative documents sort of better than anybody else has, but like, they didn't invent that either. And they, you know, they're trying to do social networking and maybe they'll do it better than Facebook. But but, you know, who knows? I just think I mean, Google, it seems to me, has had has had sort of this one one really, you know, like hit it out of the park home run in. They they've done search better than anybody else has done it. And they've had really one, I think, major innovation, which is a business model innovation in advertising. But aside from that, I feel like... Which they basically took from Overture. True, right? True. And it just seems to me that at this point... So if we point to, let's say we point to search and ads as like the Google, the real revolutionary thing that Google did, I feel like all this other stuff is, you know, it's sort of the cart starting to come before the horse. And I think you're right. I think they've made this shift to being a kind of destination when before they were really a service. And that, it puts Google in a whole new light for me. So I think it's going to be very interesting to see where Google goes, you know, in sort of the second decade of its life. Well, and I think it's, in that sense, it sort of mirrors a lot of what we saw in the 1990s is e-businesses that then started building bricks-and-mortar stores, and most of those didn't work out very well. And so it'll be interesting to see whether Google can make some of this transition to the equivalent of a bricks-and-mortar operation for certain things. And certainly, you know, if they build this vast digital library that they've been working on and it becomes a competitor in some way to Amazon or other kinds of library services, then they'll be judged by a different metric than they're judged now. I want to go back for just a second to something that Dan said because one of the things we've talked about a lot on the podcast is universities moving increasingly to cloud-based services for email and just about anything. And instead of paying for these proprietary email systems that are generally pretty bad, what do we think about that? If universities really are moving in that direction, this kind of aggregation of information that Dan was talking about a minute ago, is that going to be a problem for our campuses? Well, I think one thing that Google did very, they were very smart about with the launch of Buzz was that they didn't apply Buzz to Google Apps for My Domain. So all of those students who are on university campuses that have switched to Gmail and all of those businesses that are using Google Apps for My Domain, those people weren't automatically added to Buzz and all of those contacts weren't automatically exposed. It was just people using the consumer service, Gmail, not the web mail for Google Apps for My Domain. And I mean, it would have been a much, much bigger deal had they all of a sudden exposed all of the contacts and all of the email addresses for everybody on, let's say, the Boston College campus or the USC campus or these other institutions that are using these services. If it's just a person here and a person there and a person there, they can make a lot of noise. But if you do that with a big institution, you end up in a lot of trouble. So I think in that respect, they were kind of smart, which actually starts to make, you know, I guess, I'm not sure whether Dan or Amanda said this, but they had thought about this initially. This wasn't something that, you know, this wasn't just a goof. This was maybe more planned than they let on. Well, Tom, I mean, that kind of scenario that you're describing is almost like you have to pay for privacy. You know, if you get a service like Gmail for free, just as an individual consumer, well then, implicitly, the transaction is Google has the right to use your data to, you know, show you ads or that kind of thing. Whereas, if you're paying for Google services on the enterprise level, well, there's an implicit agreement in that that Google is not going to expose your data willy-nilly the way it did for individuals. Yeah, and that's a great point. I mean, because the value proposition for Google of those two different services, the Gmail versus the Google Apps for My Domain, are totally different, right? I mean, they're getting, you know, I have a paid account for Google Apps for My Domain, so I don't have to see the ads because AdBlocker doesn't work on Google Apps for my domain. You know, so I pay 50 bucks a year for this service, and my contacts weren't exposed. It makes sense, though, for Google to expose the contacts. I mean, right? Like,'s whole business model is putting more information out there, getting people to expose more of their web pages, their information. And so the value proposition for Gmail is, I mean, it needs to be more public. It's not good for Google to have all those databases locked down and private. They need to be public in some way for Google to make money on them because they need to put ads on them. So I think you're totally right. Maybe it was a value proposition there, a decision that they made. Well, Tom, I wanted to go back to your point, actually, because I disagree a little bit that Google didn't innovate much. I mean, I think they did. I think innovation in general isn't necessarily about being purely original. You know, it's about taking things and adding that one little twist that makes them really useful. But I do think that you're absolutely right, that Google seems to be changing as a company, that they do seem to be focusing more on building things and becoming a destination and that kind of thing, rather than organizing information. You have things like the fact that Google has a phone, the Nexus One. Even last year, there were people who said, Google's never going to get into the business of building a phone or building a phone operating system. Why would they do that? What does that have to do with organizing information?
So Google is, it seems to me like, if you think of Google as a person, as a character, it's kind of transitioning from being, they used to have a kind of an academic personality, you know. They were run by Larry and Sergey, who were engineering PhD students, and they had all these kind of idealistic things that they would say about what Google's mission was, but they just seemed to be turning more and more into the kind of business that we academics all love to hate, where they're playing catch-up with other companies, and it seems to be all about the competition, all about social networking is where it's at. Let's do social networking. Mobile phones is where it's at. Let's do that. And you see that Larry and Sergey have, in fact, announced a plan for selling their majority stake in the company and for basically getting out. And so even just structurally, it is becoming more of an ordinary publicly traded corporation. Yeah, and, you know, now they've announced that they're going to start experimenting with providing broadband access in selected markets, another sort of bricks and mortar strategy. You know, what I worry about going forward, just back to, Mills, your original point on privacy, is that I think what happened, I think what happened and I've grown to love Twitter, but I think Twitter is having this influence that Twitter from the start was, it's all public. This is a public stream of information. I think what's happening now is even though Twitter really hasn't been in the big scheme of things, a success like Facebook or Google, I think a lot of the tech people, because they hang out a lot on Twitter, feel like this is the future of this open information. And Facebook, a lot of its clumsiness surrounding privacy, and now Google, a lot of its clumsiness surrounding privacy, has to do with them really wanting to get as much information as possible into a public data stream that then can be mined and used in other ways. And so Facebook is, you know, in this latest update where they basically had the default be that all your updates were public to everyone, you know, was trying to kind of Twitterize itself. Google, I think with Buzz, was sort of trying to Twitterize itself. And I've been playing around a lot with Google Books with the My Library function, which is used by me and maybe one other person in the entire world. But if you go to books.google.com and you have a Google account, they're really pushing it now. And what's really interesting about this, which I think is very unusual for the book world versus, let's say, the Twitter world, is if you save books to your library, the default is that they're public. They start you out with a bunch of public folders. And I had to really look around to find a way to create a private folder that has a little lock next to it. They're called bookshelves. So if you favorite something or if you're reading something, there's a reading now folder or a have read folder or a reviewed folder. Those are all public folders. And, you know, you think about the future here of where Google Books is going to be licensed to universities if, well, we can talk about settlement in a minute, but maybe it won't be licensed to universities. But at least in the hypothetical, if for universities like Mason, where we only have a one million volume library and we want to get access to another 10 million volumes and the university licenses Google Books to get access to those and that My Library features turn on, you know, we're going to have a lot of people finding out that what they're reading is public, that all the defaults now are going to be for public, public sharing. It's so funny because that's information that librarians, you know, have a deep cultural principle about not sharing, you know. Yeah, yeah. They want to protect their users' data. What you are reading should be private data. Funny story about that, Dan. The class I was teaching last fall, I assigned my students to make... I made them sign up for Zotero and make Zotero libraries, and then I was going to grade them. As I was grading them, I realized that they were all private by default, so I couldn't see them. I was like, whoops, I'm sorry, I have to go in and make Zotero libraries public so that I can see them. It was kind of funny because I assumed that they would be public by default. And I have to say that that's kind of my approach to the web. I mean, even email, I kind of assume that it's going to be public. But I don't think that that's what everybody does or what everybody should have to do. Right. I mean, but can you imagine the associations, if they had flipped on Buzz, which it looks like they've sort of done, or they flipped on this social feature to Google Reader this week, which clearly is going to hook into the whole social framework, I guess, or setting up that Buzz is one part of. But can you imagine if they flipped that on in Google Books and all of a sudden, you know, you could see that whatever, someone was following, you know, was reading Karl Marx for a class. And so, you know, had taken out Karl Marx into their library and then instantly was associated with, you know, the Communist Party of America. And, you know, their parents log on. And, you know, it just, the potential for havoc here is really increasing. Well, in particular, you know, finding out that Dan Cohen was a major fan of Harlequin romances was a shock to me. But now I know what to get you for your next birthday. I'm going to fill my iPad with Harlequin romances. Well, you know, one of the sort of counter arguments to the things that we've been talking about is the, but if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you worry about this? I hate that argument. Although, as I say, it's kind of the way that I conduct myself online. You know, I feel like I try to be squeaky clean. You know, I actually do. I do cuss. I say bad words like in private, in real life. But I don't on the internet, you know, and I won't now, you know. It's a family podcast, yeah. But, you know, yeah, I just I don't like that argument at all. And of course, Eric Schmidt has been quoted saying that kind of thing. And so is Mark Zuckerberg. And it's you cannot impose that on other people. But so now I'd like to turn for just a minute to another story that was in the news about privacy. And this was a case of a high school student who was disciplined for saying bad things on a Facebook page about an administrator at a school that the student attended. Speaking of cussing. And speaking of wanting to cuss right now. Yeah. So, I mean, what do you guys think about this? Is this too far? Disciplining a student in this way? Well, yeah. I mean, I think it's absolutely too far. I mean, I think what the student says and says out of school. I mean, I can't see how that should be disciplined by the school. But I think it also shows that in these more complex systems, the more feature-rich the system, the more difficult it is for the users to kind of understand what is private and what isn't. I'm sure the students sort of thought that this is never going to get back to the administrator. But it's very difficult on a system like Facebook. I mean, the privacy settings are, I mean, you really have to like, there's like 100 of them. And you have to really think very carefully about which things you're going to make private, how private, which groups of people can see what. It would take a study and a lot of time to customize your privacy settings for something as feature-rich as Facebook to really be what you want it to be. I think that's part of the problem is that people don't really know the things that they're doing, which ones are private and which ones aren't. And so a student goes on and thinks he's talking to his friends. And in fact, he's not talking to his friends. He's talking to the principal. And that, I think, is a big problem with all these more complex systems, which sort of sets them apart from Twitter, which the privacy settings on Twitter are very simple because the system is very simple. But, you know, corporations fire employees all the time for writing things in blogs or, you know, on Facebook or Twitter, you know, criticizing their employer. So should students get a pass just because they're students?
The principal, the administration of the school is there to serve the students, not the other way around, whereas in a corporation, I mean, the employees are there to serve the owner, the shareholders, whoever it is, and they serve at the pleasure of those people. School is, I think, a little different in that way. I haven't thought this through, but it just seems to't have too much choice about which public school they are going to go to. So they've got to be there and they've got to be subject to rules that it's a free speech problem. I'm just trying to be a little provocative about this because as a parent of now a middle schooler who spends a fair amount of time on Facebook, there's a certain amount of it that is just teenage 13, 14-year-old behavior. And then some of it can start crossing over into inappropriate. And I think in this particular case of the school administrator going after the student for posting something on Facebook, that seems like a real overreach to me. But at the same time, I think young people can learn some useful life lessons about exactly what Tom said, the need to develop a fairly complex set of skills when it comes to monitoring their Facebook settings, for instance. I think what I found kind of interesting about that story was that the student seemed to be reasonably sophisticated already about what she could and couldn't say. I mean, she created a page, like the opposite of a fan page, I guess, you know, a page that this teacher is the worst teacher I've ever had. And what was interesting is that in the judgment, they said, look, this page was not libelous. It wasn't threatening in any way. It almost sounded to me like she had some kind of instinctive sense of what would be okay and not okay in terms of free speech. And it looked to me like it was absolutely, you know, perfectly valid criticism, you know, the kind of thing that you would write in a course evaluation if you had that. But I guess there's another, there's sort of a, you know, there's an issue here, and I think it's an issue that's not unique to the internet. And it's, you know, there is a difference between what is legal and what is proper and what is good for you. You know, like, you know, it's legal for me to say whatever I want on Twitter. It's not good for my career to say certain things. And so I try not to say those things. So, you know, there's and I think teaching students those skills. And I think it certainly extends into the college years and even into the graduate student years, teaching our graduate students and even junior faculty. You know, what really what are the what are the norms of these communities? What is what is meant to be kept private and what is meant to be made public? You know, I think those kinds of issues are, and today or two days ago about a school district in Pennsylvania that had given laptops to their students with software in the laptop that allowed the schools to turn on the webcam in the laptop remotely and monitor the students' behavior. And a child was disciplined for, according to the story, improper behavior in his home. Using in the evidence for this was the vice principal took a photo of the student through the webcam as evidence. It seems to me this is way over. Without the student's knowledge. Without the student's knowledge. most of them, and they're being photographed without their knowledge by adults, not their parents. I almost can't believe this. I mean, this is like you can't make it up, you know, when you're learning about writing fiction and they say, you know, that truth is stranger than fiction. You actually have to write something that makes sense. This just almost doesn't make sense to me that this could happen. But in the story, it says the school district admits that student laptops were shipped with software. Right. No, I mean, I think what's happening here is that people are starting, as people get more savvy with this technology, I think as in a, you know, in a school environment, there's just going to be an arms race. I mean, there's going to be an arms race around GPS devices for students. You know, I can absolutely imagine there's going to be an arms race in terms of privacy and monitoring around e-readers. So let's say a school district gets a bunch of iPads or Kindles. You know, I'm sure it will be easy to find out. Did a student actually leaf through the entirety of a book or look at a textbook on this device? All these things that you couldn't do in an analog world. And, you know, Millsy mentioned you're, you know, you have a middle school age child, I have a middle school age nephew who is very technically sophisticated. And he and his friends set up their own websites that they could have kind of back channel communications. I mean, they actually got a domain name. They set up a forum software. And this was all to have a kind of back channel conversation about classes or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever else they wanted to discuss. I assume it will be shortly girls. But, you know, and I just think there's going to be this kind of cat and mouse game, but the temptation will be so much more there. And again, this feeds back into our initial discussion in that, you know, if the corporate world is moving toward, let's get as much of this public as possible, let's make the defaults all be public airing of your information, then there's going to be even more chance for administrators or parents or other monitoring services to kind of connect the dots. So look at your Google Books shelf and your Facebook profile and all these things. I mean, it's rather frightening. Well, and the New York Times had a story today about a cell phone monitoring study. They weren't monitoring individuals, but using data about calls placed through individual towers to track the movements of about 100,000 people in Europe and found that we're actually pretty boring because 92% of the time we follow pretty predetermined routines. But again, it raises the same issue of GPS-enabled phones being able to, you can follow the movement of people by the movement of their phones. And so I think it really is going to be an issue that's going to play out in the public sphere a lot over the next couple of years because if this Lower Marion, Pennsylvania school district is any indication, there are lots of people who are willing to cross some pretty obvious lines to gather data for whatever purpose. And purposes which I think they felt were very legitimate purposes, and I think it was just a boneheaded decision on their part. So I think this is something we're going to see a lot more of. Turning now away from privacy to the other big story that we talked about in the last podcast, which was the appearance of the iPad at an Apple event, one of the things we've all talked about since then is that the appearance of the iPad, if it does nothing else, it's going to ratchet up the quality of e-book readers. Amanda, you've spent a lot of time in the library world. What do you think the improving quality of e-book readers is going to mean for libraries? Well, it's not clear yet. And it's not clear to me that iPad, to be honest, is going to improve the e-book reader experience that much yet. It may well, but it may not. I do think that not only libraries, but universities in general, there have been some universities that do e-book reader studies in the classroom. And I think even still, there's no real sense that e-book readers are going to improve learning. And there's no real sense that students are chomping at the bit for e-books with two exceptions. People are always a little interested in not having a lot of books to carry around, and people are always, you know, students are always interested in getting their text cheaper. So I think that actually an improved experience of e-book reading is not at the top of most students' lists. And again, the other thing about things like the iPad is that it doesn't matter how beautiful the text looks. Like they had that demonstration with the iPad where you can turn a page with a swipe of your finger. You know, that kind of thing is not a legitimately improved experience for most people. That's just, you know, oohs and ahhs. People actually really want, particularly in the educational sphere, a way to take notes, save them, search them, export them to other formats. And again, it's not at all quite clear to me that the iPad is going to do that, although I believe the iPad is going to support the open EPUB format, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know. It's all still really up in the air.
But it is true that e-books are becoming more and more important and of interest to all kinds of people. But it seems to me from the standpoint of the library business, the main attraction is storage of books and the preservation of books, that it could potentially significantly reduce those overhead costs if we move in this direction. And there were a couple of studies that came out really recently suggesting that. I see that maybe libraries might jump on this bandwagon, and I think that they would be a little wrong to do so. I'm not actually convinced that, despite these studies, perhaps irrationally, that the cost of keeping bound books on the shelves is that much greater than the ultimate long-term cost of investing in e-books. There's always a lot of infrastructure that goes into supporting any digital format or any digital project. There's hiring programmers who can make a lot more money elsewhere. And to some extent, it's also shifting the costs of the library onto the users. I mean, yes, it costs the library a lot of money to maintain these collections of books, and it will cost them less to acquire and maintain copies of e-books. But that then requires the user to have a new e-book reader every two or three years in the way that the user has a new laptop every two or three years. You know, you need, who's using the cell phone they used five years ago? Me. Everybody. Well, Mills, you're... I'm the last dinosaur. You're the last. Is that like a StarTAC flip phone? What were we using five years ago? It's a brick with antenna, isn't it? That's what Magnum PI used. My son tells me I'm not allowed to take my cell phone out of my pocket in the presence of his friends. It's too humiliating. So the cost then of the library then gets just shifted to the patron, where maintaining the hardware and, and, and maintaining the software and updating the, updating the hardware and the software. I mean, that all then falls on the, on the patron and the student and the, and the, and the faculty members. So I don't know, you know, really, you know, if the total, I mean, maintaining, you know, maintaining technology infrastructure is not cheap. And so this may shift the cost away from the library, but I'm not sure it saves money, as you say, Amanda, in the long term. I'll add one more thing about this. The entire discussion, it seems to me, or most of the discussion about e-book readers to this point has been about how it changes books, right? How it changes the book market, how it changes how books are stored, distributed, shelved, used in the classroom, paid for, all of those things. What we haven't seen and what there's been a lot less discussion about, and I think legitimately because I don't think we know the answer to this question yet, is how e-book readers will change reading, right? And I think that's actually the much more interesting question. It's like, how do these devices and these new distribution methods and these new technologies, how do they change reading? Not so much how they change books, but are we going to read differently? And what does that mean for knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination and learning and all of the things that are associated with those things? So that I think really remains to be seen. So while we can have these discussions about business models and costs and all those things, which are interesting, I don't think we know the answer to the real question, and we probably won't for another several years. That's interesting because I think that this is all my own personal sense, but I feel like reading has already changed in that people are less likely to read books and long-form things. I feel like my own reading has become more fragmented, and honestly, I think that's a good thing. I feel like I'm acquiring a lot more information faster. But that's why this, I'm all in favor of, you know, reading digitally and digitizing information, digitizing articles, writing blog posts, you know, digitizing books, all of that kind of thing. But that doesn't translate for me into being really rah-rah about the e-book, which seems to me to be a completely different beast, you know, like a thing that you read on a digital reader separately, like people trying to translate the book into a digital format for long-form reading. I just don't think that people are there yet. And the reason, I don't know why people do these long studies if they can't convince people, but the studies that are about to be published by the Council on Library and Information Resources suggesting that e-books will save the libraries a lot of money, I don't quite believe them because that strikes me as a really convenient argument for libraries. Libraries want to do a lot more stuff with digital material and they want to have control over that. And I think they recognize that one of the most powerful arguments is going to be the economic argument. If you can argue that digital is cheaper, people are more likely to give you money to do things that are digital. When in fact, maybe what, maybe what you just want to do is, you know, see what happens, explore it, you know, play with it and not, not have to justify it upfront with that kind of thing. That's what I want to do. I want to just go digital just for the heck of it. You know, I've, I've actually been reading a few eBooks lately. Um, uh, I did read Adrian John's book on piracy, which is terrific, and I highly recommend it. When Chicago had their, University of Chicago has this monthly, you know, get a free e-book. And I've also been downloading some books from our local Fairfax library. They have an online program. And, you know, one of the things I do worry about. What are you reading, Dan? Are you reading them on your laptop? On a laptop. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me tell you the rest of the story on this and why I think it's just, you know, I agree about, you know, getting past technology into what does it do to reading to have it be an e-book. But, you know, one thing I did realize is the Chicago book, to read it, required me to get an account with Adobe, what's called an Adobe ID, to read this book, which, first of all, just offended me on that, if anyone from UChicago Press is listening. I mean, to have that be a requirement of reading an e-book, because, of course, it's DRM'd, It's got digital rights management on it, which is another issue entirely. But the fact that the ID has to go to Adobe, and then they know what you're reading because they have to authorize the book before you can read it in their special software that I had to download. So that was one experience that kind of creeped me out. And then you wonder about, you know, Steve Jobs on the warpath trying to get rid of Flash on the iPad. I mean, what if this software goes away, which it will in five or ten years? You know, how does a library anticipate these things unless there's an, you know, unless we all standardize on an open non-DRM format like EPUB, which is basically just an easy to read XML format, you know, HTML, CSS-ish kind of format. We're going to have these sort of generations of, you know, upgrading the technology. The end of the story is from our local library, they required me to install a bunch of software, which I did. And then I started downloading some things. And then I just couldn't get them to open at all. And I tried downloading an audio book for my kids. That also didn't work. And then I went back, looked through all the frequently asked questions. Finally, at the bottom, it said, you can't use this on a Mac because the DRM is linked to Windows DRM. So, you know, there's going to be these technical environments that just prevent you from getting to the reading itself or that are going to change over time. And I also noticed that when I went to, they then had a subsection that were just MP3s. So, in other words, open, more or less open, you know, can play on anything files for the audiobooks. And then did have some epubs and the epubs were like you know self-published you know my theory of the universe books that you know someone had probably published for free uh in epub or self-help books um and so you know i couldn't get to the actual good non-fiction that i wanted to get because all those were drm'd um so I think this technical environment is rather important.
And I pity the library directors who have to kind of make purchasing decisions on, you know, what digital environment they're going to subscribe to. Or, you know, at least a book, it sits on the shelf. You can always access it. That's my rant. Speaking as a university administrator, I have to say this whole discussion has been highly unsettling to me because I've lived my whole life assuming that if it was digital, it was virtually free. And now I'm going to have to rethink my entire budget allocation strategy for the university like I get to allocate any budget. But it is, you know, this does raise some really serious issues for our campuses because I do think that there is an assumption that if it's digital, it must be cheaper and that comes into play on an awful lot of campuses. And, you know, we've ranted about this a number of times on the podcast, but it is something that increasingly our administrators are going to have to face. Well, I think we've reached the end of our discussion on this. And I just want to say for the regular listeners and for my co-participants in the podcast today, I have to tell you why it is that when I tried Google Buzz, I recoiled in horror and had to immediately unconnect myself. And that is, I started seeing things that looked like Twitter feeds showing up on my Google account. And this frightened me that somehow Google had tricked me into joining Twitter. And so I had to immediately disconnect from the whole system. Oh my gosh. You're unclean now. I know. I feel sullied in some way. You were like the angel of this podcast on soil. Not only that, but they published the fact that you're actually a Harlequin book author and have been emailing Harlequin frequently. I am not embarrassed to be the author of many Harlequin romances because you should see the Bentley that I drive to work every day. This is a highly profitable endeavor of mine. But I will not tell you what my pseudonym is. You'll just have to guess. So thanks to everybody. Is it Kelly Mills? No, that would be, that would actually be my, that would be my cousin, Kelly Mills, who is a photographer in Atlanta. And if you want to know the whole story behind the naming conventions in my family, you'll have to listen to another edition of Digital Campus. Just look for any romance set in Slovakia and you'll know it's Mills. That's right. That's right. And well, Slovak men are known for their large pectoral muscles and long hair. So, anyway, thank you all very much for listening to another edition of Digital Campus. Thanks, Amanda, for joining us again as one of our irregulars. And we'll see you the next time you sign on and listen to the podcast. The only thing we have to fear is future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself!
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus, number 39, for the 10th of March, 2009. Upgrades in the downturn. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome again to the Digital Campus Podcast. Podcasting this week from, I guess, our economic hovel, from the economic apocalypse, the crater, out of which we are podcasting on the cheapest possible mics. And we're here, of course, I'm Dan Cohen, joined by our regulars, Tom Scheinfeld and Mills Kelly. Hi, guys. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. I'm going to live on rice and beans for a little while, but doing okay. Good. You're not opening up your 401k plan? That vanished long ago. All we have left is this podcast, Tom and Mills, and our audience, which our beloved audience, send us PayPal payments, please, soon. Yeah, any amount will be appreciated. Right, right. Well, welcome to the podcast. And we're going to jump right into our news roundup where we start each and every podcast. A lot of interesting tech stories. And we will talk about the economic apocalypse and the future story later on. But a number of these stories that I think caught our eye over the last couple of weeks sort of relate to it in terms of cost-saving measures that a university might use and new technology and the way it might play into cash-starved campuses over the next five years. Oh, before we start, though, hey, Mills, did you know that Tom and I, as of tomorrow, we're recording this on Friday, March 6th. As of March 7th, Dan Cohen, yours truly, and Tom Scheinfeld will no longer be members of the Facebook nation. We've left Facebook. Have you really? Yeah. We'll have to talk about it more in the future. Taking too much time away from Twitter, was it? It was costing too much, actually. The monthly fee we were paying to Facebook just ended up being too much. So, you know, we had to scale back. No, we'll have to discuss it on a future Facebook, but we participated in a rogue action really enabled by Twitter called Forget Facebook Friday, where a bunch of people just dumped Facebook for Twitter. So we'll have to catch you over there. And well, let's dive in. We'll talk about Facebook on a future podcast. But since the economic news is so dire, we'll stick with that for today. First of all, a lot of interesting movements. We talked about the Kindle 2 on the last podcast. And now over the past couple of weeks, they've released the Kindle app for the iPhone. We were talking about the iPhone as a potential competitor. Does this just make the eBooks platform that much more ubiquitous and more palatable for the student body? Milos, what do you think about that? You guys will have to say what the resolution looks like on your screen. I don't know if Tom has an iPhone or not, but I don't. I haven't seen the resolution, but my view is that students are going to prefer this kind of app rather than a Kindle because the iPhone has all this capability that a Kindle as just a book reader doesn't. And so I've been saying all along that's the issue is that it's not an internet device other than just a download books from the internet device. So I think students are definitely going to prefer this. Yeah, I think this is a brilliant move on Amazon's part. I mean, my suspicion of this whole e-book thing, going back to last week's or our last show, it was that they, why is Amazon building hardware? And this way, it seems like they're going to build the hardware. You can get their e-books that way. But they're providing another channel for these e-books. I think one of the things that, at least as far as I – from friends who have used the new Kindle app, as far as I know, you can't download the books yet directly to your iPod or your iPhone. You have to put them on when you sync up your iPhone. But once they build that in, and I don't know, maybe Apple won't let them, but if they could build that in, then I think they've sort of got the entire landscape covered. And then I think they really could end up being kind of a monopoly with e-books. I'm not sure about the entire landscape, though, for campuses in terms of at least this iPhone piece of it. And I do think that obviously the iPhone or really the iPod Touch are going to be way more popular than this dedicated Kindle device, at least among students. But it doesn't seem like you can send PDFs to your iPhone. Well, I guess you can right now, but they don't display that well. And I guess one of the advantages of the Kindle is you can send it a Word document or a PDF. You can email it to yourself or download it over USB. And it seems to me that for course reading, not only do you want the books, but you want that capability, don't you? I mean, isn't that a huge gap if you have a device like an iPhone or an iPod Touch or any other mobile device, if you want to have a dedicated reading device? Reading a PDF on something as small as the iPhone just doesn't work. Yeah, that is true. And I think actually that's where things like netbooks come in. And I think that we're going to see a lot of kind of churn in this e-book space as kind of the right device for the right use shakes out, I think. And I think it may be that we end up with multiple devices for multiple uses, that textbooks are better on, let's say, the dedicated device and newspapers and magazines and other things are better on the iPhone. I think we'll see. I was just going to say, I think that's absolutely right. And I think Tom's earlier point is kind of the crucial one, and that is that Amazon can't be in a position of restricting the possible sales of content to these other kinds of devices. I think they're in business to make money, and the publishers are in business to make money, and so they can't say, oh, well, the only way to distribute this is on our dedicated device. Right, right. You know, what I don't get is the, the, also the other thing, interesting thing, ebook wise, it's happening on the iPhone is that people are creating eBooks just as apps and selling it through the app store. And in fact, there was a piece on the O'Reilly radar that, um, these kinds of ebook iPhone applications are actually the fastest growing segment of the, um, iPhone app store. So, um, and in that way you can think about can think about it as if you're an author and you put a book up there or you're a publisher and you put a book up there, you're getting 70% of the app store price. Now, of course, that price might be pretty low, but you're not splitting it with Amazon and you're not, you're kind of more in control of your content, aren't you? Well, maybe you're not. You're in Steve Jobs' world rather than Jeff Bezos' world. But it seems like that's another kind of alternative distribution stream. It's just the App Store itself. Yeah, it just seems whether, I mean, I think in the end, we're going to see one of the problems with these things is going to be discoverability. That like, where is it easier for people to find your content? Is it going to be easier for them to find it through the iTunes or the iTunes music store interface, the app store interface, or is it going to be easier to find it via Amazon? It seems to me that Amazon is really good at connecting people to the books they want to read. That might favor Amazon. On the other hand, you're right. It's like why the intermediary? Why not just get it directly from the App Store if you're already there in the way that you get music from the iTunes store? So I think maybe we're going to end up seeing some kind of a head-to-head contest between Amazon and iTunes and maybe a three-way contest with Google jumping into the mix too. Right.
Really a comprehensive, and of course this works on an iPod Touch as well, a whole suite that lets you know what's going on on campus, includes a campus map. I think there's some location-based services. There's the whole university course catalog. So I got to believe that there's going to be a lot of universities with this come fall 2009. I think definitely. I mean, even just the campus map would be hugely useful. I mean, it's the kind of thing that it may be as useful to visitors as it is to students. I can imagine if you're on a college tour with your high school junior, having a set of these apps that you could download and have campus maps for all the different places you're headed would be really, really useful. I also noticed that Duke, I think unlike Stanford, who's done it before, are going to build this out to be used interoperable with BlackBerrys as well, or at least the new multi-touch BlackBerry. And, you know, hopefully for me, the Android phone. Yeah, and I think, I mean, you can imagine right away, just on the campus map piece, then from the standpoint of, you know, people, visitors coming to to the campus when you're in a particular location, touching on the image of a building and then seeing what the lab looks like inside or watching five minutes of a lecture in one of the lecture halls inside. Just that alone, I think, would be a great marketing tool for universities. So I think they'll definitely jump on. I think admissions offices will jump on that as a possible application. Yeah, I've got to believe it's great marketing to have like that little D or the big D for the Duke logo sitting in the app store. It looks contemporary. It looks future. I just don't know about the – one thing that I wonder about this and I think you're right that that we're going to see a lot of this in fall of 2009. But one thing I don't quite understand is it seems like all 3,500 colleges and universities in America are going to build their own app. And we're going to have – in the app store, there's going to be 3,500 different universities with their own – and're all like essentially doing the same thing and recreating the wheel. It seems like there should be, somebody should be building some kind of a platform for doing this rather than each university building its own specific iPhone app that basically does the same thing. Right, well, it seems like Stanford, these Stanford students who created a mobile application suite for Stanford in the fall, I can't remember if it was part of that course at Stanford on creating iPhone apps, but they created a, I think a company called Terribly Clever Design to make the, to make Duke Mobile and the Stanford thing. It seems like they just would have a template that you could. Oh, so they're going to provide, Ah, I see. So you can contract to them. But, I mean, this does get to the point of for campus use and even just what we're talking about with book releases as apps, doesn't the App Store get so cluttered with what will eventually be thousands or hundreds of thousands of books and thousands of university applications. And it still makes you yearn for the more open platform of Android where you could just go to, in our case, let's say gmu.edu and just download the app straight from there rather than fishing around for it at the Apple App Store. Kind of doesn't make sense as a long-term discoverability model. Yeah, I think we're really going to run into that with the App Store. It kind of doesn't make sense as a long-term discoverability model. Yeah, I think we're really going to run into that with the App Store. And it's the disclosed model, and I think that's one of the problems with it. Well, iTunes University, getting more good press in New Scientist, had an article really looking at the way in which iTunes U has been used on campuses, and particularly the podcast lectures that, Mills, you've really been pushing for many years now. And they did an actual study. It seemed like an actual scientific study, according to the New Scientist, a randomized study where half of a class got a downloaded podcast and half did not. And, you know, in other words, they attended the class in person. Can you believe it? And looked at this and they really thought that the students who downloaded the podcast, you know, ended up getting better test scores than those who attended the physical lecture. Mills, confirmed? Are you finally verified scientifically what you've been saying for years? First of all, it shows that lecturing is not a very good form of teaching. If being in the physical presence of the lecturer is actually worse for you than having a recording of the lecturer in terms of your performance on exams, then what does that tell us about lecturing? And so, I mean, there's still – I would love for our listeners, somebody to please send me an article they could find somewhere that demonstrates in a scientific way that lecturing is actually an effective form of teaching. Because I've been looking for such an article for years and haven't found one. But maybe it's out there. But what it does show is that if the delivery model, if the information delivery model is just a push model, then somebody standing up on a stage and pushing information at students, then it's actually better to record it and have it on a podcast because as this article shows, the study in the article shows, the parts they didn't get, they can immediately back up and watch it again, listen to it again, and replay it several times until they get it. And so their performance on exams was much better. I actually, I saw somebody give a presentation along these lines about three years ago at a conference. He was an engineering professor from somewhere in New Zealand. And they did a similar kind of test where they had the same class taught by the same person. One version of the class was podcast and the other version of the class was substantially better on their exams than the students just downloaded the whole suite of the six weeks worth of lectures and listened to them all one after another and then sat for the exam and did really well. And he said that in their department, they had kind of two reactions to that finding. One of them was that a group of faculty members were just horrified and said, God, what is wrong with our teaching that our students can just download our lectures, listen to them all in 48 hours or so before the exam, and actually do better on the exams. We must be doing something really wrong in the classroom. The other half of the department said, wow, this is fabulous. I can just go into a studio, record all my lectures for the entire semester in, say, a day, two days, and then I've done my teaching for the whole semester. I'm done. I can go do my research. And so he said it led to this. We could work a few days a year. This is genius. That's right. Yes. That's right. And this new scientist story seems to indicate that that group was right. Well, and you don't just have to do it. It's not just a couple days a year. It's a couple days in your career, right? Because you just record the lectures for, you know, you teach, let's say, a suite of, over the course of your career, 10 or 12 different classes. You could just do them all in a span of a couple of weeks and just be done with it. Tom, I have to stop you there. I don't want you to ever say that out loud again because there's somebody listening to our podcast right now who is in the business side of the university and teaching is work made for hire. And so his university is going to say, oh, wow, we just get them to record all of their lectures once and then we can dispense with the faculty member because we've got all of his lectures and the students will do just fine. Well, right. See, I mean, that's what I was sort of getting at is like if you take this argument to its logical extreme, what do you end up with? I mean, you end up with those recorded lectures that you can buy in the backs of magazines and stuff. It's something I think we're going to need to work out. And I think it does speak to something that might be wrong with the teaching model that we followed and that we need to – I think more needs to be done on this topic because I think it does say something about the way students are taught on our campuses these days. Well, with that, maybe that's a good segue into our featured story about, well, reducing costs on campus.
But let's move on and see what we have to say about that topic. Well, as we all unfortunately know by this point, the Dow is way, way down, 60% as we speak from its all-time high. And down also are campus endowments, often many cases 20, 30, 40%. And state budgets are down, of course, and in crisis, hurting universities like our own beloved George Mason University. or the avoidance, I guess, of technology, since technology can be expensive as well as money-saving, and see what it really means for the next three to five years on campuses. What will take place because of this downturn? What will it mean for technology and library and museum budgets are also feeling the crunch, and, of course, that's part of our topic of discussion here as well. So we're going to just kick right in and start talking about this. You know, starting with where we left off in the news roundup, I guess the question is, are there ways that technology can really save money by, let's say, making better use of iTunes U and reducing the need for expensive physical plant-like classrooms. Mills, I mean, we were sort of joshing about this, but is one potential outcome, let's say the use of kind of more canned teaching, a kind of, you know, invasion of distance education into the mainstream of education practice. And after all, it is really expensive to have people show up on campus with, I was going to say expensive professors. We're not that expensive, but we're more expensive than a podcast. Is this a potential outcome? And where do you see things going in the next three to five years in terms of cost savings and how technology might affect that course? Well, first of all, I hope five years from now I can be classified as an expensive professor, but that's one of my career goals. I want to be expensive. But, you know, here's a specific example of how the iTunes use stuff we were talking about in the news roundup can really make a difference. As George Mason began slashing its budgets back in the fall in response to the state's economic crisis, of course, for us, we have virtually no endowment. So we weren't affected by the stock market plunge in that way. It's just the state has no money. So we had to start slashing our budgets. And so for this coming fall, every department in our college and the university had to make do with less money and increase the class sizes on average by 6%. So, you know, some classes didn't increase at all and others increased by 15%, but we had to average a 6% increase. The problem is you bump up against a physical limit. You know, a lot of our classrooms on campus only seat 45. So how you can, and if the class already enrolls 45, you can't add another seven or eight students into that class to get that 6% increase. And so some kind of hybrid model where the class could either be taken physically or virtually makes it possible to take a popular course and then have lots of students take advantage of that course. So for instance, we have one person who teaches in our Western Civ freshman course who, you know, his waiting list, he's so popular that his waiting list consistently have, you know, 100, 150 students on them for 50 student classes. And so students just line up to try to get into his classes. Well, if his lectures were all podcast, then he could be in the classroom for those 50 students and the other 100 or 150, instead of sitting on a waiting list, could just download the podcast. And they could all be registered for the course and they could all be paying tuition and it would save the university a tremendous amount of money. So I think we're going to see universities, especially because space is finite on our campuses, really grapple with this and see are there ways that we can construct hybrid course models that blend traditional teaching methods with technology-enhanced teaching, if only to save money. But this story that we talked about in the news roundup seems to indicate that there might be a pedagogical value also. But Mills, I'm, isn't the, I'm sure our audience is wondering about this, I mean, isn't the potential outcome a kind of smaller group of, you know, professors or tenure track professors just teaching more people? I mean, isn't this a kind of way to effectively, you know, get cheap labor to, you know, and some would say sort of cheapen the classroom experience. What would you say to those people who are just saying, well, okay, now Mills can teach a thousand people a year rather than a hundred people a year? Yeah, that, you know, the labor issue is definitely one to be considered. For me, I'm a lot less interested in the labor issue and a lot more interested in the learning issue. What I want to see is the learning outcomes from any particular kind of teaching. So a small class with a world-renowned researcher where the world-renowned researcher stands in front of the students and reads his lecture notes that he's been giving for the last 15 years, that class might as well have nobody in it because there's probably very little actual learning going on in that room where it's possible that some kind of virtual class or mixed virtual and analog class, a tremendous amount of learning is occurring. So I think the real question is not how many students are in the classroom, but what kind of learning is actually happening? And, you know, as I was joking in the News Roundup about the iTunes U courses showing more learning in whatever class that was, I'm kind of on the side of there was something wrong with the way that class was being taught. And that's why just listening to a podcast would cause students to do better on an exam. So I think the real question is, how are we teaching and how are the students learning? And then what's the optimal model to, you know, and the model is different in every discipline, to try to maximize learning, because that's the point, is maximizing learning. You know, universities have to at least break even, but the real point is maximizing learning. Tom, what are your thoughts? Do you think there are ways that universities and libraries and museums can take advantage of technology to reduce costs, even if it perhaps requires some investment in cyber infrastructure or technical equipment up front? Well, I mean, I think we have talked about sort of outsourcing some of the infrastructure, some of the email and services, licensing agreements that they have, moving to open source software, moving to web services instead of desktop applications and those kinds of things. So I think there's an opportunity there. I think like from my particular position in the university, managing a largely grant-funded institution, I'm sort of interested to see where the financial crunch, how it affects grant-making and grant-getting. I know, like, I think we are all excited to see that the funding in the president's budget that he sent up to the Hill, funding for NEH and NEA and NSF and NHPRC and all of the funding agencies that we go to, all the federal agencies that we go to for money, those budgets have all been increased modestly in the president's budget, which is a good thing. And I think we're all very pleased with that. But I do think that in this economic downturn, we're going to be seeing a lot more competition for that money. And I think, you know, and maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but I do think that digital projects that can show a lot of bang for the buck, where they're reaching large audiences, where they're making – where they're doing truly innovative work are going to be better positioned to get that money in this new competitive environment than maybe more traditional projects. That may or may not be a good thing depending on whether you're a tech enthusiast or not. But I do think that that's one opportunity. But I think we're going to see a lot more competition for these grants in the next year or two. Yeah. And it seems to me flowing out of that, that, you know, on the, beyond the research side of things and the grant side of things, on the undergraduate side of things, you know, we're starting up an undergrad course in digital history next year. And, you know, I think all three of us and probably a lot of our audience read the article either online or in the physical newspaper in the New York Times about the humanities sort of justifying themselves and their worth during this economic downturn that, you know, there are fewer history majors and humanities majors than there were 30 years ago, a lot fewer. And, you know, there's a sort of feeling, I guess, among some that the humanities have to justify themselves. Now, of course, you know, we won't get into the argument about whether that's valid.
But it does seem to me that having a technology angle to something like a history major or a art major, let's say in digital, who understands how to use Photoshop extremely well, or any other major that sort of takes advantage of digital technology, it at least gives those undergraduates another possible outlet for employment after graduation. If they don't end up getting a job in history per se, they have some technical skills that would transfer well into the current job market. As bad as it is, it's probably better to have some technical experience as part of that undergrad degree. You know, if you really are interested in humanities, you can get some of that by getting involved in digital humanities. And at least in that way, it strikes me that digital humanities right now is in a very good position to kind of show its value by kind of communicating some really practical technical skills in addition to the, you know, the historical rigor and the humanities rigor that we also love. I think that's absolutely right. There was another article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, probably now, saying that one of the few sectors of the job market that's growing is digital archivists, in fact. And, you know, there's jobs in digital imaging and digital archiving, not just at, you know, institutions, libraries and museums and archives, but in industry, in business. Those kinds of skills are things that we really can teach. We know about those things. And those are transferable skills. So I hope that that's something we're going to see too. We're seeing it at George Mason. And I think we'll probably start seeing more and more of it elsewhere. The other thing is just what we've been talking about in the podcast now for the last couple of years is that there are all of these free services like Google Docs or free email or all these other ways that technology is now essentially free. I mean, it's not entirely free because the university has to, if they go with, say, Gmail, they still have to have a few people on campus who are the Gmail support people for all of those faculty members who can't figure out how to manage their mailboxes. But by and large, it's going to be a lot cheaper than any sort of enterprise application that the universities are using. And so I think we're going to see a lot of pressure on the purchasing side of the university when it comes to rethinking those contractual relationships with various enterprise applications. I think we're just going to, I think the stuff we've been talking about for the last couple of years is going to really accelerate in the next year because the money's just not there. Mills, this was your, I have to give kudos to you for your prediction for 2009 was in fact free, that free was going to take over. And I think you, you know, in part said that we were already in the downturn. But, you know, in part, you just saw it as a general trend on the web toward free applications. And, and, you know, Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired is coming out with a book on called free, and all about free things and how they're kind of taking over our economy in a digital age. But now it's even kind of more pressing, isn't it? I mean, these transitions to things like outsourcing to, let's say, Gmail or Hotmail or some of these big kind of technical infrastructure aspects that have been at universities for literally two decades. I mean, email service, for instance, which was always hosted in-house. You know, obviously, there'll still be some problems with, you know, local laws and privacy laws in terms of the things that universities have to do to keep track of their own electronic records. But for a lot of things, they can get outsourced, right? And you're not going to end up wanting to pay a million dollars a year to Microsoft or Oracle for licenses when you can get, you know, pretty much the equivalent for free. That's going to be a really compelling sale, I guess, if you can call it that at this point. Yeah, and going back to what we were saying a minute ago on podcasting, so I've been podcasting one of my undergraduate classes the last two times I've taught it now. And so if you're a George Mason student, you can access those podcasts through our iTunes U site. Or if you're not a George Mason student, you can just access them through iTunes because I put them in both places. And so you can listen to my lectures for free by accessing them through iTunes. Or you can also, if you're a George Mason student, you can listen to them for free, but you can't get credit for my class unless you pay tuition. And so that's one of the examples of how the free economy is going to start shaping what higher education does I think is that an awful lot of people are going to start – especially – I mean we work for the state of Virginia. And so I'm a public employee and so I ought to be making my stuff free to the public. They can't get credit unless they pay for the credit but they should have access to whatever it is that I have to say about a subject because they're paying my salary. And I think we may see at a place like George Mason, maybe not in the state of Virginia, but state governments looking at all kinds of ways to cut their budgets. They may be – I wouldn't be surprised see some state governments, as we've seen some other national governments from around the world, move to favor open source software as they move forward with purchasing. I saw that the UK government just, I guess, last week changed its stance towards open source software. It used to have kind of a neutral stance that you could go either way. Now they've got – now the stance is that they favor where all things considered, the open source software does the job as well. They are mandating the use of open source software in government agencies. That's going to trickle down to universities, most of which in the UK are government entities. And I think that's going to happen with state governments in the states where we see them, some starting to move to open source software just as a place for cost savings. And so we may see that trickle down to our campuses as well. And cloud computing as well seems to get a huge advantage here because so many cloud services are also free, right? I mean, doesn't, Tom, you just got a netbook recently. I mean, this seems like a boon for netbooks. It's in the same way that the one retail store that's doing incredibly well right now is Walmart in the United States. Its sales are actually up because people are looking for the least expensive option for their basics, and they're keeping it to the basics. And it seems like the netbook phenomenon is sort of perfectly matched for an economic apocalypse, isn't it? I mean, especially once you move over to, let's say, Gmail or some other kind of cloud provider or Google Docs or Zoho Office, you just need a cheap laptop or machine that just has access to the web. You don't need a lot of RAM or storage or a really fast video card. Everything just lives on the cloud. Yeah, I have over the course of the past few years, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, ended up migrating most of my data over to web services. And I got this netbook. And really, I frankly don't see almost any reason to have my expensive laptop anymore. I mean, this thing, which was $300 or so, does everything I need it to do. All my data is there. It doesn't have a ton of local storage, but I don't need a ton of local storage. It has a VGA port. It has USB ports. I can put an external monitor on it. I can put a keyboard and a mouse on it. It has Bluetooth. And that's pretty much all I need. Now, if I want to do some heavy duty video editing or something, this is not the box to do that on. But for 95% of my computing needs, this netbook is fine. And I think we're going to see a lot of that. I think it's really going to hurt. and I think computer manufacturers are already seeing this, that why would you buy the $1,500 or the $2,500 laptop if you could buy the $300 laptop and it does everything or almost everything you need it to do and everything the other box does. And I think that's the reason why we haven't seen one from Apple is why would any business want to cut their profit margins by half or more by putting out a new device that's so much cheaper? So I think we will see more netbooks on campus in this downturn. We've selected applications, links, other things we've seen that can reduce your costs and give you some value at the same time. Tom, what do you have for us this episode?
It uses their moderator web service, which is a web service to help you organize group discussions and conference discussions and other things. But they've used that technology to build something called Tip Jar. We'll post the link in the show notes. It's a little bit of a ponderous link. But it's a place where you can go and you can suggest money-saving tips and other people can vote on those and the most popular ones will rise to the top, kind of crowdsourcing money-saving tips. And it has different sections, tips to save money in finance, in health, in shopping, in food, in vacations. It has a tech section where right now the number one tip, as voted by the users, is turn off your computer at night. Other tips that they have are call your cable company to cancel your service, and they'll generally, if you do that, offer you a discount. So if you want to go find a bunch of money-saving tips, TipJar is one place to look. Great. Google TipJar. And of course, we'll link to this from digitalcampus.tv. Mills, how about you? What did you find online this week? Well, mine is also a money saver. And it's GOI.com. It's a company that does high-resolution satellite imagery. But they have a really nice gallery of satellite images, incredibly high-resolution satellite images. It would be really useful for teaching images of places like Angkor Wat and the pyramids at Giza. So people, especially people teaching world history, just really, really fabulous images. And amazingly, you can download the images and republish them as long as you give them proper attribution. So it's a nice free teaching resource for people who want to jazz up a lecture, jazz up a website. So it's another good money saver. Terrific. And these are really high quality images I can see. Wow. Well, I have another Google pick, similar to Tom's, actually a whole suite. And it's the Google Apps for Your Domain. It's a little bit of a prosaic name for it. But if you do have your own domain, and I've had dancohen.org for over, I guess, about around a decade now. And I've just sort of installed Google Apps for My Domain. And what it lets you do is, if you're used to using Gmail, it gives you your own Gmail, Dan at DanCohen.org email address, but it pipes it through Gmail. And you get all of the Google Docs and all the other free Google Apps that you can log into. And it gives you an administrator interface. So if you have other people you want to add to your domain, you can give them their own Gmail account, manage all this from the web. It's a really nice basic suite. I guess the only drawback is that you can't get certain things that I'm used to from the consumer account. So, Tom, I think you noticed this as well. For some reason, they don't have the Newsreader, Google Reader, which is what I use to read blogs. For some reason, that's not part of Google Apps for your domain. I think it's because it's really more oriented toward businesses. Yeah, but one thing that is kind of... They focus on things like calendars. Yeah, go ahead, Tom. Right, but I was surprised. So Reader is kind of more of a consumer product, but there are other things that aren't built into it. Analytics, which you'd think that businesses would be really interested in, and Google Groups, which is something that I would think businesses would be interested in too. Maybe it's just that they haven't rolled them into the service yet. Yeah, I suppose I should say they do, because this is really, I think, again, oriented toward businesses, and indeed there's a paid version that's really only $50 a year, but that guarantees you uptime and things like that. I think because of that, it seems to me they're hinting that they don't want to roll anything into Google Apps for your domain unless it's really rock solid and that it's very business-oriented and can be trusted. And so they tend not to do some of the fancier parts of, for instance, Gmail. You can't quite get – you do get Gmail Labs, but you can't skin Gmail as much as you can in the consumer apps. There's kind of pieces of it that, again, I think they're trying to keep really basic so that if you had a non-technical administrator, they could manage the entire domain, manage your own website, et cetera, without bumping into some of the more distracting and complex elements that you get through all the Google beta applications. And it seems that they're all in beta, so they try not to have too much clutter, I think, when you do get Google Ops for your domain. Well, we have come to the end of another episode. And we want to thank everyone for listening in. We hope you're doing okay and that your savings are still there. And, you know, we are a free podcast. So do tune in again next time for the great cost of $0. And, of course, subscribe to us via iTunes. I think we're also, we spoke about iTunes U, but I think as of this episode, we'll be available in iTunes U as well. So look for us there or look for us online at digitalcampus.tv, where you can join for your country. Here it goes.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is Digital Campus, featuring Tom the 8th of December 2009. The Twubble with Twucklers. And we're here with the 49th edition of the Digital Campus Podcast, quickly approaching the celebratory 50th special. What is that, the gold platinum anniversary? What is that? I can't remember which anniversary it is, but we're very excited about the next podcast, but even more excited to be here. Is it gold? It's got to be gold, right? Yeah, it's gold. Do you think we could look that up on the internet? Here I am sitting in front of two computer screens, and I'm the host of a podcast and haven't even taken the time to look up what the 50th anniversary is. We'll do that later in the podcast, something exciting to look forward to. Well, welcome. I'm Dan Cohen here with our regulars, Mills Cully. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hi, guys. Hey. And we're here also with one of our new irregulars, our regular irregulars, Steve Ramsey from the University of Nebraska. Hey, Dan. Hey, welcome back. Thanks. Good to be back. Well, let's dive right in. We didn't get a chance last time to discuss one story about Twitter that we saw on the Chronicles Wired Campus blog. And it's been a while since we've talked about Twitter. And even though one of the regulars who will go unnamed and has a fake, fake, oh, yeah, has issues with Twitter. Well, it always adds to the debate, which we like here at the Digital Campus Podcast. Twitter at conferences, you know, I noticed, guys, that there's already a hashtag for the American Historical Association's 2010 conference, which is in San Diego in a month, in early January. And, you know, the Chronicle sometimes, you know, which takes a dark view of things online like Twitter and blogs, has this piece about Twecklers. I hate all these neologisms that involve TW for Twitter and then something else like tweets. But Twecklers, is this a potential problem now as we get, as Twitter goes mainstream, that there will be audience members who will be tweeting nasty things about the presenters at the same time over the last couple weeks? Dana Boyd, who is a fairly prominent blogger and was an academic, got, I think, a PhD in something digital, cultural anthropology and digital anthropology. She studies digital natives and now works at Microsoft Research and was giving a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. And I guess they had a live screen up behind her with all the tweets from the conferences and experienced the, I think, dually difficult twekling and then also, I think, some gender, you know, really gender discrimination as people started sort of talking about her as an object on Twitter rather than about the content of her talk. Is this a real problem and something that those of us who have been involved in, you know, Twitter should have been sort of glossing over or taken lightly? Well, I mean, did anybody think that when they were giving a presentation before the advent of Twitter that people weren't talking behind their backs? I see it as it may be more public. It may be facilitated by the technology. But it seems like I think we've all gotten through a session at a conference and walked out of the room and said to our friends, boy, that was terrible. We've done that before, doing it on Twitter. I'd see it as an evolution, not a revolution. So the evolution is just before we said it to our friends and now we say it to the world? Yeah, I mean, is there something about the scale here where everyone's tuning in? Yeah, I don't know. I feel like academic conferences still retain a great deal of formal ceremony, you know, that you give your paper and then, you know, afterwards there is a set period for question and answers and, you know, the questioner stands up and says who they are and, you know, etc., etc. And that's a very different vibe than, you know, I can't believe she wore that skirt. You know, coming over Twitter. I mean, I think those things are worlds apart. And I'm not sure that it's appropriate to do, it's any more appropriate to do it over Twitter than it is over, you know, to like that. Because I've seen this happen, and I want to be very careful here not to mention particular communities, particular conferences, or particular people. But I've certainly watched conferences, watched the Twitter feed, and seen some very prominent key member of the field tweet something absolutely devastating about a paper being given by a junior colleague. And, you know, I saw that and I thought to myself, you know, I would have been in therapy for months if someone had done that to me. You know, sure, of course, they might be thinking it. But to do it in that very public way, I can't believe that it's any more appropriate than standing up and doing it out loud. And both of those things seem world to world. I think you're right. I think it's completely inappropriate. But I don't think – I guess the point you made, Steve, saying that academic conferences still retain a lot of formality and there are other venues, other kinds of conferences that don't. And I'm not sure we're going to see so as much of it because of that tradition of formality and respect at the AHA as we might at a TED Talk. Those are different things and I think you might – Yeah. You know, this article in the Chronicle. Microsoft developers event. Right, right. I mean, if you look carefully at, you know, they call it conference humiliation. They're tweeting behind your back. But the conferences they mentioned really are more along the lines of what Dana Boyd went to, the Web 2.0 Expo. I mean, they're the Higher Ed Web Association. So this is a very, you know, Twitter-heavy group, but also a snarky group. I mean, and the guy that they were, what is called here a virtual lynching, which seems rather harsh. But he was the, I think the president of Ruckus Network, which is a now defunct online music service for college students. So it was, you know, someone outside of academia, which I think does bring out a kind of feeding frenzy. You know, I can't imagine, let's see, these other, the other groups where they talk about twekling was the National Association of Science Writers. And let's see, you know, I mean, they're, you know, I can't, they're not, it's not the MLA. It's not the AHA. And I have a hard time thinking that there'd be snarky public tweets by people at, let's say, the president's address at the AHA. And the last time the AHA was in Washington, the Washington Post ran a kind of post facto story about people during the presidential address, people that were part of the podium group having a difficult time staying awake. So, you know, the mainstream media has, you know, picked up on this. But what worries me is, I mean, it picked up on something, you know, well, Roy started talking about forever ago, which is how incredibly boring academic conferences, at least historian conferences, tend to be. And so I think this is, in one way, a response to that as a way of is, you know, the anonymity question in Twitter is really, I mean, you could set up another account, but you'd have no followers. I mean, I guess you could use the hashtag and it would get into the mainstream. But, you know, I don't know. You know, I mean, that's true of kind of any online piece. You can go anonymous. I haven't seen it at the conferences I've been doing. Obviously, we've... No, I actually... I mean, first of all, I think we can all agree that, like, someone saying, like, a truly inappropriate comment is a truly inappropriate comment, no matter what, I mean, on Twitter or any, boy, what an ugly tie is not a useful academic statement of any kind. And so I think we can all sort of agree. But it is, I wonder whether, I mean, and I should maybe, I should step back for a minute and say, I really love this. I really love this Twitter conference thing. I think I love it. I think I really... Why is that, Steve? Yeah, I mean, I don't... I think I feel like...
I occasionally find it information overload. You know, I occasionally have to shut it down because I just can't watch the speaker and think and watch the Twitter stream and all of this at once. And that seems to me a separate issue. But in general, I love the idea of someone who's up there giving a paper and there's just this active conversation going on while the paper's going on. And I think I like it. But I do also think that people say things, and again, we're not talking, not necessarily inappropriate things, I mean, just ordinary academic criticism or academic statements. People say them on Twitter in a way that they would never say in the public forum. But the thing is, they are saying it in the public forum because everyone else in the field is watching that Twitter stream. Do you see what I'm saying? It's sort of like, there's a sense that we can make snarkier statements because this is less public, and it's not less public. It's sort of analogous to our handwriting about our students posting inappropriate photographs in Facebook, isn't it? We've lost some of our boundaries, some of our professional filter about what's appropriate and what's not. Here's the. I mean, here's, here's the thing about it being, here's the thing about it being public is that there, there are consequences when it's public. I mean, if I walk out of a conference presentation and I say, you know, I, I elbow my friend and say, and say, you know, that was, boy, that was lousy, um, you know, or make some, make some unhelpful comment, it goes nowhere. If I do it in the community of, of public, to the community, the community can take me to task for that. If I make an unhelpful comment, my guess is in a conference like the MLA or something, people are going to take me to task. People are going to say, well, wait, what do you mean by that? Explain yourself. Or if I say something truly inappropriate, I will be shunned by the community. I think I'll lose some friends and colleagues. And so in a way, I think it shines some light on what would have been whispers are now public. And maybe it will discourage, I mean, if people are smart, it will in some ways discourage them from whispering. I don't know. Maybe that's open-ended. Will it also discourage junior scholars from even getting into this? I mean, you know, I remember getting ready to give my first paper ever and being thoroughly terrified. And now I'm seeing even greater evidence to be terrified. I mean, now it's really... You see what I'm saying? Because I don't think anybody would... Someone can say something really devastating in a Twitter stream that I'm convinced they just wouldn't... I mean, they wouldn't get up at the mic and say, I've been listening to your terrible talk and I've decided it's nonsense. No one would ever say that. No one at an American conference. Because I got to tell you, Europeans, not so much. Let's just say, I've been in conferences where the first person stood up and said, okay, that was really stupid. Or, you know, someone would never get up and say, you're a really terrible writer. It's hard to understand what you're saying because your writing is so obscure. No one would ever make that comment. But you see that kind of comment on the Twitter stream all the time. I mean, it's really extraordinary. I I just, you know, I don't want, I guess what I'm concerned, worried about is that, and, you know, I'm aware, actually, that I am making a, I'm possibly making a sort of knee-jerk and highly specious argument that is of the form, that is similar to everything is different over email. You know, like, somehow somehow with email, we had this thing that we went through this period where, well, we're still in this period where, you know, I mean, do you remember back in the 90s, we'd have these netiquette guides that came out that would say things? Yes, and people would get on email and just have no sense of etiquette or how to use it. Well, but there was a flip side to that, that they would say, okay, guys, email is totally different. Email is a completely different thing, and you have to be so careful because with email, it's easy to offend people. And those of us who have devoted our lives to the study of rhetoric and the written word are looking at this and going, actually, that's a property of language. Like, that's a property of written language, generally speaking. And I'm worried that I'm making the same leap here with Twitter and saying, well, you know, this is a totally different thing. This is a totally different kind of tone, a totally different kind of form. And it may not be. It may just be, you know, it may not be quite as sort of thunderously different as I'm portraying it. But I worry, I guess, about civility and incivility and the way incivility, you know, may affect people coming up in the field. I guess that's one of the things I worry about. But do you think, just to be clear here, I mean, do you think that the incivility is encouraged by the technology of Twitter, let's say in the same way that we saw this happen in Usenet or some other environments that encourages people to be impatient and frustrated and to feed on the speaker. Is that just endemic to the technology? Well, I guess what I was trying very awkwardly to say a moment ago is that I'm always a little suspicious of arguments that say that technology changes the whole thing completely. Even though there's some truth to that. If people would not get up to the microphone and say things that are uncivil but would over Twitter, then I think we can conclude that the technology is playing a role this discipline and this endeavor, those don't all go out the window because you're on Twitter. I just come down on the side of, is this really happening? At least in my experience, I don't see all kinds of nastiness at the conferences I attend going on. Occasionally, there are unhelpful comments, and that is what it is. But I think on balance, for me, the Twitter stream is a net benefit and is, on the whole, tends to be very positive rather than negative. That's where I come down. And this issue of whether the technology changes everything, I think about there's a story from a couple years ago where the mother and the daughter forced the suicide of a classmate by saying nasty things on MySpace. And that's awful. And everybody blamed MySpace for, in addition to the mother and the daughter, but everybody blamed MySpace for this poor girl's death. And it seemed to me the whole time that I was thinking, if you're that much of a jerk, if you're going to be so nasty that you're going to cause somebody to commit suicide, you're going to find a way to do it, whether you have MySpace or not. And so I just, I, you know, Steve, I take the point that like, I just don't know if the technology changes all that much. I think, you know, if you're, people who want to be jerks, people who want to be jerks in writing are going to be jerks in writing. Twitter may make it slightly easier, but they're still jerks. I agree with you absolutely. You don't want to think of this as a causal phenomenon. People are jerks because of Twitter. People are jerks because of the way the technology is set up. I don't think that's true either. No, but I think that there is something still to the perceived anonymity, even though your name is on your Twitter feed or your name is on a comment that you post on a blog or whatever it is, there's still this sort of – you're sitting in front of your computer other sort of formal environment like that would never say kind of really off-base things to other students. We'll post comments in a blog or back in the day go out in a threaded discussion that you read them and you just think, whoa, where did that come from? And lots of students. What we're really talking here is a 21st or Web 2.0 version of a flame war. Remember that term from the past. Students who are sort of mild-ered and otherwise, and all of a sudden this just rage or inappropriate stuff comes out in an online comment.
So that, I do worry about this a little bit. My biggest concern on this issue has everything to do with the job market. Because, okay, faculty members who have tenure are completely insulated in many ways from the consequences of people snarking about them. Okay, people want to snark about my conference stuff. I'm fine. I can live with that. I'll be probably very unhappy or angry or offended or whatever, especially if they comment on my ties, which I'm very proud of because they're so tacky. But I put a lot of thought into these tacky ties. I've been meaning to tweet that, Mills. I've been meaning to tweet about your ties. You should. You should tweet away. Wait until the holiday party. Then you'll really see Tacky. But all of us, I think, need to reaccess the paranoia of the almost finished or just finished PhD in a bad job market where even the slightest imperfection feels like a giant wound that's going to prevent them from getting a job. And whether that's true or not is a whole different story, but it feels that way. And so I can just imagine somebody who just finished their PhD. They go to the AHA. They give a paper. They know that members of search committees who they're interviewing with are there in the audience. And then somebody posts this snarky tweet about, I can't believe this guy can't translate from German to English properly. And some member of the search committee might read that. Well, search committees probably don't pay close attention to these things, but just reaccess the paranoia that you felt or that your friends felt when they were going on the job market. We should mention, though, that I have exactly the same worry, but we should mention that there's a possible flip side to this, too. And that is just that just as you could have an eminent, extremely tenured leader of the field in the back row kibitzing away over Twitter, you know, and just feeling perfectly at liberty to, you know, harumph about everything, feels completely protected and immune from prosecution. At the same time, you know, you can also have someone who's very new to the field, is slightly, you know, intimidated by all of this, who can put a comment into the Twitter feed and have that't think I was. I think they're just sort of, they're in this place with their dissertation work or whatever it might be, and they just have one insight after another. They're connected to the literature in a way that's just astounding. And now I, who am closer to Harumphine in the back row than giving my first paper, know who all these people are. And that's good. That's good for them. You know, I recently put together... You know, I would not have had a... I just, I would not have had a way as a graduate student to be friends with me before Twitter. And like, I'm friends with tons of graduate students through Twitter. And that is, I think, again, when I say it's sort of, you know, it's a net positive. I think that's where exactly, Steve, where I'm coming from. And I actually don't, and it's funny how since they're not my graduate students and they're not at my institution, I mean, let me be clear, some of them are, but a lot of the graduate students I know on Twitter are, I only know them through Twitter. I only know them through this venue. And so a lot of the sort of power dynamic of having graduate students as students that you're working with and trying to bring up in the field, you're more likely to view these graduate students on Twitter as just peers, just other intellectuals out there, which I think can be very empowering for them and very useful for me. So it's another example where the technology in a way is very useful. It levels the field a bit. In the Twitter stream, I don't sit there and think to myself, well, that comment was just made by a graduate student. What could this person possibly know? I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, I think that... No, I mean, you wouldn't say that. You know, you just think, wow, that's incredibly smart. And like I said, I usually think, I wonder if I was that smart when I was a graduate student. And I think to myself, no, I probably was not. You know, I made the same argument a few years ago about one of the things I like about Google Reader is that it turns all writing into the same font and, you know, in a non-hierarchical list of blogs and feeds. And, you know, it is how I found up and coming stars in digital humanities is, you know, I just subscribe to their blogs and I don't think about the fact that they're grad students or early grad students versus tenured faculty. And I think right now, you know, I created this Twitter list when Twitter lists came out about a month ago of everyone in digital humanities. And to be honest, I can't think of right now a more comprehensive list. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I'm trying to think of where else would I go to find 354 people, which is what I've got right now, who are in digital humanities. It's hard for me to imagine where I could find those people, especially since they're in literature, they're in history, they're in museums and libraries, they're funders, they're institutions. I'm not sure that it'd be easy to find it, especially in a kind of non-hierarchical sense or non-Balkanized sense that you get on Twitter. Well, we may have to move on here. You know, looking at these articles about these Twecklers, I also wonder if part of the problem here is that they have these giant 20-foot screens behind the speakers. I mean, you know, when you talk about Mills' point about that certain percentage that will go AWOL on Twitter, I wonder if they're encouraged a little bit by the fact that they know that their tweet will show up in foot-high font behind the speaker as this goes along. I do. We should probably just mention it would be good to hear from some graduate students in the comment thread on this podcast about their perspective on this. Yeah, great idea. Ringing true for that. Yeah, that's a great idea. Or if we're just projecting onto them and misremembering our own experience as graduate students or something. Yeah, and this topic came up a little bit because some of us received a message from some researchers at University College London who were doing a study of Twitter at academic conferences. You know, true academic conferences, not these Web 2.0-y sorts of technology conferences. And I'm interested to see the results of that as well and how people felt about it. That'll be interesting to follow up. Well, Mills, we'll put you out of your suffering and move on from Twitter. I know you'd like us to do the whole podcast on Twitter, but we will move on. Well, and I was feeling a little lonely there because I guess I'm not one of those 354 people. Well, you are in your alter ego. Oh, okay. At Ed Wired. The fake Mills on Twitter, at Ed Wired. Well, at some point, you'll have the real one. I know. 2010. New Year's coming up. Well, let's move on to just a cluster of stories that caught our eye from the past couple weeks that I guess summarizes some areas that we've talked about on the podcast over the past year that Google has been working on that I guess we could say is generally grouped into the title of Google and speed. Over the past couple weeks, you know, we've seen a preview of their new Chrome operating system, which is different for some reason than their Chrome browser, but is a kind of always-on-the-internet operating system that will run on new laptops and connect always to the cloud and be very speedy. In fact, they require a solid-state drive. So one suspects that this will be a very speedy operating system, though limited in many ways, of course. Can't operate it if you're not connected to Wi-Fi. But they've done a lot of smaller things as well. They have just yesterday launched the Google DNS, which is a new domain name server that you connect to to translate domains like dancohen.org into the IP address that it needs to reach to talk to a server and get my website. They have a new protocol called SPDY, or I think it's pronounced SPDY, it's S-P-D-Y, which tries to speed up the communications between servers and clients so that web page loads faster.
And they also came out with a new, interestingly, not a scripting language, but a real kind of root hardcore coding language that would compete with something like C or C++ called Google Go. And also Eric Schmidt talked a little bit about their obsession with speed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, which was a kind of counterattack against Rupert Murdoch and his obsession with Google as stealing their news. And part of Eric Schmidt's point was that, you know, newspapers online are a terrible experience right now. You're clicking on pages that take 10 seconds to load, and there's a speed issue, there's a display issue, and that he talked about, I guess they have this pilot called Flex, which presents a new sort of viewing environment for newspapers and magazines. I think we might have talked about this a few months ago. But a kind of glossier and very fast-loading environment, sort of like a flash environment that Google's experimenting with for their print materials. So what do the three of you think is going on here? Is this obsession with speed something important? Is that such a serious issue that it would take prominence over other issues of displaying robust content online? Mills, what did you think of this, these set of developments? Well, I, for one, would certainly welcome a little more speed, especially with newspapers because I do find it incredibly frustrating. And what I'm not clear about, and just because some of this now moves into technical domains that are beyond me, but I mean, is Google really, do we think that Google's really trying to set up a whole alternative, not an alternative internet because the internet is more than just the protocols, but sort of an alternative piece of the internet? And this sort of goes back to the conversation we had in the last podcast about the balkanization of the web with News Corp trying to isolate their content just to Bing. I think one analogy to this is what happened with Walmart and the little scan codes, the barcodes. When barcoding first came out, retailers resisted it a lot because they didn't want to go back and fix their packaging to have barcodes on it. And Walmart, because of its domination of the retail market, was able to say, if you want your product in our store, it's going to have a barcode on it. And so retailers then went and used the barcodes. Is Google's position on the internet big enough that they could say something like that? You know, you're going to start using our protocols rather than these, as you say, venerable protocols that we've been living with all these years. So I think that's really the interesting question is which direction is this going? You know, pieces of this make a lot of sense. I mean, especially I think for an academic market where an academic market where we're less interested in advertising and flashy content. For instance, the Speedy protocol allows you to specify what loads first on the page. So if you look at the way a web page loads, it's often just slapdash. Sometimes a big logo shows up first, even on non-commercial websites, museum or library websites. You could actually specify if your server is using the Speedy protocol, you can say, hey, show the, let's say, the primary document first and then show me all the navigation, etc. The logo for our museum or library archive, second or third. That seems pretty nice, doesn't it? I mean, isn't there something to this? I really think that Google's formula here is actually really easy to understand. And it's just that they're an advertising company. What they sell is ads. They sell ads on the web. And their plan for world domination is going really well in terms of dominating that field. And what's essential to their domination is the idea that there are lots and lots of eyes on the web. And it's all about the more people who are looking at web browsers, the more they can assure their advertisers that their advertising model is working. And I think everything they do can be instantly and easily related to that goal. It's like, why move into the mobile phone business? Well, because you would like the mobile phone business to be about looking at the web on the phone. Why develop a new browser with this incredibly fast Right. And, of course, we look at this and we go, wait, isn't everybody on the web? But I think from Google's standpoint, no, not enough. We would like everybody on the web all the time. And so, you know, so they get into things like, so in a sense, I think they step back and they say, in what way does the web suck? Well, it's a little slow. And it's a little clunky over here and it's clunky over there. And it's difficult to use it in this environment. It's difficult to difficult to use it on this device and they just they make a list and they knock them down one after the other yes so so now we we as humanists are interested in the web uh for us it strikes me we're interested in the web for a slightly different reason you know we're interested in it because we have a a diverse community with a lot of different – or I shouldn't – you know, we have – our community has lots of different platforms and lots of different technological situations and all kinds of things. And it's easier for us to deliver our content and our tools and all of that sort of stuff to that audience over the web than it is to do application development for individual platforms and so forth. And so in a way, we benefit, I suppose, from all of Google's obsessions, but we're not exactly after the same goal, are we? have the same, exactly the same idea that Google has. Right. I mean, aren't we more on the side of, I mean, I shudder to think of this, of Rupert Murdoch and saying, well, content is king. You know, good content, you know, matters more than web design or speed of loading. And I think Google says, oh, is it content? We don't actually care what it is. We just want to figure out. I mean, I think when you say content is king, you're making a statement. Not only you're making a statement about how the world is, but you're also making the statement about how you think the world should be. And I think Google doesn't care what is drawing people to the web, except insofar as it relates to the question, what will get them looking at browsers? And that's not the same thing. When we say content is king, we don't say that because we're trying to find out what is king so we can get as many people looking at our ads as possible. We say content is king because we believe in content. We believe that that actually sustains human culture and so forth. So that's not exactly... There's a lot of relationship here, but we're not after the same thing. I think that idea that content is maybe not king and that they're not really caring about what the content is extends to the Google engineers. And I think to some extent all of these developments, and we talk about Google a lot because it seems like every week they're coming up with something new. And I think some of that has to do with the way Google is managed in that they give these brilliant engineers 20% time. They give them eight hours a week to work on whatever they want. And that is not exactly true of all of the people at Google. But a lot of them are spending eight hours a week plus probably a lot of their spare time looking at things like, you know what, I don't like the way HTTP works. And they know HTTP, the innards of the protocol, intimately. And they say, you know what, I could make this better. And so they go off and they make it better. And then Google posts speedy to the web and says, here, we've got a better HTTP. You know, so to some extent, it's just it's letting engineers loose on the web. And they come up with a bunch of these things. And it is in the end, I think it's kind of schizophrenic. And some of these things, I think, I think we have to say won't go anywhere. You know, I don't I think. I think it's difficult to predict which ones will stick and which ones won't. But I would guess the majority of them will kind of fall by the wayside as good ideas, nice little experiments, but nothing that's going to be actually commercialized and widely adopted. Their vision of Chrome OS and all of these related technologies to make the web function well is pretty similar to what we've discussed on the podcast in terms of campus applications like a tablet or mobile unit that basically operates as a single application. So, you know, a web browser application that feels like a device.
I mean, they're trying to say on Chrome OS, sort of the browser becomes your entire desktop. And it's just got a bunch of tabs. And so you could imagine very easily a bunch of cheap Chrome OS devices, I don't want to call them laptops because I assume they'll come in all shapes and sizes, but you know that you could use for, you know, as clickers, let's say in classroom or to beam out video. It just, again, gets to, I think, a lot of where, you know, there are other efforts like their mobile effort, Android is going toward and the iPhone and all of these, these new devices. I mean, they just want it to be always on and snappy and to feel like a device, but to use web, you know, standard web protocols, right? Well, it's, it's sort of to say, you know, I would, I would like to, if I did all my word processing on the web, then I would be staring at the web more often, and that would be good for Google. And I don't do that because, well, I mean, it's not quite, you know, you can't really build a serious application on a serious word processor on the web. And Google looks at that and says, well, what if we gave you a new system programming language? And what if we gave you always-on ubiquity? And what if we gave you this massive widget set that was incredibly responsive and easy to work with? And what if the JavaScript engine ran like an assembler? I mean, they go on and on like this. And then the goal here is that I look at the web. All of this, it seems to me, is focused on how do we break down people's unwillingness, strange and inexplicable unwillingness to do absolutely everything in their browser window. That seems to me what it's all about. It's funny. I think it was Mills, you were just saying, you began this by saying, are they creating a kind of alternate web? And I don't know, and I think they would disavow that and make all kinds of noises about how they're not, they have no plan like that at all. But it's interesting that when you look at the protocols of the web like HTTP or DNS or any of these things, I mean, if you're an engineer and you look at these things, you're immediately struck by how stupid they are. I mean, you say, could I use my eight hours on Friday to develop a better DNS? And the answer is, actually, you could use your train ride in to think of that because it's not hard to get a better HTTP. I mean, HTTP is not a, you know, I mean, you could on the back of an envelope design a better, you know, design a better protocol. But that would ignore the fact that the stupidity of the protocol, the simplicity of the protocol and all of that is one of the reasons we have the web in the first place. And so you wouldn't want to step, you wouldn't want to, if what they're up to is let's make everything better and sacrifice that simplicity and all of that other stuff, that could have a deleterious effect. Okay, well, we'll leave it there. I'm sure we're going to follow some of these threads, certainly the Chrome OS and what happens with that on various platforms in 2010. But let's move on to our Picks of the Week. And it is, in fact, time for Picks of the Week. Boy, we haven't had them in a couple months as we've experimented with our new irregular format, but we've had some requests to bring them back, and we've duly noted that. So let's start with you, Mills. What do you have for your Pick of the Week? Well, as I suspect the oldest member of the podcast, I'm going back to the past instead of back to the future. And there's a Firefox add-on that brings back Gopher. And of course, many of you listening to the podcast will have no clue what we're talking about here. But the rest of us oldsters out here are old enough to remember the good old days when Gopher was how you surfed the web. And so Gopher, the University of Minnesota, has long since shut down their Gopher server, but something called the Overbyte Project from Floodgap Systems has brought Gopher back. So if you just want the cleanest and most boring way to browse the web, you can download this extension of Firefox and go back to Gopher. Do you want to explain the Gopher interface for those who don't remember it? I mean, it is truly just some text on a screen, and that's it. There are no image possibilities. Like, if you're sick of all those slow-loading images or you don't want video popping up on your screen or any kind of pop-up browsing opportunities, pop-up windows, any of that, just go with Gopher because it's just going to give you... It's like the Joe Friday, just a fax man approach to web browsing, just the text. And it really was an alternate universe. And if I remember, it's all menus-based, right? It conceives of the internet as there is stuff out there and you go get it. That's it. There's no dazzle. No idea of interaction or anything like that. This is web 0.3. Right. A series of folders. I remember my Gopher client just was a series of folders and you click in the folder and folders within folders and folders linking to other folders. It's beautiful. Okay, well, we'll put on our, I don't know, our Journey CDs and fire up that extension. Thanks, Mills, for the addition. Tom, what do you have for us this time? I've got a print book, but it's also a free download on the web called The Art of Community by John O'Bacon. John O'Bacon is the Ubuntu community manager. And this is a book that I'm not quite finished with, but it gives a good roadmap, really, for anyone who wants to manage a community project. In his case, he manages an open source software project, but it's something that we in digital humanities do every day and strive to do better. And I think this book can help people with some ideas in that effort. Great. And that's a free download? Online? Yeah, you can order it. I mean, it's a print book from O'Reilly. So you can buy it from Amazon. But it's also a free download at theartofcommunityonline.org. Great. We'll link to that in our show notes as well. Steve, what do you have for us from Nebraska? Well, those of us who remember Gopher, and I definitely remember Gopher, also remember the blink tag. Ah, the blink tag. That has become a kind of proverb for horrible, irritating, stress-inducing web design. And people still use it. Well, I think people still use it on most web pages because most web pages, it seems to me, are blinking and flipping out. You go to the New York Times and it's like you've walked into Times Square. There's all these things blinking and flipping out and all of this sort of stuff. And into this cacophony, which does nothing but cause me pain and distress, comes readability, this marvelous little tool from Arc90 Laboratory. And this group of developers, we can give some more information about it on the website. But basically what you do, and it's not a plug-in and it's nothing fancy like that, you go to a website like the New York Times and you're looking at that website. You click this button on your, you click the button for readability and this will put this up on the screen like you're looking at a book. It will remove all of the blinking ads and all of the nine-point font and all of that kind of stuff. It will just present it to you as a single call. You have a few choices in how you represent that web page, but as clear and as uncluttered as possible. It also, I like it because I do not think that it, because you have to, you go to the website and then you represent the information. It doesn't compromise, in my opinion, the ad revenue that is likely sustaining that site in a lot of cases, because I think that it's just when you settle down to read the article, you just click this button and it will reformat it so that you're not, you don't have all this distraction out of the corner of your eye. Yeah, this is great. I've used this before and it really, really helps you out.
And in this case, I think for deep reading, this really helps. Often your eye is distracted. I mean, the other great thing about readability, and I use it almost daily, is it gives you a print style sheet as well. So if you want to print out the article, it has a great print style sheet. I didn't realize that. Huh, even better. Great. Okay, well, my pick of the week is a little self-serving. It is another Zotero pick. I try to keep them to one a year, so I feel like 2009 is almost over. And I just want to let everyone know that Zotero Cloud Storage is here. We have been offering up to 100 megabytes for free. But on a cost recovery basis, we've now made available up to 10 gigs that people can purchase from within their Zotero account. So if you're a user of the Zotero research tool, you can now go to your settings and look under storage, and there's the possibility there of getting additional storage. The neat thing about this storage is that it can be attached to groups. So it's not just for personal backup and synchronization across multiple machines, if you have multiple machines, but it also allows you to put up to 10 gigs on a group. So if we have a group, let's say, for Digital Campus, and we wanted to put files there, which we can do now, I'm going to go ahead and attach my storage. I bought 10 gigs and yes, I do pay for it even though I'm part of the project. We can now put files into the Digital Campus folder or collection as we like to call it. Those files will automatically in real time sync out to everyone in the group. It's a really nice way of adding, again, more collaborative features, this time with files. And you can have files up to 4 gigs, although I have no idea what would happen if you started putting a lot of 4 gig files in there. But it's a nice way to have those files, like PDFs. You could even do MP3s. Any research that you have have you can put in a file and share it with other people in your group. Again, that's Zotero storage and we'll have a direct link to our frequently asked questions page as I'm sure a lot of our audience has questions about this on Digital Campus TV blog. Well, Steve, thanks so much for joining us. It was my pleasure as always. Always good to have you on here on a regular basis.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Here it comes.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself. Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is Digital Campus, episode 57, for June 10th, 2010. Fight Club Soap. Well, welcome to another edition of Digital Campus from the Center for History and New Media. It's the show with all the semi-informed nonsense of your average tech podcast combined with the suspense and excitement of a college lecture. So for new listeners, you are in for a real treat. I'm Tom Scheinfeld here from foundhistory.org. Here with the regulars, Dan Cohen from dancohen.org and Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hi, guys. Hey, there. Hey, Tom. I'm definitely ready to spout off the top of my head. Good. Things I only know partially about. Good. Good. Making it up as we go. That's how we like it. And I'm also happy to welcome back our very first two irregulars who were the first two people who joined us in our new guest spots. Jeff McClurkin of the University of Mary Washington and an author at ProfHacker. And Amanda French, who is, I'm now happy to report, a member of the CH&M team. Thank you. Proffhacker's move to the Chronicle and what you guys are doing there. Maybe you could give us a little bit of news on that. And also, feel free to plug any other links you'd like to plug. Sure. Well, as many of the listeners of the podcast know, Proffhacker had been started actually by Jason Jones and George Williams coming out of that camp last year. The Chronicle was interested in seeing, in bringing ProfHacker and the various columns that it produces to their readers. And so we saw it as a chance to get an even broader readership. And so I think we've certainly gotten that, a lot of new readers, and it's been a pretty good move for us. Great. And where can people find ProfHacker? Well, you can go to ProfHacker.com, and it will automatically take you to the Chronicle site, the Chronicle of Higher Ed site. You can go to chronicle.com and then it's not as simple as just chronicle.com slash ProfHacker, but it's one of the columns that you can find there. But ProfHacker.com is the easiest way to get there. Great. And I know you can follow ProfHacker on Twitter as well. I think it's just at ProfHacker. It is. That's right. Great. And Amanda, you've now joined us here. You're not physically here in Fairfax at the Center for History and New Media, but you have joined us on our That Camp project. Could you maybe say a little bit more about your new gig and actually the regional That Camp program that we've launched? Absolutely. Well, as you know, Tom, because you wrote the grant, Mellon has given CHNM some money to, as we put it, leverage that camp for digital humanities education, which just means that there's all of these that camps kind of popping up around the world. And I'm coordinating those and helping people organize that camps. And in particular, implementing, helping to implement a series of workshops at various that camps, you know, helping people find instructors, helping people, you know, provide workshops that are going to be useful for people who attend them. And just in general, you know, helping everybody who wants to organize an unconference, organize one. And as I've been saying, and I'm probably not allowed to say for much longer, so far my job has been mostly keeping up and just trying to keep up with all of the people who are really interested in having that camps. And I think in the next couple of months, at least, I hope to get out ahead of the wave and start actually, you know, for instance, initiating new things. We're developing a little piece of software that will make it really easy for people to build a that camp website on WordPress. We're looking at maybe, you know, trying to convince people who are not already organizing that camps to organize them, that sort of thing. So I'm really enjoying it and I appreciate the chance to telecommute. Great, great. Yeah, we're really happy to have you on board. And the That Camp movement, as Dan has been calling it, has really... Like the Olympics. Yeah, like the Olympics, has really taken off. So we're, we're, we're just thrilled about that. And, and any listeners who are interested in organizing a that camp please get in touch with Amanda. Don't get in touch with me. Get in touch with Amanda. Info at that camp.org has been very busy with emails from Canberra in Australia recently. They just opened up their call for participants for that camp Canberra. We've gotten just nibbles from places like Poland and Chile in South, South America, you know, as well as places closer to home, like that camp Bay area, which I'm actually super psyched about. I think that one's, that one's going to be held at the WordPress headquarters. And so it's going to be a real, that one is in particular is going to, I think, you know, bring a lot of technologists together with academics, which is the part that everybody really likes best about this, I think. Can I insert a quick plug here for that Camp London, which is coming up in early July. I believe it's the 6th and 7th in London at King's College. And I'll be there. And it looks like we've got lots of people coming now. I think Amanda and I were a little worried that it would be lightly attended, but I think we're maxing out. But there's still some room. If you're listening to this relatively close to the release date, hurry and get your mouse over to thatcamplondon.org and sign up. I think there's still some slots left, but we are rapidly approaching, I think, 80 people. So get in. We'd love to see you there. And we do still have spaces in that camp Tahiti. So be sure and sign up for that one as well. It's a little more expensive for the flights, but way better than London. You laugh, Mills, but you won't laugh so hard when you're attending That Camp Jersey Shore, which is in Atlantic City. I'm so glad there's the That Camp Jersey Shore. I think we should all go on a road trip up to that. I actually think we should make a reality show out of it. Probably won't be quite as interesting as the original Jersey Shore reality series. But, you know, you never know. We humanists, we digital humanists like to party as much as the rest. Anyway, so lots of news this time around. We've been off the air for a little while, and it seems like this is some kind of a pattern maybe, but as the only regular of Dan Mills and I who doesn't use any Apple products anymore, I seem to be the one who is always saddled when I'm hosting with the Apple news. And this week we've got more Apple news. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 on Monday. We're recording here on, oh, geez, what date is it? The 9th of June. And I guess on the 7th, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4. Tom, I'm actually broadcasting live from the line at the Apple Store that I got in on Monday, immediately following Steve Jobs getting up on stage. Good, good. Well, I guess we'll have a first look at the device once you've made it through the line. Well, Dan, maybe you could give us a little bit of an idea of what is new here and what might be interesting for the campus crowd. Sure. It's actually a new device and also a new version of the operating system. Yeah. So on the device itself, you know, I mean, I think it's pretty much what people expected. It's a snazzy update to a already good looking device. I think that the advertising and I think what everyone will see as the kind of selling point is this FaceTime application, which allows the same video conferencing that has been available on Skype for the past five years. So to me, that's a little bit less exciting. And I think from an academic standpoint, I mean, it'll be great for students who want to do things with their phones.
I think that this, really the big story for me is that this phone has a screen that is to older phones what the laser printer was to dot matrix printing, if you remember that from the 80s. When that first laser printer came out, which cost $10,000 from Apple, but when you looked at it, you were astonished that you could actually at home have a printout of your essay that looked as good as the published, a published work in a book. And, you know, I had that old dot matrix printer. It was ugly. It was distracting. And I think by going to over 300 dots per inch, you know, obviously I haven't seen the phone yet, but the descriptions have been that it's really like looking at a piece of paper. And I think that that is enhanced by the fact that John Gruber, who's a commentator on all things Apple and is also kind of a fan boy of Apple, but he noticed something else important, which is that the screen itself for this new iPhone, which has the very silly name of the Retina display. But beside the marketing, it's much closer to the surface of the glass than other phones, including the older iPhones. So it actually does look like evidently a piece of paper. I mean, obviously it's glowing from the LED. But I think what's going to happen over the next year is Apple is going to be focusing on their devices as really killer, non-distracting devices in a way that Android will not be. Android will remain the kind of anti-Apple. It will focus on lots of features and notifications all over the place and little blinky things. And I think what Jobs is going for with the iPad and this new iPhone is we're going to provide you with an experience where you completely forget about the computing device and you're immersed in very, very high quality visuals at high DPIs. I'm sure we're going to see this on the iPad next year is a retina display for the iPad 2. And it will be just a killer, killer reading device. You know, I think little noticed on Monday was the fact that they also released a new edition of Safari, which has built in something that I've been using for close to a year now, which I just love, which is the readability bookmarklet for any browser, which allows you to take any web page and strip it of ads, images, everything except just the text, and it reformats it into a beautiful single column of text that's not distracting. And I find myself more and more, I think Nicholas Carr's new book on this is right, despite my qualms about Nicholas Carr, but I think he's right that we've gotten too distracted with windowing systems on computers and that Steve Jobs has decided he's going to attack that by getting rid of windowing systems, making sure that there's a very immersive experience with no distractions on his devices, including browsers, iPhones and iPads. And it'll be the place for academics to go when they want to kind of get away from the web in kind of all of its distracting 2010-ness. Yeah, there was actually, it seemed like there was kind of an asynchronous exchange between Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer from Microsoft over the last couple of weeks where, you know, one is saying that the era of the PC is over and the other, and Ballmer saying that, you know, the is is not over that the ipad is is really just another another pc and but i think you you get at it exactly dan with with the idea of distraction and distraction free i think that you know the critics of the ipad and and of the iphone actually say you know it's not open i can't mess with it i can't do anything with it it's kind of closed it's locked down i i you know it the the input mechanisms you know there's not a there's not a physical keyboard there's you know i i can't do anything with it. It's kind of closed. It's locked down. I, I, you know, it, the, the input mechanisms, you know, there's not a, there's not a physical keyboard. There's, you know, I, I can't do what I want to do with it, but that, I think, you know, that is sort of the point of, of, and, and where Steve Jobs is, is going. Any other thoughts about, about the, about the, the, the new iPhone or, or actually now that we've had a chance to get our hands on, on. Any thoughts on that, Amanda or Jeff or Mills? Yeah. Actually, I guess I'm a little surprised to hear you say that about distraction-free reading, Dan, just because for whatever reason, I'm more or less anti-iPad as an e-book reader. And one of the reasons I'm a little anti-iPad, just for myself, is that it has all the other applications on it. You know, it's got a web browser. It's got, you know, incredible video viewing capabilities and things like that. And I don't want any of that. I really don't want an iPad, even though I have played with them a few times since it's come out, but I still want a Kindle because a Kindle is a one purpose device. And that to me is my definition of that immersive experience. Yeah. It's easy to sort of forget about the Kindle and all of this, but I think the Kindle is still doing very well. And we've seen in an effort, I think, to compete with the iPad there. I think the Kindle is going to be sold in retail stores starting very soon. Target among them. I would add that. I mean, it's interesting to hear all of this as well. Because one of the things that one of my favorite apps on my iPod Touch is actually the Kindle app on the iPod Touch. Right. So it's Amazon software on the iPad. And actually, I read a number of books on it all the time. And so the notion of an iPad, having that and having that larger screen, and now with the new iPhone with a high resolution screen, I think I can see myself reading even more on there. The other question about distraction, it seems to me, I mean, one of the things that I have been looking for, lots of people have been looking for in this software update beyond the hardware of the new iPhone is multitasking. You can run and, more importantly, perhaps switch between various programs fairly quickly. That's something that a lot of people have been looking for. It was one of the big knocks on the iPad, Amanda's comments notwithstanding. I mean, I think that this is, in some ways, this makes, for me, it makes it an even more appealing device in the educational market when you could have, you know, a reading app and a note-taking app side-by-side, whether it so. I am a iPad user and I do. I'm actually almost ruining the fact that it's going to get multitasking because I fear that, you know, I'll be tempted to play Pandora in the background while I'm reading something. And right now, I guess, Amanda, what I was sort of talking about, I totally agree that the kind of one device for reading works better. And I am weak, so the temptation to kind of switch over to your email program is strong. But with the iPad and actually whatever has been rebranded as iOS, what those devices will have is that you don't see what Edward Tufte called in the early 90s when he was sort of ragging on Windows, was that you don't see Windows. You don't see what Tufte called computer administrative debris, which I think is a great name for it, which is sort of all that stuff around the edges of your Word document that distracts you from the actual column that you're reading or writing. And I think what these iOS apps are doing is that they're just, they've gotten rid of that. They go all the way out to the edge. There's not even scroll bars. So nothing is taken up except the content. And I think that there is something now to that that is important. I think the Kindle does it even better, right? Because, you know, other than a little bit of a strip at the bottom to tell you where you are in the chapter, it's got almost no computer administrative debris. I think the multitasking hides that, the multitasking under a kind of lift up sort of shade type animation. So maybe that will be okay. But I do think that there's something to this, that we're going to have to force ourselves into devices that maybe limit our experience in some way. And I have no doubt that when the Android tablets come out, they'll have all kinds of bells and whistles and things going on and notifications. And I think Steve Jobs and Johnny Ives will be sitting there snickering, saying that's just the wrong way to go.
Well, to some extent, snickering. But also, one of the things, I mean, and this is not something that Steve Jobs would admit directly, I don't think, but this new phone is, in some respects, a response to the challenge of Android, though. I mean, there are features, certainly in the operating system, which, I mean, multitasking is one of those responses. Unified inbox, that's another one. The background wallpapers, so you can change the wallpapers. You can have folders for apps. That's something that Steve Jobs resisted for a long time and told us that we didn't need. Those are all things that have been in Android since the beginning. And I think – so there's this kind of – the Android or the Windows alternative aspect of the new iPhone. But there's also – it's also, it also knows, I think it's competing with those systems. And that's going to be a hard, that's going to be a tough line for Apple to walk, I think. And I think we'll have to see as this plays out. We're also seeing a ton of new Android hardware coming out and new Android software. I mean, Android is definitely the platform for the tinkerer, for the person who likes all of that administrative debris. I think, you know, it's filled with all kinds of Easter eggs and the settings menus are vast and intricate. You know, and it's building in innovation like in the new Froyo Android 2.2. You can set it up as a Wi-Fi hotspot. So I think in the end, this competition between Android, iPhone, and I think the Kindle still is out there. There's more to come from Kindle. And I think we'll see some more from Microsoft and from Palm, which was bought by HP since our last podcast. I think there have all these things. It will sort of have to unless it's going to be $59 or free when you buy 10 books at Amazon. Yeah, I agree. I totally agree with that. And I think we're seeing that kind of call and response across the board here. Well, moving on from the iPhone, moving on from Apple, maybe our favorite topic of discussion, to our second favorite topic of discussion, Google. We saw in the last couple of weeks Google came out sort of just in the way that Google does, just kind of an offhand remark on one of their blogs. They have launched and released what looks a lot like a learning management system called Cloud Course. Mills, have you had a chance to look at a couple of the samples, and I think once they make it a little more user-friendly for the average user, because it's not designed for higher education. It's designed for enterprise learning environments, you know, corporate training, that sort of thing. And so it doesn't have many of the same kinds of features yet that we see in the course management software that has swallowed most of our campuses. But it will, because I think a number of colleges and universities are going to jump on it and start installing, creating, since it's open source, creating grade books and things like that that it needs. But it looks like a much sort of stripped down version of what you see in course management or learning management software platforms, but it's because it's still very basic. And in the way that Google does, they've put it out there with some, you know, some nice basic features and capabilities and then said, okay, go ahead, play with it and see what you can come up with. So I think it's going to get a lot more sophisticated fairly quickly. And I expect that fairly soon someone will hack it in a way that makes it possible for average Joes like me who know no Python to get it set up and going. So, you know, if you don't need all the bells and whistles, it's fine. And if you have somebody who can help you set it up, it's fine. A year from now, I think it's going to be something that we see a lot of use of at those institutions that are moving toward the cloud. At those institutions that aren't, it's just not going to happen except for the individual faculty member who decides, yeah, I would rather do this than Blackboard or Moodle or whatever. One of the things that I thought was interesting about CloudCourse is not just, you know, the fact that Google releases what some people are calling a learning management system, even though it isn't really. It's really a course scheduling app, but it does integrate with Google Calendar. So any enterprise that is reliant on Google Calendar, and I think many are, would find that very attractive because calendaring systems are, you know, something that actually a lot of universities, I think, are all having the same kinds of problems with those that they are with email. You know, the fact that everybody's already using some kind of calendaring system when they get to the university. And then if their employees or staff or whatever, they're supposed to be using, you know, whatever software the university has decided to use. And they may just sort of, you know, cut through all that hassle by saying, look, let's just use systems that integrate with what people are already using when they get here. Yeah, I think that's a great point. As the only member of the podcast who uses the George Mason University internal administrative calendaring system, which I've now abandoned, but I had to use last year while I was working in the dean's office, I can say it's a nightmare. And it's a big enterprise platform, which is used, I would guess, by thousands of organizations around the country, around the world, because it's from a major software manufacturer that I won't name. And it's just an- It's Oracle, isn't it? You're talking about Oracle, aren't you? Sometimes. Well, what is that amendment to the constitution? The fifth one? Yeah, that's the one I'm going to do. So it's clunky. It's horrible. And after being a Google Calendar user for two years, to have to then use that for a year was just like sticking small pins under my fingernails. And now, you know, the day that I stopped working in the dean's office was the last day I logged on to that system. And so it's, for me, one of the things I've been thinking about for this fall, I'll be back teaching again in the fall. And, you know, my students are always trying to figure out what's the best time to get in touch with me. And so I think what I'm going to do is, is kind of rejigger my Google calendar so that they can at least see the blocked out times. And so they'll know when I'm in the office, even not my normal office hours. And so I think that that alone is just, which I can't do with that other system that I'm not going to name. And so, which, cause they can't get access to it because it's an administrative system. So that alone makes life a lot simpler. And so if I could then start building things on top of that calendaring system that I'm already very reliant on, I don't want a whole course management system, but I do want some things that make life easier for me as an instructor in interacting with my students. And so if I can start adding those bits onto my Google calendaring system, I'm going to love that. I don't need a whole thing, a whole big management system. I just like some modules, or maybe we should call them apps. Jeff, you and your colleagues at University of Mary Washington are well known for kind of alternative educational technology systems, UMW blogs being the best example. Is this the kind of thing that Jim Groom and people of his ilk, let's say, he's a friend, so I think we can say that, would be interested in? Or is this kind of more of the same from a from a different company? Well, yeah, I mean, I think that certainly that early conversations with Jim and some others at Marion Washington suggest a real kind of excitement about the potential of this particular idea. I mean, again, the problem is, as Amanda and Mills have pointed out, this is a relatively basic beginning, right? I mean, it's got scheduling. It's got some notions of how to not just calendar scheduling, but room scheduling, ways to begin to manage rosters of classes. That's the beginning. That's the beginning structure of perhaps what we might call a learning management system. But it's still pretty early on, and I think it's got a ways to go. Now, you know, at some point, I think, as Mill says, within the next year, we're going to see something built on this that's a little more user-friendly that I think we would probably be interested in looking at.
One is that lots of people seem to hate not only their calendaring systems, but their room scheduling systems. And that the notion that this could somehow replace whatever third party or proprietary software people are using, or in some cases, no system at all for scheduling the rooms, is I think, incredibly, it speaks to the need in this area. And perhaps Google sees that and is tapping into it. But even more amazing to me, I think, was the general reaction that I saw on Twitter and in other places in the blogosphere to the possibility of an alternative learning management system. You know, Mills may say that he's not interested in necessarily using it this way, but I think a lot of people are really just excited by the idea, even though there's nothing here yet that is really a learning management system, but I think there are a lot of people who are really excited by the potential of offering alternatives to what we currently have. Well, and as somebody who had to spend a lot of time last year working, interacting closely with the people who schedule classrooms on our campus, we use a whole different large corporate system for that, which is, it's not the same level of nightmare, but it's just not very good. And it's just difficult to use. And, you know, only a couple of people are expert enough to actually make it work. And the rest of us interact in kind of strange ways, but ultimately it happens. But that is the scheduling of classrooms is an incredibly complex endeavor. You know, we have a hundred and I think 159 classrooms at George Mason that are in use from seven 30 in the morning until 10 PM at night, Monday through Friday, plus some on the weekends. And they have all sorts of different tech capabilities and everything like that. And, you know, different numbers of seats and, and seats and some faculty members only want to teach in certain buildings, which is too bad for them because it doesn't work that way, but they try. And so that's a really complicated set of algorithms. And if Google can figure out a better solution to that, I think you're going to see registrars perk up their ears because it's registrars who are generally responsible for that particular issue on campus. And I think there's a wide open market for that. Well, I think in some ways we were surprised by this announcement from Google. But in other ways, I guess it doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Google has been moving more aggressively into the education market with Google Apps for Education. And a lot of universities have been, as we've talked about on the podcast, have been switching to Gmail to provide – to sort of outsource the email functions of central IT, Google Docs, and the other Google Apps applications. So just on that point, though, isn't, I mean, this didn't seem like an aggressive move, to be honest, or as aggressive as I think a lot of us would have liked to have seen. I think, I think I tweeted at the time I heard about it, if it had been, if they had released a beta of courses.google.com, that would have been impressive. I think they put something up in the app engine. I think they're hoping, you know, it's open source. They're hoping for a developer community. But, you know, I think a lot of us were hoping for like a nice sucker punch against Blackboard. And this just wasn't that. I think it's just a little bit too amorphous at this point. Well, absolutely. And it's clearly some kind of labs project, you know, somebody's 20% time. But again, I think as you said, Jeff, it's the reaction to this. Or as you were saying right now, Dan, you know, the fact is that a lot of people would like alternatives to Blackboard and even to open source learning management systems like Moodle or Sakai. And there's some sense that, oh, you know, we'd welcome our Google overlords into this space as a change from the other overlords. Right, right. But I mean, to really replace it, it would have to be something that would be able to be run on the campus because of various legal issues. And so I think the fact that it's only running in Google's app engine is going to be problematic for that. Well, but I wonder, too, to get back to Tom's earlier question, I guess, you know, is this something that Google hopes the DIYU crowd, right, the do-it-yourself university crowd begins to pick up on. And that if it were a completely finished and polished app, that's a group that probably wouldn't necessarily be interested in jumping onto courses.google.com. I don't know. I mean, I'm just guessing here, but I wonder, it'll be interesting to see what happens indeed over the next year to this project. It does feel a little like testing the waters. Well, moving on, you know, speaking of competition and alternatives, we saw also just this week that Microsoft rolled out its own version of a cloud solution for a cloud application solution, Microsoft Office for the Web. And it has sort of, as far as I can tell, a couple different names that it's under. Microsoft Office Web Apps on SkyDrive is, I think, the official title. How did they come up with these names? I know. It's like typical Microsoft. It's like horrible branding, and they're targeting at 10 different markets and just kind of can't get all their ducks in a row. But we have seen that Google has made some inroads in providing email and office solutions in the cloud to universities, and it looks like Microsoft is making a fairly bold counter to that. This isn't specifically for the educational market, but essentially what this Microsoft Office web apps on SkyDrive does is it provides a web-based word processor, web-based spreadsheet and just as web based presentation tool, just as Google Docs does. But what it does on top of that is it integrates with your desktop version of Microsoft Office so that you could be working on a desktop copy of a document, save it to your desktop, and then that's automatically synced to the cloud so that if you are later on in a different location and want to do some more editing in the cloud, you can do it there. And those changes are reflected in both places and can also be used for collaboration in that sense that changes that you make on your local machine can be shared and replicated on a colleague's local copy of that same document. So it offers some features that Google Docs doesn't. It also looks and feels like Word and Excel and PowerPoint, which I think is an important thing. Google Docs has always felt a little different for when you start using it. And these things look and feel just like the, quote, real thing. So a big play, I think, by Microsoft. Any thoughts on this? We don't tend to talk much about Microsoft on this podcast, but it is probably the software that most people on most campuses are using most often. Any thoughts on what this does for higher ed? I mean, I think this is a smart move on their part. I mean, it's late coming, frankly. People have been calling for some kind of version of this ever since, you know, Google Docs really rolled out, you know, and began to collect some steam. I actually have had in some ways in the last month or so begun to switch over to using Google Docs more to write things, partly because it synced up pretty easily across machines. It didn't have to worry about thumb drives or any of that. There are other ways to do that, but it was just easier. So, I mean, I think this is a really powerful thing. I think, Tom, you're right, that the way things look and feel are going to matter a great deal to people who aren't interested in tinkering around, who want to just continue to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel and things like that. One of the interesting things for me, though, about this move is that you apparently can do the online stuff without actually owning a copy of Office 2010. I mean, I think that's great. I think they have to do that to compete with Google Docs. The problem is, is that does this potentially, you know, cannibalize the office business any? And I don't know, maybe they're too big for them to worry about that. But I thought that's an interesting sort of thing looking forward. Yeah, I think Microsoft is in some ways facing the same dilemma that, you know, publishers are with making products open access on the web. Like, you know, okay, they need to do this to compete, but how then do they maintain their business models? And I think it is in that way a pretty risky move for Microsoft. Dan or Amanda or Mills, any final thoughts on this? I was just thinking that, I mean, I do think it's a brilliant move.
People are thinking about Google Docs can just get like a taste of what real office is like on their live series seven XP, whatever, online live version. But I think there's something to these applications. I've just my shorthand for them is, you know, fog applications. They're sort of like, you know, sort of in the cloud, but also on your desktop. And Google has gone all in for obvious reasons to cloud applications and their upcoming book reader, which I'm sure we'll talk about this summer on the podcast. You'll have to be connected to the internet. It'll run in a web browser. I'm sure they're thinking ahead to their Chrome OS, which is different than their Chrome browser, which will need to be connected to the internet. I think there's still something for at least the next few years and probably longer where applications that run locally that connect to the cloud, that synchronize, will have a major advantage. And I mean, I think it's something we probably just by sheer luck stumbled upon in the Zotero project of having, you know, you always have a copy of everything you want on your own machine, but if you're connected to the internet, it synchronizes to the cloud and you can access it on the web. I think it's a really powerful model because desktop stuff works better. It just does. It's just snappier. Yeah, and it takes advantage of all the local APIs that an operating system has to draw things better and to, you know, I mean, just cut and paste. All that stuff that is done with local APIs, it just gets all goofy in a web browser. And I don't think Google has solved that. I've had a lot of frustration. I know others at CHNM have with Google Docs. And so I think the idea that you could just, you know, move something offline. Sorry if I'm getting some feedback here. But I think it's a very attractive idea. Well, I think we'll have to wait and see. This is the first week of it. And I do think, though, it's going to be an interesting thing to watch here, especially with school starting. And we'll see if any campuses make announcements about the Microsoft product as they have been about the Google product. We mentioned publishing very briefly there. And another thing we saw this week was that the University of California is in a bit of a standoff with the Nature Publishing Group, the group that publishes Nature, the journal Nature, and many, many other scientific journals. It turns out that Nature was asking the University of California system for, basically, they hiked their price by what the University of California is saying is 400%. So they wanted four times the amount of money that the university had been paying for the subscriptions to almost 70 titles. And the University of California and the California Digital Library, which manages that, their subscriptions, decided to say no and to threaten a boycott of Nature if Nature didn't enter into negotiations about that price quote. They said that they would tell their faculty members to stop publishing or they would ask their faculty members to stop publishing in Nature journals. They would ask their faculty members to stop serving on editorial boards or serving as peer reviewers for Nature journals. And they would stop buying the Nature subscriptions to the Nature journals if Nature didn't negotiate. What do people think of this? This seems like a fairly aggressive move by the University of California to stem the rising costs of journal subscriptions. I think this is outstanding. I think it's absolutely fabulous. I'm sure you'll link to the letter that Gary Strong, head of the UC Libraries and others, put out. But the appendix to that letter is really worth a read because the numbers on this are amazing. I remember, you know, they literally are, Nature really literally was proposing a 400% increase in what they were paying, going from an average cost per journal of about $4,465, which I bet is per year. I think that's a yearly subscription cost, to an average cost of $17,000. Amanda, have you heard anything I mean, as Nature said, is this just chutzpah? I mean, 400% increase? It just almost seems like unreal. Nature has not, according to what I've read, they have not responded to the letter yet, or at least not publicly. And they at least refused an interview to Jen Howard at the Chronicle. So yeah, it does sort of seem like chutzpah. I don't know if this came out of the blue or whether they had been in negotiations for a while and it ended up in a standoff. Has anybody else heard any more details on where this kind of comes from? No, but I did read, and I actually Twittered earlier today, you know, of course, this is the Nature Publishing Group, which is one of many STM, science and technical publishers. But another famous one is Reed Elsevier. And I was reading an interview earlier with a business analyst who was talking about how Reed Elsevier posted unprecedented profits in the last year's earnings and so on. And this business analyst was basically talking about, you know, you guys, you publishers cannot keep raising prices and raising prices and raising prices and earning these crazy profits because at some point people are going to break. And he wrote this, you know, before this whole you see a nature publishing group thing happened. And I mean, I think he's got to be absolutely right, because it's amazing when you look at the culture as a whole, where newspaper publishing is in trouble and everybody knows it. Book publishing is in trouble and everybody knows it. They're trying to hang on to earnings, trying to innovate, you know, to figure out new ways of dealing with the internet. And in scholarly publishing, it's exactly the opposite. You know, you have, you know, they're the opposite of being in trouble. They're just charging more and more and more. And, you know, for them, the move to online resources has been nothing but a cash cow. And it's been really amazing to me the extent to which open access publishing, the whole notion that you publish your scholarship online for free, has not so far been a threat to scholarly publishing. And the reason for that is basically reputation. It's because it's a reputation economy, I think. So anyway, this strikes me as, I hadn heard anything about like why Nature Publishing Group thought they could get away with this or thinks they can get away with this. But I think that the answer is, is that historically for the past, you know, 20 years, they've been getting away with stuff like this. I mean, it's pretty astounding. I just did some simple multiplication based on some of the numbers in that letter. The University of California, the California Digital Library, from what I can tell, they subscribe to about 8,000 journals online at an average cost of $3,000 to $7,000. So let's figure like 8,000 journals times $5,000 per journal. That's an online journal's budget of $40 million a year. I mean, that is astounding. Think of what $40 million looks like in a university's budget. So, I mean, the numbers here are really, I don't think, before this spate of articles, I don't think I had quite wrapped my head around just how much money we were talking about here. But that's just, I mean, it's a big state, but that's just one state, one state university's library journals budget, $40 million. It's the UC system. Right. But it's hard to believe. It's not $40 million for cafeteria food. It's to return to the faculty the articles that they wrote in a formatted way. Many of which were paid for by taxpayers. Right. Yeah. That's the grants that did the research. Beth Noveske had the great term fight club soap, which is basically, you know, if you've read fight club or seen fight club, you know, they take this, well, I don't know, you'll have to, I'm not sure I can describe it right, but you take someone's own output and sell it back to them at an outstanding cost. Yeah, it's obscene. It really is obscene. because it's the largest state education system in the United States. So they've got to be the biggest customer. And when the biggest customer says no, then the smaller customers are going to feel empowered. Well, if Berkeley doesn't have access to that journal, well, we can live without it too. And, you know, UCLA doesn't have access. We can live without that because, you know, we're not done with budget cutting in this great recession that we're living through. And it's only, I mean, this is going to be a very low hanging fruit.
How much are we spending on online journals now? I think we're going to look back at this and see this is one of sort of those crucial moments in a trend away from paying these just obscene journal subscription fees, especially because more and more, even though, as Amanda says, it was a reputation-based economy on this, but more and more people are publishing in their own work in venues that are free. And the younger generation of scholars coming along behind those of us on the podcast, they're not as wedded to the old models. And the ease of publication, the open access nature of that publication, and the freeness of that publication, I think is going to be very attractive to them. And I think speaking for myself, I'm not so I don't really care what the peer review of an article was so long as the peer review happened. And so if it happened by an editorial board in one of these reputational journals happened in the old ways by an editorial board prior to publication, that's great. If it happened after in some other way and the scholar can show me how the peer review happened, that's peer review. So I think we're going to see some big changes and it's going to be the cost that finally is the overreach on cost is going to be the nail in the coffin. Yeah, I thought the most damning part of this was in the article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Keith Yamamoto, who's a professor of molecular biology at UC San Francisco, he made the just incredibly obvious commonsensical point at the end of this article where he said, you know, okay, what does nature have? It has branding, right? It has, it's just a brand name. And so that's why people want to publish in it. But then he says at the very end of this article, he says, you know what, though, in many ways, it doesn't matter where the work's published because scientists will be able to find it. And I think that's the correct sentiment is sort of like, as that spreads, Mills, exactly what you said, is that attitude kind of spreads. If scientists feel like, well, you know, I can just publish it to my personal website or an open access journal like PLOS or an institutional repository. And, you know, people find it. Google is pretty good. I'll let people know via social media or other methods, email. It just, you know, I think it's going to erode the brand that is nature right now. Well, let's see. I think we'll have to wait and see on this to see whether California will be like it is with auto emission standards where California passes the law and the industry and the rest of the country follow suit just because of the sheer size of the state. I think, Amanda, you're probably right. It could be that this is the start of something. Just to finish off the podcast here, we noticed one more thing and maybe a little lighter. Or actually, maybe not. Maybe this is disturbing. I kind of can't tell. It turns out that there was an article in Inside Higher Ed where they picked up on a story where a student was actually selling his course spot on Craigslist. So there was an over-registration in the course that he was signed up for. And he was trying to sell the spot on Craigslist to the highest bidder, to someone who needed to get into the course. Is this something we're going to see more of? Is this entrepreneurial or is this a complete breakdown in the registrar's office? Well, and it's actually a slight reverse to what you just said. It was somebody trying to buy one. They were offering to buy. Oh, I see. Okay. All right. It was not offering for sale. Not offering to sell. Yeah, I actually have it up on the screen. The person in their posting apparently wrote, so if anyone is currently enrolled in any of the Bio 160 classes for summer quarter and is willing to sell their spot on it or knows of anyone that is, please, please, please let me know ASAP. So somebody desperate to get in the class who's willing to pay. And I have to say, I was so excited when I read this because it just proves that what goes around comes around. When back in the Stone Age, when I was a college student, and we had such a great registration system, it was still on those fabulous little punch cards that computers used to use. And every seat in the classroom was represented by a card. And we all went into the gym. And we stood in lines at the English department of the history department table. And, and I asked a seat and, you know, the Tuesday, Thursday, nine o'clock section of history 300. And they flipped through the thing and, oh, look, here's a card and they handed it to me. And so I had a seat. Well, there were very entrepreneurial people standing in the middle of the gym who had gone table by table and selected the cards for the most popular sections by the most popular professors, and they were selling them. So that market has existed as it turns out. So nothing new under the sun. All that's different about this particular story is that – and who knows whether it's – there's some question about whether or not it's true or not or whether he was joking. But the fact is that this has been going on in some form for a while, whether you do it for your friends or whether you're actually selling it. What's different is that there's a kind of transparency that the web brings that makes it both easier to connect with these people who might be engaged in these practices and for the rest of us to have a sense that it's going on. Well, the other thing I think about it was there was a quote in this Inside Higher Ed article from somebody at the college who said, oh, well, no, this must be a fake posting because our registration system guarantees that if you really need the class, you're first on the list for getting into it. And I think everybody knows that that's never true. I mean, of course, this is a real ad. It seems to me, you know, of course, you know, even though you really need the class to graduate, you know, somehow you got down to the bottom of the registration list. That happens all the time. Or, you know, I mean, people really, really need the course, meaning that they work on Fridays when the only other thing, you know, that would fit into their schedule is offered or whatever, you know. So I think it just goes to show, too, that there is room for Google to get into the class scheduling and class registration business because I don't think that there is any system that would ever be perfect, but there are always going to be human systems that get around what the technological systems fail to do. See, I think the student's mistake was posting it on Craigslist. They should have just looked for it on eBay. Great idea. Well, we're over time, so let's leave it there. Thanks to Jeff and Amanda for joining us again. And thanks to Mills and Dan. I think next time around it's Mills' turn, I believe. Mills, your turn next. I think it's Dan's turn. Oh, it's Dan's. All right. Well, it's Dan's turn. Back in the saddle. All right. Well, we'll try to be – We'll talk about all Microsoft then. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You're stuck with Microsoft next time. Thank you so much, Dan. So join us for that, for that exciting discussion on the next episode of Digital Campus. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv what you can do for your country hear it
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do, 2008. Making it count, I'm here with Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hey, how's it going, guys? maybe since the beta, beta 4. Yeah, it's great. It's fast. It's slick. I think the UI is a lot better. I think if people are still using Firefox 2, they'll be pleased. And I think I'd recommend people go and it's a quick download and easy install. Keep all your bookmarks and all. So I definitely recommend it to listeners. Yeah, I've been very impressed in particular with the speed increase. Yeah, I think it's going to make it a little bit easier for us to evangelize Firefox in the educational community. I mean, I thought 2 was pretty slow, and it was a little bit buggy, and this feels really snappy, and so I think it's a lot easier. And I think also now that we're a few years on, people, I think, are feeling more comfortable about moving over to Firefox. Actually, worldwide, it's up to 18%. And I think IE is down to somewhere in the mid-70s, which is, you know, IE used to be 95% of the market. So this is a pretty incredible move. And certainly we've noticed, I think, at the center that we sometimes, some of our sites have over 50% Firefox usage. So it's really not a marginal alternative browser. It's now really sort of number two. It's quickly becoming the Pepsi to Coke. And actually, that's probably an apt description. Anyway, I suppose there's not a lot with Firefox 3 that relates to education, but good to just mention at the top of the podcast, maybe a bonus featured software download for the week when we get to our links at the end of the show. But first, as usual, let's start with the news roundup. Well, I guess, you know, one story that really caught our eye this over the past couple of weeks was Amazon's Kindle, which we've talked about before. In fact, we did a whole feature story on e-books and their potential. Well, certainly it looks like university presses have decided there is a lot of potential there. And they're starting to, in fact, release books. Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, Oxford are all moving very aggressively, actually, onto the Kindle. Is this going to make any difference in terms of, you know, we always talk about the university presses being in a certain kind of crisis, and I guess by that we mean a kind of financial crisis. Will this help them out to not have to print stuff out on paper and to not have to do these kind of limited runs of paper books that might sit in a warehouse for years? Here's where I think it's going to make the biggest difference is with the kind of marginal sales books. The things which are being sold regularly and it makes sense for them to continue to print copies of, then I think they'll keep doing that. But I think for the book that sells pretty well the first year and not so well the second year and then kind of drops down to the 50 or 60 professors who assign it on an annual basis, where they're going to make extra money is they're going to be able to continue to sell those books over and over and over, but only in this electronic format. It doesn't look, though, Mills, like they're going for the long tail here, at least initially. I mean, Princeton University Press not exactly taking a gamble by having a book by Robert Schiller, you know, who is the famous irrational exuberance economist and generally depressive figure in the economic field. He's got something on the subprime crisis coming out. You know, it's called Subprime Solution, How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do About It. This seems just like a popular press putting out a book on the Kindle. Yeah, they're definitely going with the safe route for now. Although, I mean, I was surprised, as you said, Dan, how aggressive they really are with this. They're putting out, you know, it's not just a couple of titles. It's a bunch of titles. But as you say, they are the more mainstream titles and the more famous, more sort of safe authors. But eventually, I think they probably will move to the long tail. In some respects though, I think this is – I still have skepticism about the Kindle and all of these e-book readers. Or maybe it's not skepticism, but I think that like what's the real story here? I mean this seems like more of an evolution of the traditional text, an evolution of the traditional book than a fundamental technological shift to me or something that's going to really change the nature of scholarship and publishing. I see it more as just another distribution channel, just like Amazon is another distribution channel. But I do think, as Mills said, the long tail is really the hope for this model. Yeah, I don't think that there's any big value added to this other than the long tail and then possible convenience. We talked a lot about Kindle before and I'm still pretty skeptical about its value for education other than just continuing to make out-of-print books available in an electronic format. There was a big meeting of not the university publishers but the total book world a couple of weeks ago. The reporting on that in the New York Times and other places seem to say that a lot of publishers are worried about the Kindle, that it might destroy their business model. But I think for university presses, and I think in part, you know, they're selling the books themselves pretty cheaply. Like a lot of books are $9.95 on the Kindle. And of course, Amazon's getting a big cut of that, although they work out deals. I think for a university press, Mills, you know, although I disagree with you, just at least in terms of this initial release, they seem to be going for the greatest hits. But, you know, you could imagine some books that are really in the long tail that, you know, maybe someone might want to sample, you know, a Kindle owner might want to sample for $9.95, pick up a book on a more esoteric topic because they're not paying. I think about those Cambridge University press monographs that are $100. What about their background that farther down the list where they might sell more than 10 copies of a book at $10 versus one at $100. So the pricing models, I think, are pretty interesting in this medium. It looks like at least at first they're going for more expensive pricing than the mainstream presses. They're going for $20, $25 e-books, which to me doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, I think they'll get pounded down on that in a hurry. And I think the people who are really in danger on this are not the presses but the university bookstores because it really will cut them out of their most lucrative business transaction, which is the used book. They make way more money on used books than they do on new books. And this will essentially eliminate that market. Yeah, that's a good point. Good point. Well, speaking of books, another story that caught our eye over the last couple of weeks that we wanted to mention was a pretty interesting collaboration between the Copyright Office, Project Gutenberg, Carnegie Mellon, and the Distributed Proofreaders, and at the very end, one very enterprising Google engineer, and who have made something that I think is pretty important for our digital academic future available online, and that is a XML file, basically a text file, of the copyright records for books from 1923 to 1963. So this period, for those of you who aren't very familiar with U.S. copyright law, books published between 1923, books published before 1923, are all in the public domain. But between 1923 and 1963 is this kind of gray area before copyright law became much more advantageous to the author, where you didn't, you know, after the 1970s, you didn't have to reassert your copyright on a book to have it automatically renewed. The copyright terms were extended. And so now we're living in a world where if you publish a book, you have the copyright for a long, long time. But between 1923 and 1963, the rights owner had to actually submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office saying that they wanted to renew their copyright for another 28 years after the first 28 years.
And so those books are in the public domain. And really what this means for us in the digital world is those books can be put online and made full text available for free. And so it's, I think, really critical to kind of look at this gray period. But the problem was that we didn't really have good records, and they certainly weren't online. So what happened in this story was that Carnegie Mellon University scanned the Copyright Office records from this period as part of their Universal Library project, which is online. And then people from Project Gutenberg, which of course has been making free text available for decades, and the distributed proofreaders who often do OCR correction for Project Gutenberg, got involved and did all the correction, amazingly, on these scans from Carnegie Mellon of the Copyright Office records. And then, finally, someone from Google took those records and did a little processing on them to make them available, massage them into a single XML file, which is now available for download. We'll actually link to this from digitalcampus.tv, but it's on the Google site. And you can just download it. It's a zip file. And get this file and you can then learn what books are in the public domain. And those books, you can do whatever you want with them. Is this going to have some kind of impact in terms of scholarship? Is this the first of many projects to sort of figure out what's in the public domain and what's not and sort of make this online landscape a little bit less tricky in terms of copyright? Well, in some ways, I think this is kind of unique in that that period from 1923 to 1963 is really kind of the, at least as far as I understand U.S. copyright law, kind of the grayest of the gray periods. But I do think there's some grayness in the copyright laws of, I think it's 1976 and certainly with the DMCA. So I think there is opportunity to do this. What I'd really like to see is one thing I don't know much about are international copyright laws. And I imagine there are, you know, every country has its own copyright law or most do. And projects, some kind of aggregation or unified database where you can go to find this information for copyrights of all countries would be tremendously useful for – I know in our content-focused projects, our education and our public projects, we're always looking for good copyright-free public domain content. And having somewhere that's open and free and comprehensive would be a tremendous benefit. Yeah, I think it's kind of a one-off in the sense that – so there's this big list of material out there that's copyright-free. But then I don't think there are other big lists like this available. I think what would be more interesting – and again, this goes back to our conversation about the Kindle and sort of the long tail of scholarship – is that there are an awful lot of books which have gone out of copyright or gone out of publication where the authors sort of wish that their books would reappear or would be available through some sort of long tail process and not even necessarily for sale, just available for use. And so authors can reclaim the copyright of those out-of-print books without much difficulty at all. And so what I'd love to see is a project that encouraged authors to reclaim their copyright on their out-of-print books and then make them available easily for scanning in this way. And so then we can have access to that work again. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think in you know, in general, I guess a lot of these sort of, you know, orphan works or these works that are just sort of forgotten, to get more of that stuff. And after all, I mean, what's the overall percentage of books, let's say, from the last hundred years that are still viable commercially? It's got to be minute. I mean, it's got to be 1% or less. So, you know, you would think that most of this stuff, if you could clear all the rights on it, which is an enormous project, we'd have a much richer commons online to draw from. And I think, you know, and then all the services on top of that. I mean, not just to be able to read it, but be able to search the full text, you know, to be able to mash it up with other documents. I mean, all that stuff that we're doing in a kind of Web 2.0 world is just impossible if you don't have the correct rights clearances. We probably should note that the U.S. Copyright Office does make records, copyright records for books from 1978 onward available online. And again, we'll link to that in our show notes. It's copyright.gov slash records. But, you know, it's not the same thing. It's not a database. Well, it's a database behind the scenes, but you can search a specific title. But I think what's neat about this is, for instance, libraries could download this XML file and integrate it into their online catalogs and then make full text availables at a single click. You know, once a scan is available, let's say at Google or Open Content Alliance, even better, something that's truly open, then they would know, hey, we can link from our online catalog to the full text of that book because that book is scannable, it's been scanned by someone, and we can freely distribute it. So I think that's a pretty powerful combination to be able to do these searches and then be able to link to the full text. Well, you know, we'll see if this is just a one-off thing or more will come online. And I think it'll be interesting to report back maybe in a few months and see if some libraries take this XML file and do something with it. It's an interesting collaboration also between a number of different groups that sometimes are at odds with each other, people like Project Gutenberg and Google. So I guess it's good to see this kind of collaboration. One topic that we haven't really discussed at length here on the podcast that we thought would be a good summer topic and also has been something that's been, I think, blogged a lot recently by a couple of us on the panel. And that topic is really about making digital scholarship count. And indeed, Mills, that was the title of your three-part series that's been getting a lot of notice. And basically, I want you to describe what you talked about in this series. But I think we've been thinking a lot, not only about digital scholarship, but how it fits into academia, how it fits into promotion and tenure, how it fits into hiring decisions. And I guess this would even go beyond academia, because surely people, for instance, in the museum world who publish, you know, want works that they publish in a kind of digital form or websites that they produce in some sense count for things like raises and things to put on their resumes and CVs. So maybe do you want to describe a little bit, Mills, you know, what got you thinking about this, why you did this series of posts and what you learned in writing it? Well, what really got me to write the series is a conversation that took place at our That Camp program that we talked about in the last episode of Digital Campus. And a number of people toward the end of one of our sessions said, well, you know, it's great we're doing all of this, but in my department it doesn't actually count. And I realized I had this strong sense of frustration at that, and I was trying to figure out why I was having such a strong reaction, and I realized it was because I've been listening to this conversation now for, I don't know, six or seven years, and I guess I'd just kind of gotten tired of listening to the lament of, yeah, but it doesn't actually count. And we should say we've heard this lament not only at that camp, but, gosh, it must be dozens of conferences that I've been to. It's the first question that comes up, isn't it? Well, but we'll account for tenure and promotion. Right. And it's just over and over and over. I mean, I can remember my first foray into something that might be called digital work was back in 1999 when I was a fellow with the Carnegie Foundation. My department chair pulled me into his office one day and said, well, geez, Mills, the stuff that you're doing with this web work, it's really interesting, but how's your book coming? Because he really didn't care about it. All he cared about was the book. Put the book on the table, you'll get tenure. There was also an implied warning there to junior assistant professor from the senior department chair that you better get going on that book. We've all heard various horror stories. I think some of them are probably urban legends.
But I just – basically I couldn't take it anymore. And so I decided I would write a series of posts in which I speculated a little bit about this business of counting and what it meant for historians doing digital work. And so – and I tried to be a little more deliberative or thoughtful maybe than I have in some of my other posts in the sense that I actually wanted to talk to some other people, senior people in our field to find out what they thought also. So it wasn't just going to be my reflections on it but also what some people who I really respect and who have been around even longer than I have and seen various iterations of the tenure and promotion mill. And so I talked to Stan Katz up at Princeton and Kathy Davidson down at Haystack and then Peter Stearns, our provost here, George Mason, who's a past vice president of the American Historical Association. And well, I don't know, as of last week, he was the author of 102 books. I think probably by next week, it will be 103. But we all joke because Peter seems to publish a book a month or more. So as a provost, he, of course, knows a lot about this business of counting and tenure and promotion. So I tried to figure out why was it that we're having this problem with digital scholarship counting. And I think what I concluded, and I don't know that I even made it as clear as I might have in my blog post, is that we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole or vice versa in the sense that we're trying to claim – often we're trying to claim that something that I call digital work as opposed to digital scholarship, we're trying to claim it as scholarship when it isn't because it's an incredible amount of work and it has a big audience and we're really proud of it. But it's not the same thing as scholarship. And so my argument in this series of posts is that for digital work to count as digital scholarship, it has to be scholarship. And scholarship, I think, is pretty easily defined in any discipline you care to name as the product of research, that it's embedded in a conversation among scholars, it's peer-reviewed, and it's made public. And as long as it has those main characteristics, and it has some kind of an argument. So as long as it has those five characteristics, then it would fit as scholarship, whether it's in mathematics or history or physics or English literature or whatever you want to pick. Scholarship has those kinds of characteristics. And so often, digital projects don't have an argument or they're not clearly connected to some sort of larger conversation among scholars. They're fabulous projects, but they're not exactly the same thing as scholarship. So I was trying to – and because they're not the same thing as scholarship, then it makes it really hard to make the case that they ought to count because, okay, they were an incredible amount of work and they're very popular, but they're not in some way roughly equivalent to a book or a series of articles in prestigious journals or whatever might be your accounting system. So that's what I was trying to deal with. And that's really what I heard from all the people that I talked to was that if we're going to claim it as scholarship, it has to actually be scholarship, not just a big database with lots of primary sources that people use a lot. And so, for instance, many of our projects here at CHNM qualify in that second category. They're big archives, like the September 11th Digital Archive is a digital project, but I'm not sure why it's scholarship. At the same time, I don't think that means that it shouldn't count at all for something. And clearly, it does count for something to a lot of people. And I guess what I would say is that if scholars and other people working at universities and libraries and museums are making an argument that the nature of scholarly and academic work has changed with digital technologies. I think that they have to be willing to accept that the models and terms of academic employment may also change with that. So, for instance, I'm not in a tenure-track position, and that has its drawbacks, but it also has its benefits. And, in fact, I don't care that I'm not in a tenure-track position, and that has its drawbacks, but it also has its benefits. And in fact, I don't care that I'm not in a tenure-track position because it allows me to do all of the kinds of things that I really want to do. I can do the digital projects rather than the digital scholarship, which are my primary interests. So I can work on something like 9-11 or the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank or I can build Omeka, a software platform. All of these other things which wouldn't count as historical scholarship, although they relate to history and they are historical work in some sense or another, they don't need for me to count. I am not judged on whether those things are scholarship by the criteria that Mills just laid out. And that's great for me. It has its drawbacks. I suppose I can be fired, but so can my wife, who's a lawyer. So can 99.5% of the U.S. workforce. If you don't perform, you may get fired. If you do perform, you generally are rewarded and promoted and compensated. And one of those consequences may be that they don't have the same exact terms of employment as their colleagues doing more traditional work. And that can be fine, as in my case it is. I've been able to kind of find a third path. I'm lucky in that respect. I don't think everyone else has the benefit of being at a place like CH&M or George Mason, but I think that's also part of it. We need to have a shift in that there are other models of employment other than the traditional promotion and tenure system of academic scholarly departments that's existed over the past, let's say, 100 years. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I mean, tenure really is a racket and it's unusual compared to other jobs and job security. And I think we should both, I think academia often doesn't think too much about how unique it is and that there might be other models. So Mills, in reading your series, I had kind of two reactions. I think in some sense, I mean, I very much agree with a lot of what you said. And I think what you wrote in terms of, you know, it's got to look like scholarship. It's got to be part of, you know, make reference to existing discussions, et cetera. I think that fits very well with my feeling that, for instance, blogs could be scholarship. Often they're not, but they could be scholarship, that there's nothing necessarily preventing them from being sites where scholars post long-form argument. I guess where I diverge slightly from what you've said is that it does seem to me to privilege a bit the standard narrative format that historians are used to. And so then we get to the question of these other forms. So, you know, when you were talking about making an argument, we've tended to make that in a linear text fashion. And so I think the really tricky part for making things count are these kind of sites. Now, 9-11 is just a pure archive that we host. But there are sites that kind of do make some argument, but it's not maybe as clear as a straight narrative text that you'd see in a journal article, which, after all, could be posted on a blog very easily. And then there are kind of digital tools and some of the things that I've worked on that implicitly make an argument about, let's say, the nature of historiography or research, but that isn't clear from the tool itself. So I'll give you, I think, one pretty clear example. So I wrote a tool that's still used pretty widely, the Syllabus Finder, that is just a search engine for syllabi. And you think, well, this is not something that should count. But what I've tried to do with that tool is then to produce scholarship based on it to show people how the tool enables new kind of scholarship. So the tool itself, yes, you know, it's a technical exercise, but there's some intellectual thought that went into sort of the creation of it and then to figure out what the products of it could be. So, for instance, beyond just, you know, trying to find a particular syllabus or a set of syllabi on a particular topic, I ended up writing an article for the Journal of American History using the Syllabus Finder to show how American history was taught at the basic level, at the textbook, you know, history 101 level. And that the Syllabus Finder helped me to produce scholarly insights about the nature of that teaching.
And so in that way, the tool was a kind of bridge that got me to scholarship that would not have been possible without the tool. So in that case, you know, and I've talked about this with a lot of people, or some of the software projects that we have at the center, that I try to tell scholars who are in the tenure track, look, if you're going to build a digital tool or resource, I would really try, I think at least in this transitionary period, if you want it to count, to try to write some piece of scholarship based upon that tool or research that looks more like standard narrative that then shows how, hey, this isn't just an exercise in HTML and the technical infrastructure, but that it enables something new that we couldn't have done without it. And in that way, I think then you can have recognition for the peer review article based on the resource and the resource itself that's online, that it then becomes more accessible as a piece of scholarship to people who don't maybe understand the intellectual work that goes into a technical resource. Does that make sense, Nils? Yeah, and I think I completely agree with that. And what I would say is that a couple things. First of all, on the example of the syllabus finder, I think we're trying to make it then into a square peg that will fit into a square hole, the system that we're used to. To me, that's sort of like the historian or an equivalent to the historian who comes up with a new methodology for analyzing and presenting an argument about the past. So for instance, Pierre Nora wrote this – I can't even think of the name of the book or the article now – that sort of the first point of thinking about sites of memory and he uses this term, sites of memory. And then this whole sites of memory industry appears in the historical profession. There are books in every national context and articles and conferences and all this sort of stuff. Well, but everybody has to footnote Nora because he's the one who got it started. And so he gets more credit because it was his idea to start talking about sites of memory or who was the first person to start talking about the public sphere. So when the historian comes up with a new methodology that then creates a cottage industry following it, well, you get more credit for that because now you've done something really new and different. Well, that's where the tool fits in is it's like a new methodology. It allows us to think about the past in ways that we hadn't thought about it before or it allows us to understand it in ways that we hadn't understood it before. So the digital tool is sort of like coming up with that new methodological approach and I think the big difference is digital tools, it's easier to come up with digital tools that allow us to do lots of really interesting things because the possibilities are still so wide open. But I think – so that's where I think that fits. In terms of the linear, nonlinear question, I think you're absolutely right. And I think we're just in a period of transition on that because historians are, as I wrote in an earlier post, we're pretty fussy and conservative as a tribe when it comes to what we accept and what we don't accept as scholarship. And what we're used to is linear and nonlinear is hard to figure out. And that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be accepted as scholarship. It just means it takes more explaining to a tenure and promotion committee or just simply a hiring review committee in a non-tenure situation like Tom described. And so you have to be able to explain it a little better as to why this is also scholarship. And so for instance, my next project, I'm calling it a project rather than a book because I don't expect it to ever appear as a book. Instead, I expect it to appear as some kind of a digital project that has many of the same characteristics as a book but will be a web-based thing. I don't even know what it's going to look like yet, but which has primary sources and an argument and is the product of conversations among scholars. And it's all of those things, but it's also an opportunity for you as the user to wander around and maybe decide that your argument is actually better or more interesting than mine. But I'm going to have an argument there that is at least made front and center at the beginning of the project. I guess the only other thing I'd add here is that in some ways we're talking about fitting our digital work into models that already exist for historical or humanities professionals. And I think that's an important thing that we need to do. And we need to take that step and make that effort to make our work understandable to colleagues, our peers in various ways. I think the only thing I'd say is I think they also need to, in some respects, meet us halfway. I think it's very important for us to meet them halfway, but they need to meet us halfway too. And I think there are models for that. For instance, I think, Dan, you can do what you did with Syllabus Finder or HBOT or these other tools you built and write a kind of long-form narrative piece about historiography and the nature of history teaching and learning and that kind of thing that would be very recognizable to any historian. I also think there are other ways to models from the sciences and from especially the applied sciences for writing up the results of technical research for a tool. I can imagine a set of articles coming out of Zotero that really just report the results of the research that explain how you built something and then to suggest some future directions for research that would be not, let's say, 20-page articles but would be four or five-page articles that would look more like something that is in an engineering journal or an applied sciences journal. And in those disciplines, those shorter research reporting kinds of articles count. They count for traditional tenure and promotion. to not try to fashion some narrative journal article out of what really is technical work and rather just treat technical work as technical work with its own value. But that also needs to be peer-reviewed and needs to be reported and needs to be written up in a way that's standard and understandable and reviewable, etc. So I think there's a balance here, and I think that's the balance I think we need to find. We need to do some work, and our colleagues need to do some work to find out where this stuff fits. And I would add, you know, I said that we're a fussy and conservative tribe, but I would also say that all across the United States anyway, and also in the UK, and these are the only two contexts I'm really familiar with, there is an increasing willingness to start moving toward that halfway position in a lot of different departments. And so it's not as though historians are all this way, but still as a group, we as historians have a ways to go to sort of find an acceptance for other forms of scholarship. And I think my last post in the series was about the process of peer review. And that's where we differ from other disciplines the most, is that we insist on this prior peer review process as the coin of the realm. And we're one of the only disciplines, there are a few others, but we're one of the only disciplines that insists on that. When I was talking to Stan Katz, he said he was trying to have a conversation with the chairman of the computer science department at Princeton about peer review. And he said they couldn't actually find a way to talk to each other because their systems are so different that nothing that Stan said made any sense to this computer scientist and vice versa. And yet computer science at Princeton, I'm guessing, is probably a pretty highly developed discipline and department. And so, you know, with really high standards. And so it's just that their method for evaluating is different from ours. And so I don't know that ours is perfect in any way. And so I think we need to, and digital work, as I wrote in this last post, is really undermining that prior peer review process. And that's where I think we're going to have the biggest giving away our software picks, our links, and other things we found online. Tom, why don't we start with you? Sure. I've got something a little different this week. It's the Creative Commons Case Studies Wiki. For people who don't know, Creative Commons, I'm sure most people do, Creative Commons is a set of open licenses for web and other content that you can create. So if you want to license your blog under an open license that allows people to use and reuse the content on your blog, you can release it under a Creative Commons copyright license. And this is a big trend in the world of the web and also in the world of the scholarly web. And sometimes it's a little confusing what – there's a variety of licenses you can choose from, each with their own terms. Sometimes it can be a little confusing which licenses to choose.
And the Creative Commons case studies wiki, it's basically a database of case studies of people who have used Creative Commons on their projects. That can help you make this decision. So basically, this is a place where people who have used Creative Commons and released things under Creative Commons licenses have gone and just basically told their stories about how they made the decision, why they chose a given license, why it works or doesn't work for their particular project. And so you can go there and read through these case studies and find a project that looks a little like yours and see maybe, learn from the experience of somebody who's already been through this decision-making process. I think it's a really great resource for people who are interested in open access and interested in making their content available under open access terms. So the URL is wiki.creativecommons.org slash case studies. We'll put that in the show notes. And it's a great resource. Great. Thanks, Tom. Mills, what do you have for us this week? Well, I've got a new online journal. It's called the Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. And it comes from the web portal for the Association of Computing Machinery, which is not the place that I think most historians go looking for a journal. But it's just the first edition, the first issue came out in June, and it's an international journal, and there's some really, really interesting articles in here that are a little tech-heavier than maybe would be normal for a cultural heritage journal, but that's as it should be for this platform. So it's everything from sample 3D models for cultural heritage applications, the dream of a global knowledge network, preservation, emulation, migration, and virtualization of live electronics for the performing arts. It's kind of all across the waterfront for cultural heritage and the intersection with computing. So the articles are really well written. It's clearly very carefully edited. And so I highly recommend it. Great. Thanks very much. Well, in the spirit of Firefox and Firefox 3 releases, I wanted to point to an article on the Mozilla Zine. So Mozilla is the company that produces Firefox. And Mozilla Zine is actually, I think, a non-affiliated magazine, a sort of online set of articles about Firefox and Thunderbird and other Mozilla creations. And I wanted to point to, in particular, an article about something called About colon Config. And one of the neat things about Firefox is that you can really trick it out with extensions. You can skin it with different looks. And you can also modify how it works very specifically through a configuration file. And in Firefox 3, if you type into your location bar about colon config, you'll get a list of all those tweaks that you can make. And this article will help you make tweaks to Firefox 3 that I think make it even more useful. So some of the things that, for instance, this points out is that you can have a setting for automatically ending a certain top-level domain extension. So if you type in, let's say you do a lot of things in the .edu domain, and you want it to automatically add .edu every time you type in, let's say, gmu, it will add .edu rather than .com. You can change that in the configuration file. This is particularly handy for non-US-based users of Firefox because, for instance, if you're in France, you can have it automatically default to .fr rather than .com. There are other tweaks like turning on spell checking for different size text boxes. So one of the great things about Firefox is, and one of the advantages it has over Internet Explorer, is that it does a spell check when you start typing in large text boxes. But you can go into about colon config and change that. So for instance, it will correct your spelling even in the smallest of text boxes. So if you're typing in something in a one line search box, for instance, on a website, it will correct your spelling there as well. So there are all these little tweaks and you can really get into it at Mozilla Zine, and I'll add a link to that from our show notes at digitalcampus.tv. Well, thanks once again, Tom Mills. It was a great discussion about tenure and promotion and digital scholarship. And I hope you both have a good Fourth of July, and our audience does as well. And we'll hopefully hear from you online. Again, if you go to digitalcampus.tv, you'll see lots of ways to send us feedback. You can post a response to this episode. You can email us and you can also give us a call at our new number where you'll leave a voicemail for us. Thanks once again and we'll see you in two weeks on another episode of Digital Campus. Fear itself. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fair and simple.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it's built. This is Digital Campus number 44 for the 29th of September 2009. Unsettled. I'm Dan Cohen. And welcome back to a new edition of the Digital Campus Podcast. I'm Dan Cohen, and here with our regulars, Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hey, Dan. And Tom Sheinfeld. Hey, Tom. Hey, guys. Hey, we're piping in Tom NPR style from an undisclosed location. And so we're glad we could get you on, Tom, even via cell phone. And we're really glad to have a guest Thank you. Podcasts in New Ways, and one of the ways in which we're doing it is simply because Tom Mills and I are just sick of each other's voices, right? Pretty much, yeah. And we agree with each other too much. We need to diversify the podcast, and so we're delighted to add two new podcasters to the Digital Campus team this week, and we'll be adding more in weeks to come and rotating the team. And so the first one that we'd like to introduce is Amanda French, who is in New York City right now. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Dan. Good to talk to you. Good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for being willing to do this. Oh my gosh, willing doesn't even cover it. Try it eager. You're too kind. It's great to have you on. We have a lot to say about Amanda. She's a friend of the show and is a, how should we introduce you, as a research scholar at NYU. My title is always a little dicey, but assistant research scholar. We'll drop the assistant. Okay. Can we call you a senior research scholar at NYU, where she's helping to model a digital curriculum for the MA program in archives and public history. She's actually teaching a class right now on digital history, and we can talk about that. You can check out her program at APHDigital.org, and a project that's sort of coming along to come up with certainly a better digital history curriculum than I probably have at the current moment, which is at digitalhistorycurriculum.org. And Amanda can be found at amandafrench.net and, of course, on the Twitter at Amanda French. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda. Thank you so much. We're also joined from the University of Mary Washington, just south of here, by Jeff McClurkin. Hi, Jeff. Hi, Dan. Hey, welcome to the podcast. Jeff is a associate professor and chair of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington. And your independent research is really in 19th century America, is that right? That's correct. Okay, as well as digital humanities and some of the things that we tend to talk about on the podcast. And he can be found at Techist, is your kind of digital humanities blog, is that right? That's correct. The easiest way to find me is mcclurkin.org. Okay, great. All my links are from there. And Jay McClurkin on Twitter. That's correct. firestorm of criticism that we discussed on the last podcast, the authors who are on the plaintiff's side of the podcast asked the court, and Google did not object, for an extension, a several-month extension, to, I guess, modify the settlement. Where are we? Has anyone been following this in enough detail to understand? You know, I've seen some posts saying that the settlement is dead, but isn't it more like's part of the question is whether or not they're going to, quote unquote, tweak it or sort of really throw it away. But it's a hard case to follow. I always have the sense that there are a number of very specific legal points that they're really talking about that don't necessarily have, or are not necessarily directly relevant to what I'm concerned about and what a lot of people are concerned about, which is I don't want Google to have an exclusive monopoly over the orphan works. That seems to be one of the big issues, isn't it? That came up is everyone kind of understands the state of the public domain books. And more or less, we understand books where the authors are still around or the publishers who have copyright really know what they're doing and have either opted in or opted out. But there is this key segment of 1.5 or 2 million books, I still haven't gotten a definitive number, that are sort of in limbo and that this settlement would effectively give through this book rights registry to Google for whatever purposes it sees fit, at least as the critics put it. That's right. I think that the crux of all of this and the reason sort of behind the settlement and the money that's being paid as part of the settlement, $125 million, goes to this book rights registry, which deals with this problem of the orphan work. It is complicated, though. There are a lot of other concerns that have been raised, including privacy concerns by the EFF and others. The Department of Justice weighed in this week, saying essentially that this probably should go forward, that the parties have some rough agreement on how they should proceed, but there are enough concerns that the settlement should be revised. And I think Judge Shin took that into account this week and sent the parties back for further negotiations. I'm not at all surprised that that's how it turned out. I think probably the Obama administration and the judge, and I sort of agree with this, that there is a settlement here that can work, that doesn't give Google a monopoly, that doesn't violate privacy rights, that doesn't make sweeping changes to copyright law by judicial fiat, that there is a settlement here that can work, but that maybe the way this one is currently written is not quite there yet. And so I think it's probably just going to go back for a couple months and come back. And my guess would be we're going to see something that we're all going to be a little happier with when that happens. I mean, isn't the likely outcome, right, that they'll have to grant other parties some kind of license to these orphan works or somehow make sure that that piece isn't a monopoly? I mean, the privacy concerns is odd because, you know, well, you're on the web. I mean, you're doing Google searches. Those are also, I mean, if you search for things, those are being stored and those tell you a lot about a person just as much as checking out a book, maybe more so. Yeah, I sort of, this is sort of opportunistic. They're just getting in these concerns about privacy because Google is before a judge. I think people have concerns about privacy and Google just generally, and they happen to be before a judge right now, and so they're kind of flipping those in into this to kind of push Google in a certain direction more broadly. But yeah, as part of this particular issue, it doesn't seem like the crux of the matter. Have they addressed at all the pricing issue? Because that seemed like another sticking point that we discussed last week on the podcast. I think, Mills, you made the great point that however benevolent the current leaders of Google are, one can imagine in 20 years that a more profit-driven company would put the screws on local libraries with this terminal that has still not been really priced out or pricing to libraries like ours here at Mason, how we would get access to the broad collection, since those prices aren't spelled out in the settlement. I don't see anything in the settlement or any of the news stories about it that even brings that up. And this is, I mean, this is in a way similar to Amanda's concern about the orphan works because, you know, I remain worried that it's going to end up being sort of like JSTOR, that the institutions and organizations that can afford the access will have that access and the institutions and organizations that can't won't. And so will public libraries, especially in rural areas where they have no money, will they be able to have this kind of access? And so then do we start creating some sort of privileged information and unprivileged information? It's just potentially a real problem that I think, given the global nature of this, it really needs to be addressed. And if I could add to that, I think for academic libraries in particular, they've been so burned by what happened, what has been happening for the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years with journal subscription prices going way, way, way up.
So I think libraries have learned from that and are saying we desperately don't want to get into that situation with Google, where Google is in a position to dictate the price to us. So I don't know whether, however, that I'm sure that is a concern that they're discussing among themselves. I don't know whether the judge in this particular delay of the agreement cited that as an issue. Well, I mean, what I thought was interesting about this was that the Justice Department weighed in in such a way to say that the settlement itself would have actually changed copyright law, you know, or would have set a precedent for copyright law. And I think that's, you know, it seems to me that they're thinking that this is an important, I mean, it's such a huge case and such a huge number of books involved that this is a real, potentially a real precedent setter for some of the questions that Amanda was just raising about, you know, journal subscriptions and about, you know, all this information that's increasingly behind these subscription walls that makes it harder for lots of, I mean, my university has problems affording to buy all of these journals. And we have to subscribe to Google Books as well. I mean, I think that raises some real questions. In fact, actually, I'll be a little pro-Google for just a moment. On the one hand, you know, they did do the work. They did do the scanning. And they did it when no one, few people in the academic and nonprofit sector was willing to. So I actually do think that most of the people I talk to about Google Book Search do agree that Google has a little bit of a right to profit somewhat from this. And everybody also wants this digital library to exist. I actually gave a paper a little while ago about the enormous benefit that Google Book Search had for my research. I did my dissertation research in 2004 before Google Book Search, revisited it after Google Book Search, and it was phenomenal, like the kinds of things that I could find using this resource that I couldn't have otherwise. But I think that the fact that this has been delayed is a really good thing, and I think, as you say, Dan, we're going to be happier with this unsettled settlement when they renegotiate it. Right. I mean, Amanda, you bring up the great point that, you know, academics are really good at looking a gift horse in the mouth. It's one of the things we specialize in. And, you know, I respect Google for doing this. I mean, Microsoft, after all, had a scanning project and they stopped. And, you know, I know lots of people at Yale, literally, they just one day pulled up and left. And, you know, they were nice enough to leave their scanning equipment there and their files there. But they didn't have the commitment that, you know, Google had to do this and to spend the $300 million. So I think at least we need to keep on the table that, and I'm dreading this because I'm on a panel called Is Google Good for History at the American Historical Association meeting? I think I've been put on it as the patsy. I'm really concerned about going up there. But I'm sort of going to be the guy who sits between the angry person who's opposed to Google and the guy from Google. So that will be fun. But, you know point is I can see some tremendous benefits to this. It seems to me like there will be a settlement. We've come too far. There's been too many books scanned. And I guess the question is, it really boils down to how much we trust Google, right? I mean, isn't there a kind of larger issue here? We've talked about a lot on the podcast, for instance, with email outsourcing. We had this case this past week where some Brown University students were able to read each other's Gmail email because of a mess up with the Brown Google Apps for your domain site. And, you know, and there's just sort of lots of little cases as we go along where people both love Google because it provides free, incredible things and hate them because of potential monopoly power. And it just kind of boils down to that, doesn't it? No, I disagree. I don't think it does boil down to whether we trust Google because the truth is that I do trust Google and I trust Gmail. I mean,'s outages and mix-ups I think are no, no worse than you would get from something that's internal. They just get a lot more news play and potentially affect a lot more people. But with the settlement, even though I trust Google, I don't want it to be inscribed in the law or in case law precedent that Google has all this power. I do really trust them, but I want to make sure that that's not the only recourse I have. Right. I think the issue here is we can trust Google, but I also want a choice not to use Google if that choice presents itself. And I think as the settlement was currently written, effectively these orphan works would be under, the scans of these orphan works would be under Google's control. And if a smaller project even wanted to come along and do a scanning project of some subset of the orphan works in the world, of a particular author or of a particular publisher or whatever, it would make it very difficult for them to negotiate the right to those books. That's, I think, the problem. Yeah, that's a real key part of this is the book rights registry itself, isn't it? That's hard to replicate. Anyone can scan the books. It's getting that piece of it. Well, and we desperately need that. We need to have that registry. That part I always have found a little weird. I mean, Google has the technical chops to build it, so everybody's happy about that. But it seems like a kind of registry that should be something similar, something owned and run by the copyright office. Right, exactly. And I just think we just need to maintain choice in this arena and opportunity. And as long as that's there, I'm happy to use Google as long as Google's the best thing out there. And currently it is. Right. And as long as we're setting precedents that we do think about, you know, life beyond Google, right? You know, if others do want to come along, the potential for creating some better set of these works is there. It should be able to happen. Locking us in is what concerns me most. Yeah, but hasn't, the underlying assumption in all the coverage of this is that no one else is ever going to do this. Am I wrong about that? That Google is the only one who will ever actually make a project to scan tens of millions of books or 20 million books, whatever the final number is. Well, I think that's an assumption, but I think also it's worth remembering what happens to companies in the United States when they develop too much of a stranglehold on a particular market. Standard Oil got broken up. AT&T got broken up. If Google controls all text, then they'll get broken up. I just expect that that will happen eventually if they exert too much of a stranglehold on the information market. And I'm also just not willing, and I said this last time we got together, I'm just not willing to concede that Google is the only entity on the planet that can do this. It's a $300 million project. That's a big project, but companies and governments and even non-governmental organizations undertake $300 million projects all the time. So it's for something this important. It's not all that expensive, and I'm just not willing to concede that Google's the only game in town. Really, since those books are still on the shelves of those libraries, to their credit, Google didn't destroy them in the process of scanning them. Just so long as that very large subset of those books on the shelves, those orphan works, are available to another party if that party decides they want to scan them. So that's, I think, the key. And I think it's sort of unclear in the settlement what if Microsoft or if some other company or the European Union or whoever came along and said, okay, we want to scan all these orphan workers too, whether they would ever be able to come to a similar settlement as the one Google has come to. That, I think, is the crux of this. And I think as long as there's opportunity for someone else to come along and do that, then we're fine. I'd be satisfied. What did others make about the acquisition of reCAPTCHA this past week? It was kind of a sidebar to the main story about the Google Book settlement being postponed. But in some ways, it is a big part of the story, right?
And so you'll see on a lot of sites kind of wavy, squished-up words that come out of books that are being scanned as part of the Google Books project and other projects. Internet Archive actually was part of the reCAPTCHA system as well. And by solving those words, transcribing them by hand, you are effectively digitizing these books. So Google went ahead. I mean, this is a project that many consider to be kind of nonprofit or research project at Carnegie Mellon. And they've acquired it, surely in part, to make their Google Book Search better. I mean, I guess they had already been using this to some extent, as I understood it. I mean, it wasn't completely in-house, but they were already using that technology for some of the Google Books and some of their archival newspaper stuff. So, I mean, in some ways, it's not a big change for them. The question is why they chose to bring it in-house as opposed to, you know, is that about keeping it from others? If you wanted to take a particularly Google is evil perspective on this, that's, you know, this is about making sure that other people won't be able to do other book projects. I mean, I have no information along those lines, but it certainly could be interpreted that way. I mean, why, if they were already using it, did they need to bring it in-house? Well, the other issue I have with this a little bit is this is all very clever. You're killing two birds with one stone. It's a little security thing. And then you're also improving OCR and I suppose improving the text. But what many people want, particularly librarians with regard to Google Books, is a way to correct the, you know, the OCR text of those things and also the metadata about them. They want to be able to send that information directly to Google. And so far, Google Books does not allow that. So this is a very indirect and, you know, maybe overly clever way of improving those texts. Why can't we just improve them directly? You know, at Digital Humanities 2009, the meeting at the University of Maryland, John Orwant of the Google Books Project, that question was posed to him about why they wouldn't take more human input. And I think the difference between reCAPTCHA and a direct, you know, feedback mechanism is, I mean, I'm paraphrasing John here, and hope not doing him disservice, but they sort of distrust crowdsourcing. And I think what's interesting about Recaptcha is it has this engineering view of crowdsourcing where multiple people have to solve the same word before it's considered solved. It doesn't have that direct input as you would have in, let's say, a wiki where anyone could kind of come in. Although, of course, this past week, Google launched this side wiki project where anyone could come in and annotate a website and store that information on Google. So, I don't know, there's a little bit of maybe schizophrenia here. And you can imagine this being applied not just to the text, to the body text of Google Books. You can imagine it being applied to the metadata as well. If they wanted to use it on certain segments of title pages for instance, you could have people transcribing publication dates and publication locations and ISBN numbers and other things. So you could imagine it being something, you know, they'd have to make it a little bit more sophisticated, but something that could be used for metadata as well. I mean, I, you know, have this kind of gut distrust of, you know, this thing. I use ReCAPTCHA on my blog. You know, I thought it was this kind of open source-y kind of independent scholarly side project and, you know, then it gets sold to Google for an undisclosed amount and it just kind of rubs me the wrong way but I don't really have any reason that it should rub me the wrong way. I guess the reason it probably rubs me the wrong way is it just seems like and here we are, you know, halfway through our podcast still talking about Google. And now they're taking over academic software projects. And, you know, if somebody came along and offered us, you know, $50 million for Omeka or Zotero, would we sell out? I mean, we kind of can't, but it's a little disheartening, I guess. So that's where my feeling on it. Okay, we'll try to move beyond Google here, Tom. I hear you. I was going to bring up that on the positive side of Google's chutzpah, they have decided they're going to take over Internet Explorer by inserting Chrome in it, but maybe we'll discuss that next time. Between overlords, I think I would choose Google over Internet Explorer. Agreed. Well, that's the problem. The benevolent dictator is still a dictator. Yeah. Yep. Gosh. All right. We'll bring up Aristotle. He'll be on the next podcast. We'll be reading Aristotle's Politics, book one, next time on Digital Campus. Well, speaking of benevolent dictators, Windows 7, are we excited? Are we having parties? Fired up. Fired up, ready to go? Have they bought a Rolling Stones song yet for it? Is there anything that we can say about Windows 7 for the academic market? I mean, actually, to their credit, $30 upgrade for students in the United States. That's a good thing to publicize if people don't know that, that there are discounted versions of Windows 7, not versions, but installations of Windows 7 for students. Well, I hope it works better than the upgrades to Word, for instance, in the new versions of Microsoft Office. Yeah, I mean, I think the big question will be, I mean, if you sort of delve down a little deeper, they basically are telling people, if you have Vista, this upgrade will work. But if you don't, if you have some earlier version, that you should probably think about getting a new computer. That's pretty much what they say. So it does sound like it's a limited upgrade. It's an upgrade that mostly, that they really intend for Vista-enabled machines. But I do know that there are a number of campuses that are still using XP. They haven't switched over to Vista yet. And so Microsoft is clearly attempting to, you know, by getting students to switch over, I think trying to convince, you know, institutional IT groups to make that switch as well. You know, I think that's... Yes, and then in three or four years when those students graduate, they're going to expect the new version of Windows on their work computer as well. So students are a good place to start to kind of see the market. I totally agree, Joe. Are there any features of Windows 7 that I'm unaware of that I should be excited about that have any kind of impact? Or is this just... Well, I might... You know, I run desktop Linux, but I have been running the Windows 7 release candidate in VirtualBox for a few months now. Occasionally, if I want to, like, use Microsoft Word to make sure the formatting on a document is right or something. I keep a Windows instance available. And I will say, and I will go out on a limb here, I will say that Windows 7 is great. It's not just good. It's great. And it's still Windows. So that is what it is. But it delivers, I would say, as polished an experience as Mac OS X does. It's really great looking. I've experienced almost no crashes, which for Windows is saying something. I think the old software from XP and Visto seems to work just fine. It works very well with my hardware. I think this is a real winner for Microsoft. The question will be whether they can get their reputation back, if they can rebuild their image with this or not. But in terms of just the technology, I think we're looking at definitely the best Windows, certainly since XP, and I would say probably since Windows 98. So I think, I mean, there's no features. It's not going to do your homework for you or anything. I think I just would adopt it really quickly. But it is as slick and nice an operating system as you're going to find, and I would include, you know, the new Snow Leopard in that category. So, I think... So, it keeps Windows alive as something that's important, that would be important to campuses or library terminals or things like that for another, Jen, or whatever, for another few years. Oh, Windows is very much alive, I think.
This seems to say to me, well, you know, a nice, slick, good operating system for Microsoft still matters. Yeah, I think you can't count them out. I just, I think it's too easy. And frankly, historically speaking, this is their pattern, right? I mean, you have 98, and then you had me, and then you had XP, and then you have Vista. And I mean, you sort of, you know, you have a good operating system that everybody uses, and then they try something else, and it doesn't really work. And then they go to a good operating system that everybody uses. So we're back to this is their time. Windows 7 is the good one. Can I just ask Tom a question? How's the search, the hard drive search? Have you tried that? The search, I would say, is much improved. I would say from what I tend not to use the operating search all that much, but I would say from my experience it's as good as the Spotlight search on the Mac. And it's actually more conveniently located than the Spotlight search on the Mac. It's built into the Start menu which is where everything is on Windows. And it's sort of right there when you click on that start button. Really your cursor is placed in the search box. And so the search I think works really pretty well. Things seem quickly indexed. And in terms of the browsing experience, they do some really nice things with stacking icons. So for browsing photo galleries or something where visual materials, they're stacked in interesting ways and you can resort them according to color, or according to date, or according to the device that they were taken on. So there's different ways to kind of browse these stacks of images. So, you know, that kind of information management interface is really good. I have very good things to say at Windows 7. Well, Tom, I'm looking forward to your Windows 7 release party in three weeks. Oh, yeah. You're all invited. Thank you very much. That sounds so fun. I'm not expecting very many. I have three chairs in my office, so I think that'll do it. I'm sure you have several other Windows 7 launch parties to go to that same night, so I won't be able to come. You're too popular for the rest of us, Amanda. Well, yeah, I guess so. We'll watch you at our Windows 7 party. Well, this will be a bad segue, but from the Windows 7 parties, it seems like the parties are over in university libraries, according to a meeting in New York at Baruch College about the libraries of the future, which, according to an article at Inside Higher Ed and some of the Twitter traffic that we saw about the conference. This conference on the sustainability of libraries in a digital age really focused on sparse staffing in the future, highly decentralized libraries where all their information is sort of outsourced to the cloud, and a smaller physical plant just focusing on special collections. Amanda, you kind of followed this conference. Was it as depressing as it sounds in this article, or were there good things to come out of it? I know a lot of librarians were worried about, you know, what this implied about their future. Well, it's interesting. This idea that the library will cease to be primarily a noble building filled with books has certainly been kicking around for quite a while. And there is no reason it needs to be a scenario of doom, actually. If you define library as your sort of information acquisition and dissemination nexus for the library, or in the case of public know, your county or whatnot, your area. If you define a library that way, then I think everybody agrees that libraries are not going away. But it is funny how this particular meeting where Daniel Greenstein said this, he said, you know, we're going to see the physical building of the library house only special collections and study areas where, you know, the actual information dissemination part of the library will, as you say, reside in the cloud. Perhaps not surprising, but it is a little surprising how freaked out people get by that because there's a utopian vision of that same thing, right? If you start from scratch, if you were to design a 21st century library from scratch, many people say, well, this is kind of what it would look like. So I found this meeting really interesting in that in one way, it's a horrible vision. But in another way, it's a very utopian vision. You know, There are real benefits to having all that information in the cloud. In many cases, there's no real reason to have a big noble building filled with books and journals and so on. But I think that actually the physical space of the library is probably not going away anytime soon, if only because I've read elsewhere that that need for study space is actually going up and up and up. As students learn to collaborate more online, they learn to collaborate more in person as well. And so particularly at universities, they find the library invaluable as a place to study with their Wi-Fi enabled laptop open on the table in front of them rather than, you know, with the books from the stacks spread out in front of them. Well, and, you know, along those lines, I spend a fair amount of time in my local public library, and it's full of people using the computers. And I think probably most of those people did not drive up in their BMWs and Mercedes. There, you know, there are an awful lot of people in our communities who really need this kind of information access. And the library is the one place that they can get it, whether it is the only place that they can actually use email or the place where they can go online and look for further information, whether it's about a book or a property tax issue that they're having or something like that. So the library also is this kind of community information space I think is not going to go away anytime soon. I was struck, though, when I read this article on Inside Higher Ed about the meeting that if it turns out the way that Greenstein says, it's time to sell your stock in university presses because the only thing that's keeping university presses open is the library orders. Because if it weren't for those library orders, you know, the number of books that they would sell would drop into the dozens instead of the thousands or hundreds. And so, you know, that would be the final death blow to the university presses. But if they're not dead already, this would for sure kill them off. But, you know, a, I taught at Grinnell College, and the library there is quite a nice library. I mean, Grinnell has tons of money that they can spend on pretty much whatever they want. And the students joked about this addition that was on the library. They called it the Steve Jobs Wing. And the reason it was called the Steve Jobs Wing, according to the local common knowledge, whether it's true or not, I'm not sure. But Jobs had been on the board of Grinnell when they were getting ready to build the new library. And he convinced the board that they shouldn't spend so much money on the structure because books were pretty much over. And so they wouldn't need all of that space for stacks. And so they built a library without enough stack space. And then they believed him because, of course, who doesn't believe Steve Jobs? And so he can be very persuasive, I'm told. So they built this building without sufficient stack space. And then six or seven years later, had to build an addition just to accommodate the books. I think in the case of journal articles and things like that, I think it would be much more plausible. If a library consisted of nothing but journals and journal articles, then I think that this everywhere library would come a lot sooner and with a lot less anxiety. However, e-book as an object is still an extremely rare beast. You don't see it around that much. There's only so many people who have Kindles or e-book readers. We really have not settled how or even if the book is ever going to transition to the digital realm. So as long as there are books, I think there will continue to be good physical spaces for libraries. Yeah, I would also add to that that I think that I would echo Amanda's point about student space, because I do think that that's, if you look at the new libraries that are being designed these days, there is a lot of attention paid to that. Hopkins is, Johns Hopkins has been doing, putting together a new library, and it has, sort of, the books are not front and center. The study spaces are front and center. The collaborative spaces are front and center. But one thing I think is we do see more of that attention to collaborative spaces.
I mean, if the library is sort of a knowledge center for the institution or for a community, librarians continue to have a role in helping people navigate through, even if everything's online, even if everything's searchable through Google or something else, there's still a need for human assistance in directing us towards particular things. Well, there's a really great need for that. And what's often a shame is that neither students nor university administrations really recognize that. I mean, people feel like they can Google everything and find it, and they're not even aware that that's not true. And, you know, even still, too often, you know, the library training that a student gets consists of an hour in your composition class, and hey, you've been trained to use the library now, and it's a lot more complicated than it used to be. So, of course, librarians have this whole information literacy movement, and I'm glad that that has taken place. Yeah, and I think it's going to be important for librarians. I think they're starting to do this and I think people have written about this and studied this question. How to connect to the students and the public in the ways that they are expecting them. How to get to students in ways that feel natural to the students. I think sitting behind a reference desk probably isn't it. Figuring out ways to reach students on Facebook or whatever, however students want to communicate now, we're going to have to figure out a way to communicate with them that way. I was excited to see that the Mason libraries now have a little Mebo widget, an instant message widget where you can ask a librarian on the library, sort of the home page. And so doing those kinds of things, experimenting with those kinds of technologies is going to be an important piece here because I still don't think that the building is even going to be the place where people go to ask a librarian a question. Well, but I also think, you know, I mean, I think that faculty have some responsibility in this as well in ensuring that students don't just search in Google and not just for our own sake, but I mean, I think, you know, you can make real efforts to bring librarians into your classroom and we do, you know, I do a session in our department's methods class where I bring the research librarian in, and so everybody sits there with their laptops, and they're searching on their individual topics, and the research librarian is there giving them advice about how to search different databases. I think there are certainly ways that faculty have some responsibility in ensuring that libraries and librarians don't get left out of this. Well, it's exciting to go to picks for the week on the podcast. There's now even more picks with five of us. And actually, it might mean that a few of them are actually good, statistically speaking, because mine usually aren't. Amanda, maybe we'll start with you, you know, in a hazing kind of way. Start with the new people. And do you have a site or a tool or something you want to point out to the audience that you think they might find useful? I emphatically do. I was fortunate enough to be asked to read a forthcoming work by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is a scholar who's been doing work on scholarly publishing from a sort of a media studies point of view. She gave a great paper at Digital Humanities 2009, for instance. And so in conjunction with New York University Press and the Institute for the Future of the book, she has just announced or is just about to announce, in fact, we're recording this on Friday, she's going to announce this on Monday, so by the time you listen to this podcast, it will have been officially announced. Her book, Planned Obsolescence, Publishing Technology and the Future of the Academy. Now, this is published on futureofthebook.org as part of Media Commons Press using Comment Press. So it is a site, really, but it is also a book. And it's just a marvelous book. I can't recommend it enough. I'm so enthusiastic about this book. I thought it was just really wonderful. So I can give you the URL for this, or of course, you can put it in the... Right. We'll go ahead and put it in the show notes. But that sounds terrific. I've been looking for that book to come out. Yeah. Oh, it's wonderful. It's mediacommons.futureofthebook.org slash mookpress slash plannedobsolescent. I won't rave any more about this book. I do recommend that you go and comment on it because, of course, as we know, comment press allows you to comment on each individual paragraph. I will just say that I'll give away the ending. The book recommends that universities take responsibility for scholarly publishing as a matter of infrastructure, that we basically not try to have university presses be these unsustainable cost recovery organizations that they are, that they really, the university itself, take responsibility for publishing the output of its own faculty, which would mean re-envisioning what a university press is in a major way. Great. Thank you for that plug and certainly look forward to reading that. Jeff McClurkin, what do you have for us this week on the podcast? Sure. The site I'm recommending this week is TED.com and that's, for those of you who don't know, the TED conference comes from Technology Entertainment Design. And this is a conference that's been going on for 25 years now. But in the last couple of years, they've begun to publish their TED Talks, as they're called, which are somewhere between 10- and 20-minute talks by leaders in a variety of fields, top thinkers. Al Gore did the slideshow presentation there that became an inconvenient truth. And so I would recommend it's wonderful to see sort of the experts in a field try to take their life's work and condense it to 18 minutes. And, you know, two to sort of get you started are Ken Robinson's talk on how our schools are killing creativity and pretty much anything Hans Rosling does. He's a professor who works with stats, especially statistics involving the comparisons between the third world and the first world and very interesting stuff, fascinating stuff, and I highly recommend you check out TED. You will lose hours and hours of time, but you'll feel like you're doing work. Right, great. Yeah, it's fun to kind of leaf through those, and we'll definitely link to those ones that you found most interesting for our audience. Thanks, Jeff. Sure. Mills, what do you have for us this time? Well, in the sort of reversal of our bashing on Google today, I have a somewhat humorous Google page. Humorous in one way. If you Google study tips for students and Google, you get this particular page which provides sort of links to various Google services for students. And it's lots of librarians and others point their students to these sort of information educators, point their students in the direction of this page because it shows them how to get to Google Books and how to use Google Scholar and things like that. But the part that I find rather humorous is that there's a nice little box in the upper right-hand corner that says a great quote for your cover page or conclusion and then you click generate a quote and from somewhere in the Google database comes up a pithy quotation for the cover of your paper and just as I looked at this today the random quotation that came up on my screen was historical books that contain no lies are extremely tedious and this this is from Anatole France. And so, and you know, you refresh the page and you get another one. And so mine right now is I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain. Yeah. Mine is H.G. Wells. His studies were pursued, but never effectually undertaken. So, so I we'll start seeing, if this gets wide dissemination among students, then we'll start seeing some really great quotations on the front pages of the papers our students give us. Okay, thanks, Mills. Tom, do you have a pick for us this week? What I'm going to recommend here is the Online Database of Social Media Policy. This is a database put together by a guy who is writing a book on social media governance. And essentially, it's a list of links to organizations, private companies, universities, non-governmental organizations, government organizations that are blogging or tweeting or on Facebook or MySpace and it provides a link to those organizations to their social media policies, the guidance that they give their employees and their members for how they should use social media.
This is a good place to look for some models. There's about 99 today. The database contains 99. There's about 100 different policies here and you can just surf through those to get an idea of what other organizations are doing in terms of managing this online communication that I think scares a lot of people and in some ways should scare a lot of people. A lot of bad things as well as a lot of good things can happen in these social media spaces. And so I think it's important for organizations to start thinking about at least if not a formal policy, an informal policy for how they and their colleagues and staff are going to use social media. And this is a good place to start. Great. Thanks very much. I'm going to recommend a site that I just came across recently called Invincible Cities, and it's a site that's hosted at Rutgers that was produced by a really talented photographer named Camillo Jose Vergara and curated by Howard Gillette who does the introductions to these. It's got a long URL at the Rutgers Camden campus that I'll post you from digitalcampus.tv. But effectively what it is is Vergara went around Richmond, California, Harlem, New York, and Camden, New Jersey, and took extensive photographs over several decades of the kind of places that just aren't normally photographed in cities. So rather than in New York photographing the Empire State Building, he went and just photographed storefronts in Harlem or parks, small parks that generally aren't visited versus Central Park. And he put this all together. It's put together in a very slickly designed website from Tender Creative, a pretty talented web design firm. And it allows you to go through and really look at sort of block by block, for instance, in the Harlem section, the transformations of certain sites over time. So there's a bunch of photographs where he set up tripods in exactly the same point every five years for 25 years. And you can kind of see the kind of rise and fall of urban blight and various things going on in Harlem. It's really fascinating, beautiful photographs, and some interesting kind of social history that Gillette has also put together with it. It is available online for free at invinciblecities.camden.rudkers.edu. But again, since it's long and I know you might not have a pen handy if you're on the treadmill right now, we will link to it from digitalcampus.tv. Well, Jeff and Amanda, I hope we haven't raked you over the coals too badly today. No, it's fine. Not at all. It's great to have you on. And we'll have you back on again as our semi-regulars. We'll have to come up with a name for you. You're part of the team now, the Digital Campus team. I like guest hosts. Guest hosts, okay. I was going to say irregulars. Irregulars. Right. Well, thank you to our irregulars, and thank you very much to our regulars as well, Mills and Tom. Good talking to you. And we'll talk to you all again soon, and thanks for listening in on this edition of Digital Campus. Please visit us online at digitalcampus. ask what you can do for your country.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. This is Digital Campus number 13 for the 21st of September, 2007. Everything in moderation. I'm Dan Cohen. Well, we've done it, Tom and Mills. We are on episode 13 and a half year of podcasting. We can all celebrate at this point. Welcome to the 13th episode, lucky 13, of Digital Campus. We are here with much greater sound fidelity over our high-speed Internet 2 networks here at George Mason University, the Center for History and New Media. I'm Dan Cohen, and I'm here with Tom Scheinfeld of foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly of edwire.org. Hey, Mills. Hi, Dan. How are you? Very good. And, of course, I can be found at dancohen.org. And welcome to the podcast. New listeners of the new semester and our faithful listeners who have been with us from the beginning, we'd like to welcome you back. And we're going to kick right off with our regular opening segment, which is the News Roundup. And there were a lot of stories this week around online and free Office applications that compete with Microsoft's near monopoly of their OpenOffice, or excuse me, their Office suite. These are applications that, of course, we use all the time, things like Word and PowerPoint, which I always have to shudder when I say, and email applications as well. In fact, on email, it looks like the founders of the Firefox web browser have spun off Thunderbird, which was sort of really playing a second fiddle as their email application to Firefox. And so Mozilla has now spun that off as a company. I can't remember if it's, I guess it's sort of for-profit, but they're not aggressively for-profit. Is that right? I think it's going to be for, I think it's probably, at least from what I understand, it's along the same model as the Firefox Corporation, which is a for-profit company that's wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. So it's actually called the Mozilla Corporation. But I wonder if they're going to change the name to Firefox Corporation and then have Thunderbird Corporation so that they're sort of separate entities so that the profits all get rolled back into the Mozilla Foundation. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, they're really known as a kind of one-trick pony at this point with Firefox, and I'm sure a lot of the energy goes into Firefox. So this seems like a good move for them to create a separate entity that can really solely focus on Thunderbird, which is a competitor to Apple Mail and the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook. We noticed that also Google launched their presentation part of their online office suite. And at the same time, IBM released an open source suite called Symphony, a beautiful sounding name for some existing software. Of course, the OpenOffice.org suite of open source tools, very popular, often comes in different flavors sold and distributed by different companies and entities. And Yahoo bought Zimbra, which is a big sort of email and collaborative calendaring system. So they're going to fold that in, I think, to their Yahoo mail system as well. So it seems like a lot of competition for Microsoft this week. In addition, they were sort of received an interesting and painful smackdown by the European courts. And I think this was also an interesting story that kind of brackets all these other stories about, you know, the role for government regulators in Europe, the much more aggressive role that they're taking in terms of, you know, beating down near monopolies in the tech industry. And I think what was interesting is that probably here on digital campus, we'd like to see bad news about Microsoft. And certainly all of the things I just mentioned are bad news in a way for Microsoft, which makes a considerable amount of profit from its office suite. But this ruling in Europe really means that they're going to get very aggressive for not only for Microsoft, but other tech companies that achieve very high sort of near monopoly rates of adoption. You can think already about Microsoft was criticized and ultimately sued in Europe for adding in a media player when real networks had a competing product and was out in front. And then, of course, Microsoft in the same way that they crushed Netscape by including Internet Explorer in every copy of Windows, simply just added Windows Media Player. And that pretty much did in real, although, of course, real is still around. But Europe didn't like it that much. And so you wonder about, you know, Google adding, for instance, new features to the search engine that really take on independent companies. You know, even their productivity suite, their office apps compete with independent companies like Zoho, which has a terrific set of, you know, very similar sorts of online applications. And Apple, of course, with their iPod, you need to wonder what happens there when they've got 85% or 90% of the market, what will happen to them in Europe as they sort of continue to expand iTunes into more areas. So, Tom and Mills, what was your take on all these stories and what is the future for the Microsoft Office suite? It's still really the standard, isn't it? I mean, we ask for, for instance, applications, you know, in Word format or, you know, it's the most common format that's tossed around between collaborators. I think this is the thing that Microsoft has been afraid of for probably five or six years, and it's finally really starting to come to pass largely because big companies like Google are really taking it seriously as a possibility. I mean, for a long time, I can't remember now how long it's been since the first time I saw the prediction that the Internet eventually would go to this sort of model of applications running off of servers of various companies rather than having to buy the software and run it on your computer yourself. It's been so many waves of that, haven't there? Every five years, you think it's there, that thin client model. Well, that was the whole kind of, that was supposed to be the revolution with Java in the kind of early and mid-90s was that we'd all be running thin clients and running these Java apps on our thin clients. But that never happened. So I think the big difference now is that you've got a company with the strength of Google behind it and the technical capability of Google. So Google can actually – they have the resources both fiscal and also technological to make it happen. And so I think that's really what's going to make the difference. The question is will people buy into it or do they feel more comfortable owning a copy of the software themselves? I think the other question is really can they get the software? How long will it take them to get the software up to speed? And are they rolling it out too soon? I know that from what I've seen of the new PowerPoint, the new presentation software that Google's rolled out, it's really not a substitute in any way for PowerPoint. I don't use PowerPoint very much myself. I actually think the Google Docs are actually pretty good, but you need a lot less, it seems to me, a lot less computing power and sophistication to build an online and run an online word processor than you do to run an online graphics and graphing and video audio presentation software. And from what I've seen of the Google presentation software, it's not there yet. And the question then becomes like, okay, well then you roll it out too quickly. A bunch of people try it. They find out it's kind of cheesy and clunky and the presentations come out kind of ugly and amateurish. Do they say, forget this, I'm going back to PowerPoint and never come back? That's one of these things where I think in this online environment with running web services, and I think this applies to digital humanists running web services, you can release too early because, you know, you've really got one shot at people, I think. You know, people will come and try your product. They try it the first time and don't like it. It's really hard to get them back to try revision two. Boy, that's really the case. I mean, people who beta tested Zotero last fall, I've now seen updated blog posts where these people sort of come back to the, you know, to the software and, you know, haven't realized that we've done this enormous amount of development in the past year and realize there are all these new features. But you're right.
I wonder, though, are we talking about apples and oranges here? I mean, isn't, you know, I guess the IBM Symphony story, there is a direct competitor, i mean that's downloaded applications it's really a direct replacement for your um you know for your installation that runs on your computer that you can take on an airplane and uh you know exchange documents with other people across the network um but google docs it strikes me you know and and indeed their whole suite is isn't it for kind of more collaborative space than Microsoft? I mean, isn't it about, you know, you're not going to get the formatting because Google Docs drives me insane with its formatting and, you know, trying to delete, for instance, sometimes the delete key doesn't work. Like you would imagine, you can't delete a line for some reason. But if you're just interested in the content and not the layout and these sorts of things that we're used to, kind of that are leftovers from the print world of, you know, I need that specific font and I want to have lots of fonts and I want to be able to do a three column view really easily and, you know, create a newsletter on it. If you're not concerned with that, if you're more concerned with, okay, I need some text and I'm working on it and Mills, you might have to take a look at it at some point and then Tom, you want to write the second half, Google Docs really excels at that. it actually really does work. I think the presentation software, when you start to get into that, because there you are building a finished product. That's the whole point of the presentation software is to build a presentation that you will, and the layout is everything, and the presentation and the fonts and the colors and the graphics and the charts and the graphs and all that. That is the point of it. And so there, I'm a little more skeptical. But yeah, I agree. I think maybe it's not a direct competitor. Maybe it's a supplement or just a different market, a different kind of client. The other thing I would say is to go back just for a minute to Dan's point about, well, if you don't get it right or Tom's point, when you don't get it right the first time, then people aren't going to come back. I think that's true in the United States. I think it's true in Europe. I don't think it's true in Central America. I don't think it's true in Africa. I don't think it's true in Southeast Asia where – I mean when I was in Cambodia back in the spring, I bet Microsoft has only sold hundreds of copies of its office suite in Cambodia in a country of 30 million people. They're going to use the Google Docs and not worry about the fact that it's a little clunky. So I think there is really a divide on this. They're going to use the pirated version. Yeah. I mean, certainly there are probably thousands. But now they don't need to. There are free versions, right? Right. I'm sure that there are thousands of pirated versions floating around. But the freeware is going to make, I think, a really big difference also in the developing world. I think that's a great point. I think that what's also going to make a difference is when they get Google Gears up, really up and running, which is really just in beta now, but they need to get the airplane market, the offline market, the don't always have Wi-Fi market, and that's going to require them with Gmail, with Google Docs, with the presentation software in particular, because I know when we go to meetings, the American Historical Association, you're not going to have a web connection from your point of presentation. You need it on a USB key, or you need it on your laptop that's not online. And so what Google Gears will do for them is the ability to run Right now, the only thing it really works with is Google Reader. And I get how it works with Google Reader. It's using the Firefox SQLite backend, and so it's saving it in a little table where it's got my 200 items from my feed reader on red items, and it's got the text of the post and the title and the date, and that's a pretty simple table, and it doesn't take up much space and everything. How are they going to do that with Gmail? I've got 50,000 emails with attachments in my Gmail. How are they going to make Google Gears with the Firefox SQLite database? How are they going to make that work? Is it going to be so slow to do the syncing and the upload and the download? I just don't see it happening anytime soon. And that's actually another story that's kind of out and about today is that Google Gears for Gmail is going to be coming out soon. Now, that may be just a rumor, but I'll believe it when I see it. Well, Tom, actually, I'll throw out the first link for our show then. If you want a vision of the future, this is not from Google, but a third-party application that does just this. It's called Mailplane for OS X or OS X. It's just that Mailplane app like M-A-I-L-P-L-A-N-E-A-P-P dot com. And it's a Mac client for Gmail. And it is really strange. It's got the Mac trimming, so menu bars, all this stuff. And inside of it, you actually view what looks exactly like Gmail. And you can take it on the plane, and it works just fine. Really, it's an offline client. Yeah, it does it offline. And you can even drag and drop attachments, like you do in Apple Mail, onto the window, which you can't do in a web browser. And it just will add it as an attachment. Because I heard about it early, early on when it first launched, and I don't think it had that offline capability. That's amazing. Okay, I'm going to have to check that out. But they're not using the backend that Google Gears has, which, you know, we don't need to get too technical, but really is sort of a database backend, which makes a lot of sense for, like, as you said, for a reader, a newsreader, but, and I guess in some ways makes sense for mail, but then you do have this problem of attachments and all the stuff that you need. It'll be interesting to see what they can do to get these things offline, but I'm sure this is where they're going. At that point, then they're in a really competitive space because they have the online-offline thing. That's what's a real killer app, I think. They're clearly way smarter than me do it, they can. Right. Well, it looks like, at the very least, we will not be paying much for these important Office applications in the very near future, one way or another, whether we use Symfony or Google Apps or Zoho or Zimbra or any of these other applications. And also this week, it looks like we're not going to be paying much for premium content anymore either. There's been a lot of buzz about the New York Times basically doing away with Time Select, which was their, really what I guess was an experiment to see if they could charge visitors to newyorktimes.com for some of the quote-unquote premium content. By that, they meant op-eds and certain parts of each section. And I think, you know, they seem to have some success on this front. From what I read, there were about a quarter million paying members of Time Select. I mean, I was a member of Time Select, but I get home delivery of the physical paper. So I think there was another 700,000 or 800,000 Time Select users that were getting home subscriptions and signed up for Time Select for free. So they were making some money, but decided, no, the future is really in free content online. Sort of dovetails, interestingly, with what we discussed last week with the New York Times setting up an online learning company, essentially, and trying to get more paid content that way. And, of course, then immediately there was speculation that Rupert Murdoch would, as part of one of his initial fiats over at the Wall Street Journal would actually make that open up as well. And they actually have many more subscribers at, I think, $100 a year for their online content. What do you think the significance is on this, of these major institutions like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal opening up? I think it's going to feed nicely into our feature segment as well.
In particular, I get this from my students. They just aren't going to pay for content online. They've come through this system for the last five or six years where there is a tremendous amount of free content that is perfectly good. And so since what they found is perfectly good, why would they pay for premium service? I mean, there are businesses where that's true. I'm sure that that is the entire business model of the pornography industry online. But there's so much free, why would you pay for information content that just seems marginally better to the average user? So I think that they've kind of had to recognize that the average person on the Internet just doesn't make the kind of premium, not premium distinction about information. I think there's also a tension with the Internet, and I read this somewhere. Maybe it's like O'Reilly. I should probably source this better. But there's a tension on the Internet with gated content, and I think this goes just as much for gated scholarly resources, educational resources, ProQuest, things like that, as it does for the New York Times. Maybe not quite as much so, but same idea. That when everything is linked to everything else, you can have some things that are behind a wall and some things that aren't. Like I know that the blogosphere got really angry with the Times for gating some of its content because you're a political blogger and you're blogging and you want to comment on Maureen Dowd's piece and you put a link to it up and only 3% of your readership can actually get there. So that's like a real problem with this kind of – if they want to be major players in the kind of blogosphere, in this world of social media and sharing information and all the things that the Internet is, they can't be gating some of their content. Yeah, I mean, you could do a really interesting experiment on this. Go to Technorati or Google Blog Search and get a feed for blog posts that link to NewYorkTimes.com, to articles at NewYorkTimes.com. And your feed reader will instantly fill with hundreds of things a day. I mean, they were getting all these link backs that after two weeks or perhaps not at all, no one could actually view the article. I mean, they're turning away readers. They're turning away advertising eyeballs for just this relatively small number of people. Because nobody finds an old blog post, finds a link to a New York Times article, clicks on that link, finds that it's gated and says,, oh, yeah, I'll pay the, you know, 80 bucks or whatever to subscribe or 20 bucks to subscribe or whatever. They just say, I'll go somewhere else. That's right. And, you know, they're in the business of maintaining a certain kind of premier reputation. And also, you know, I'm sure that they looked at the advertising dollars and that, you know, despite the burst of the dot-com bubble, that's now come way back up. And, you know, I think you can just project that into the future and look at your server logs and how many people you're turning away for viewing, you know, all these link backs and page views that you're missing out on because your stuff is gated. I imagine that there was a lot of agitation even before this happened, especially among the people in the New York Times business unit who really understood what this meant to give away these free eyeballs that were being linked back to their site. And not only that, these articles last for years and years and years. I mean, you Google search some things, you'll get New York Times articles now, and you couldn't before. They have permanent URLs for these articles, and so you're just missing out on all that Google traffic. Someone Googles a particular topic, and if the New York Times had an article about that, they wouldn't get any of that traffic. So I think this makes a lot of sense. And I think it'll be interesting to see if others open up as well. I guess the Wall Street Journal is the biggest, but there are probably others as well, right? Economist. Yeah, Economist is gated. Washington Post is gated. Right, right. Or at least you have to sign up for an account. Well, it's not yet. They don't charge you, but you still have to go through the process of signing up for an account, which an example that Tom gave is the same problem. I mean, if you click on a blog post, you read the link, you see a link to WashingtonPost.com story, you click on the link and you can't get in, are you actually going to go to the trouble of registering for the site just to read it? I think a lot of people won't. Right, right. Well, it sounds like open is king, and that actually leads into our featured story. For our feature segment today, we wanted to spin out some thoughts from a discussion, or really rather a debate that came about because of a blog post from our own Mills Kelly on the podcast. And Mills, you had a post about HNet, which for people who are not in history may not know HNet, but it's very widely used and really has been around for what, I guess about a decade. Is that right, Mills? Yeah, about a decade. Listserv, really, so an email discussion group that's separated into various fields. So there's, for instance, I read H-SciMed Tech, which is about the history of science, technology, and medicine. And I think there's well over 100 of these groups. And, Mills, you had post on the past, present, and future of H-Net, and particularly in relation to blogs. And it really had to do with this issue of making scholarly materials open and available. We should say H-Net is totally free. Anyone can go to H-Net and sign up. But on the other hand, it isn't available in the same way that sort of Washington Post articles aren't really available or visible on the web. Do you want to explain your thinking a little bit about that? And we'll talk from there. Sure, sure. Well, first of all, just to kind of clarify on the availability issue with HNet and a little bit more on the kind of background of the organization. HNET is really, it's more than a list service. It's really a cluster of networked communities of scholars. I guess there are more than 100 different list serves that are under the HNET umbrella and they are really all over the scholarly map in humanities, social sciences, technology, education. And some of them are quite small with a small number of members in the dozens. Others are quite large with, I know for sure, one has at least 13,000 members who are receiving email through the list on a regular basis. So they really range in size and amounts of traffic on the list. The second thing has to do with the availability issue. You can go to the H-Net website and you can search the discussion logs through a kind of clunky search process where you have to search each log by month. But you can do it and search through the posts in any one of the different scholarly communities represented there and read what was posted on the list. So it is open in that sense and accessible, not easily accessible, but accessible. And then the second thing, though, is that they blocked access to all of those posts, those tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of posts in their archive. They blocked the major search engines from them. So an H-Net posting never turns up in Google, for instance, unless it's been reposted somewhere else like on somebody's blog or on a website. So that's one issue about accessibility. The other is not everybody can belong to an H-Net list. They are closed communities, moderated lists. And so, for instance, one of the lists that I've been involved in for a long time, Habsburg, because I'm a Habsburg historian and I actually was the teaching editor of that list for several years, undergraduate students are generally barred from the list. And so it's really grad students and professors and then other interested scholars, I guess is maybe the way that they put it. So that's not really an open community of interest the way that other websites, other kinds of social networking opportunities might be. So they are closed communities by choice. And so that, you know, it's really kind of a restricted conversation that goes on among scholars there. Mills, if I could just interrupt you there. I mean, the defenders of H-Net and indeed the three of us know that that closure or whatever you want to call it, partial closure, had significant advantages for many years.
So posts that were really off topic were kept off the list. It acted as a filter. We have filters all throughout academia and journal editors and peer review. What is the problem there? I mean, what has changed and what are your concerns? Well, I have kind of two concerns about it that I raised in the blog post. One is this question of accessibility. And so if the material, if it's a closed conversation among a small community of scholars, then that really shuts out the sort of general public from the conversation. And so we end up as scholars just kind of talking to ourselves about things that we already know a fair amount about. There's some advantages to those sorts of semi-private conversations and there's some disadvantages in that we don't tend to get a lot of new perspectives. I mean I'm bothered by the lack of accessibility for undergraduate students, for instance, as though somehow they don't have something to contribute. But the bigger issue that I raised in the blog post that kind of set off this discussion was about the future of email as the delivery system for scholarly content because that's what HNET is based on, the email model. All of the material comes as not just email but plain text email. So if you're working in a language that uses diacritical marks in the language, all of those words that require diacritical marks are misspelled because email just won't do that or at least the kind of email server that they're using won't do that. And also, I started my blog post with the question of do you get too much email? Because certainly I do and I think just about everybody listening to this podcast gets too much email. And so I wondered whether email was really the right way to maintain these scholarly communities and suggested that there were now other kinds of platforms like blogs and wikis and other sorts of social networking platforms that would allow scholars to have the same sort of interchange of information and they could do it still in this sort of semi-closed way that H-Net is, only letting in quote-unquote reputable people. I guess grad students and faculty members are by definition reputable, but letting those people, only those people could comment or whatever. So it could be that closed in that way or it could be more open and really give sort of a wider frame for the discussion. So my speculation was that email as a method for delivering content is probably on its way out and so HNET ought to start thinking of other ways to build the same kinds of scholarly communities that it had five years ago, three years ago around some of these new platforms. And I also asked the question, kind of an empirical question, which was what's happening to the traffic on their list? Now, you can go to hnet.org slash stats and get the results of the stats program that they run. And I would say that those stats are pretty much useless because they're cumulative stats from the beginning on a daily basis. And so there are 3 million and some odd messages that have been posted in the last year or something like that. It just doesn't actually tell you anything about the traffic on the individual lists. So I went to the brute force method and went to their logs for four different lists and counted the traffic on those lists. And I didn't just pick them at random. These were lists that I have either subscribed to or know that other people find very useful and they've been fairly active in the past. And three of those four lists have had a decline in traffic over the last three years for the same three-month period of time I looked at, and one of them was flat over that period of time. So that raised the question in my mind of, well, is their model really starting to show signs of strain? And it set off really a fairly interesting discussion from people about whether email was the right way to go or not. Yeah, and we'll post to HNet and also to some of these online discussions about this. Again, just playing it from the side of HNet, I think some of the arguments for are, first of all, probably first and foremost, just the barrier to entry question of everyone has email, we know how to use it to post to H-Net. You simply, you know, put in the address for your particular list and send it off and it goes to the moderator and the moderator accepts it, it gets passed along to the entire list. But, you know, and there are other arguments as well in terms of, you know closure. I say this obviously with some note of skepticism sense. I do think that the technology has moved on. And we should say, in all fairness, it sounded to me, Mills, and you can confirm this, but it sounds to me like these very discussions are going on within HNet, as I assume they're going on within all listserv communities, including old-style forums and these sorts of things that blogs and other technologies have overtaken. That's right, right? Yes. I heard from a number of senior people at HNet after I posted the thing on my blog, and several of them indicated that they were having these kinds of discussions, but that thus far those discussions really haven't gone anywhere. Right. And, you know, now I think the issue is, well, there's several issues. I mean, the barriers to entry for something like a blog are extraordinarily low. I mean, Mills, you and I, we both have all of our students blogging. And, you know, at this point, I have no problem getting anyone online. Literally, if you can sign up for an email account, you can sign up for a blog and start blogging. So that's quite simple. You know, the big issue that you brought up is, you know, searchability and findability. You know, having, for instance, each post on HNet be a distinct URL that has a page would be enormously helpful because then you could refer to it from other places. And, you know, that's what we're kind of getting used to in this quote-unquote Web 2.0 world is, you know, we want to be able to point to fixed, you know, permanent URLs for objects that, you know, that we want to cite. Well, they do have fixed URLs for each one of those posts through their logs, but finding that is hard. And it's not, it's still currently not crawled by Google. In other words, if you search, okay, huh. Yeah, and that's one of the things that blogs do really well is actually on my blog, if I post something, it's available not only in Google Blog Search, but actually the main Google index generally within 24 hours. Sure. And because Google knows that, okay, it's a blog, it's updated more frequently than other kinds of sites, and they ping my site a few times a day. So you get that. You know, There is the question of elitism, which I thought was an interesting one. Tom, your blog is really oriented toward a more popular audience within and outside of academia. What's your take? I assume you'd want HNet to open up a bit more than they currently are. I think I would like HNet to open up a bit more than they are. Although I think where I come down on this is that I would like to – I think that email has some things to recommend it. And one of those things from a community building standpoint is once somebody's signed up to your list, you know that they get that email every time it's sent out. And you know that it goes to their inbox. You know it's delivered to them. So it's this kind of push mechanism whereas with blogs, they still have to pull the content from you to some extent. RSS readers is pushing the content to them to some extent but it's less of a guarantee that they're getting the content. Now, you could argue that people should have the choice whether they want to get the content every day and every time or not. But I think as a moderator for one of these communities, you know that the people are getting the material. I think also if anybody's ever signed up for a listserv and then tried to unregister for the listserv, you know that it's kind of hard. And it's, you know, I'd be interested to see with HNET's lists, just how many people are members of these communities, but only because they just haven't gotten around to unsubscribing. I mean, I think there is this kind of constraint of, you know, you have to go back to the welcome email that's sitting, you know, somewhere at the bottom of your saved message folder and figure out what command you're supposed to send to sign off the list. And so I think, I mean, from a community building point of view, that's in some ways a positive, although it might be a negative to the users. So that's one thing.
I mean, I think whenever any new technology comes along, especially communications technologies, I think the history of technology is rife with these examples. Everybody says, oh, well, you know, TV is going to be the death of radio. Well, we see that radio is still around. It may not be quite as prominent as it was before television came around, but it's still around. And it works very well for certain things. I mean, you know, like, you know, video didn't totally kill the radio star, but to the extent that it did, you know, talk radio replaced that. And radio, in many respects, is the best place if you want political talk. It's just the technology is just very well suited to political talk. And really, if you're going to have a 24-hour political network, radio is probably the best place to do it, not TV. I mean, the talk radio stations are doing much, much better than MSNBC and CNN. So maybe TV isn't the right place for that. Maybe radio is. And I think we're still in the process, you know, as the Internet in general, but also, you know, scholars and educators and public historians and other public cultural professionals, we're still in the process of figuring out, like, what is email good for, what are blogs good for, what is social networking good for, and how do these technologies kind of mix. So I think that's where we are. And so I think it's kind of hard to say whether email is dead or even how far it will die. Yeah, I agree, Tom. I think this is a, this is a process of figuring, yeah, right, figuring out the advantages and disadvantages of each technology. I think where I had kind of a problem with the defenders of H-Net this week were those who were saying there's not serious scholarship going on on blogs. And it's amazing to me that after all these years of, you know, the existence of blogs, that there's still this feeling, and I've blogged about this. In fact, the most popular post on my blog is called Professors Start Your Blogs. And it's all about how there's a sort of legacy of the early years of blogging that for some reason, this myth still sticks around that, you know, blogs are about what you ate for breakfast that morning. or, you know, if you're a teenager, what current lusts you have, you know, and there's now a very serious body of academics blogging. You know, if you look at the library community, there are very great, serious library blogs, lots of them, hundreds, thousands of them. If you look at an area like the law, there are law blogs that have literally tens of thousands of subscribers that are reviewing, really within days, articles that come out in the major law reviews. So they provide a much more extensive feedback section than some of these journals, even if the journals are online. And then you have preprint services like archive.org for the natural sciences that are doing an amazing job sort of taking forward the idea of, you know, putting out serious scholarship in a kind of, you know, quick, online, fully available way. And I think it's really starting to change some of these fields. I mean, certainly it's changed the field of physics and mathematics. I mean, you've had advances come out on archive.org before they're published anywhere else. I mean, major advances show up there. And I think it's only a matter of time. I think the humanities are really far behind that this is going to start happening, that there'll be a blog post that will be really important in some field of, let's say, history. And I think it's more likely to happen on a blog where you have the ability to do images and, you know, a bit longer form than you could do in an email and also have the ability for comments directly on that particular article that you post to your blog, that seems to me to have a lot of advantages. Go ahead, Mel. The other problem with email as a delivery system through the Listserv software is that what you just said, something about images. I mean, on these HNET lists, you can't get any images, you can't get any video files. It's only plain text. Yeah, and I just don't see how, I mean, I don't think that there's tremendous scholarship happening on listservs either. I mean, a lot of the things that are happening on listservs are answers to, people are asking and answering, important to them, but still relatively mundane questions like, does anybody have a source on, you know, such and such a topic? Or can anybody point me in the right direction to somebody to talk to about X, Y, or Z? So it's not like, you know, people are writing, you know, full-blown journal articles on HNet lists either. So. Yeah. Well, I guess we'll have to keep track of this. You know, I think, I think, you know, it remains to be seen. I think certainly Mills, you, you know, you mapped out, I think, some changes that HNET can make. And surely HNET will have to change somewhat. But, you know, of course, I'm sure the debate within HNET is also that any change incurs loss, and there'll be some people who will be quite fussy about losing email or moving into an RSS reader or any of those things. It's hard to know how to move forward from here. Yeah, certainly fussy would be the right word. I got a few fussy responses to the whole thing. But yeah, I think, I mean, there certainly will be a loss for the people who I think who will get lost are the people who only want the push. You know, they just want to have the stuff show up in their email inbox and they don't actually want to transfer this whole process to a feed reader or something like that. And so I think that what we'll see is some sort of a transitional period. And I think that it may be that blogs ultimately end up, instead of having an RSS feed only, they may also have some sort of an email feed where they're sending things regularly to subscribers that way. Who knows? Well, if the audience would like to get fussy with us on this issue, please, of course, join us online at digitalcampus.tv and write in some comments for episode 13. It's time once again for Picks of the Week. Tom, let's start with you this week. All right. I have another podcast here to recommend. It's actually a radio program that is also made available now as a podcast. People in the U.K. will be familiar with this. Maybe people in the U.S. and other places not as much so. It's called In Our Time, and it's a history podcast from the BBC. It's very British. It's a little dry, but it brings together usually three scholars with the host, Melvin Bragg, for an hour. And it comes out about once a week, usually I think during the winter, and I think they take a recess during the summer, to talk about issues mostly in intellectual history. And the discussions are usually very, very rich for a podcast, certainly, very highbrow, and usually very good. And he gets very, very good scholars on the program. So maybe don't listen to it while you're driving if you're worried about falling asleep at the wheel, certainly not late at night because it does get a little long-winded. But it is very, very good, very high quality. And if people want to see, I guess, not a commercial radio broadcast, but a mainstream radio broadcast that is incredibly high quality and very well done, have a listen to In Our Time. Yeah, it's a great podcast. It was one of the first podcasts I ever downloaded was In Our Time on Renaissance Geometry. And it was so good, I could not believe it. So great pick there, Tom. Mills, what do you have for us this week? Mine is a blog called Strange Maps. I don't know if either of you have ever seen this, but it's strangemaps.wordpress.com. And it's a blog about unusual cartography and some of it historical, some of it not. Some of it humorous. I was looking at one the other day, which is a Texans map of the United States where Texas occupies about two-thirds of the land mass of the lower 48. And the state just to the north that Texans don't even like to mention is the state of misery and Illinois is ill noise and things like that. There are various maps. There's a very humorous one from Punch of John Bull sending bumboats toward France and you can perhaps get the idea of what a bumboat is.
China is black in this map. They have all sorts of different takes on cartography that not only the creator of the blog has put in, but other people have pointed him to. It's an academic's take or a more precise take on this cartography. It's not just, hey, look at this funny map. But here's a map. Here's the context within which it was produced. Here's what it's saying. And so it's really useful with students. This semester I'm teaching a variety of courses on the Cold War in Eastern Europe. And so they have in this blog a Stalin's map of what Central Europe was going to look like if the American and British forces hadn't gotten into Germany by 1945. So that's a very interesting discussion piece. Wow, this is great. I just pulled it up on my browser. Terrific. I've got a map of plastics, plastic world, and that Texans map of the United States where California is listed as uninhabitable looks awfully good. A great mix of sort of popular maps and also some terrific historical content. Well, I'm going to join in the maps meme this week with the launch of, last week we talked about the launch of Yahoo Teachers. And this week they launched what I think is just a terrific product, this Map Mixer. I don't know if the two of you saw this, but it is a site where you can upload your own map. So if you scan in a map or if you have another map that's already in a digital format, you can very easily upload it. I mean, it's just as easy as finding the map on your hard drive and uploading it. And then you can place it onto Yahoo Maps and use what's called point matching, which is a very standard system for sort of stretching a map to fit onto another map. You can place it right on top of Yahoo Maps and zoom in, zoom out. I think it's really, really useful for the classroom, for scholarship. If you want to take a look at a historic map and sort of map it onto an existing city, it works extremely well. It's very easy to use. And I'd encourage everyone to try it out if you're interested in maps. And, you know, this is possible in other platforms, but the actual placing and matching up points tends to be harder than it is here. So I have to give kudos to Yahoo for MapMixer. And, of course, as we do on every podcast, we will have links to all these sites on our website, digitalcampus.tv. And as we said in our feature segment, we hope to see you all there. Of course, you can email us. We do indeed read email. Despite what we just said in the feature segment, we will get any email you send to us. I think it's feedback at digitalcampus.tv. And otherwise, if we don't hear from you there online or via email, we will hear from you in two weeks on another episode of Digital Campus. only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Here it comes.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here is the bill. This is Digital Campus number 26 for the 7th of May 2008. Free for all. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome back to another episode of Digital Campus. We're lucky to have Mills back on the program. Hi, Mills. Kelly, hi, Mills. Hey, how are you? And Tom Scheinfeld, of course. Hi, Tom. Hi, guys. And we've got some interesting news stories from the week, and of course we're wrapping up the semester, and Mills, you're finishing up grading, is that right? No, the grading tsunami has just crashed over my desk, and so now I'm going to spend the next week grading. Oh, goodness. Well, good luck with that. I guess we'll keep the podcast short today. The first story we wanted to talk about was very much a campus story, and one that we haven't talked about in a while, but certainly something that we have covered on prior digital campus podcasts, and that is that the recording Thank you. known in the past to send out tersely worded emails to CIOs and others on campus about the file trading that goes on, music file trading. And evidently, it looks like they've really stepped up their efforts to crack down once again on piracy, music piracy on campuses. We haven't talked about this in a while. Mills, Tom, is it your sense that, I mean, is this just, you know, they've gotten more aggressive because they think there's more piracy? Is this something new? Has the landscape changed in the past year since we started discussing this on the podcast? And do you think file trading is up, down, about the same? I think from what I can tell and sort of from what I, just the sense I get on campus and what little I hear from students, I think it's probably about the same. I think this is possibly the RIAA feeling increasingly desperate. They've exhausted, I think, a lot of their legal challenges and legal means for stopping this. And going after individual students has gotten them a ton of bad press. And so maybe now they're targeting, and it seems like this is true also on the legislative side as well as maybe the more retail side, they're targeting the universities themselves rather than the students at the universities. So here we see the RIA sending more and more notices to university IT departments trying to get IT departments to cooperate in cracking down on file sharing. In the House, we saw RIA lobbyists push through a bill recently that would target universities who allow their students to file share or who don't crack down sufficiently on their students. It would target them with penalties to their student loan funds. And so maybe it just represents a change in tactics for the RIAA. But I don't know if it reflects any kind of increase or decrease in student file sharing. Yeah, I mean, GW, George Washington University, just down the road from us, they usually receive, according to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, five to ten notices per week from the RIAA, and last week alone they received 123 notices. You know, it could be software, you know, that's detecting this better. Mills, what are your thoughts on this? My thoughts are that, I guess, if I were them, I would probably be doing it this way because, as you said, the targeting of individual students has just garnered them a lot of bad press. The targeting of the platforms like Kazaa and I can't even think of what was the original one. I've already forgotten now. Napster. Napster. Napster. See, it's been so long. The targeting of those organizations hasn't really worked. It hasn't prevented anything in terms of file sharing. And so now they're going after what is, I have to say, a weaker link in the chain because universities are so lawsuit-averse that just a threat of a lawsuit is often enough to make universities knuckle under. And I'm not saying that universities should facilitate and allow lots of file sharing, but I do think that, especially universities like ours, which is incredibly lawsuit-averse, in part because we have no endowment to speak of and so can't afford expensive lawyers to defend ourselves. So if I were the RIAA, I would be going after places like George Mason. I probably would give Princeton and Stanford and Harvard a pass because they might actually defend themselves in court. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like, you know, I mean, this has been going on for a while, and, you know, I think it probably had some effect, but I just think this generation is probably lost to the RIAA. I mean, you know, I think people under 25, they just got used to, between the Napster years, Yeah. but a free and easy model. It just, you know, I think, you know, we're buying music, but I think this younger generation has just gotten used to getting music through all these different ways. I mean, I think they're not using something like Napster anymore, but there are just so many ways to trade files on the internet that I could believe that probably after, you know, some decline in file trading after the initial lawsuits went out, I think people just feel like now there are just so many ways to get free music that they're probably doing it again. And I'll bet you the RIA has some numbers backing this up and is getting worried about that sort of generational problem that this whole generation has come up with, the notion that music is something you get for free and they're options for downloading digital music from the Internet. So now we have finally, after years and years, a mature outlet in iTunes, a good competitor in Amazon, and then some worthy subscription services like the new Napster and others, Rhapsody and others. So, I mean, it took them really almost a good decade to provide consumers with what they were wanting, to provide a legal means for giving consumers what they wanted. And so in those intervening years, the students who, the early adopters, went elsewhere, and that was to the black market. And then those early adopters told all their friends about how to do it. And, you know, these are people with time on their hands. They can, you know, now even though it's relatively inexpensive and the Amazon service is really terrific, it's 89 cents a song, it's less than iTunes, and it's DRM free. I mean, you can put it on any device you want and as many devices as you want, but they're still willing to kind of go around that to get free music because they know how, they've learned how to do it really easily from all their friends. And this is why, you know, I think Chris Anderson is completely right in saying that the problem with this particular issue of music sales is that it's an economic model that was created, what, in the 1920s, 1930s, whenever vinyl records started being mass marketed. And so it's worn itself out. The new delivery systems for content are completely at odds with that model that worked so well for, you know, 60, 70, 80 years. And what the RIAA is doing is defending a model that's really over. And they just won't recognize that. And that instead, they should be investing their resources as an association into developing new economic models where they can make a lot of money in this new economy instead of the economy that, you know, was great in the 1960s. Yeah, right. I mean, I still think they've got this deer in the headlights way of looking at things. And I just, you know, I wonder about, you know, like Tom said, it's been 10 years really since Napster took off. It's hard. It's amazing to think about that. But the fact that you have a whole decade to try to think about new models, you know, you've got students coming into colleges now who were, you know, were eight when Napster was launched. And they're just, they've been used to, through their entire teens, you know, they've been used to stealing music. And they haven't experienced something really exciting from the RIAA's membership that's gotten them to look at this a different way. It's rather astonishing to think about. Well, another interesting story that caught our eye this past week was the University of Chicago Law School. I guess the professors there were getting a little sick of students in classes tapping away at their laptops.
But they're now actually cutting off wireless and wired access in their classrooms at the University of Chicago Law School. Good idea? Bad idea? Boy, students, you know, they're bringing their laptops. They're clicking away. I assume they're not taking notes all the time from a professor's perspective. Surely there's other things going on. Is this the wave of the future? You know, I think they're really on to something here, and I think the next innovation that they need is these cerebellum implants that you can install into the human brain that as soon as somebody starts daydreaming in class, it gives them like 40 volts. You know, I think that that's really, that's the answer is no, no, no one in my class is allowed to not pay attention. They must always pay attention at all times. So give me those implants, you know, I've put them right in my students ears and then they'll just get zapped every time they lose the thread of what I'm saying. But, I mean, you don't think there's a distraction going on here, Mills? I mean, this is the box of utmost distraction. Yes, but that's their problem, not my problem. You know, I have exams, and if they want to pass my exams, if they want to do well on the papers that I assign, then maybe they want to pay attention. And, you know, if they want to get in my classes, class participation is 25% of the grade in whichever class I teach. And so, you know, if they want to participate, they better be participating as opposed to doing whatever else they might be doing. And so, you know, over the years, I've gotten pretty good at noticing when somebody's eyes have glazed over in front of their laptop. And so what do I do? I ask them a question. So, Dan, what do you think about that? And if Dan looks up from his laptop and says, uh, what? His class participation grade just went down. And I tell them that on the first day of class, that, you know, I'm happy for them to bring their laptops in, to look things up and use them as a participation device. But if they're not paying attention and I notice it and I call them on it, their grades are going to suffer. And that's, you know, in the Kelly family, we call this paying the stupid tax. Well, I mean, there is a trend that, you know, I just read about this somewhere else about, I don't know if the two of you have heard about this, but they're called topless meetings, which it's a pretty funny name for, you know, no laptops in the meeting. And companies, so companies are doing this too. You know, they just say, you know, we're going to have a topless meeting, no laptops, no BlackBerrys, no iPhones. And, but is that a different situation, the teaching situation? Is it something where business really can require their employees to kind of pay full attention and not be surfing the web or doing email or text messaging? I think the problem here, I guess, is I think there are times in a class when you want to say to your students, okay, shut your laptops. Or even particular classes, courses, you know, a full semester where you say there will be no using laptops in this class. I can see why, you know, in a certain circumstance that a certain professor would want to do that either on a class-by-class basis or for the semester. The problem here seems to be that they're just, it's a blanket policy. They're taking out, they're cutting off access to all classes. And I think that is this kind of reaction. If you read actually the email that the dean of the University of Chicago Law School, Saul Levmore, sent around to his faculty and students explaining the new policy, he actually, I'll quote something here, he says, several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes, and within 20 minutes, an entire row is shoe shopping. That seems like an overreaction to me. I'm sure that shoe shopping is not that contagious, that entire classes at the University of Chicago Law School, which is, after all, one of the best law schools in the country, are spending all of their time shoe shopping in class. And I think that there are times and places for allowing students to use their laptops and disallowing students to use their laptops. So I think it's the blanket nature of this policy that's the problem. What I just don't get here is aren't we moving more and more to applications that live on the web that, you know, note-taking applications and all kinds of services that we use in academia that are, you know, as they say, in the cloud. They're out there on the internet. And so, you know, I just don't get how this works in the long run. I mean, it just... Well, this is, you know, I'm sorry, but this one really frosts me because first of all, so what if they're shoe shopping? Okay, what does that say about the kind of instruction that's happening in that classroom? If, in fact, students at the University of Chicago Law School can do well in their classes and pass the bar and also shoe shop, either that instructor is fabulous because he or she is teaching in such a way that all of those things are possible, or that instructor is so deadly boring that the only way students can make it through an hour and 30 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes is by going shoe shopping or checking out the latest celebrity gossip. So it says something about the pedagogy that's evident in that classroom, and I would have to go and see for myself. But about two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago now, I was sitting in on one of our adjunct faculty members here classes and observing her teaching and providing feedback. And I was sitting all the way in the back of the room, and there were 10 or 12 laptops open in the room. And most of the students were, in fact, just taking notes. Now, they would get an IM every once in a while, and they would type in two or three words to respond for a second or two, but then they would go back to taking notes. There was one student, however, who was all over the Internet. I could just see she was IMing. She was checking her email. She checked her bank account balance. She did all sorts of stuff, and I was thinking, okay, here's a student who's just not paying attention. And then she raised her hand and asked the best question that any student in the class had asked. She was a very bright young woman and was staying connected to what was happening in the class while doing all these other things. I think what's happening at the University of Chicago Law School is that these professors are feeling wounded in their vanity that students aren't paying attention. Well, get over yourself. If students choose to pay attention or not pay attention, whether there's a laptop there or not. And the question is, how are they performing in class and what does that have to do with the way the class is being taught? Well, that was quite an impassioned speech. I'll not get off my high horse here. I'm sure you made some good points, Mills, but I was actually on the internet shopping for shoes. Yeah, well, I know, but you know, maybe our listeners don't know that your middle name is, in fact, Imelda. It's gotten a lot of press, and he's turning it into a book, and the book is simply entitled Free. And it's just about the way in which so much of what we see on the Internet, by its very nature, will be reduced to a price of zero. And this is just inevitable. It's the nature of the Internet. And, Mills, you know, you've recently written a lot on your blog, edwire.org, about the coming Chris Anderson-type world in academia and what free means for us. I guess maybe I want to toss out a challenge and answer a question about that. And, indeed, this featured segment, we're going to talk about, you know, how we can sustain digital projects, digital education, digital tools in academia. But isn't Chris Anderson, and indeed, you've sort of thrown a wrench in this by saying, well, it is going to go to free. If that's the case, I mean, how do we live in this free world and still have some kind of model towards sustainability?
So it's not like that. Anderson proposes in this article a whole series of different models for a new free economy. So, for instance, the one I think has the most relevance for higher education is what he calls the cross-subsidy model, where essentially what I'm proposing is that we ought to just go ahead and give away the general education curriculum because in many cases we do anyway. We allow students to transfer in from other institutions, especially community colleges, and we give them credit for all of that prior work that they've done that somebody else got the money for and not us, but we still credit them for that. And instead, we should go ahead and give them about a third of their college degree, about 40 credits worth, something like that, as a way of then inducing them to focus on the upper level courses. And at the same time, if they want, if they need other services from us, it's kind of like the Ryanair model where you get the ticket from Dublin to Barcelona for $19. But if you want to bring luggage on, you have to pay an extra $5 per piece of luggage. And if you want a drink, you have to pay for that. And if you want extra legroom, you have to pay for that. Well, in our case, it's if you want instead to use the writing center, that costs money. If you want to use one of the student media labs, there's some charge against your student account. So that if you want to pay for premium services, you can, and those premium services cross-subsidize the free general education. Huh. And so, I mean, the other model I'm thinking about here is the free nacho chips at Mexican restaurants, which makes you thirsty and you want beer. Is the General Ed sort of like, it's a loss leader then? Is that what you're saying in this model? Well, in some ways it can be a loss leader, but it can also really, you know, there are other varieties of this model that can work in higher education. You know, if you think of the Flickr model where you get the basics for free and you can only upload so many photographs a month or you pay $29.95 for the pro account and then you have unlimited uploads. Well, students could have the basic general education for free. They have to test out of these courses. They don't get to just walk in and get check marks next to their name for Western Civ or whatever. They actually have to test out of the courses. But then if they want the pro model, then if they want to participate in some sort of freshman learning seminar or something like that, that costs extra. And so it's not even necessarily a lost leader. You can do the basics. If all you want for general education is just to kind of get through it, which we have to admit many students, that's all they want. But the students who have real intellectual curiosity and want to explore other topics on their own, well, they have to pay a little extra for that. And that's where scholarships come in to help discount it for students who can't afford to pay for that extra. You know, it doesn't make financial aid go away. Yeah, I can see university accountants ripping their hair out right now at the complexity of this model. I mean, I just, you know, isn't the model right now, it's so comprehensible, right? You know, there's certain number of credit hours and, you know, they cost X amount. It just seems like, you know, the only other model that I can see that's similar to this that has had some success is the OpenCourseWare model where MIT has, you know, put out this, all this massive material, but, you know, sort of like, you know, we just discussed the RIAA and you think of the free model there is, you know, what Madonna and some other stars have done, which is, you know, they realize their music's going to be traded for free. And so instead of signing a contract with a record company, you sign a contract with a tour promotion group because you're making all your money on the live performances. And so in that way, for instance, MIT, they're making the money on the attractiveness of actually being able to sit in person with that star professor who's put all their stuff online for free. Is that different than what you're saying? You've got a more complicated model here. No, I think that's in many ways essentially what I'm saying. I think that there are a variety of different models that could be explored. And also, I think there's something kind of wrong in what you said earlier, that it's a pretty straightforward model right now. In fact, every student on our campuses pays a different price. It's actually colleges and universities have an incredibly complex financial modeling system where each student has a different amount of financial aid or scholarship. And some of that's based on needs. Some of that's based on merit. Some of it's based on the fact that we need more students to study Italian or play the trombone in the band. And so they have – we have – in many ways, our model is much like the airline's model. Once the semester starts, if students aren't in the seats in our classrooms, that's money that we've lost and we can never recover. The airlines, it's the same. Once the plane takes off, the empty seats represent lost revenue. And so universities discount aggressively to try to fill all those seats because we're still going to heat the building. We're still going to pay the faculty members to teach the classes. We're still going to have campus security officers and all of those things, which we're stuck with. So we want students there because if they aren't there by September 15th, we've lost that revenue and we can never recover it. So we have this actual discounting model that means that nobody's paying the same price on campus. That's a good point. Let me expand out this conversation about the free and the sustainable to include not only education but also digital tools and services of the kind that we discuss on the podcast quite regularly. Tom, you know, both of us are responsible for major software projects that put out free and open source software used by a lot of people. And, you know, we encounter this problem, right? I mean, we're, you know, we not only do we want to, but we are actually, you know, we have to put out our materials based on our grants under a free and open license. But we're also charged with the need to come up with a sustainability model. What are your thoughts on this matter? How do we deal with not just the education side, but also resources, collections, online archives, online tools to go with education? How do we make those sustainable for the long run if we're not getting paid for them? Yeah, it's a very difficult problem. As you say, we're required to release our tools under open source licenses. And while we're not prohibited from exploring cost recovery models, I think we are encouraged to give at least some version of these things away for free. We're charged with providing free tools to students and scholars and researchers and teachers and others. isn't squandered, that it lasts and that it has a long-term effect and is able to last beyond the life of the grant. And so we're faced with this dilemma. After the grant is over, how do you maintain these tools? When you're building digital tools, they require really constant upgrading and maintenance and user support and other things. And how to do that is problematic. And so with something like Omeka, we're exploring a bunch of different options. One of the things we're exploring is a model like you have with WordPress, where the server downloadable application is free. But if you want a hosted account on WordPress.com, you can get free accounts, but you can also pay for a monthly subscription if you want more features, more services, greater storage capacity, and other things. So we're exploring that with Ameca to have a hosted version where a kind of freemium model where you can get more services, more support, more storage if you're willing to pay for it, but there's always going to be a free version for non-profits or for people running smaller projects or who don't need lots of support or services. So that's one model we've been exploring. There are others. One is an ad model, an ad-supported model. We've thought about that, although it's hard to see how that works in an educational context, a scholarly context, both because the audiences are very small usually and because there's a certain, I don't know, morality, ethics surrounding advertising and education, and you don't want to mix the two. And other things like donation models is another thing we've been exploring.
And if you like it,, you give money and we'll have to have some kind of membership drive. So it is a very difficult problem to solve and I don't think anybody's come up with any real good solutions yet. Yeah, you know, I think there was a great post and I'll link to to this from digitalcampus.tv, a great post on the OpenCourseWare blog by Laura Dewis, who is, she is the sort of online communications person and media relations person for the Open University's OpenLearn website. And she wrote a really eye-opening and sort of helpful blog post called Money Makes the World Go Open, in which she sort of goes over a bunch of the options that, Tom, you just spelled out for funding the free and making it sustainable. And so I'll just real quickly reel off some of the things you mentioned, but, you know, pre-financing from a foundation, sponsorships, subscriptions for extra services or fees for extra services, Mills, that sort of gets into what you were talking about. The freemium model where 1% of the users pay sort of extra and 99% of the users, you know, use a more basic version. So the people who really need kind of a high-end or larger version of something pay more or pay something, whereas most people who need a kind of restricted version get it for free. Private partnerships, donations by the community. And then this one that, Tom, you mentioned, I sort of want to talk about just very briefly, I mean, advertising. You know, do, you know, universities that want to have, let's say, an open courseware site, is it okay to put, you know, advertising on that site to make it sustainable? I think there are, I think in some cases it probably is okay, and I think in other cases it probably isn't, especially since the way that the ads are placed, at least in today's world, is by search algorithms and by keywording and things. I think we, you know, if let's say you're, I'm just thinking of Omeka and online exhibitions in the museum world. If you're running or launching an online exhibition on, let's say, the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado and a battle between the U.S. Army and Native Americans, which is a very sensitive topic, a very controversial topic, something that has a long memory and is very, in which the wounds and the emotions are very raw. For that, I don't know if you want Google deciding what kinds of ads to place next to the content. I think you want to give visitors and your stakeholders an experience that's free from Google ads. So I think in some cases it may be okay. Maybe for a course website it may be okay, but I think for other kinds of websites or tools, it may not be. And I think that's a difficult question. It's certainly not a model I think that you can extend to all tools. And it may be that we need to come up with some hybrid, and it may be that on a case-by-case basis, you have to look at your tool and decide which of these models works best. I suppose that's the way it's going to shake out. But none of them seem like a silver bullet to me. Mills, looking forward, do you think that this, you know, free will indeed gain traction in the university? Is this a way of doing, you know, what you were saying of a sort of price, what do they call it, price differentiation or slicing up the market so that this will be effective? Well, first of all, it's already happened. Isn't Princeton free? Yeah, right. So there's, you know, and I think, but in addition to that, I think that, I think we're going to see it instead of kind of from the top places like Princeton or Harvard that can afford to give away their education. I think we're going to see it from the bottom as well. But I think it's going to take a long time. I mean we've talked about this before. Universities are incredibly conservative institutions and move incredibly slowly in the face of changes in the marketplace. But nevertheless, they do. And so I think it's going to happen. I think it's just going to take a while. And Tom, what do you see in the future for the people building tools and archives and museums and libraries who are putting things online? What do you think about this? I mean, do you think there'll be a common sustainability model or will it just be an amalgam of some of the things that Laura Dewis talks about? I think it's going to be an amalgam of some of those things. I think we, and I'm not sure if we know really any of these models are tested yet. So I think we're going to have to spend some time testing these models. And I imagine each project is going to have to make its own decisions on which models are best for it. The other thing I would add to this is right now, the burden for sustainability, it's sort of assumed that the burden for sustainability falls solely on the grantee. It's almost as if at the end of the grant term, if it's a two-year grant or a three-year grant, that the foundation or the agency that's funding the project just assumes that they are out, that it's over, and that all the burden for sustainability, for long-term maintenance and sustainability, upgrades, et cetera, fall onto the grantee. I think that funding agencies and funding entities are going to have to work more closely with their grantees on sustainability in the future. I think that some of the burden is going to have to fall on the funders as well as the fundees. And I think at least until these questions are sorted out, some of the burden is going to have to fall back on the foundations and the agencies, something which they're not at all comfortable with and that they don't have the mechanisms in place to deal with, but neither do we. And I think if we're going to work this out, it needs to be a collaborative effort. Great point. Well, if our audience has good examples of either free tools and resources that have come up with good sustainable models, or if you know of education projects of the kind that Mills was talking about that also have models for sustainability, let us know, of course, on our website, digitalcampus.tv. Time for Picks of the Week. Mills, why don't we start with you? All right. Well, my Pick of the Week is actually an interesting pair of maps produced at the website WorldMapper. I don't know if either of you have ever been to this website, but they display some geographers who display data proportionally on the globe so that countries get larger or smaller based on their values in the data table. And so these are two maps that they produced recently on Internet users, one from 1990 and then the other from 2002. And it's really quite remarkable how the Internet world has changed in that span of time. And so it really helps us to visualize the changes that have gone on in the digital world, where in 1990, almost all of the Internet users were either in the United States or Western Europe, with just a few scattered around the globe. And now it's a much more evenly distributed phenomenon. And so I think that really has to change our thinking about what we're doing in digital work because we're no longer just talking to ourselves. We're actually talking to people all around the world. Great. Yeah, that's a really interesting site, and those maps are really eye-opening, and they look good. Tom, what do you have for us this week? This week I've got the Harvard College Thesis Repository, which is a project headed mostly by students, which aims to get all of the Harvard College theses up online for free under Creative Commons licenses. And I got an email about this asking me to put my, Harvard's my alma mater, and I got an email asking me to put my college thesis up online in this repository, something which I haven't done yet, and it looks like not many of us have. Right now they've got 25 theses available. And that may change. I'm thinking that may change this spring when Harvard ends a little later than most. And as seniors start to finish their theses, I'm hoping to see more of this. But I think this is a great idea and something that other schools, other undergraduates should consider. There's so much good undergraduate work done and so little of it ever makes it into print or even online. And so I think this is at least one model for getting some of that great work up online and I hope it succeeds succeeds. So I'd like people to check it out, and we'll put the URL in the show notes. That's great. I've been meaning to check that out.
All right. Thanks, Tom. Well, I'd like to do my part to, this was this past week, included RSS Day, which was a day organized decentrally around the Internet to try to get more people to understand what the heck RSS is and to use it more. And I think the three of us were used to seeing things pop up in Google Reader or whatever RSS reader we're using. And a lot of people who are sort of technically savvy and are using all these Web 2.0 services, and I assume this includes most of the audience here because if you're using this podcast, you are using RSS to get the actual audio file via RSS enclosure. But there's so many people out there who don't know what RSS is and how it can help their lives. And I think there's a great website that I like to promote just called rssday.org. It's the May 1st launched on RSS Awareness Day. And it just explains it in five sentences what RSS is, has a little video, which is really terrific, and then shows you, you know, it actually, you know, how to subscribe to a feed, what the RSS icon looks for, looks like, where to look for it, in other words, in the location bar of your web browser, and then how to, you know, start using something like Bloglines or Google Reader. It's just all on one page. It takes about one minute to read. I think they probably could have used better examples. Of course, this being set up by techies, they used Smashing Magazine and Mashable, two sort of tech slash web design websites as their examples. I think it would have been better to use New York Times or BBC as their screenshots. But nevertheless, I think it's a helpful quick site that explains what RSS is, how it can help out people who currently aren't using it. And I think this is the kind of site that really helps out when there's a new technology and there's a real large mass of people. I mean, I know among historians, for instance, I would say over 90% of them won't know what RSS is, at least faculty. And so I think this is the kind of site that we could use for other sorts of technologies that sort of underlie Web 2.0 and a lot of things we discuss on this podcast, again, at rssday.org. Well, thanks to our audience for joining us. Mills and Tom, thanks for the conversation. And we'll be back again in two weeks for another episode of Digital Campus. itself! Fear itself! Fear itself! Fear itself! Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus 21 for the 13th of February, 2008. To read or not to read. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome listeners, new and old, back to the Digital Campus Podcast. We're here, as usual, with our regulars around our virtual roundtable, here with Mills Kelly. Mills, hi. Hey, Dan. How are you today? Pretty good. And Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Good to talk to you, Dan. Good to talk to you. Well, I guess we're going to jump right into the news roundup, and I suppose we need to maybe say a few words about the possible impact of the Microsoft Yahoo story. Of course, Microsoft offering $44 billion to buy out Yahoo. I mean, obviously, this is a business story. This is a tech story. Is there any angle here or importance for academia or museums and libraries to this union? Should it go through or if it doesn't go through? Tom, what are your initial thoughts after seeing this story come out? Well, I think now, earlier last week, I think I was thinking that it was definitely going to go through. I couldn't see why Yahoo wouldn't. Now it looks like they're looking for more money. I guess I would say that it is probably an important story if it happens for higher ed. Just in that, I think that there needs to be a competitor to Google. I mean, Google is doing amazing things right now, and I am bought into the Google suite of technologies. I'm using Gmail. I'm using Google. I mean, Google's doing amazing things right now. And I am, you know, bought into the Google suite of technologies. I'm using Gmail. I'm using Google Docs. Google's my primary search engine. I use a lot of the Google products. But as, you know, with Microsoft 10 years ago, I think having a viable competitor in the web services realm is important to the internet in general, but to higher education users in particular. As we've said this before, as universities and other institutions start looking at using things, for instance, like Gmail instead of their own homegrown email servers as they start looking into Google Docs as a collaborative environment for their students and for the work of museums and libraries. I think it's important to have a competitor to that, and Microsoft hasn't been able to be a viable competitor. Yahoo has put out some really great products and has actually been able to incorporate some great products like Flickr and Delicious into its stable of technologies. But neither of them have really been able to compete with the onslaught of Google. And I think this is an opportunity for that. These are two giant companies, and we'll see if it works and we'll see if it even happens. But if it does, I think it's a good thing. Mills, what were your initial thoughts on hearing about this alliance? I guess I sort of had the same opinion as Tom in that I guess it's not going to make that big of a difference one way or another for higher education, except that I have one kind of personal concern, and that is I'm a big Flickr user. And I've written a good bit about Flickr in my blog, in particular a recent post about the Flickr Commons alliance with the Library of Congress. And Microsoft is an increasingly bureaucratic organization, at least from the outside looking in. And so I would worry that some of those kind of exciting fringe developments around the edges of Yahoo's core business would get lost in this merger if it happened. But that's, I guess, my really only significant concern. Yeah. I mean, I didn't think it had a lot of applicability to higher ed until, you know, I started thinking more along the lines of, Tom, what you were speculating about web applications and services. And, you know, also knowing that Microsoft has indeed, I think, recently tried to start matching Google on the, you know, sort of Google Apps for Education, at least in terms of their email systems, I think you can now get a similar deal, sort of free deal for some kind of Microsoft Mail for campuses. And, you know, but then spreading that out a little bit, I think John Markoff had a good column on in the New York Times about this. And he actually thought, much like you, Tom, that maybe what this is is while everyone's focusing on Yahoo's search business and the advertising business, which is where much of the money is right now, and certainly it's where Google is making 95% of their money, that in the long term, Microsoft is looking to sort of migrate their Office suite, which is an enormous moneymaker, online. And they, of course, have Microsoft Live applications that live on the web, that are in the trendy term for cloud computing now is what it's called. And that Yahoo has 350 or 400 million users and that they get that user base and kind of convert that user base into Microsoft Live Apps, Office Online rather than Google Apps, that maybe that's the road forward for them, that they kind of keep this Office suite but move it on the web and then get all the Yahoo users and get a dominant position there, which has always been their cash cow. And in that case, then it really does provide a serious competition to what Google is trying to do with Google Apps. And, you know, we all use Google Apps, but, you know, Gmail is still a distant second to Hotmail and MSN and, or what's the, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. So they have a very, you know, strong position in email. And then,. And then Google Apps, while it certainly made inroads among early adopters, most people are still using Word, and they're using it on their desktop. And I think if Microsoft can provide a seamless sort of migration path, then you've got a real competitor for, especially on campuses, for sort of free apps that are probably going to be ad supported maybe in the long run. But it kind of provides that competitor for that market. And so I think thinking not in terms of search and advertising, but in terms of those all important sort of office suite applications might be, it might indeed have some kind of impact on campus. Well, the other story that we were following this week or that we always like to see every year is the Horizon Report. And the Horizon Report comes out at the beginning of every year. It's a production of, joint production of the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. And what it does is it basically just sort of looks ahead to the coming five years and sort of splits out what they think is going to happen technologically on campuses in the next year, in the next two or three years, and then sort of in the long run, if we can call it that, in a five-year window. And, you know, a lot of these key emerging technologies, as the Horizon Report makes available, by the way, we'll, of course, link to this, as always, on digitalcampus.tv, but you can download the PDF. And a lot of these prospective technologies are things that we've talked a lot about and perhaps confirms our vision of the future. But we will walk through here and see if there's any surprises. First of all, at least in the near term, they're looking at the growth of grassroots online video and it seems like a no-brainer there. And then also one year or less in that category are collaboration webs, which they sort of define as collaborative tools that enable, for instance, groups to edit documents online or hold online meetings. And indeed, that's just what we discussed. Does this make sense to you? Is this just the Horizon report tipping their hat toward these Web 2.0 phenomena like YouTube in the case of video and also Google Apps? Is that what's going on with these first two? I think the whole report is actually that. I read through this when it came out out and I thought, well, this isn't, I guess maybe horizon is the right term for it because it's not all that future looking. It's what's on the near horizon as opposed to the distant horizon. What they're really talking about is things which are already pretty common and so that, but that will, I guess, work their way into higher education to a much greater degree. So there's nothing kind of all that forward-looking here. It's more like, hey, everybody, pay attention. This is already going on, and it's going to affect what's happening on your campus. Right.
Collective intelligence and social operating systems. So here we've got, you know, collective intelligence. They mentioned Wikipedia, community tagging also seems a lot Web 2.0-y, and social operating systems. Maybe I didn't quite get this one, but, you know, it seems like, again, the impact of kind of the social graph, social networking is sort of having an impact here. Tom, did you agree that maybe this is just rather than a horizon, it's sort of maybe what's here and now and that we can already see? Yeah, I do think it's that. I also think it's, and I guess this is defensible because they're trying to predict the future, but it seems incredibly vague to me. And maybe this is partly because they're trying to predict the future and partly because their past predictions maybe have been a little off. But all of these things seem to me to be in some ways kind of the same thing. I mean, maybe mobile broadband is a little bit different, but collective intelligence, social operating systems, data mashups, collaboration webs, they all seem to me to be sort of a piece. And it is this Web 2.0 piece. I think, you know, in the past, last year, one of the things they had on there was virtual worlds, and that's not on there this year. Yeah, interesting to see it drop off. Right, and maybe they were a little too hasty in that judgment, and so this year they're pointing to things that are clearly underway and that are clearly going to have an impact over the next couple of years. Yeah, they actually talk a little bit about virtual worlds a little deeper into the report under their category of meta trends, sort of looking further off into the future. And they actually have a more interesting way of thinking about these virtual worlds, and that's to talk about three-dimensional viewing of information. And as opposed to a virtual world environment. It's more sort of how is that information displayed and now in a virtual world environment. It can be in three dimensions. And they talk about not only Second Life but Open Croquet, this project coming out of Duke and UNC that's trying to do sort of an academic version of Second Life. And so at least, you know, they're still talking about it in this report, but I think they've kind of moved it further off into the future as one of those things we have to keep an eye on as opposed to something that's really going to affect us now. Right. I think that's right. And yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, of course, this report is not necessarily for super geeky people who are all using Flickr and Delicious, etc. It's for administrators as well and people who need to understand the lay of the land. That way, I think it does do a good job. I think it's very important that they've added mobile. Basically, the smartphones thing. I think that's the big new addition with sort of knocking virtual worlds off of maybe the top tier. We've certainly covered that here on the podcast. I agree that this is something that, for instance, if the president of our university was going to ask me, is there something I can read about new trends on the web and higher education? This is useful for that. I would point him to this. So I think it's a very useful thing in that regard. Right. Well, on the next podcast, maybe we'll mention, you know, on social operating systems, certainly we saw some news from Google about their sort of attempt to regenerate the social networking just with what's already on the web. And we can discuss that in greater depth since we don't have a lot of time in this news roundup. So stick with us for Digital Campus 22. Maybe we'll start there along with some of the other things that Google's done. Just one last word in the news roundup. Our favorite bill, and I'm sure the favorite bill of so many people in our audience, COA has passed the U.S. House of Representatives. This is the well-named College Opportunity and Affordability Act. How could anyone be against it? Except for that it has this piece in the bill about copyright infringement and peer-to-peer usage, and it really strongly pushes colleges and universities to basically to buy, you know, replacements for peer-to-peer music sharing, which, I mean, it sort of forces them toward services like the new Napster, which isn't like the old Napster. It's a commercial service. I can't remember the other ones. Ruckus, is that the one from MTV? Or some of these other services that basically provide free music on campuses to try to prevent or to de-incentivize, is that the word? Students from just grabbing it free off of peer-to-peer networks. And it's not clear to me, did anyone in this final passage of the bill, did anyone really get a sense of, will there still be these financial penalties for universities that are caught with high numbers of peer-to-peer traders among the student population? My sense is that it's still in there and that there was, in fact, an attempt to remove those provisions from the bill by a Democrat from Tennessee named Steve Cohen. And unfortunately, unfortunately for many reasons, but unfortunately for higher education, the tornadoes in Tennessee struck last week and Representative Cohen had to go home to Tennessee and wasn't able to present his amendment at the meeting of the Rules Committee. And so it seemed like there was some opposition to it in the House and that the leader of that opposition or one of the leaders of that opposition wasn't able to take that out. So I think it's still there. I think we're still stuck with those. And hopefully when this goes to the Senate, something changes. Yeah, I mean, Ars Technica did a little investigation of this, and they said that the staffers for some of the members of that committee said, oh, well, we're not, there won't really be financial punishments. I mean, I think the original language had them taking away, for instance, funding for student loans on campuses that were caught with a lot of peer-to-peer activity. And so they were sort of saying, well, it's still in the bill, but we're not really going to enforce it. But I don't know, it seemed like a very weak response, at least, that Ars Technica got. And I think there's still a real possibility here that this could go through with strong language. Well, I mean, and it doesn't set my mind terribly at ease for the staffers of a committee to say, well, we're not really going to enforce it when it's not Congress's – certainly not the staffer's job and not Congress's job to enforce the bill in the first place. It's going to be the executive's job to enforce the bill and it's going to be the judiciary's job to interpret that. So if it goes through, that's a very bad thing, I think, whether Congress's intent is more benign or not. Okay. Well, we'll keep track for the Arts. Hi, Sunil. Hi, Dan. How are you? Good. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. No problem. And Matt Kirschenbaum from the University of Maryland. Hi, Matt. Hi, Dan. Well, welcome. And we also have Tom Sheinfeld on the line, and Mills Kelly has had to go off and teach, but he may join us momentarily. So I'll toss him into the conversation if need be. So we wanted to discuss the report that came out from NEA. And this report was about reading or the lack thereof in modern American society, and particularly among the younger crowd, those in the K-12 group and even beyond. But I thought maybe we'd start with Sunil. Maybe if you, you know, some people in our audience might not have read the report. And maybe for just a couple minutes, do you want to summarize what you feel were the main points of the report for our audience? Thanks. Sure. Sure, I'd be glad to. So this report is called To Read or Not to Read, a Question of National Consequence. And it's really a compilation of data on reading, that is to say voluntary reading, non-required reading, that is to say non-required for work or school reading of virtually any type. It really started from a study we did several years ago on reading of literature and reading of books. And while literature was not attached to a specific format other than, you know, one could, for example, read a poem online or a short story online or in print, we did ask about the number of books read over a period of a year. And we found that there were significant declines in the amount of reading that was going on compared with previous years that we've done this survey.
So in the wake of that, a major concern for our agency and for a lot of our partners and people in the community, in the arts organizations, but of course those in education, has been how is this trend of reading less? Is it seen extensively throughout various other types of studies, as well as what are some of the implications of this, and to what degree is it truly significant? Well, we then, so to answer that pretty formidable question, we looked at a series of federal, non-profit, academic, some industry studies with the criteria that they all had to be large and nationally representative. So having looked through the data, we came up with three central conclusions. The first is that unfortunately Americans are spending less time reading, but that's particularly the case with young adults and with teenagers. We also find that reading comprehension skills are eroding, and this is a very serious finding because the Department of Education has noted this, both of the adult population as well as some of the teenager groups we're talking about. Finally, we found some striking statistical links and correlations between reading frequently and reading well, and also reading well and reading frequently on the one hand, and some very positive individual and social outcomes on the other hand that we could discuss if you'd like. So those are really the three conclusions, which is very hard to generate, as you know, probably, when you have very discordant data sources. But we were, you know, to some degree gratified that we could synthesize the results into this report. Well, just maybe one point of clarification for our audience, since our audience is a sort of digitally savvy one. It was a little unclear to what extent digital reading was in fact covered. What's your sense of just, if you want to summarize for us, sort of how many of these national studies you looked at included some kind of breakout for digital reading and sort of how much you took this into account, for instance, the example you mentioned about reading a poem online, that kind of thing. Sure. So as with any literature review or study, meta-study, you're really bound to the data and the questionnaires that have already been written and that have been provided for the surveys that we were gathering. In other words, we couldn't go back, obviously, and change the information that was collected. However, in the majority of these studies, so to answer your question, really about a couple of dozen, up to 40 or so studies figured in some way in this report. I would say close to a dozen were central to the report, and the majority of those stemmed from the Department of Education, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Department of Labor, and a couple of other sources, U.S. Census Bureau sources. Now, with the exception of our own study, the one I referred to at the beginning, where we were really, as an arts agency, concerned about literature, we focused on literary reading, and we defined that as reading a poem, a play, or a short story, or a novel. We didn't specify the medium, but when interviewers were asked, does online count, they were told to say yes. But they didn't specify for every single question reading online or in print. Now, that was a limitation there, but with every single other study cited, we are talking about reading of any type whatsoever. So the standard question is, how much did you read for fun this week? Or how much did you read you read for pleasure now it is up to the survey respondent to interpret that question you know when they're asked that ideally if they consider what they do reading if they're reading a book or reading a chapter reading a blog even they should be answering accordingly now we hope to refine our own internal data collection to more, if I could say more specifically, you know, kind of adumbrate what is, you know, what we're talking about with electronic reading. But we also do footnote some studies that have been done with online reading specifically, and there haven't been too many to our knowledge. It seems there's still a murky line between reading in print and reading online. And so, in a sense, the study sort of skirted that problem because the surveys themselves were focused on reading of any type in any genre in any format. I think that murkiness is part of what's significant at our contemporary moment because when we talk about reading a newspaper, often just in casual conversation, we don't even bother to distinguish anymore whether we've read it online or whether we've read the hard copy. The same goes for magazine articles that we might read or all different kinds of media. One thing that I've noticed that was a concern to me in Chapter 3 of the report, where you look at the breakout of how people are spending their leisure time, and you look at the different sources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Michigan Study, the Kaiser, all of them differentiate explicitly between reading and then something that's usually described as computer use or computer activities. And the implication that follows then from the data is that what we do when we're spending time with a computer online is something other than reading. Reading remains a separate category. And that to me suggests that the way in which we're talking about online reading really hasn't been sufficiently conceived. I know what data you're referring to. That's the way the U.S., the Department of Labor Statistics, for example, just to give you an example, they ask about, and this is what you're referring to, Matt, they ask about leisure reading, how much is being done, and they ask the individual to keep track of that in a time diary. Separately from that, they do ask about games and computer use. Now, in their definition, games can include hopscotch, computer use could include reading, or it can include other activity. But talking with the Department of Labor researchers, they believe that the reading, and this is something that I would agree with you, that we need to revisit how we define some of these computer activities. But they are hoping reading is discreet enough and separate enough to encompass what people consider they're doing on the computer when it is in fact reading. As we know, the computer can be used for multiple things, not just skimming, much less reading. So I think I would tend to agree that that category is insufficient right now. But I just want to point out that what we're seeing is really an aggregate. And I know you understand this, but it's important to kind of explain that various studies, so for example, the Kaiser one, too, their whole concern was multitasking. And all these studies have different intents. Like this one was looking at multitasking in media. And they found that, for example, 20% of the time spent reading anything of any type is done, this is among 7th to 12th graders, done using a computer in addition to reading, which is when the computer is not the primary purpose. In other words, you're not reading on the computer in that case. Or watching TV or instant messaging, texting, or emailing when that's a separate activity from what they were supposed to be reading in their minds. So there's some perception problems here, clearly, and I do think survey methodologists can do a better job in time of refining this. One last thing about this I just want to throw out there because this is frequently asked and it really dovetails with this is there is actually, there are a couple of statistics at least in, I think it's on page 42 of the report, where we talk about online reading exclusively. And that was because of the high school survey of student engagement, which found that, I think it was, yeah, 71% of high school students in 2004 read online for zero to three hours per week. And then a year later, that had climbed to 81% or sorry, 84% of them reading zero to three hours a week. Therefore, you're having less people in that group reading more than that. I agree with you. This is a more complex issue. I just would say there are a lot of indicators showing that reading as a whole, however, if one just defines it as reading in an absolute sense, it seems to be diminishing. And we're talking about it in an absolute sense, or are we talking about leisure reading in particular? Oh, yes. Important distinction, yeah. Because I know, for instance, just in my own career even, I know when I first started out in sort of the mid-s, at work, I spent a lot more time on the phone doing, you know, just conducting business. And now, at work, the way I stay in touch with most of my colleagues is through email. And so I'm doing, I would say, on a daily basis, a lot more reading and writing than I had done probably at the beginning of my career. But it's not necessarily, it's this kind of email activity, which is somewhat different than I think what you're talking about in the study.
And I don't think it's easy or self-evident. This is where I think a historical perspective becomes helpful. Because once you start to delve into the history of the book and the history of reading and you take that long view, in some ways, the conversation that we're having today, it's the kind of conversation that's happened many times before. And the irony is that there have been anxieties, both that people are reading too much or that people haven't been reading enough. And, you know, if you go all the way back to the etymology to read Leggera from the Latin, this is a point that a scholar named Bill Sherman makes in a book on Renaissance reading and how readers in the early modern period read in a very interactive way by marking up their books and essentially talking back to them. But Sherman points out that in the original usage of the verb and the etymology of the word, reading included gathering, it included choosing, it included overhearing, even stealing, wandering, and tracking. It was really, it was a much more inclusive activity than simply consuming text. It was related to observation. And that, to me, sounds more like the kind of reading that we're now doing once again online. So, Matt, is it... Yeah. I mean, to summarize your critique, then, is your concern about the sort of mythologizing of some kind of armchair reading from the 20th century? I think so. And this is, you know, I often think in terms of visual imagery, and this is why the photography that accompanied the report struck a chord in me, where you have pictures of solitary readers. And we know historically that the look of reading has changed over time. In other words, how reading is represented visually, pictorial, that matters. And that tells us something about how we understand the activity of reading. There's actually a book. It's a great coffee table book I recommended. It's by Garrett Stewart. It's called The Look of Reading. And it simply gathers together drawings, paintings, photographs of people reading. And what immediately becomes apparent is just the variety of different social situations, the variety of different environments, postures in which people are reading. And so to me, what we tend to, I think, feel anxious about in our own present moment is the loss, the increasing loss of a certain kind of reading, that deep immersive reading that's typified by the stereotypical image of the reader under a tree. And I think that what we fail to recognize sometimes is the extent to which that is very much an idealistic image. It's a historically constructed, a historically specific image of reading. People did not always read that way. Again, if we come back to the example of the Renaissance reader, very aggressively marking up the text, or even earlier than that, medieval readers who would read out loud and read to groups of people and so the act of reading was very much one of conversation. I completely agree with that. Just philologically as you're saying, there's a great amount of history here to mine in the way that the book is portrayed and not to speak for our art director, but we were just simply looking for pictures that were aesthetically, we didn't have to crop that fit into the pages. But I can tell you what you're Right. I don't have an exclusive right to that salutary effect. And I know you're not necessarily saying that either. In other words, I believe, like you're saying, people still can mark up books. We're not trying to preserve the fetish or the artifact of the book at the expense of everything else. We're just saying that we do have these strong correlations between reading and with, for example, how well people read, how often people read. I would wager all of you are fairly frequent readers, however we might define it, because I think we would have the commonality that you read deeply, you think deeply, and you write about these issues. Now, we can't get everyone there necessarily, but I do think it's helpful to have that as a goal. And certainly reading in the conventional sense has proven, or I should rather say, reading of books is not a hindrance in that way. There's certainly some great opportunities to engage on the internet, to interact as we are doing just now. But that's kind of a slightly different form of interaction, I would argue, than one's writing and reading in a long form and then sharing it with more written critiques added onto it. And I think that's being done on the internet, too. Go ahead, Matt. I was just going to share a quick quotation, if I could. This is from 1859, published in Christian's Penny Magazine, an item that appeared there. And the shape of a romance. This led her to utterly neglect her husband, herself, her eight children. One daughter, in despair, fled the parental home and threw herself into the haunts of vice. The house exhibited the. And lots of different things one could do with that. We could certainly talk about the way that reading has been gendered, for example, certain kinds of reading, the genre of the romance or the novel. But to me, when I hear that, it sounds so much like some of the critiques that we hear about today. For example, digital gaming, where you hear these stories about the mother, it's often the mother, so again, gender does come back into it, or the father who gets caught up in World of Warcraft or Second Life or whatever it is, and the kids don't get their supper and the house goes to ruin. The media loves those kinds of sensational stories. And again, I think when we look historically, we do very much see a certain kind of pattern and a certain set of anxieties that manifest over and over with regard to new media. I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I agree with you to a point there. I do think that's certainly the case. There's always an anxiety with the new transference to a new medium, what are called disruptive technologies, often misleadingly. But I think at the same time, I think what I'm just trying to draw things back to, and I hope this is not outside the purview of this, but I feel that really a lot of this has to do with reading skills as well. In other words, we're talking about the historical, as I understand it, the historical associations with reading and whether that's in fact been elevated unduly, that is to say book reading or any reading in the conventional sense. But all I'm trying to say is with statistics showing that those who read frequently tend to perform much better on reading tests and they also tend to perform better on writing tests. And really, I don't see how in this case one can really mind necessarily that whether we're delineating that in terms of reading books or reading that online, because reading online, too, is included in that category of reading. If one reads frequently and reads widely online, then they will do presumably much better in these measurable outcomes than those who don't. And in fact, we see that reading online is often a co-occurrence, and it goes hand-in-hand a lot of times with people reading conventional text. That is to say, those who read, say, for example, books or magazines also tend to read more online than those who don't read at all, of course. And so I think some of this is mainly, I agree we need to refine the way we collect a lot of this data, but I think I hear a lot of things in common that I think our study might have been misconstrued in some ways as advocating only one type of reading versus another. Sunil, maybe you could tell us a little bit, I mean, what, you know, Tom and Matt and I all, among other things, actually teach in the classroom and have students. And what do you think the prescriptions are from this report? Is it, you know, I think a lot of people saw it as, you know, as a sort of Jeremiah ad. But are there prescriptions and are there things that we can do considering that, for instance, Matt is a owner of a shiny new Kindle. Should he be giving Kindles to all of his students? Should he be recommending they read the New York Times online? Is it to read offline as well? What is the point of it for teachers, let's say? Sure. What can we do? Right. Maybe I can answer this through a very good piece of an observation that Matt made. I mean, I think there is a misperception that reading is a passive, maybe ivory tower type activity. And we are saying through this report, particularly in the third final section, that no, those who read often engage at higher levels in a variety of social and civic activities.
But when you control for various factors such as those, you see that invariably those who read also engage more intensely in their communities. So what I would do is I think what we would like to say is that it's really, it starts with the parents. It starts with the family to, you know, read in front of your kids, read to the kids, have kids read at a very early age. If they want to start reading online, great, but I would argue that one should still not lose track of the, you know, the conventional methods. And then throughout time, especially when one hits 13 and goes into high school or, you know, enters that environment where there's so many competing pressures and time considerations, that one continues to read and possibly engage in social circles through literature and through reading. And then through college and beyond, if they go to college, you would like to see communities engaged in reading and discussing things. I know that sounds like a utopia, but I feel in some ways it's no less utopic than some things we've been hearing sometimes about the great new media. I mean, I think, in other words, there's so many things we can do with what we have already, and we should bring that into the new media means and take advantage of the unique aspects and benefits of online reading. But I just think that we would just encourage people to make reading a social and civic priority. Matt, how would you respond to that? What do you see for the future in a world where students may be using the internet more than TV and maybe gaming more than the internet? I guess what I would just want to underscore is what a remarkable moment I think it is for reading. And that to me is part of the, really the urgency and the excitement of this conversation. I mean, I look at the NEA report as one contribution to a discussion that also includes, or you mentioned the Kindle, which was actually released on the same day that the report came out. I have a colleague who has vision trouble who reads exclusively via audible.com and they have 40,000 books online. I look at Google, they're digitizing 3,000 books a day. I look at efforts like the Open Content Alliance. So there's a remarkable amount of intensity, of thought, of creativity that's going into really reimagining the act of reading, reimagining our technologies of reading, and not just imagining, but reengineering. That's something that, as we know, the book, although it has not remained a completely stable platform or technology over the years, certainly this is the most fundamental shift. It's really the moment in which we're rethinking what a book is and what reading is in ways that we really haven't for a long time. To me, I spend less time worrying about the end of reading or the decline of reading than I do simply thinking about the opportunities of the present moment. Well, Matt, Sunil, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast to discuss the report and to discuss reading in a digital form and also in those armchairs. Thanks again, both of you. Thank you don't mind, Tom and Mills. And I want to start with a new part of a website for the Newseum. That's Newseum with an N at the beginning. And for those of you who haven't visited Washington, D.C., the Newseum used to be a very popular museum that was actually across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. And they had a museum there about the news and about journalism. And it's about to reopen after many years of, it closed in Arlington and they got a great site right off of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with a very neat new modern building. And they're about to reopen, but they've already sort of relaunched pieces of their website. And I wanted to point to one in particular because I think it's a great example of a terrific interface that uses maps and uses sort of archival materials to, I think, provide viewers with a kind of way of prospecting through the past and sort of through an archive in a really interesting way. So when the museum was over in Virginia, they used to have this wall called Today's Front Pages. And somehow they were able to sort of fly in overnight newspapers from all around the United States, and they'd post them on a giant wall. And so you could kind of compare and contrast all of these big and small newspapers and what they chose to make their most important story or below the fold stories that they wanted to cover, social issue stories and things like that. And it was a nice kind of overview of news in the United States. Well, they've now moved that online. And again, we'll have a link on our digitalcampus.tv website to this. But there's a website, part of the website at the Newseum, which is at newseum.org, where you can look at all the front pages. And they have a map, an interactive map of the United States with little dots where they have the front pages of the physical newspapers. And you kind of roll over the map and it shows you different covers in the right side of the website. And it's just a great way as you kind of move from east to west or around a region to see, you know, the ways in which, for instance, Super Tuesday was covered by different newspapers. I think it's a really interesting, great interface that could be used by a lot of museums and libraries that want to put their archives online. And I think it's a nice way to also do, you know, it shows the principle of what Edward Tufte, the great interface expert, called small multiples, where the use of kind of little graphics next to each other so that it takes advantage of the human brain's capacity to compare and contrast quickly. A nice interface over at the Newseum website. Mills, why don't we go to you next? All right. Mine is a website called Aluka, A-L-U-K-A, aluka.org. And as their website says, they're building a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. And so this is an attempt to leverage lots of information from a variety or leverage the information that a lot of different people have about Africa, both contemporary and historic, and biological as well as textual and images and that sort of thing. But what's interesting to me about this particular project is that it gets at something I've been talking about for a while, which is allowing users to tag various records within the database. And so they've actually, as long as you're a registered user, then you can, any item in their database, you can add your own tags to. And this is something that we've struggled with, with projects like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and other projects that we've got about to what degree do we allow users to tag the information on our sites. And the Aluka folks, anyway, have settled on allowing people to tag whatever they want. So I went in the other day and tested out the tagging system, and it works pretty well. Their search process, the search engine within the site could be a little better, I think, than it is. It's not all that user-friendly. But it is nice to see a project that has pretensions of becoming a very large project starting off with allowing users to tag their own information. So it's worth checking out. I guess the only criticism I have is that this is not open to the general public for free. And the only reason I know this is because on my screen it says access provided through George Mason University. So they're somehow keying on the fact that my IP address is a George Mason University IP address. And so I get into the system that way. I suspect that if I were coming at it from home, I might not have that same access. I have to try it from home. I haven't yet. Okay, great. Thanks, Mills. It's a really interesting site and very varied content, as you said. Tom, what do you have for us this podcast? Well, I've got something for Black History Month, actually. It's called Amistad, the Amistad Digital Resource, and it comes out of the Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. It's a fairly traditional resource. It includes a kind of online exhibition of the history of the Civil Rights era from Brown v versus Board of Education through the March on Washington and Black Power movements and kind of ends with the foundation of the Congressional Black Caucus. But the content is very rich. It's very professional. It's very well done. So it has that kind of online exhibition component. And then alongside that, it has a set of maps and timelines, an image archive, an audio-video archive, a document archive, and then some glossaries of key figures, organizations, and institutions in the civil rights movement.
Very well done. Very traditional site. Nothing terribly revolutionary in terms of the technology, but clear, well done, and I recommend it. Great. And, of course, we will have that link along with the other links that we mentioned on this podcast on our website, digitalcampus.tv. And feel free to surf over there to leave some comments on this podcast and prior podcasts. And, of course, feel free to email us with questions or things you'd like us to cover on future episodes. Good talking with you, Tom and Mills. I'll talk to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, featuring Tom Sheinfeld, Mills Kelly, Amanda French, and Dan Cohen. You ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 62, recorded on November the 8th, 2010. PDA in the library? Well, welcome back to another edition of Digital Campus. This is Digital Campus number 62. We were just thinking that perhaps 62 episodes meant that we might be the longest running podcast in history. So some kind of an award for longevity, I'm sure, would be in order. But we're podcasting away from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason. And I'm Mills Kelly from edwire.org. Joining me today is Dan Cohen, director of our Center for History and New Media. Dan, how's it going? All right. How are you doing, Mills? I'm doing quite well. Enjoying the fall weather here in Virginia. Yeah, me too. And also our newest podcast regular, Amanda French It was sleeting this morning, and now it's snowing. Very nice. Very nice. Well, it's your fault for living there. And here, also in the nice weather in the greater Washington area, is one of our irregulars on the podcast, Jennifer Howard from the Chronicle of Higher Education and JenniferHoward.com. Jennifer, how are you? I'm fine, Mills. How are you doing? I'm doing quite well. I'm doing quite well. Well, we have a number of things to talk about today that we are somewhat surprised by and perhaps not surprised by other things. And I'm going to start with the thing that I'm, I guess, not so surprised by. And that is that the Wikimedia Foundation, we haven't talked about Wikipedia much on the podcast in a while. So I thought we needed to bring it back because the Wikimedia Foundation has recently announced a public policy initiative where professors of public policy, including one from George Mason, where the podcast is based, are going to do something really surprising, and that is that they're going to have their students write entries for Wikipedia as a way of teaching them about this vast information resource. I say surprising with a certain degree of sarcasm. That's a little familiar to me. Yeah, I say that with a certain degree of... Sorry, is that like digital campus number one? I think it is, in fact, digital campus number one. And if you're counting, this was 62 and we go all the way back to one. I don't know how many years ago that was now. It's almost four years. Almost four years ago. And I think our title was, in fact, Wikipedia Friend or Foe. And in that podcast, a certain podcaster, who shall remain nameless, talked about assigning Wikipedia to his students and how that worked. And so perhaps what this means is that the folks at the Wikimedia Foundation have begun listening to the podcast at last, and they sort of worked their way all the way back to episode number one. But, you know, I'm, okay, I'm being very sarcastic, but I think... Wait, does this mean you're off of Jimmy Wales's dead-to-me list? Oh, no, I'm quite certain that I'm still on Jimmy Wales's dead-to-me list. And anybody who doesn't know the reference can go back to edwired.org and look for Jimmy Wales's you're dead-to-me comments. Not happy with Mills. Yes. We'll put it that way. Actually, his exact words were, not a fan. So, but, and also, you know, for those who may remember, for a brief period of time, I was actually blocked from Wikipedia editing. I could actually read it, but I couldn't edit either from home or from my office, plus the classroom that I was teaching from that semester. Whoever the instructor was who followed me in that class, that IP address was blocked for a little while, too. But I'm unblocked. I'm allowed to edit again. I've been forgiven by all but Jimmy. But I mean, what do you guys think about this, about assigning Wikipedia to students? Well, I have to say it. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead, Jen. No, I was just going to say, if part of the idea these days is to teach students about information literacy, maybe it's not a bad idea to have them tackle, you know, directly tackle one of the main and often maligned sources of online information. Amanda, what about you? Oh, I mean, I'm all for having students edit Wikipedia. And it's funny because I think we get so much student work and it's always such a shame that that student work isn't read by other people. It's no wonder that students kind of aim their writing only at the professor because they know that no one else is reading it. So I think in general, opening student work up to other people is always a good thing. And, you know, having them contribute to Wikipedia is something they can see immediately and they can watch their changes over the course of the, you know, the semester as you've done or whatever. I did this with a dance class actually down at Emory. They asked me to come in and help them contribute to Wikipedia dance. There's a whole separate project of Wikipedia. And so the students wrote biographical articles about dancers who only had stubs. The only thing that I'll say is that I was surprised that this particular article that we're looking at about professors assigning their students to write for Wikipedia is that the issue of privacy doesn't come up because we get a number of people will maintain, some students among them, that student work is, it is by law private. So really you're supposed to get release forms from the students before you have them do anything like this, unless they're doing it anonymously, I suppose. But even then, you're really supposed to get a release form. But to my mind, usually you ask the students to sign a release form, and they happily do so, and you go along with your work. But that is an issue to be addressed with assignments like this. Dan, you teach a grad seminar. Yeah, we did it this semester. I'll tell you, it's one of the assignments that I like the best. It always works. And it's also, as Amanda hinted at, it's kind of the gift that keeps on giving because they can watch the changes for the rest of the semester. So we did it a month ago or so. I split the class up into four groups and assigned them some, I always like assigning contentious articles. So we looked at four articles. I'm probably going to forget one of them. But I know we looked at Thermopylae, which you wouldn't think was contentious, but the Battle of Thermopylae, Joan of Arc, Hiroshima, and I can't remember the fourth. I knew I was going to forget one. But it was a fascinating, I think, experiment. Just looking through the existing discussions of the sites, you know, this year Hiroshima was particularly interesting because that entry has changed so radically over the past 10 years in the English and in the Japanese language version. And so the students got, I mean, the reason I feel like it has so many facets when you teach this, because they learn about the writing of history in this sort of natural, neutral point of view. They also learn about debates and fact checking and footnoting in the weird way that Wikipedia does that. Edit wars, all these things in the nature of wikis. So there's a lot of different angles to it. What I was going to say before that tangent was just that, you know, Hiroshima, for instance, has changed over the past 10 years from being almost solely about the dropping of the atomic bomb to being about the city itself and the arts of the city in a kind of longer view history, which I think was very instructive for students to see how that changed and how the bomb became just one section in a much broader article about Hiroshima. In the Japanese language version, even though none of us speak Japanese, you could see that change actually. We used Google Translate and went back over the edits over the past eight or so years in the Japanese language version of Wikipedia. And you could see very early on there was enormous resistance to making the article about Hiroshima being solely about the bomb and very quickly moving it into a broader economic, social, and intellectual history of the city. So, you know, I just think it's great to get people involved with Wikipedia. It's much deeper than I think a lot of people imagine when they first see it or just if they use it just superficially. So it's always effective.
Yeah, I will say that the only problem I've had with this assignment that I came up all these years ago is that I used to say to my students, okay, find an entry on the subject that we're working on that either needs to be elaborated on or there is no entry and so you need to write one. And as Wikipedia is getting built out, it's become increasingly difficult for them to find something like that. So increasingly, my assignment turns to editing existing entries rather than creating something new. But it was always a lot of fun to turn the students loose and say, write an entry on a subject that interests you within the general framework of our course. And so when I was teaching Western civilization, that meant sort of all of Western history. And so they had a lot of room to wander around. But I think the student who got the most excited about this was one who, she didn't actually check with me in advance, but she wrote her entry on the only husband and wife serial killers known, the Birneys of Australia. And why she chose that, I really don't want to know. And however, she came into class, she came into class just sort of floating about three inches off the floor, because the day after the, her entry went up, it became the featured entry on the Wikipedia homepage. And so now what is she going to remember about Western civilization, she's going to remember that she wrote a Wikipedia entry that was the featured entry that day. And so if you look up the Bernese, she was the – and you go into the history, the creator's handle was OMG, it's Monica. And so that was one of my students. So great. Yeah. It's pretty rare for students to get a chance to put writing or ideas in a form that has a billion users. I mean, I don't think people really realize the scale of Wikipedia as a top 10 website worldwide. And so it's just incredible. I mean, when would you normally have the chance to do something like that? Yeah, I mean, exactly. When would a freshman in college be able to write something that millions and millions of people read that day? So, so. I'll say too that, I mean, another assignment that I think one could assign and something that I did a little bit in my creating digital history class last year is even if there aren't a great many text additions to be made to Wikipedia, I think lots of articles need references and even updated references. So I could see your assignments, Mills, maybe changing from being write this article to source this article, you know, find sources for it, add new sources as they come out, you know, because Wikipedia always needs that. And I think they're very good about being vigilant at making sure that articles are sourced. And when I was working with archivists last year, we looked at articles that said, look, when you link to primary sources in your archives from Wikipedia articles, because a lot of those are online at the item level, the traffic to those items goes way, way up. So particularly for librarians and archivists who know all these unique special collections materials on these arcane topics and know where they are on the web, I really think it's a public service for them to put that in the references to Wikipedia articles. Yep. Well, I think you're absolutely right. And speaking of libraries and archives, there's been a lot of buzz about libraries the last week or two, in particular about a proposal from Bob Darnton up at Harvard about creating a national digital library. Jan, you had a chance to talk to Darnton about this. Tell us how that conversation went. Sure. Well, Darnton hosted a top-level gathering at Harvard at the very beginning of October. He got about 40, 42 representatives from the library world, the foundation world, some of the top foundations were there, including Sloan and Mellon. It was a very, it's probably wrong to call it top secret, but it was not publicized. Media were not invited, but I called Darnton up afterward just to see how it had gone. And he was really gung-ho about it. He said that everybody was on board with this. Critically, I think he was very pleased with how the foundations felt about it. They all seemed willing to step up and put some cash toward it. So he was actually less worried about the financial outlook for this proposal than he was about the copyright issues, which of course is what Google with its mass digitization project has run afoul of. Darnton seems to think that as far as creating a national digital library, there are various terms one can use for it. It doesn't have to be national per se, but something that would really be overarching, that it's going to be the copyright issues that are the most troublesome, not the financial picture, which surprised me a little bit, but maybe shouldn't have, as I thought about it. Yeah, that surprises me quite a bit. So why isn't the funding a problem? I mean, doesn't it require, I assume, several hundred million dollars to... A year. Probably so. Now, nobody has made public any specific plans about how the financial structure of this thing would work. They do, they are planning to, they have a game plan of some kind, an action plan, which involves, I think, getting more formal commitments from foundations and putting together some kind of governance structure. It's not clear where that would be housed, if that would be housed at a foundation or at Harvard. I mean, somebody has to be in charge of organizing this, you know, octopus of a project. And I haven't seen any specifics yet. So I'm very curious to see, you know, what kind of projections they're looking at and how much they can draw on things that are already in place. You know, would HathiTrust be a big part of this? I'm guessing yes, I think. But, you know, I don't know what kinds of, I don't think there are any formal agreements yet. in DC. And DLF is an organization that's been around for a while, since 1994, and it's been a standard-setting organization, and it's been this essentially consortium is not quite the right word, but association of major research libraries and the kind of digital library part of that. And so there was some discussion of this at the DLF Fall Forum, but it's the kind of thing where all of these major research libraries have, as you said, Jen, they've been doing things kind of piecemeal. Even HathiTrust, which takes files that Google Books has digitized and makes those available through a nice little interface, it's not one of these web scale things. Web scale was a term that kept coming up at the DLF Fall Forum. So I think that there was a lot of willingness to be involved, a lot of the perception was everywhere that, yes, we as libraries need to band together, club together, and provide something that, you know, everybody would know where to go to find digital books, you know, besides Google. I think there's a lot of willingness there, but yeah, what the administrative organization would look like, what the technical infrastructure would look like, that's still to be determined. One thing that I was struck by after my conversation with D'Arnton, I got a note from somebody at a foundation whom I will not name, but he said, D'Arnton is a wonderful guy, great ideas, great champion for this idea, but he's not the only person who has this idea. There are other people involved in this as well. And this is a at i think at the meeting um and that made me wonder how organized this group is internally um if they're not even sure what is you know who can say what now um who speaks for the group does anyone speak for them um i'm sure that that partly is coming out of a sense that this has to be a collaborative and collective enterprise but it's such a big idea somebody has to be a traffic controller of some kind and and they've also gotten tangled up in some of the rhetoric surrounding the project some of you may have seen paul caron's post about darnton's use of the term cultural patrimony to describe what the contents of this digital library would be and that provoked several people were upset or upset or concerned that D'Arnton had used this charged rhetoric. I think D'Arnton used it in a, what was meant as a constructive way, but it's a term that's fraught for a lot of people. So if they're already getting, encountering rhetorical hurdles, I'm wondering how they will handle the more practical and substantive challenges involved. That's a tactful way of putting it, yeah. Well, and for me, I mean, we have such an organization already. It's called the Library of Congress that is charged by Congress with doing this, although in an analog world.
It'll probably be a little bit, but I think it will begin to emerge. But I wonder the degree to which whatever emerges is then direct competition to the mission and purpose of the Library of Congress. And at what point then that's going to be coming up with a national plan for preserving digital infrastructure. It's got all this, you know, this material it has to do things with already. It's got too much to do already. Oh, I completely agree. So Jen, did you get a sense of which path this is likely to go, whether it will be, you know, I think Amanda, you brought up the web scale notion and the technology I think about that's web scale is the web, which already has collections that are at endpoints that could be virtually aggregated. And so one version of this project seems to me to be some kind of virtual aggregation, you know, decentralized, but maybe with a centralized interface or search tool to scan these various books or materials, which kind of already exists in some ways, but maybe not to the extent or the ease of use that, say, Google Books has. The other option is more like HathiTrust, where you're actually depositing an archival digital copy into some center, which I believe the grid for Hathi's at Indiana, I want to say, their main technical infrastructure at IU. I think it's at Michigan, actually. Is it at Michigan? I think so, but I'd be wrong. Or maybe there's a couple of centers. But still, it's a centralized technical infrastructure. Do you get a sense of which way this is going? I did not get that sense from Darnton. I think he's not the nation, to LCE or whatnot. Well, Darnton made it very clear that this was not an anti-Google gathering. Was anyone from Google there? No, I don't believe they were. I don't know if they were invited or not. And why was it secret? I mean, even though it wasn't top secret, but why? I guess this is just my way of expressing sadness that I wasn't being invited. I'm sorry, I wasn't invited too. My impression is that there was some concern that the foundation folks in particular and some of the governmental representatives were there. They didn't want their involvement made too public too early, not because they're embarrassed about it, just because they didn't necessarily want to be committing publicly to anything before they had a chance to hear what was going on. There's kind of a debate about whether it was really a secret meeting or not. Okay. So it was more expectations management than some kind of secret cabal that was... Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely. I don't think it was meant to be, you know, exclusionary in a scary sense, more just, well, this is, you know, there are a lot of people who have, foundation people, you know, notoriously sensitive about what they're going to commit to publicly too early. But is there, honestly, is there any hope that the copyright issues are going to be overcome by this attempt? Boy, that's a great question. I don't know, but I'm hearing more and more urgency when I talk to librarians and others about the need for copyright reform. Although at a recent meeting, not a meeting I was at last week, but a couple weeks ago, somebody was saying, well, but look at everything that Congress has on its plate. Are they really going to get around to copyright reform right now? This is urgent for librarians and scholars, but maybe not for the people who actually make law. Certainly not for the next couple of years anyway. Yeah, yeah. Well, but also who's, you know, which party is the champion of copyright reform? I mean, the Republicans are against it and the Democrats are against it even more. I mean, like they each have constituencies that are, you know, lobbyists who are against it. I mean, there's no point. Well, I think at the very least, it's not immediate, but we're going to get some discussion about copyright reform coming up in six years or so when you get the Sonny Bono Term Extension Act, you know, it's going to run out, right? They reinstated, you know, they lengthened the term of copyright for 20 years back in 1998. So in 2018, Mickey Mouse is going to be in danger of going into public domain again. And I guarantee you that will light a fire under copyright discussions, even if we don't get any before then. We're also about to get a new register of copyrights. Mary Beth Peters is retiring. That's an interesting hidden story. I mean, with Ed Felton going in, into his role at, people don't know this, the Princeton professor, who's really done a lot of work. You know, I would say in this area of, well, you know, computer security, but also in, you know, working for kind of a fair and open environment for computation in the United States. He's now become the chief technologist for the FTC, which is, you know, really unusual and interesting. He's been the person who's been, he's argued against a lot of these, the Diebold machines, voting machines. He's done a lot of work on their security. So, you know, he also was a witness in the United States versus Microsoft antitrust trial. So, you know, I think he's been, by the way, and, you know, saying that he was a critical part of that trial in that he showed that you could uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows, which Microsoft said, no, no, no, it's this will happen, but a Larry Lessig type person as the copyright officer would, I think, change things. And the Google book search settlement, if we ever get one or get a ruling on that, that amended settlement, that may also change the legislative picture some, depending on which way that goes. Right. Do we have any sense of what's going on with that? I mean, it was supposed to be resolved, you know, a year ago and then six months ago, and now we're all waiting around. I have heard nothing. I mean, I, you know, I keep, I've been trying to keep tabs on it since it's something I will need to write about whenever we get some kind of ruling, but I hear, I about it. I hear much more chatter about Google Editions. But as far as when we get a Judge Chin ruling on the amended settlement, I have no idea. It could be today. It could be six months from now. It's funny you mentioned Google Editions because I was just about to bring that up. Because Google Editions, and again for those who don't know, Google Editions is essentially the Google e-bookstore, right? You know, Google selling electronic copies of some of the books that it scanned, the in-copyright books that it has scanned. And it was actually supposed to go live this past summer and is now delayed. I think I read an article that said, oh, maybe fall. I wouldn't be surprised if the delay in that has to do with the Google Books settlement as well. Might well. Well, from the sublime, the National Digital Library, to the mundane, individual libraries. Jen, you were at a conference in, you said, I think, Charleston, where one of the hot topics was patron-driven acquisition. What is patron-driven acquisition? Sounds like print-on-demand to me. Well, it can have that component. The conference I was at was the Charleston Conference, which has been going for about 30 years now. It's not associated with any particular professional association, not the ALA or anything like that. But it's where librarians and publishers and some vendors of materials to libraries, you know, people like Ibrera, Yankee Book Peddler, where they all get together to talk about this very practical as well as larger thematic issues that are affecting all of them. It's an interesting gathering. It's not an unconference, but it's less formally organized than a lot of the scholarly conferences I've been to. But anyway, I think I counted at least nine sessions out of a three-day program on this patron-driven acquisition. It comes in a lot of models, a lot of flavors, if you will. I'll give you an example of one of these. A library, an academic library can get from its vendor a bunch of catalog records for e-books, drop those records into its catalog as if it already owned those books so that users, you know, you or I can go in that catalog and we're clicking through and we'll see those books, those e-books, and be able even to pull them up and read through them as if they were already part of the library collection.
If two or three users select the same book and spend some time browsing it or printing out parts of it, that can be a trigger event. You can set a number of different options for what demonstrates enough interest on the part of your users. But a lot of librarians are trying this and with fairly good results. They can burn through a lot of money quickly doing this, you know, if people, if they don't set the trigger events correctly. But they know that users are interested in these particular books because the users have shown that by using them. Now there's some argument about how much use really constitutes genuine research interest, but it's a much more targeted way of buying materials than just going in and guessing what people are going to want out of a publisher's, you know, catalog or these approval plans a lot of libraries use where they say, I want everything from Oxford University Press and classics, and then 50% of it doesn't get used within five or ten years. 50% is the very general statistic one hears a lot in the library world about how much material just sits on the shelf. You know, I just figured out how to make my next book an academic bestseller. While you were describing that, I formulated my plan, and that is I'm going to hire a group of undergraduate students or maybe even just high school students, and they're going to go to the websites of all the university libraries around the country and request copies of my book. One nice thing is that the user in most cases has no idea that his or her actions might trigger a purchase. As far as you can tell, it's just there in the catalog for you. So there's a little more. I still love this idea of gaming the system. Well, people used to do it with search, right? They would hire companies to do just search requests over and over. All you have to do is assign your own book in your classes. You can't just be old-fashioned about it and do it that way. Which, by the way, I found out just the other day, just as a total aside, that that's not illegal in the state of Virginia. It's illegal in the state. It's not illegal. It's illegal in Texas, where I used to work. I'm just surprised. Now I know how to make more money and write books, which I did. I know. I live off the $13 that I get each semester from my, my royalty check. Um, so Jen, I have a couple of questions. What, what about how do libraries answer the question? First of all, of the, I don't know, the serendipitous, you know, bumping into it on the shelves question, which, you know, I don't know if I've, I've got that question, but maybe at some large research libraries there would be people who would kind of wonder about that question, that if it's not physically present, you know, and that's their method of kind of browsing, that that's an issue. Sure. There's that question. And then what about the overall market for academic books? Yeah. as you said, I think almost very casually, the fact that this might lead to a lot of libraries to just unsubscribe from buying every classics book from OUP. Right. Well, I think librarians are getting much more comfortable with that idea. But going back to your first question about the serendipity of browsing, one thing that struck me as I was interviewing librarians about PDA, sort of a lovely acronym for this concept, is that patrons, both students and faculty members, are getting much more comfortable using e-books and just getting the book on their computers, their laptops, wherever they are, not going to the stacks anymore. Of course, there always will be people who love the browsing of actual books on actual shelves, particularly in fields like art history where e-books have not really caught up yet to what the field expects and needs. So there's not, librarians will also tell you truthfully that they're not doing away with print acquisitions. In fact, they can use some of these models for print acquisitions too. So in most cases, it's not like all the books on the shelves are going away and you'll only be able to get them through your computer. But going back, going then going on to the question of what about this object only exists when it's wanted. One thing that I found fascinating when I was talking to librarians about PDA was that they're keeping statistics on usage of books by publisher, which if I were a publisher, I'd find very scary. And I think that what they're seeing is that the reputation of a publisher does not necessarily guarantee that its books are really going to be used. So I think the librarians are hoping that this will get publishers thinking harder about what they're publishing. Maybe some of these books shouldn't be published or shouldn't be published in this form. There's a lot of waste in this system, arguably, and this may be a way to help publishers think through more carefully what they're doing, which gets us into a lot of the raging debates about tenure and promotion criteria and credentialing and all those good things that we see. Right. Because, okay, when I was in high school, PDA was public display of affection. Too much PDA was kind of gross. And then there was the personal digital assistant. And now there's patron-driven acquisition. Okay. But I like it because it is PDA. It's a public display of affection for a particular book. Exactly. Exactly. It's people expressing their love. Amanda, you had mentioned Amazon's plan to become kind of a limited lending library. Does this sound like a similar development, a connected development? Well, yeah, actually. Yes and no. What I was thinking before you gave us that great explanation, Jen, was that if you have a Kindle or an iPad, there really isn't any way for a library to buy an e-book and then lend that e-book to, you know, 50 patrons. Unless, of course, you buy the device itself, download a book onto that, and then loan the device out. So I've often thought that somebody clever should come up with some way for, I don't know, people to buy an e-book on their Kindle and somehow share that back up to the library so that you could, I don't know, you could borrow a Kindle from the library, buy a book on it, read it once, be done with it, and then give the Kindle back to the library so that other people could then read that book, something like that. But yeah, Mills, I know what you're referring to is the fact that the Kindle now has a very mild and limited form of lending, which is good, but it's so limited as to be useless for libraries. And actually, I think kind of useless for most individuals too. You can, you know, it sort of guts the whole copyability of e-books generally, you know, of digital files. You know, you can loan it for 14 days if the publisher allows it only once and while you've loaned it out, you cannot yourself read it. So, you know, I think it's a sop to people who hate, you really are dependent on their good graces. But it's a good thing. And I have to say that thinking about this a good bit, say that we live in a world in which all books are electronic, which I don't know that we'll ever get to that world, but say that we do. And then, you know, what happens to the library in that world? And I think that it honestly would not bother me a huge amount if, you know, the model of the library as we know it, whether a research library, a university, or a public library, goes away as long as e-books remain cheap enough to where you really can get them when you need them. And that's what I'm worried won't happen. I think that in a world where almost everything is an e-book that is a book at all, there has to be some right to, um, acquire that information without having to pay a whole lot for it. So, um, yeah, I mean, right. I mean, I think that we're going to end up with in the next few years, a lot of what, um, when I try to get a, um, an audio book out of their electronic audio books you know files essentially from my local public library and of course it only works on Windows it's entrapped in some kind of horrific DRM that I can never get to work and so I have to boot my Mac into Windows to try to get this all to work. And it's got all kinds of crazy restrictions that, you know, while I'm listening to it, somebody else can't listen to it, even though it's a digital file.
You know, I assume we'll get a lot of that. You know, I kind of wonder what will happen to libraries of the size we have here at Mason, you know, the one to two million volume, you know, pretty much recent, you know, past 100 years, you know, doesn't have a deep catalog of rare books. You know, past 100 years, you know, doesn't have a deep catalog of rare books. You know, what happens to that world in Amanda's scenario? What happens to that kind of library? I mean, I still get the Library of Congress, your Harvard's, your University of Michigan's. But it's hard to imagine. I don't know. It's hard to give the rationale for why, you know, Fenwick library here sticks around. It's a lot of heating and it's a lot of physical time and it's a lot of people. And I love libraries, but I'm just saying, you know, aside from that fact of a kind of upstairs, downstairs, well, this is where the poor people go to get their sad old printed books. You know, what happens to you? Because it's not really in which all, there are no free e-books is that there is a lot of free stuff on the internet, right? There's a lot of free information on the internet that isn't a book. Right. Yeah. One thing I'm hearing from librarians a lot as I go to these conferences and do interviews with them is that they're redefining themselves not as a place but as service providers. There was a fascinating presentation at Charleston given by a medical librarian from Johns Hopkins University. They have a medical school library, obviously. And they have been given, I think they've been told to get rid of 80% of their print books by 2012. And they're repurposing the library building. The building itself is going to be something else. It's not going to be a library. What they're doing is embedding the librarians within specific departments of the medical school so that the patrons, they said, just weren't coming to the library anymore. So the library has to go to the patrons. Now, that's probably, given the nature of medical training, a more extreme example than many libraries would be confronted with. But the librarian said that – basically said that we're a set of services now. We're no longer an institution of cultural memory. So we're not that. This was very interesting. Yeah, I find that very interesting because it's so reminiscent of a conversation that Tom and I – and I never mentioned. Tom was not on the podcast today. Tom, unfortunately, couldn't join us, but sends his best wishes to all of our listeners. But Tom and I had this conversation with one of the big telecom providers about doing some mobile apps several years ago. And they told us at the time that they felt like their business model as a telephone company was already over. And that although it was just sort of their legacy business, and that really what they were planning to be was content providers. And this was before the smartphone. And so, you know, clearly they had it called correctly. I mean, the phone companies, although people still do use their phones to make telephone calls, they use it less and less for that purpose. I'd be interested to see what the sort of overall use of a smartphone is in terms of calls versus other kinds of data that pass through the phone. Well, I think it's very clear that libraries are in a tremendous transitional period, and it's completely unclear to me anyway, and I think to most people in the library business as well, how it's all going to turn out. So we'll stay tuned. Briefly, at the end of the show today, I want to ask Dan to tell us a little bit about a new development at the Center for History and New Media, omeka.net. Dan, can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Well, this is intended to replace all libraries worldwide. And archives. Don't forget archives. That's right. I think this idea has legs. We're trying to hasten the end time. And I'm just kidding. It's the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. The audience has already labeled Amanda as a library hater. And I'm worried now I'm getting the same thing. All right. No, I'm just joking. People may know Ameca. It's one of our two big open source software projects here at CHNM. And like all the things we do, it's intended to try to sort of make easier a lot of the more difficult digital things that people do at digital humanity centers. One of which is getting digital collections online and making a nice looking website and making collections searchable, scannable, and also extending them to include things like maps or exhibits or contextualization or note taking capabilities. And so Omeka is something that really has developed specifically in the last two years here at SageNM, but really comes out of really a decade's worth of generalized code for making, you know, online collections that are really nice to look at, are easy to look through, but also have really rigorous back ends that adhere to standards, library standards, yes, digital library standards, archival standards, and are really easy to administer, even if you have no technical experience. So Omeka for the past couple of years, it's almost coming up on a couple of years, has been available for free. Everything we do is free and open source, of course, but you had to have your own server or know how to use a host to install Omeka before uploading or scanning your collection and putting it online and putting it into exhibits and putting a theme or a skin on top of that. So what we've done now is the project was always intended to really help out museums, libraries, and archives that maybe didn't have their own IT staff, technical staff. And we've taken that a step further by actually now providing our own hosting for people who don't even want to download it and install it, but just want to get right going with a collection. And we're charging on a cost recovery basis. It's really quite modest. The plans, I think, start at $49 a year, which will, I think, be good enough for a lot of small digital collections to go online. So not much more than a hosting plan would cost, or probably even less in some cases than a hosting plan would cost on a per month basis. But if you go to omeka.net, O-M-E-K-A dot net, you can find out about the Omeka plan. And there's even what I'm really excited about for pedagogical uses. There's a free plan that you can sign up for. So if you've got students, you can have them sign up for the free plan and they can host a small collection and just sort of get used to what it's like to put a digital collection together, what it takes to kind of get things organized online. And then to just begin with playing around with some of the Omeka plugins and geolocation and all the kind of fun things we do in digital humanities. So it's a really good way to get started. And we don't really think there's anything else out there like it. And so if you're interested, try it out. There's also larger institutional plans for universities and large museums and libraries if they want to just buy a blanket plan and roll out as many online exhibits as they want or digital collections as they want, they can go ahead and do that too for modest cost. Hey, Dan, can I ask a question? Sure. On the microblogging service, which shall not be named, I noticed that several people, it looked as though a lot of people were kind of interested in this, you know, bigger than big plan, like interested in getting customized plans. Is that right? Yeah. I was surprised by that. Yes. Sorry. No offense. Pleasantly surprised. Oh, thank you, Amanda, for asking about our extra large super plans. This week only listeners to the Digital Campus podcast get 50% off. No, yes, of course. We in fact, we have gotten already some calls. And actually, this is done through a nonprofit that we spun off from CHM called the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, which also runs the payment systems for Zotero storage. And so all this goes into a 501c3 corporation with a board that actually includes librarians and others to administer the financials and the governance of that. And so there are contact points if you go to Omeka.net for contacting people at CDS, the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, to talk about bigger plans. Because yes, we can pretty much provide unlimited storage.
So I thought that it would be like this rare case where somebody would want the huger than huge plan. And this actually relates to something that we didn't put in the lineup, but that I'll just mention. It's similar to a university going to Google Apps or Google Email, which I noticed a couple of universities did this last week. NYU decided to move all its email to Google Apps and things like that. So to me, it seems to suggest that here are these big institutions that don't want to take on the burden of hosting and managing something itself. and technical infrastructure savings. So actually in retrospect, it doesn't surprise me that some of these large organizations which are used to paying tens of thousands of dollars for an equivalent to a digital collections management system for $1,000 a year can get essentially a very large plan. So we're trying to do here I think what we've tried to do in other places is what's going on in the web in general, which is that the cost of these things have come way, way down. And that there are these legacy systems that cost, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that are being replaced by much less expensive web apps with relatively inexpensive and much easier to use plans. And cloud storage. And cloud storage and the virtualization of storage, which has come way down in price. So if you don't know much about Omeka, go to omeka.org. And of course, it's still and will always be free. It's under a GPL license. So if you know what you're doing, you can do that as well. And actually, there are web hosts that will roll out an Omeka site for you. But we just wanted to make something that is just drop dead simple. I mean, literally, just type in your email address and a password, and you can get going and start uploading things. And then if you need more storage later on, you can just add that as you wish. So this is really, I think, a very common kind of freemium model that you see now on the open web. And we hope it'll be a big success. And institutions that subscribe to the funded service will also get the warm fuzzies of knowing that that money is channeled through a nonprofit back into further development of the general open source Omeka platform. Well, thank you very much, Dan. And just speaking as somebody who tried it out in my class on Thursday right after it was announced, I can say the students figured it out in about three minutes and went and just ran with it. So it worked extremely well in the classroom environment. Well, we've reached the end of another Digital Campus podcast. Jen, thank you so much for joining us. Good to be here. Great to have you, as always. And thanks us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. Here it goes.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, featuring Tom Sheinfth of December, 2010. The Year in Review 2010. And it is time for the fourth annual Big Stories of the Year Roundup here on the Digital Campus Podcast, something we love to do every December. I'm Dan Cohen, broadcasting from the Center for History and New Media, where it is a frosty day outside with a cataclysmic one and a half inches of snow. We're recording a little bit later than we expected, but glad to have here in the hearth of the room, we have, of course, Amanda French, our newest addition as host of Digital Campus. Hey, Amanda. Hi, Dan. I'm wearing a red velvet formal floor-length ball gown. It is very nice. We noticed that on the red carpet, and thank you for dressing up. I am wearing a tux, at least on the top half. I have sweatpants on the bottom. Welcome back. We also have Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. How's your tux fitting you today? Fitting not quite as well as it was last night at the holiday party. Lots of food and drinks to be had. Also coming off an excellent CHNM holiday party with a lot of food, drink, and mirth and bad gifts. Vuvuzelas were traded. And also Mills Kelly. Hi, Mills. Hey, I'm still smarting about somebody stealing that USB-controlled rocket launcher from me. That was just the best. I know. That traded hands quite a bit. We have a process here at the Center where you can steal other people's gifts, and the USB-driven rocket launcher was highly popular, although there were many excellent gifts. Well, let's dive right in. It's been a great year, 2010, and we decided to mix it up a little bit this year. Normally we've done a countdown from 10 to 1, top stories, but this time we're going to go around the horn and discuss one big flop that we saw this year, one big hit, and one story to watch for 2011. So let's kick right in. Amanda, what's your big flop of 2010? Well, it's a medium-sized flop, but I have to say that the revolution so far has not happened in terms of libraries putting up a whole lot of resistance to insane journal publishing prices. So I got very incensed by and excited about the University of California System's protests against the Nature Publishing Group's attempts to raise their prices 400%. And basically that fizzled just a little bit. You know, apparently, you know, there weren't huge boycotts of nature publications. It wasn't, at least hasn't so far, been the enormous blow for open access that I hoped it would be. Apparently, the University of California and Nature Publishing Group came to some agreement, which is more or less secret, and that's really all we know about it. Yeah, you know, I think I said on Twitter I was hoping this would go nuclear, but I guess that was not to be expected. You know, I assume that the faculty wanted their journals at the end of the day, and it was going to be hard, really, for everyone to go to war over this. It does highlight the continuing secrecy around these agreements with publishers, doesn't it? Yeah, they're always, you know, they're contract negotiations. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure really on both sides, honestly, for to keep the actual prices secret and the actual terms of the deal secret. So, you know, what was interesting about this, at least, was that it did get a lot of actual data out there about what the journal prices are. And, you know, so that's good, at least. Right, right. It's a great site that I saw this week, writetoresearch.org, that's organized by students. And it's the first site I've seen that really does a good job just visualizing the prices of these journals, mostly the scientific journals. But they've got a great video introduction that just shows the graph of journal prices against inflation, you know, up several hundred percent versus general inflation being something like 80% in the last 25 years journals and libraries are kind of in this, you know, in this death struggle, this death struggle. They're in this kind of mutual suicide pact, it seems like, in a way. The journals need the libraries. The libraries need the journals. Everybody keeps raising their prices. Nobody can really back down. And meanwhile, we're starting to see alternatives, open access alternatives that aren't, that, you know, aren't, aren't published through the normal channels and aren't distributed through the normal channels, which, you know, published through the presses and distributed through the libraries. They're, they're published in different ways. They're distributed in different ways. And it seems while the libraries and the big publishers continue to continue to, you know, fight these battles. Some of us, you know, I think many of the listeners of this podcast are, you know, busy getting on with it and coming up with new ways to disseminate scholarly information. Yeah. Amanda, you were going to say something? Well, yeah, I just, I, more and more, I really, I think there's data on this as well about the decrease in individual subscriptions to scholarly journals. And I always wish that somebody would just come right out and say, look, if this is so important to you, maybe you should subscribe to it yourself individually. And hopefully there would be subsidies for those prices through grants, particularly since these are STM publications we're talking about. But again, that didn't happen and doesn't look like it's going to happen. Libraries are going to... I gave a talk recently, actually, which I'm still revising to put up on my blog, but I gave a talk at Metro in New York City. Metro is the Metropolitan New York Library Council. And so I was talking to some librarians and I used a phrase that went something like, this service ethic thing, get over it. You know, stop helping scholars so much because sometimes it becomes a little codependent. You know, I mean, libraries often, you know, there's everybody in libraries knows that a lot of scholars do not know how much these journals cost and do not make the connection between, hey, we provide these journals free labor and then our institution has to buy them back. And so I feel as though if people had to subscribe to them individually, they would learn that a little better. Yeah, the incentives are just all screwing the entire system. Well, I guess that's also maybe something to watch for 2011. Mills, what's your big flop of 2010? My big flop of 2010 is the demise of Delicious. Oh, man. This is like late-breaking news, isn't it? Yeah, just like in the last day or two. Yahoo, the owner of Delicious, pulled the plug as part of their continuing efforts to stay in business. Yahoo's continuing efforts to stay in business. And so Delicious, which was, I don't know what, two years ago, was the coolest thing ever in social bookmarking. And used widely on campuses, right? Oh, yeah. For the purposes of this podcast, it was important, right? Yeah, and I was a big Delicious user, although I didn't use it in the social bookmarking way. So I didn't ever take full advantage of the system, but it was the way that I saved all the web content that I was using for, I don't know, a year and a half or so. And then this thing, I don't know, Dan, maybe you've heard of it. It's called Zotero that came along. It strikes a, it sounds familiar. Yeah. It's this weird kind of name, Zotero, but anyway, it sounds like Albanian or something. It does sound slightly Albanian. Albanish. So when Zotero came along, then I just stopped using Delicious. And so I'm part of the problem, I guess, but Delicious is done. So for all of you out there who have been relying on this, what was a great system for keeping track of all your web content that you were using, best of luck with that because it's over. And it underscores really the problem of scholars depending on services that are owned by profit-making or in the case of Yahoo, I guess, loss-making entities because I'm sympathetic about Yahoo's need to balance their books because they do have stockholders that they have to satisfy. What worries me is not delicious because I had migrated off of it. What worries me is Flickr, which is awesome, by Yahoo.
Oh, man, that's such a good point. Particularly Flickr Commons, which I love so much. And as I was scanning through the stories over the past year that we covered on Digital Campus, I got reminded of a lot of things. One of which was that Flickr Commons a while ago had decided not to accept new partners until 2011. Again, that's another thing to watch. But I just think Flickr Commons is hugely important. I mean, I've been saying since Flickr Commons launched, and I hate to do, there's going to be a few I told you so's in the next couple of minutes. It's okay, we get to do that. It's for sure. Yahoo doesn't have a commitment to cultural heritage. You know, it might be a nice channel for people to do some, you know, some interacting with the public and some kind of Web 2.0-y kinds of things. But as a digital strategy for libraries, archives, and museums, which it has kind of played into a kind of broader digital strategy that has, you know, where there's, you know, sort of preservation language and stuff. It just isn't that. And I don't think we can kid ourselves that these commercial services are really places where we should invest an awful lot of our very precious, very limited resources. So I think this delicious failure and the specter hanging over Yahoo and Flickr should give us all pause that when we dedicate a couple of people at the Library of Congress to putting stuff up on Flickr, are those resources better spent somewhere else? I think we just need to be mindful of that as we move forward with, you know, in this new environment. Yeah, I think what disturbed me the most was how sort of casual this casting off of Delicious was where, you know, it really was important. It made it on a lot of lesson plans for educational technology. And, you know, to hear the CEO of Yahoo effectively say, like, it had become tiresome for them, you know, I can't imagine they had an enormous team working on it. And, you know, it just strikes me as, you know, sometimes the reason these things go away is really rather marginal, you know. Okay, Tom, we need to move on to you. What is your big flop of 2010? Okay, another I told you so. My big flop of 2010 is Second Life. Oh, Second Life. You know, we heard... Oh, Second Life. Yeah, we heard... Oh, yeah. We have been beating this drum for years, haven't we? Vindication in 2010. libraries, archives, and museums, again, poured considerable resources into building up Second Life properties. You know, not necessarily cash, but certainly staff resources. And we heard earlier this fall, I believe, that Second Life is now going to start charging for educational purposes. And there's been an exodus of sorts from Second Life because of that. This is, again, the risk of using commercial services that are free for now and exist for now, but don't have good migration paths. It's not easy to get your stuff out of Second Life or actually, for that matter, it's not terribly easy to get it out of Flickr in a way that would be useful to repurpose in a collections management system or in an archival system or other ways. Companies, as they should, make decisions for the benefit of their shareholders and their bottom line. And when the bottom line for the shareholders doesn't match the bottom line for the cultural heritage professional, that's just too bad for cultural heritage and education. So, you know, that's, again, another example of a flop, and I told you so, for 2010. Well, Tom, let me ask you something, though. I mean, to me, Flickr Commons and Second Life are rather different things because, number one, it is a lot easier to get your data in and out of Flickr than it is Second Life. You know, it's not quite as closed a system. And the other thing is that Flickr just has so many users, whereas Second Life, it never seemed to me as though, you know, a whole bunch of people were going to be using it in a really mainstream way. So, you know, to take the other side for a second, I mean, I think it's really important, actually, for cultural heritage institutions to go where the people are you know which is why i like um some of these efforts to put materials out there in in places where the people already are so what's what's your response i'm not i i first of all i don't think there's a a you know a one-to-one equivalence between Second Life and Flickr. I wouldn't say that. I also, because I do think you're right, I mean, Flickr is a much more open system. Although what I mean when I say it's not all that easy to get your stuff out, what I mean by that is, you know, so all of this interaction that happens on the Flickr site where, you know, and people always kind of point to the examples where a commenter on a particular photo provides some key identification of a person in the photo or provides some information, a date or other information that the institution didn't have previously. The problem with that is, you know, it's not easy. You can get the photo back, but you already have the photo, right? What you can't get out easily is all that comments, like all that interaction happens on their site, and it's kind of locked into their site. There's no easy way to migrate that back to the benefit of the institution, of the institution's main systems. Now, as a place for public engagement and kind of ephemeral public engagement, sure. I think that's a valid point. But I think there is a story here about putting too much time into commercial properties that you just, you know, we should just know what we're doing when we're doing it, I guess is what I would say. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Tom, thank you for that big flop of 2010. You got your rant in. We need to tell our audience that we're getting all the rants in early in the podcast so we can have triumphant, you know. I'm going to be totally upbeat for the rest of the podcast. Okay, that sounds good. I'm going to spread the holiday cheer. I'm going to mix in some happy songs behind your voice. Okay. I guess it's to me, my big flop. My big flop was a service that just a year ago, everyone considered, you know, there were these incredible calls that this was the future of computing and communications on the internet. Of course, I am talking about Google Wave, which also saw its demise just recently, or I shouldn't say demise. It has been moved into the Apache Software Foundation as it has become Apache Wave for people who had totally forgotten about the maelstrom over Google Wave when it launched. This was, of course, Google's attempt to leap ahead several generations ahead of email, IM, social networking, etc., and creating the most complicated interface I have ever used on a computer, I believe, maybe since the TRS-80. I couldn't figure it out. I think everyone else couldn't figure it out. And so late this year in 2010, they sacked it. And everyone was so excited that it has joined the Apache, of course, Apache Software Foundation, which runs the Apache web server, which runs two-thirds of the web. But it is in what's called their incubator. And I sort of checked this out to see, well, how alive is Wave now that it's moving over into the Apache incubator, which is sort of like its startup area. It actually joins 30 other projects, including such exciting projects as Apache Chukwa, Apache Droids, and Apache Wookie. And as you can tell, for instance, Droids is a intelligent standalone robot framework. So this is definitely the home of geeks, as it should be. And maybe that's where Webb should have gone to begin with, I suppose. Yeah, I'm a little sad about Wave. I mean, I never really grokked it, to be honest. Thank you for using that very geeky word there, Tom. Yeah, I thought I'd throw that in. But I certainly never really used it. But I do think there was something to the idea of kind of bringing all your different kinds of communications, instant messages, longer form writing, email, sort of text message type communications, kind of tweets, all that kind of, all those different ways that we sort of message each other and we kind of share thoughts and ideas and written thoughts. bringing that all into one place and having it available for group sharing, for group work, was kind of an interesting idea and a good way to go.
Yeah, they probably did, didn't they, in their new messaging? Right, their new messaging system where they're going to kind of bring all that stuff together. But what they're going to do is they're going to do it in a way that's kind of accessible and that's going to be easy for everybody to grok, not just the Uber geeks. So I do think there's a nugget of an idea there. I just think it was, this is an example where Google tends to leave things up, totally up to the engineers. And sometimes the engineers build things that only an engineer could love. Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder about things like Chrome OS, which I'm sure will be a big story in 2011, or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be the big flop of 2011. But they do commit large resources to big ideas, but more than anyone, they're very willing to kill things off. And I guess this is just an echo of what you were just discussing, Tom, with Flickr Commons and other online resources that are hosted by companies. Not trustworthy. Well, Wave will live on, and we will follow it, along with Apache Droids and Apache Wookie, which I don't know what Apache Wookie is, but I'm excited by it. I'm actually hoping I never find out what it is. Right. I'm wondering, you know, CHNM, people that might not know, but one of our big rooms was actually occupied by intelligent standalone robots. So I'm wondering if they were actually running on Apache droids. I'll have to ask them. Now, they've been banished. We took over. They were slow and very not Battlestar Galactica-like. So we were able to evict them at a quarter mile an hour. Okay. Let's move on from depressing stories to uplifting one. Big stories of 2010. Let's start with you, Amanda. Big stories of 2010. Yeah, what's your choice? What do you think is number one? Yeah, I would say e-books and e-readers. Good choice. It's a whole kind of failing sub-stories, but had the launch of the iPad and the iBook store in April, launch of Google e-books just last week. I was actually doing a little, I don't know if you could call it research, but Googling on just the pricing of the Kindle. Back when the Kindle launched back in 2007, it was $399. And you can get it for $139 today. And plus there's competitors, but like the Nook for like $149. So, you know, e-readers have really, I think, gone into the mainstream. And there's still some, you know, interesting, I don't know, competition going on between which e-reader and DRM of e-books and all that. But, and then I guess the other thing I have to say that's kind of interesting to me about the rise of e-books this past year is, so before, before the rise of e-readers, there were such things as e-books, but they were books that you would read on your computer. Libraries would subscribe to things like NetLibrary. They still do that. And those really didn't have, they were not widely adopted. They were not convenient to read, all those sorts of things. So there have been e-books around for a long time. But what I thought was kind of interesting about 2010 was that while we did see the rise of the e-reader and of e-book stores where you can buy books specifically for the e-reader, we also saw a lot – I think we're seeing books on the web as well. I'm not sure that – I almost think that the e-books on e-readers might almost be a little bit of a gateway drug to books on the web. I'm just happy to see that the rise of the e-reader hasn't totally killed the notion of books available in a browser. So that's kind of interesting to me, and that I think is just a huge story. Yeah, I mean, it was pretty remarkable how quickly this transition was made. I mean, even just a huge story. the phone with people that, you know, a lot of people I wouldn't expect are, you know, asking me about, you know, well, should they get a Kindle? Should they get an iPad? What's the difference? What's the, you know, what's better for reading? You know, it's really taken over the, at least the mental space, the mental share of interest. And I think that's going to accelerate in 2011, won't it? I think I read that in 2009, 3% of total book sales were e-books. In 2010, it was 9%. So that's a 300% increase. And in 2011, they think it's going to be 20%, which is actually a conservative estimate. So I mean, talking about it, one-fifth of all books over the course of three years. That's really rapid. I mean, CDs and DVDs didn't have that kind of adoption. I mean, it's astonishing. And you know, a tiny little story that came out in 2010, which I'm not sure we covered on the podcast, but the New York Times really recently started including eBooks in its bestsellers list. They used to kind of track them separately. And now, like if you publish, you know, an e-edition, an e-book edition, that's allowed to be considered for the New York Times bestsellers list, which it didn't used to be. Stuff like that, you know, is fundamentally a changing landscape of the way we read. Yeah, and I guess it's going to have an impact, as we did talk about on the podcast this year, on libraries and their purchasing decisions. Will they end up being just subscribers to giant e-book databases, or will they continue to enhance their physical stacks and book sales? Certainly going to have a huge, huge impact, And I think we can definitely say that 2010 was the year this broke. Absolutely. Mills, what's your top story of 2010? Okay, so my top story for the year is the rise of Android as a really reasonable competitor to the whole Apple app store and all of that. Listeners to the podcast know I fought off the desire for an iPhone for many years and waited and waited. And sure enough, Android came along. And so I got one. And why did I get one? Well, largely because I'm locked into my Verizon account with Fios and everything else. But I have been really happy with the service in the sense that I like having the apps. And it's been nice for me personally, but also I think, Dan, you and I were talking about this at lunch yesterday, it's going to be very interesting to see when other services than AT&T are allowed to sell the iPhone, what that's going to do as well. But the main thing is that there's now competition. And I think competition is good in this marketplace. You know, I don't think it matters which service has more apps available in their app store because there are already too many. And so they're way more apps than anyone could ever possibly think of wanting in their lives. And so I think that competition has been really good. I think it's going to force Apple to continue to get better. I think it forces the folks doing Android things to get better. So all in all, I think it's been a really positive development. Yeah. We didn't actually end up seeing what I think we predicted last year for Android, which was I think we were excited about it because of its openness and the possibility that there could be Android devices that you could use in the classroom because they were unlocked. You didn't have to pay a monthly fee for them. We didn't get the Android equivalent of the iPod Touch this year, did we? No. I guess we started to get Android tablets. The big one of those is the Galaxy Tab, which is still tied to a T-Mobile contract. But I think there's – And it's expensive. I mean in terms of what we were talking about is a cheap kind of touch device for the classroom. Yeah. At CES in January, the Consumer Electronics Show, I think we're going to see a ton of new Android tablets and smaller devices drop. And I think 2011 is going to be the year of the Android tablet. I think we're just going to see... Oh, now you're getting into predictions now. Yeah, okay, sorry. There's going to be tons of them. Can I just mention something about that too, though, is coming back to my story, my big story.
And that's actually been really interesting to me too, particularly because Kindle, I think, did it exactly right where they had a Kindle app, which you can get, I think, for Android as well as for iPhone. And it's kind of amazing that those don't compete, right? You can use your phone as an e-reader and or still get an e-reader. So that's one of the important applications that you can get. Well, there's actually, you know, there's even more convergence. One of the interesting things about e-readers is one of the new developments is the launch of the Nook, the color Nook, which is, in fact, an Android tablet. It's a full-color touchscreen. It doesn't have a keyboard or anything. It's running on Android. And the word is that it's going to get Android 2.2 Froyo updated, the full OS, in January. So the Nook is now kind of pushing into the tablet space. And it's a nice little device. I know my sister-in-law has one. And so I think we're going to start, and I think we saw that with the iPad too, it's kind of pushing into the Kindle's territory. And I think it's going to force the Kindle to kind of converge too. So I think we're seeing a lot of convergence. And I think it's because of all this competition and because of the rise of Android, which is now outselling. Android phones are outselling iPhones. And so, you know, as Mills said, I think that's just good for innovation. That's just good for consumers. That's just good for everybody. Okay. Well, Tom, why don't we stick with you? What was your big story of 2010? My big story is something that is probably of more narrow interest, but certainly of tremendous interest, I think, to this community, our audience, is the Library of Congress's acquisition of Twitter this summer. If you can remember back to, I guess, June it was, June or July. If only it were interesting to all the members of the podcast. It's interesting to me. I keep really wanting to do all kinds of research with Twitter, which I can't because I can't get access to the archive. have taken. And so I think the Library of Congress made a big splash with the announcement, but I think it reflects a broader commitment that I think is that the Library of Congress has had to preserving internet, web, and digital content through their end-it program. And I think it's just a further recognition of the importance of electronic communications and the electronic life. So I think it's going to be an even bigger story when we have access to it and humanists are able to start and social scientists are able to start doing some research on the corpus, whatever that looks like. We talked a little bit last time about how WikiLeaks might change the face of scholarship by emboring diplomatic communications, making diplomats less likely to communicate that way. I like that coinage. It's really difficult to say. I actually don't recommend it. But yeah, but we have such, you know, the rise of archives like this Twitter archive. I mean, just think about how that's going to change historical research in the future. I mean, that's just insane to think about. Yep. Okay. Yeah. And I wonder if now they could step in and grab those delicious links before those go away. Probably not. But it seems like there's a bunch of these services. I mean, Facebook probably being the number one thing that will lose quite a bit of history if that goes offline. Yet again, thinking about the downsides of the cloud. Well, my number one choice is the obvious choice, which is it's the iPad, people. It has to be the number one story of 2010. And I think maybe the iPad as a symbol of, I guess, a lot of what we were just discussing. You know, it was the Swiss army knife of touch computing. It did e-reading, it did apps. And I think the rise of app stores is probably a part B of this, that the importance of apps and what this might mean for higher ed and applications for higher ed. All of this was implied in the magical box that Steve Jobs dropped on us in January, although we didn't get our hands on it until April. But I think it was, you know, surely we'll look back and see that this was a really major time. I think really what happens with Apple devices like this, as it happened with the iPod, is somehow they kind of magically bring together a lot of things that are in the air and they put it into an attractive packaging that's a consumer packaging. And I think that's why it had this effect as a kind of catalyst for touch computing, app computing, e-reading, lots of things. I think there's probably a lot of people who see an iPad ad and then go buy a Kindle because they see the iBooks ad on it. So I think it just had this sort of effect of increasing the activity in all these areas. And I think it really was the device that changed so many or implied future change in so many areas in academia, libraries, and museums. I'm sure that there are lots of museum iPad apps out there now, and there'll be more in the future. I can see them being used in a lot of different ways. So I think just the imagination that one has when one sees the blank canvas of the tablet was really crystallized in the iPad. And for me, I think that's got to be the top story of 2010. Yeah, and I don't mind saying that I was about 80% sure that the iPad would tank a little bit. And so I, um, if I ever, uh, opined such in public, but, um, yeah, so I, I was very wrong on that. And I've been surprised, I guess one of the things that has surprised me about the popularity of the iPad and all the Me Too tablets that are coming along, because I think it's not too much to say that we wouldn't have things like the Galaxy Tab if we didn't have the iPad. One of the things that has surprised me about that has been that, to me, they're such consumer devices in the literal way, not just that they're for the consumer market, but that, to me, they're really not very good input devices. And in fact, you know, calling the iPad a tablet to begin with, before we heard what the iPad really was, people were imagining it would be a thing with a stylus, you know, where you get to write on it and have handwriting recognition or something like that, you know, which there had been versions of that before. And it's not that at all. It's a reading device. It's a, you know, yes, you can do a little bit of email on it and so on. So I may even, as I say, I'm not wanting to buy an iPad for that reason, but I have a feeling that I may not have played with it enough and that once I go and play with it some more, I may be converted to that. Right. I mean, for me, it just became my kind of evening couch device and most significantly for reading. And I think where it excelled over something like a Kindle, which I admit is a very good reading device and is considerably lighter. And I do have like carpal tunnels now from holding my iPad all evening. But it is it had enough of the apps like newspaper apps, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, very solid New York Times app, although it crashes all the time, which is rather annoying. But then apps like Instapaper, which I think are the really revolutionary part of the iPad, where you can send any bit of text, whether it's an academic article or a blog post or a newspaper piece or a magazine piece, you can send them all to your Instapaper queue and it really formats them in this sort of really beautiful, almost invisible design, but that your eye reads as a piece of paper with a slight curl to it. And it really just gets reading right on this kind of a device. And so for me, it kind of automatically assembled a nice chunk of reading for the evening and allowed me to kind of phase out some, but not all, as my Twitter account will attest, some of the kind of background noise, particularly email. And I think the fact that it wasn't a windowing system, I think everyone was thinking, and I think certainly in the Android community, people were thinking in terms of devices with windows on it. And I think the real breakthrough was that the iOS team decided to maximize everything, just like on the iPhone, so that you can't see the edges of other windows like your Gmail window when you're reading.
So I think there's a lot going on with the device that was pretty important. And I think the price was important, too, to really mainstream it. Yeah, well, I think its effect on libraries, archives, museums, and universities is yet to be determined. There's a couple of pilot programs with the iPad at a couple of universities. But I still don't think it's – it's a much more mainstream device than I would have thought, especially given the price. But I don't think we're seeing wide student adoption of it yet. But I think that two trends that the iPad represents that will definitely have a big impact on higher education are that touchscreen computing and then also that I suppose you could call it just the tablet slash mobile revolution, you know, where you have these devices that are bigger than your phone, but not as big as your laptop. And there seems to be a real, real market for that. And so that I think is going to continue to be big. Right. Okay. The big stories of 2010 from the digital campus team. Let's move on to predictions. Always my favorite part of the yearly year-end wrap-up. Amanda, what is your big prediction for 2011? Drumroll, please. My prediction for 2011 is that the Berkman Center's planning initiative for the National Public Library of America will continue to plan all through 2011. You're planning on planning. Oh, I'm so in agreement with that. Yeah, I think it's marvelous. don't get me wrong. But it's a slightly snarky way of saying I don't think that much is going to come out of it in 2011, maybe later. But I think that there are such big thorny issues to be addressed with regard to building this National Public Library of America in copyright works. Yes or no? If yes, how? You know, some kind of technical infrastructure for delivering this, right? That's a huge decision and huge implementation. You know what? I think another big issue that the planners are going to be planning to discuss is whether or not the National Public Library of America will include only books. Right. Key question. you is that, you know, when I have asked what is a digital library, you get a lot of different responses as to whether that includes things like archival collections, you know, or is it only books? You know, so what this library will include, what its scope will be in terms of digital content is going to be a really huge decision. So yeah, and I don't know if anybody would like to join me in attempting to predict what the URL of the National Public Library of America will be. I did some Googling to try to find out, you know, some likely ones. I did some domain lookups and some who-is's. So digitallibrary.org is already owned by the New York Public Library. It's not being used. Nationalpubliclibrary.org is owned by a grad student in human-computer interaction at Purdue, if it's the same guy. My favorite URL, the one that I hope it has, is library.gov. Ah, nice. It doesn't go anywhere. It's just parked. It's some Time Warner parked thing. Yeah, but this is, would this be a government entity? Right, that's what I mean. Well, the National Archives and LC are, you know, on the planning committee. They're heavily involved in the planning committee. And I will say, too, that, you know, some of the critique of this has been that, despite its name, the National Public Library of America, they're not really including public libraries per se. I mean, New York Public Library and Boston Library, that's one thing. I mean, they've both got members who are involved at least in the project. They're not public libraries in the way that some other libraries are. Exactly, right. They're private public libraries. They're big research libraries. And they're not government funded. They're private libraries. Are they both? Well, yeah. I think they're two of maybe the only, but they're not run by the city of Boston and the city of New York. They're private public foundations, but they're not government organizations. Well, I would love for there to be something that is government organized and promoted. And actually, if it were me, if I were on the planning committee, I would say do only books, do only public domain for now. You know, deal with copyright later. Just, you know, set up library.gov and put up a bunch, you know, and there's plenty, you know, gutenberg.org and the Internet Archive, all those places. There's plenty of places where you can get free public domain e-books now, Google e-books. But, you know, I think it's important for us as a country to commit to this ideal that Robert Darden has been publicizing so well that, you know, we need to commit to the principle that our citizens deserve access to free information. Okay. We will, this is certainly something we're going to be talking about, I can tell, in 2011. And we'll see where it goes. I'm having trouble imagining in the age of the Tea Party getting government funding for this. Maybe in the second Palin administration. It's anti-American, Dan. Don't you know that? It's socialist. You didn't even catch my second Palin administration. I caught it. I'm trying my best here as host. Mills, what is your prediction for 2011? My prediction for 2011 is that seven university presses will close. Oh, wow. Thank you for the very specific seven university presses. Will you enumerate them? No, I do not have a list, but I predict that seven will close. There are far too many in the marketplace as it is. All or almost all of them are losing money. The financial situation of colleges and universities has not improved in 2010 and is probably not going to improve in 2011. And most importantly, Rice University did not close down when Rice University Press closed in the fall of 2010. And so if I'm, you know, on the fiscal side of a university and I'm trying to figure out how we're going to make payroll for the rest of the year, one of the things that I'm looking at is the university press, because although they're not extraordinarily expensive, they're an auxiliary operation to the function of the university. It is not necessary for a university to have a press. And so why can't those other universities absorb the cost of doing this? And we're going to save money. And of course, maybe you heard earlier in the podcast, a little discussion of e-books and e-readers and open source materials and all those other things. There never was a strong cost recovery model for university presses, and it's getting worse by the minute instead of better. And so I think the university press, by and large, is toast. And so I think seven is the number that we're going to see close their doors in the next 365 days. Seven is the over-under. Let the wagering begin. And I'm thinking of putting a death pool on my blog. Good idea. I wonder if that domain name is available. I assume you remember the fcompany.com fcompany.com I will not say the whole word since it's a family podcast. We need updeathwatch.org. Yeah. Okay. That's a better. Or maybe, maybe.com. I think we can get some good. I like this domain speculation here on the podcast. We should start buying up domains that will be, that people will need in the future. Well, my, just to say my all time favorite, many listeners to the podcast know that the Open Society Institute in New York is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in North America, financed largely by the market winnings of George Soros. And if you go to osi.org, you can learn all about swine improvement in Ontario. And in particular, if you go there today, you can register for the Banff Swine Conference in January of 2011. Gosh, I'm surprised Soros didn't try to buy that with currency trading shares or something like that. Banff in January is a pretty nice place, though. All right. Okay, Tom, on that note, Tom, what's your prediction for 2011? So I'm not sure it's a prediction, but it's definitely something I'm going to be watching in 2011. And that's the Gates Foundation and their investment of $20 million in educational technology, particularly technology for higher education.
That in itself is news, but I think in 2011, I want to see what comes of that. I'm interested to see what exactly they're going to fund. Because $20 million in this space is a lot of money. I mean, it puts them very near the top of the table with the Department of Ed and with Hewlett and with MacArthur and with Mellon in funding educational technology. And so they're going to have a big impact, whatever it is. You know, you pour $20 million into our business, it changes things. And so I want to see what those changes are, and I'm going to be keeping an eye on that. Okay. Thanks, Tom. Certainly is a little bit off the wall for 2011, but I'm going to predict the rise of data-driven multilingualism. That's my prediction for 2011. Sorry, can you say that again five times fast? I was trying to think of the longest prediction I could come up with, and data-driven multilingualism was what I came up with. Just this morning, there was an app for the iPhone only, sorry, Mills, where you can wave your iPhone over a menu that's in Spanish, and it reads the letters in Spanish and the words in Spanish and translates it into English. And I know Google is doing a lot on this front too, but they've built up such incredible databases of word and phrase pairs in English, Spanish, all kinds of from two pairs of languages that I think we're going to see some pretty astonishing changes to the way we interact with people who do not speak our language in 2011. I think there will be services, for instance, in places, and you can already see it start happening, places like Facebook, where you will have auto translation, Twitter. There are already some apps that do rough translations of tweets in languages other than the one you speak. And I think it's going to revolutionize a lot of things we do in the academy. For instance, when we're doing prospecting for research materials and we need to scan the table of contents in a book, I think there'll be ways to auto-translate that material. Google Books, I think, will implement something like this. I think there's two technologies that are built into Android are Google Translate, so it will translate any piece of text into any language on your Android device, and speech recognition, so that you can speak into any text box, into any text field in Android, in your email or in a document or wherever there's a text box on a website. You can actually hit a little microphone and speak into it and it will translate that. I can imagine, Dan, I think you're right. I hadn't thought about this, but I can imagine a convergence of those two technologies so that you would actually speak in your own language. It would recognize that and then automatically translate it and perhaps read it back to a recipient. So you could almost imagine nearly synchronous translated telephone conversations. You know, I think we're getting pretty close to that where I could be speaking in English to a colleague who is speaking to me in Italian and we could be hearing each other in our own languages. It's kind of fascinating because, so PhD programs, historically, and as far as I know, still, require, as part of your doctoral education, that you learn another language, at least one. At UVA, we had, you had to have reading knowledge of two languages, or mastery of one. And, you know, the obvious rationale behind that is that you were going to have to do some reading in languages other than English and, you know, and then potentially speak with colleagues from other countries as well. And there was a bit of a movement in the digital humanities field to allow programming languages to be included, you know, partly because they were often so much more useful. I mean, very often, like their language requirement was the last thing that all my graduate student colleagues did. They were like, oh, God, I got to go take Italian classes or something, you know, and they really didn't find a need to use it on a day-to-day basis. And since we've seen some language programs getting cut, for instance, at the University of Albany just down the road from me, I mean, I almost wonder what the rise of such translation services will have on scholarly requirements and scholarly offerings. Yeah, I think that's a great point. You know, I think what I was trying to get at with the first part of that very long phrase of the data-driven part is that, you know, Tom was mentioning these Android capabilities. And really the way that Google has gone about this is that they ran this free service for a couple of years, 1-800-GOOG-411, where people spoke into their phone requests and they used that enormous database of English-speaking people with many different kinds of accents to be able to figure out what people were saying because then it would offer you a bunch of... Whoa, I had no idea. Yeah, yeah, no, they just used that as their... Yeah, everybody wondered why they were doing that. Right, and now they've launched similar 411 services in several other countries. So, again, I think it's the data-driven aspect of it. I think, you know, probably as scholars, you're still going to have to learn French and German if you want to do European history to get the nuances. But what they end up getting is pretty good enough translations. And that's what I think is what makes it interesting, just from the huge database they have. Well, I think we've done it. I think we have covered all of 2010, or a bit of it, that we saw. Enough of it. Enough of it. Tom and Mills and Amanda, it's great as always talking with you for this year. I'm looking forward to our fifth year on the podcast and it's really something that I know I look forward to. I hope our audience looks forward to listening to it and we're wishing all of you, I think we can speak for all of us, that we're wishing all of you a very happy holiday season and a happy new year. And if you want to wish us a happy holiday season, one of the ways you can do that is by going and rating our podcast in iTunes. I think we're approaching about 1,000 subscribers to this podcast, and we'd love for even more people to hear about it and one of the ways that happens on itunes is that when people uh rate the podcast um it it kind of surfaces more in searches um and in itunes you and other places so we do appreciate your listening in and we'll talk to you in the new year on another edition of Digital Campus. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv what you can do for your country here it goes
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number 12 for the 10th of September, 2007. Productivity and connectivity. I'm Dan Cohen. Welcome back once again to Digital Campus, our 12th episode of the podcast. And we're sitting around the virtual roundtable this week with much better Skype, thankfully, after last episode's debacle on Skype with all the problems that they had. But we're here with the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld of foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hi, Dan. And Mills Kelly of edwired.org. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. And since I rarely mention my blog on the podcast, of course, I'm Dan Cohen, and I'm at the eponymous dancohen.org. Well, it is, I guess, our back-to-school edition. The three of us have begun the school year, and so we have lots to talk about, both in the news roundup and then later on in the future story, we're going to talk about one of the main things that we often encounter at the beginning of the semester, and actually at this point, with the way that the electronic world is going sort of all through the semester, and that is the issue of information overload and dealing with all the email we get from students. And if you're a student, all the email you get from professors and also all the things we have to digest from libraries and online and news feeds and so forth. So we're going to look forward to that discussion coming up after the break. But first we wanted to begin with the news roundup, as we do every week. And before we dig into the major news stories, I have to actually give some embarrassing news, actually, from the Dan Cohen household. I have to say, I haven't told the two of you guys, but I am now an iPhone owner. You are? Yes. But did you pay $600 or $400? No, $400. I got the late adopter discount from Steve Jobs there. That was nice of him, really. I have to say, I buckled under from various pressures, but the main thing was just seeing one of our Zotero developers who has an iPhone that he has, how should we put this gracefully? He has extended through various unsanctioned means. And it really shows the power of the iPhone when you see these additional applications that you can put on there that are coming out. I mean, there's probably several dozen packages. And for instance, there's a really good book reader now for the iPhone. Again, this is sort of unofficial gray market area, but the book reader is just astonishing. I mean, the quality of the text on the iPhone is really great, and I could really see some good applications. There's all kinds of amazing stuff that's coming out, and I just wonder with all this development going on by third parties, whether this will sort of push Apple to come out with their own solution. But anyway, since we've been talking about the iPhone, I suppose I had to embarrassingly admit it after saying, I believe on episode number 10 or 9, that I was going to wait at least a year. So here I am. So Tom, who won the off-the-kool when he was actually going to buckle under? We'll have to check and see. Who do I owe dinner to? Probably several people. Yeah. Yeah. wife. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, okay, in actual news, you know, it is back to school season, and a couple of stories caught our eye here at Digital Campus for players outside of the academy getting into the online learning business, two major players, actually, Yahoo and the New York Times. Maybe we'll start with the New York Times. So, Tom, do you have a good sense of what The New York Times is trying to do with this online endeavor that they just launched? Well, I don't think anybody really has maybe a good sense, except maybe the players involved. And I think The New York Times has partnered with Mount Holyoke College, Stanford University, NYU, a few other universities to essentially provide online courses, non-credit courses, but paid courses in various subjects taught by faculty members at those institutions. And I guess what they're going to do is they're going to use some of the New York Times technologies, some of the technologies that they've developed for publishing, sharing, exchanging information, along with some New York Times content as well, I guess, maybe course packs with New York Times, bundled New York Times articles or maybe possibly, I don't know if this is the case, I haven't seen anything about this, but possibly specially produced content by New York Times correspondents to create these online courses. It's hard to say, I think, where it's going to go. Part of me thinks it's just kind of a marketing partnership where these institutions are using kind of the marketing reach and power of a brand like the New York Times to bring some money in these non-credit courses. But who knows? Maybe it will actually be a more substantive partnership than that. And, I mean, isn't this something that's been done before? You know, I think the article on Inside Higher Ed mentioned Fathom, the initiative company actually set up by Columbia University, I believe, and several other partners that tried to do this in the early part of the decade. You know, I suppose that things have changed online. You know, that article pointed out, I think they spoke with the former CEO of Fathom, and she had mentioned that, you know, with podcasts sort of coming online and widespread availability of blogs and high readership of blogs that people are now used to sort of going online to learn. But I still wonder about some of the environment for, you know, paid online learning, a kind of non-credit online learning, you know, versus, you know, what's already out there on the web. There's a lot of good podcasts. I hope one of ours, sometimes we put out decent free educational content on this podcast. Why would someone pay for a non-credit course? Maybe I guess we'll have to look at how it's exactly put together. Maybe it works for certain topics and not, let's say, history. Yeah, my take on it is that colleges and universities have been offering non-credit educational experiences to their alumni for years as a way of bonding those alumni to the institution. You know, you can take summer courses, you can do study tours, you know, sort of academic tourism. They have all sorts of different things for their alumni. And so I think the interest for the institutions is to kind of continue that process but have somebody else produce the media part of it for them because they don't have the capacity to produce multimedia extended learning opportunities like this. Instead, they always invite you to campus or they send one of their professors to a place where there are big clusters of alumni. So for them, I think the advantage is really going to be to extend that process that they've been engaged in for a while into the online environment and to get the New York Times as a media company both to help with the branding of it and also to pay really for a lot of the production expense. For the Times, it seems to me that the real advantage is that this is just another part of their transformation into a media company instead of just a newspaper company. And so they get the kind of reverse advantage of the brands of the educational institutions to lend some credence to the endeavor that they're engaged in, that they're not just repackaging educational content out of their own experiences, but they're really providing you access to well-known and excellent teaching professors. So I think it's kind of a mutual advantage in that sense, but I think it's really all about the media capacity of the times and the brands. Yeah, I mean, they've got really all their stuff online now, and they're clearly poking out in a bunch of different directions with trying to find subscription-based, you know, they tried this, what was it, the Times Plus, or what did they call it for a while, where they had Select, of course, right, you know, where they tried to have some subscriptions for a while, and yeah, I mean, they're sitting on giant servers full of really high quality content. I guess it makes sense for them to do this. I'm still a little unclear about the market, but I guess we will see if 2007 is a better year for it than at the height of the dot-com boom with fathom.com. Yahoo, at the same time, seems to have taken a different approach with Yahoo teachers.
I mean, it looks more like a peer-to-peer network. Am I right about that? Some way for teachers to sort of share, let's say, lesson plans or curricula. It's a little unclear, but it's at teachers.yahoo.com. Has anyone taken a look at this? Yeah, I looked at this because as soon as I heard about it, because this is actually an idea that I had a couple of years ago. I felt so bad for you when I saw it. And I thought, oh God, somebody beat me to it. Somebody with money beat me to it. Tom and I had, I guess, the first conversations about this probably close to three years ago now. We talked to a variety of vendors who might provide the platform for it. Basically, we just couldn't find a way of financing it. I think this has legs. I think this is a project that really is going to go somewhere because there's such a tremendous need for teachers, especially young teachers, to be able to network with each other and share lesson plans and share PowerPoint presentations and all those kinds of things that they use every day because there's such a generational transition going on in K-12 education right now. And all these young teachers who end up in communities where they don't know anybody, and they're all wired together through Facebook and whatever. And so to have something like this is going to be a natural for them. And I expect that this is going to be a real winner. Yeah, you know, looking at it, it seems to me that the key here, again, thinking about what has changed in the last five years, I think it is No Child Left Behind. You know, one of the things they mention on their homepage is to share standards-based curriculum. And so you could see, you know, the High Tension Wire Act that is, you know, being a third third grade teacher, having to prepare your students for the exam. Um, uh, and suddenly you can go online, get, you know, good lesson plans for a particular, you know, uh, aspect of, of mathematics or, uh, vocabulary or something like that, rather than coming up with it yourself. I mean, what all these students, these teachers are complaining in elementary school is about the preparation time and the amount of time it takes to, to, um time it takes to come up with good lesson plans that will help students learn to ace the test. And I think this is probably coming at just the right time. Although, Mills, I think you should reserve the right to sue like several other Harvard former undergrads are thinking or are suing Facebook for the idea. Well, no, I was there. I remember you guys having this conversation. Were you bunking by any chance with anyone at Yahoo when you came up with this idea? Yeah, I'm going to have to go back through all my notes and see who was in the meetings where I talked about this and do any of them now work for the Yahoo Teachers Project. Could be my meal ticket for the next few years. Absolutely. Remember us when you're big, Mills. Well, another area that we've talked more about is Google Books, which seems to have had a very busy summer, actually. And there were a bunch of stories that came out over the last week of things that they've added to Google Books. By the way, I don't know if the two of you have seen Rob Townsend's very good article in the American Historical Association's Perspectives for the month of September. It's not online yet, but I'll link to it from my blog and from the Digital Campus blog when it comes online. But he put together a sort of critique of Google Books in the spring, and he expanded that out based on some critiques that people made of it. And I think it's, as it stands right now, it's probably the best critique of Google Books in terms of, you know, problems with quality, problems with sharing, and those sorts of things. What's interesting is that what came out in the last week, I think, begins to address some of the criticisms against Google Books in terms of it being more closed than we'd like. And I've been one of the critics about this and have blogged most recently about them needing to open up better with an API. But now, just to go through the list here, I mean, the things that you can do with Google Books that really is not available anywhere else. First of all, the clipping story. I mean, this is something very simple, but I think will really extend the reach of Google Books and make it much more usable. You can now go into Google Books and drag your mouse over a certain section of text, as long as it's in the public domain. So full text. Remember that most books after 1923 will not be available in this fashion, although there are many books that evidently authors and publishers have allowed Google to add this feature to. But as long as it's available for full view, that is, you can see every page of the book rather than getting those little text snippets when you do a search. You just drag your cursor over a section, and a little sort of clipping icon appears. And you can clip that and then take that section and embed it in your blog, embed it in a paper with a link to that section in the book. You really begin to get that feel for the way in which they really could connect up this giant database of text with other, you know, other texts, other writing, secondary sources, et cetera. Have either of you tried this out? It doesn't work every time, but it is really pretty astonishing when it does work right and what you get. It looks like a sort of teared piece of the book. I mean, what I find really interesting about this is kind of the way that, you know, kind of the Google parent company has taken a lesson sort of from their relatively recent acquisition, YouTube, in that it's not just providing the access to the books that's interesting about Google Books and having this vast database of scanned books. It's providing the ability to share that. What makes YouTube interesting is not so much that they've got lots of movies online. It's that you can take those movies and share them very easily on your own blog, on your Facebook page, wherever you want to kind of add that little embed text, you can add a movie. They're doing really pretty much the same thing now with their book text. And their maps recently. A couple of weeks ago, they added the ability to embed a map as well. So you can really begin to think about, you know, for let's say student assignments where students would do a paper online, embed a map, you know, and you can embed a map with items embedded in that, you know, like little flags that say, you know, here's what happened in my history at these locations. You can footnote it. You could point back to the book that you got a footnote from. Yeah, I think you're right. That's a really interesting point, Tom, about, you know, learning from YouTube, which really pioneered that. And I think that's what really made YouTube take off is the ability to sort of cut and paste this stuff into different web environments. They also added a feature to save books into what they call My Library. So you can set up a sort of personal library of Google Books. And this can include both full-text, in other words, public domain and full-text available books, as well as books that are not full-text. And so this competes directly with services like probably most prominently LibraryThing, which is really a kind of small independent operate, well, not independent anymore, but a small operation run by Tim Spaulding and a few others that has allowed people to sort of create virtual bookshelves and then to share those bookshelves with other people and to sort of expose your library to the world. Now you can go into Google Books, and if you see something you like, you can save it into your library. You can categorize it, essentially giving it tags. And then I think most interestingly, since there are other services like this, not only LibraryThing but also Shelfari, which is an Amazon.com company. But really, the amazing feature of this is you can put together a bunch of books in your library and then do full-text searches of those books. And that, I think, is really interesting. I mean, there you can see a lot of great applications, both for the classroom, but then I'm also thinking for scholarship. I mean, you could put together a set of, let's say, Victorian novels, let's say 1,000 Victorian novels, and then search through all those novels at one time. That is something we couldn't do before last week. So I think that this is a really interesting development over at Google Books.
I think that's going to be a real challenge. Oh, it's going to be a tremendous challenge. It speaks to the issue we're about to discuss after the break of information overload. I mean, just the example I gave, you know, what do you do to a student, or what do you tell a student that's, you know, looking at a thousand Victorian novels, whereas they might have just looked at ten, let's say, for a literature class or a history class. It really gets into all kinds of questions about what scholarship and learning should look like. Just another small feature that they added that was sort of related to this, they're clearly doing their own pre-processing of the text and particularly finding passages that are what they call popular. So they have this new feature. If you go and look at the About page for a book in Google Books, it will tell you the 10 passages from the book that are most quoted in other books. This is just a really interesting application of the database. It's imperfect now. If you try it out, it will get things wrong. For instance, if a book talks about Shakespeare a lot and quotes Shakespeare a lot, then it will say that the most popular passages in those books are actually ones that come from Shakespeare and not the author. In other words, they come from the primary text. So they obviously haven't figured out a way to disambiguate the primary and the secondary text. But still, I think it you know, it opens up some really interesting applications for, again, for scholars and students. One final aspect of Google Books is they're really starting to work more on combining it with their mapping system. And there was a great post on Inside Google Book Search. It's a blog that you can subscribe to from the Google Book Search team about integration with Google Earth, where they're now able to extract all the locations in a book, the text of a book, and put it right on to Google Earth. And so you open up that file into Google Earth. Again, your mind starts spinning, thinking of ways to use this, although maybe it's a distraction. I guess that remains to be seen. Okay, well, lots of things to discuss on this very topic of what do you do with everything that you can now extract from Google Books, as well as many other things, as we'll discussed, with Google Books, you're now getting millions of books, and you can now search through the giant amounts of text. And if that's not enough, we're already overwhelmed by email and by some of us, by our RSS newsreaders and mills. I've heard that this semester you have 100 students who are blogging, and so you have to read all their blogs. That is correct. Oh, goodness. I only have 20 blogs to read this semester, but I'm going to do the same thing next semester. So, you know, I think we're all dealing with this. And, you know, whether you're a student or teacher or scholar, researcher, we really are dealing with an age where we're just swamped by information. And I think that, you know, there's a couple of things that we wanted to discuss on the podcast. We wanted to sort of go over, of us handle it. I don't think we're perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Tom and Mills, I think you'd probably agree with me there. We're often overwhelmed. But we try to do our best, and maybe we have some pointers that will be helpful for the audience. And then to think through, well, does this information overload, you know, hurt other aspects of, you know, of our lives? And, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, how do you start a major project like a book, let's say, or an exhibit at a museum or to conceptualize a new project at work or start a research paper as a student when, you know, you're dealing with an information stream that is filled with hundreds of little interruptions every day? I think these are really big questions. But let's start really with these first questions of just how do you actually handle the information flow? Mills, what do you do? What are your tricks? What secrets do you have for us and the audience? I never communicate with students. That's a good one. You know, you hold yourself up. That's right. I just never respond to email. I never answer phone messages. It works really well. That does work very well. Yes, off the grid. Okay, that's probably the first one. After about three weeks, they just give up. When I switched from other forms of communication with students to blogs, my life got so much easier because what I did then was instead of them emailing me constantly with questions, they blogged about their questions. Other students in the class answered their questions for them. So that cut way down on the amount of email that I was getting. But the other thing I do is I tell them, as you mentioned at the outset there, I have 102 students at last count this semester, each of whom is writing something every week in one of the class blogs. And that's just way too much content for me to manage. I mean, I use the Google Reader to manage the RSS feeds and that kind of helps organize it on my screen but it's still way too much content. I just don't have that much time. So what I do is I tell my students that I will be reading what they wrote during the semester but that I'm not going to be reading everything that they write And I have a cheat sheet and in the first half of the semester, I make sure that I comment on everybody once. And in the second half of the semester, I make sure that I comment on everybody once. Sometimes I get involved in a conversation on the blog with a group of students who are interested in a particular topic but I make sure that everybody has at least comment from me, which gives them the sense that I'm reading more than I probably actually am. But I really depend on the other students in the class to carry on some of that for me because they have to comment on each other's postings and that sort of thing. And they certainly alert me if there's ever anything untoward or unpleasant going on in the blog. But then at the end of the semester, the blog management, the blog interface really makes it easy to manage going back through the students' writing. And so as I'm trying to figure out a grade for their blog during the semester, I tell them that they have to tell me what they think their best blog posting of the semester is and that I'm going to pick one or two more at random beyond that and I'll probably base their grade on those rather than the entire corpus of what they wrote because they might write something about some article they saw in the Washington Post about Wikipedia or they might post something about a student organization project that they want to alert everybody in the class to. So that's noise. I'm not going to read that kind of thing. So this system works pretty well for me. It's still hard with 102 students, but it does work a lot better. That seems like great advice and something I'll have to think about just reading the 20 blocks in preparation for next semester. Tom, how do you handle all of your email and reading that you do online? Yeah, I have a slightly different problem because most of what I do is manage a set of some large, some small digital history, public history projects. And I have just a huge load of email that I have to manage. And, you know, sometimes I do that more effectively. Sometimes I do it less effectively. I tend to switch technologies a lot, which probably wastes a lot of time. But what I'm doing right now, actually, I'm pretty much using Google's suite of productivity tools almost exclusively. Which ones do you use in particular? Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, and actually Google Notebook. So I'm using those pretty heavily to manage email, RSS feeds, calendar, and to take notes. And I find especially Gmail to be very good. I know this is something a lot of people use, but I've actually moved all my old email into Gmail, which took me forever, but has been really worth it. And I've almost entirely eliminated any folders or tags for my email because the search for Gmail, and I've got 50,000 email messages dating back to the late 90s, and the search is so good that I really don't need to spend a lot of time now filing and sorting email. So that's been one thing that's been really good. At the same time, I think one of the problems we all have now is kind of the tyranny of email. And I think we tend to get really stuck in our email and stuck in our inboxes to the point where we really don't do anything else but email.
Our jobs are to do whatever it is we're doing, teaching or researching or writing or managing humanities projects. And so I do find it really useful. I've developed some tricks to kind of stay away from my email at times. I mean, one of the good things is to just say to yourself when you wake up in the morning, I'm not going to open my browser until noon or I'm not going to open my email client until noon because it allows you to do those other things that are off email. Because I think as soon as you dive into your email box, it's sometimes really hard to extricate yourself. So that's one thing I have. Another thing that I've done actually is to set up another profile on my computer. So there's my main profile with all my documents and all my email and all my bookmarks and everything. But I've got another one, another login that I can log into, which is kind of just a clean and empty user account on my personal machine that doesn't have all those distractions of my RSS reader and my email client. It's free. It's called Write Room and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. And what it does is it essentially just kind of, you launch it, it takes over your computer, not in a bad way though, and it just creates a black screen with a blinking green cursor. And it's just a hugely simple word processor with just green text on black screen. It hides your toolbar. It hides your start menu and all that. And it's just like a blank canvas and just hides all those distractions and really can help you write. So those are just kind of the things that I do to try to keep me focused and even if there is this information overload, to keep it from drowning me. Yeah. Wow, this is a bunch of great tips from both of you. You know that Write Room, I tried that for a while, and there was actually another program that would just white out or black out all the other windows on your Mac other than the one you're looking at. And the problem that I found is that I think a lot of the writing that I do, I need stuff from somewhere else, you know, from the web or from an email. And so I found I had to keep leaving the program to do that. It's one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to, there's a new feature in Leopard, which is the upcoming version of the Mac operating system, that will actually darken the other windows, sort of, almost looks like night, but you can still see them vaguely. So they kind of de-emphasize the other windows because most computer environments, everything is this bright white behind the window you're looking at, and so you're seeing other stuff, and it's really foreground. Everything's in the foreground for you. So I think that kind of a feature is really something that people look forward to. You know, from what I've read that, you know, the key is, you know, everybody has their own system. But I think the people who are successful, as both of you clearly are better than I am, is that they limit their, they sort of funnel everything into a specific environment. You know, and so for some people, that so for some people, that's just a specific program. Some people have amazing to-do lists, and everything goes into the to-do list that they have to do. It sounds like Mills, for instance, you're bringing everything into WordPress, and having everything there, you just go to your dashboard, and you can see sort of panoramically your entire class. And you can sort of from that one point, you're at the mountaintop and you can kind of look down and look at a specific student or look at what's going on in the class in general. That's, you know, again, that sort of single point. You know, Tom, it seems like for you, the Google Apps have been really a consolidated environment where you can get a lot done. And particularly, it sounds like Gmail is something for you. You know, I'm still operating in several different environments. I use, and I've been using it since it launched. I think it's a great web application called Backpack. And I think, Tom, you use that as well sometimes. Yeah, yeah. I have had a kind of love-hate relationship with Backpack. I've gone to it and gone away from it. We've had a kind of rocky love affair, Backpack and I. But yeah, yeah, it is a great thing. It's sort of like a personal wiki or a place that you can really quickly set up lists for different projects. And it's like you know maybe a single user project management for your for your life but it i could see how it you know i've also kind of gone in and out of using it well but that is where i keep my to-do lists and i actually have a bunch of different lists and i try to keep all my work stuff separate from my you know home stuff separate from you know class to- and things like that, so I can try to knock them out. Yeah, there are some pretty good online kind of personal project management, personal task management packages out there. The Backpack is definitely one. The same company that builds it, 37signals, has kind of a more enterprise or professional version of or similar software called Basecamp for real kind of web project management. And we should mention that that's what we use at the Center for History and New Media now for all of our project management. Yeah, and it really is a nice system. There's another thing that's fairly similar to Backpack, but I think it has a little bit more functionality, although the tradeoff is that the interface isn't quite as clean and svelte, is something called Remember the Milk, which is kind of a stupid name, but it's a good product. And there are others out there that can help with, I think you're absolutely right, Dan, this consolidating function is very important, I think, if you're going to manage so that you have a kind of single intake point for all of your information where you can separate the wheat from the chaff and then focus entirely on what's important. Yeah, I've tried, I think now finally with some success on email prioritization too. Because I get just a ton of email from a number of different angles and, you know, projects at the Center for History and New Media, things from students, things from friends and family, things from colleagues, you know, just all kinds of different areas. And, you know, I've, I think I've now come in, you know, into a system of, you know, most email programs will allow you to, for instance, flag an email as being important or that you can rank it. And I would, you know, encourage our audience to check out the various ways of sort of ranking your email. And then you can sort of quickly switch views and see, okay, which ones do I really need to respond to today and which ones can wait a week or a month. And actually, Tom, I took your advice and looked into a little bit on the getting things done system. And I'm not good about systems, as you've probably already figured out. But one aspect of that really helped me, which is to, you know, I just have three folders now. And I use the Mac mail program, not Gmail. But, you know, one folder of just, you know, an action folder of things that I really need to respond to. One, which is sort of for reference. So, you know, for instance, in preparation for this week's podcast, I could store some email in that folder that I knew I'd have to look back on, but that shouldn't be in some kind of folder that's really about replying to the email. And then another folder that I call waiting, which is just, you know, email that I am going to have to respond to, but it has to wait for some other thing to happen. And I think just with those three, I finally managed to get some system. But, you know, before that, I had a kind of one, two, three prioritization ranking scheme. But, you know, it's hard. Even with these systems, inevitably, you know, we get caught behind. And, you know, is that maybe the issue here is that it's one of expectations, Mills? I mean, I kind of felt like that's something that you were trying to get across is that, you know, part of what we have to do is sort of manage expectations. And I know you were sort of kidding about the email, but, you know, is it time where, you time where everyone realizes, wow, everyone's swamped by a lot of email and it's okay if you don't get back to someone for a long time?
I'm not ready to declare email bankruptcy yet, and I think I've kind of gotten it under control because one of the things I've done is just every email that I read now, I ask myself, do I really have to respond to this? I mean are they really looking for a response? And I never send email anymore that says thanks for the something that somebody else sent me because when you aggregate all those thanks emails over the course of a year, it probably takes two days' worth of time that you could better use somewhere else. The other thing is I don't respond to work emails on the weekend. I will occasionally respond to friends and family over the weekend, but I do not respond to people from work. I don't respond to my students. And this is just kind of behavior modification for everybody who's in my email circle is that when I'm at home on the weekend, I'm either working on stuff that I really need to get done for work and so therefore I'm not going to respond to emails or I'm with my family. And so I work very hard Monday through Friday and sometimes I work on Saturdays, but on Saturdays I don't respond to work emails. And that really helps a lot too. Well, what about that Mills? I mean, that does raise the sort of final question that we wanted to cover about, you know, how do you do something big? I mean, in this age of lots of little annoyances, like millions of blog posts and emails, how do you, how do you start a big project? How did you, you know, you're, you've started to work on a new book project. How do you carve out the time for that? Tom, I think you had the good advice of just not opening your browser and not opening your email, let's say, until noon. What other techniques can we do to do something that really requires a concerted effort and new kinds of thinking rather than little email responses or blog posts. I sit down at the computer and I work for an hour and a half or so, maybe two hours depending on when everybody else gets up. And so I get work done then and that's just really the only time of the day when I can carve that out because by the end, if I tried to add an hour or two at the end of the day, I wouldn't be able to think straight. So that's really the only way I can do it. And when I'm at my desk at home doing that, I do not connect to the Internet. So it seems like we've come full circle. Going off-grid does seem to be actually a viable strategy, I suppose, right? Just unplug, turn off the Wi-Fi. I think so. I mean, I think one of the things a lot – a lot of us have forgotten too is the telephone. I think we send emails, like Mills said, for all these little thank yous. And we send – we respond to – we take 20 minutes to craft an email that would take 30 seconds to take care of over the phone. So I think some of the solution is to disconnect. Right, right. And to use phones, which is precisely the reason that I bought the iPhone this week. As we do every week, we like to end the show with going around the horn and throwing out some links or resources or tools that we found over the past couple of weeks. And maybe we'll start with you this week, Tom. Yeah, I've got a tool. I was talking about Gmail and the Google Apps suite that I've been using so much in the last segment. And one of the things that makes it actually usable for me is this little Firefox add-on called Customize Google that I use. Basically, what it does is it allows you to make some minor tweaks to the Google Apps and actually the Google Web Search interfaces so that, for instance, you can get rid of all the ads so that your Gmail doesn't have ads. Because I think one of the things that really annoys people about using Webmail clients are the contextual ads that the program puts into all your emails. This can get rid of those. It allows you to hide certain of the menu items if they're not things that you use. And it allows you to set security settings differently than the default settings that Google provides. So it does a lot of little tweaks to the user experience of the Google apps that just makes it a little more usable for kind of everyday and power users. So it's customized Google. Great. Mills, what do you have for this week? My site this week is actually a very useful teaching site for people teaching history and sociology or administration of justice, anything like that. It's the famous trials by Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri, Kansas City Law School. And he's collected, I don't know, it looks like about 35 famous trials, mostly from American history but not entirely. There's the, for instance, the Dingo trial from Australia in 1982 and the trial of Socrates. But mostly it's American history, the Amistad trial, the trial, the O.K. Corral trial of the Earp brothers, the Mississippi burning trial, the Oklahoma City bombing or O.J. Simpson. And it's a really, really nice teaching resource because he's combined kind of the crucial documents. So, for instance, in the Clinton impeachment trial, there's the Starr report and Clinton Senate testimony and a deposition from Monica Lewinsky. And all of those kind of crucial documents are there, but it's not information overload. It's not the full record of any of these trials. It's just enough to teach them. And so it makes a really nice teaching resource. So I use it a lot. I like the site. Yeah, it's a great site. Very appreciative of Linder for putting it up. Yeah. It doesn't have the world's best web design, but it's got fantastic content. And it's one of the sites that Roy and I highlighted in Digital History. Well, for this week, I wanted to point to one to-do list. If you're around for a to-do list. And it is from the folks at 37signals, which produces Backpack and Basecamp and all these other tools we use. But this is just their stripped-down to-do list, and it's just called Tadalist, T-A-D-A-List.com. And it's just the simplest way to really get a to-do list on the web. And, you know, one advantage of it being on the web is it's really great for multiple users. So if you, you know, have to coordinate something with your partner, you can go ahead and, or a group, you can put it up on the web, check things off. It's got all the real usability and beautiful design that all the products from 37signals has. And what's really nice is you can also subscribe to the to-do list via RSS. So, again, thinking of our theme of trying to aggregate all of your stuff that you're doing in one place, I really use Google Reader very aggressively for a lot of different reasons. I subscribe not only to blogs, but a lot of different kinds of feeds. And so you can actually subscribe to a to-do list right in your reader. And so see as things get checked off right in your reader, which is a really nice way of, again, sort of just getting one web page that gives you an overview of your world. Well, one final site that the three of us actually wanted to highlight, since this podcast will be coming out on September 10th, is that September 11th will, of course, be the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks of 9-11-2001. And, of course, the Center for History and New Media, along with the American Social History Project, has put together a site called the September 11th Digital Archive at 911digitalarchive.org. It's one of the best-known sites for remembering 9-11 and contains over 150,000 digital objects contributed by tens of thousands of people from around the world. Email and artwork and photographs and stories, video, audio, BlackBerry communications, PDFs, all kinds of things from that day. It's a really comprehensive archive that was put together not only by us, but also by all of the many contributors. And it's a great way to sort of, if you want to wake up on 9-11 and just browse the collection a little bit, get a sense of what other people were doing that day and what they thought about that day. And I think it's a good way to remember the day. Again, the September 11th Digital Archive at 911digitalarchive.org. Well, we'll be back again in two weeks for another episode of Digital Campus. Fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself.
Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. you
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number three for the 4th of April, 2007, CI, Cyber Infrastructure. I'm Dan Cohen, this week's host. Well, we're back once again for Lucky Podcast number three. And I'm Dan Cohen, as you just heard in the introduction. And I'm here once again with the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld. Hey, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly. Hey, Mills. Hi, Dan. How are you today? And I should say, as you can hear from Mills and Tom's crisp voice on the podcast this week, that we think we've finally resolved all of our sound issues. We all have high-quality mics and high-speed networks, and so this podcast, I think, is going to sound considerably better than our first two. And as we said, I think in last week's podcast, we're learning each week, and we hope that you're learning along with us. And we've certainly learned a lot about sound and how to make it better. And so hopefully this will sound good when it receives, when it gets to your downloads. We wanted to start, since yesterday was April Fool's, we are not going to do an April Fool's podcast, although some of what we say may sound ridiculous. But we did want to discuss a little bit. Tom Mills, did you hear any good April Fool's jokes in the area of digital humanities? Well, I did notice that Google bought OCLC. That was kind of an interesting purchase for them. Yeah, I saw this one online, and it had all the merits of a good April Fool's joke because it was based in something that was believable. It could happen that Google might do that, and the people purveying the joke certainly made it seem a little believable. And so for a few minutes, I thought, wow, maybe they really did do that. It's interesting this year, I don't know if the two of you noticed this, but so many of the jokes, the sort of tech and academic jokes from prior years that used to be about Microsoft and their world domination have now all become about Google buying people or merging with people or coming out with products. And I think it's just very telling that now Google is the kind of center of most of these April Fool's jokes. So does that mean we should sell our Microsoft stock now? I think we should have done that a long time ago, but it's probably a little too late for that. You know, and I think Google has done a good job, actually, with their own. Every year they always have pretty good April Fool's jokes, beginning with the pigeon rank scheme. I don't know if you remember that. You know, and I think Google has done a good job actually with their own. Every year they always have pretty good April Fool's jokes beginning with the pigeon rank scheme. I don't know if you remember that from a couple of years ago, were they? I sort of remember that. They said that they had an army of pigeons sitting in a lab ranking web pages by pecking at keyboards. And then they of course had the famous Google moon unit where they were going to have a base the moon, or was it Saturn or some other planet? But they actually had a pretty good one this year that was exactly the joke that we were going to have on the Zotero site, which was they had on their Google Labs website something about how Google's coming up with a technology that writes your papers for you. And so it totally stole our joke. So we didn't end up posting it on the Zotero blog. I mean, it is interesting, though. I think this OCLC story originated on an official American Library Association blog. And it made the rounds of the web pretty quickly to the point where I think some people who maintain blogs, respectable blogs in history, the humanities, library science, and other disciplines, picked up the story and ran with it without really reading the article to the end to the point where they they gave away the joke and i think a lot of people really believe this and it says something about the power of blogs and the kind of casualness of the medium uh... and how it how it affects the way uh... professional and disciplinary disciplinary news travels around but i think i think you're right tom and and it also shows how much easier it is to purvey hoaxes in the digital age than it used to be. I mean, there are a number of excellent hoax websites. The best one maybe is the Boilerplate site, which is the history of a Victorian-era robot, which the website has the advantage of everything in the website is true except for the central premise, which is a lie. And it's very convincing in its design. It looks like a good history website. And if you're not careful, you could be taken in, as one of Jerry Seinfeld's writers was, who discussed it in a book of his about comedy. And he thought it was a spoof of a Victorian-era robot. He didn't know that the whole thing was a spoof. Yeah. And I also think just the velocity of the blogosphere. I mean, the problem I have now is if you really participate in this, you know, in the blogosphere and you're reading all these things, they're found out so much faster too. I mean, you really have to try to get to sort of pull something over on other people just with a number of eyes that are looking at these things. You know, I remember there used to be pretty good April Fool's jokes that would really catch a lot of people, including ones about Microsoft, you know, buying Apple and that sort of thing that sounded legitimate. And now I think people are more, you know, they're trying too hard in a sense to make this stuff up. But anyway, we wanted to also mention just as a follow-up to last week's or two weeks ago, we discussed YouTube. And in the interim, we've of course seen that News Corp and NBC and some of these big groups that see a lot of their content on YouTube are now banding together. I think the snickering comment of the week about this was that it was a Me Too Tube rather than YouTube, but these big media organizations trying to come up with their own structure. And I suspect it's just not going to work because they won't be able to build the kind of community that YouTube already has. But it'll be interesting to see what, you know, is NBC News going to put up free content or is this just entertainment content that'll go up on these sites, the SNLs, clips from SNL or something like that. I mean, to some extent, these big media companies are already doing this. I mean, there is video content available on NBC's site. That's true. Fox News' site. I mean, CNN has tons of video content up there. It's streaming content. It's not in the cool Flash player that you can share and pass around. But it's already up there. I just don't see what they're doing that's all that different. But, you know, who knows? Well, I think there may also be a necessary step in future lawsuits as well because if they've got a site where they're purveying their own content and then that same content shows up on YouTube, then they can show some sort of commercial harm being caused by YouTube. That's a great point. Plus, they can also show that they can filter out their site, which I assume is what the argument will hinge on, is that Google is going to argue there's no way that they can, you know, that's not humanly possible to vet everything that comes in through YouTube. And so if NBC and News Corp have a site where they are vetting everything, they can say, hey, look, we did it. Why can't you do it? You have all these math PhDs on your staff. So I think you're right. It is a good bargaining chip for them. And isn't that what happened in the end with Napster? The judge didn't say that Napster had to close its doors. The judge said Napster had to come up with a way to filter its content of copyright material, and they couldn't come up with a way to do that. Right, exactly. And that's what killed them. Yep. Well, I guess we'll see what happens there. But I think that the kind of content there is probably not likely to have, you know, the historical content that Mills mentioned.
So I think probably a lot of that content will remain on YouTube. Well, we also saw in the past couple of weeks, speaking of lawsuits, and we'll try not to turn this podcast into all the all lawsuit edition, although inevitably some of these things come up. I think there's actually a very interesting lawsuit going on right now with the plagiarism company Turnitin. For those of you who don't know Turnitin, it's used by a lot of colleges and universities as well as I think some K-12 school systems to find plagiarism. Yeah, and I think the suit is a K-12. Right, that's right. That's right. The lawsuit, I think including some students from our area, right? McLean. That's right. Virginia. And they have sued turn it in because the way turn it in works is that they take papers that have been submitted to teachers and professors and add them to their database. So they, you know, take a text dump and stick it in their database. So their database continues to grow based on the work of all these hundreds of thousands or millions of students who are writing these, you know, term papers and so forth. So they're not only scanning content on the web to see if a paper matches any of that, they're also scanning existing papers in their database. And it really, you know, I thought about this early on. It just, you know, what about all these students who are essentially contributing to the value of this company through their papers? I mean, I understand why you'd want to do this, but I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a lawsuit up till this point. Yeah, and, you know, speaking as somebody who actually uses this site with my own students, I completely agree with you. I think there's a real legal issue to be defined here. At the same time, whether it's the Turnitin model or some other model, there has to be some way for teachers to combat this sort of rampant plagiarism that's going on made so easy by digital media. Since I started using Turnitin this semester for the first time, where my students actually turn their work in through the project, and I have to say I've spent virtually no time wondering about the work that my students have turned in. It's so obviously their work and not work that they've copied from somewhere else. And so probably for the first semester in five or six years, I'm going to have no honor cases to submit at the end of the term. At least I hope that's the case. And have you ever had matches from the database that are copies from materials from students? In other words, it's not? Sure, sure. Last semester, I had two cases that I turned in. One was a match from a website, which Turnitin identified. I was taking the student papers individually and submitting them through the system if I had some reason to suspect the paper, instead of having all of the students turn in their papers this way. And then I had one student paper which came from a database of papers for sale on the Internet. And so, you know, both of those cases are in front of our honor committee right now. You know, it's interesting. I mean, in some respects, this is the same issue that Google has to deal with. Definitely. You know, I mean, and really any project that's based on this kind of wisdom of crowds model has to deal with these kinds of copyright issues. I wonder if a possible solution to it is for students to have some kind of, you know, like no bots header on their paper so that, you know, like you can make your students hand in their paper through Turnitin and Turnitin will check their paper to see if they're plagiarizing. But if they say to Turnitin, I don't want you to save my paper, Turnitin won't actually add it to the ongoing database. Right. But then, you know, then their whole model is challenged because then, you know, if a lot of students opt out of adding their paper to the database, which I assume a lot would, just if only to snicker at these adults who are trying to catch them, then, you know, you've got these papers that are sort of offline and out of the database, and they can be copied without an infraction being noticed. So I think there's a real serious issue here about it. And I'm surprised that they've kind of had a free pass on this. I do think you're right, Tom, that a lot of it has to do with the kind of copy first, ask questions later culture that Google really has to operate in. And it'll be interesting to see how this lawsuit plays out, especially with the Mirror lawsuit about Google Books, where they're saying, well, you know, we got to sort of copy the stuff first so we can find books better and, you know, do all these things and just provide snippets. You know, it's a lot of the same logic is there. Except that, you know, I think in this case, probably the students have an even better case than people who just have web pages out there or, you know, where they have the expectation that search engines are going to come along and sort of copy their stuff. In fact, a lot of people want that, so they're visible. But students, you know, these papers are sort of personal things. They might not be particularly happy with, you know, how their term paper came out, and all of a sudden it's going to go sit in some database in perpetuity. I think they've got a great case. I think they're going to win. Yeah, I think they might. Do either of you guys know how this thing actually performs and how it deals with things like quotations? How does it distinguish between legitimate copying, because there is a difference between copying and plagiarism, and Joseph Riegel, who has a blog which we'll put in the show notes he had an article a blog post about this this week that there's a difference between legitimate copying for instance in a quotation and plagiarism and how does I mean does the algorithm deal pretty effectively with that? It does I just this morning since we were going to talk about this I looked at some papers my students turned in over the weekend. And when you look in your inbox, it gives you a list of all the papers turned in, ranked either according to the student's last name or according to the suspiciousness of the paper. And so the paper that was at the top of the questionable list said, the report says 36% of the content of the paper is questionable in some way. So you pull the paper up and then it gives you two choices, two buttons to click on. One is exclude quotations and the other is exclude bibliography. And if you exclude those two, I did on this particular paper, I excluded those two things and then there were two sentences in the whole paper that looked questionable. And those, you know, I looked at those and those are kind of normal random sentences that probably show up in a bunch of papers because anybody would have written those sentences. So therefore then the paper is fine. So you can set your preferences to exclude everything that's quoted. And then, you know, so then it tells you right away whether the paper seems fully suspicious, one you need to spend some more time on or not. And do they provide links to websites or things like that where they know it's been copied from? Everything that is identified is questionable. There is a direct link to the website that it came from or to a paper in their database. And if you ask for the paper that's in their database, you have to write, it sends an email message to the instructor who that paper was submitted to. And then that instructor decides whether to send you a copy or not. So Turnitin does not send you the paper. The instructor to whom that paper was submitted sends the paper. Right, but isn't the holder of the copyright is the student, right? I think this is what's going to be decided in court, whether the student writing the paper is the copyright holder or the institution to whom the school or the college to whom the paper was submitted is the copyright holder. And, I mean, I guess this is an older issue with PhD students and other students having to submit their dissertations to UMI and things. I mean, it's a requirement for PhD candidates at most universities to submit their dissertations to these republication services. It's required by the university. But, you know, in fact, the copyright is held by the student. But at least in those cases, yeah, I mean, but we all had to sign, you know, I remember signing the legal document of the rights way. I wasn't happy with it. And it's often sprung on you, you know, right when you're submitting your dissertation, and what are you going to do?
No, and can't legally sign a legal document. Exactly. They're minors. So it seems really bizarre. And my understanding of the copyright law is anything they produce, it's theirs. I mean, they don't even have to put a copyright notice on it. So I think they've got a very, very good case. Although I assume that, you know, they've got lawyers who are quite greedy about this. And it's probably going to be a fairly ugly process. But, you know, there you have it. We also saw this week, speaking of more interesting things going on or less legal things going on, another round of the Digital Humanities Startup Grants came out. I think there were about 15 or so that were funded. And we'll also link to those from our show notes. But do the two of you see any trends or interesting projects that you look forward to seeing that came out of these grants? Well, I was one of the panelists for a portion of the decision-making process on this, so I know a few of these projects, but there were several panels because there were so many submissions. I think that there are some interesting things in here in the list of the stuff that's been funded. And it's very interesting to me having read some subset of the total submitted to see which ones were funded and which ones weren't. I think maybe one of the most interesting ones is, from my perspective, is coming from the University of Virginia, from the folks at the Institute for Advanced Technology and the Humanities. Is this the one that's led by Joanna Drucker or another? No, this is the one by Worthy Martin. Oh, by Worthy, okay. And the brief statement says, to support development of a tool to present the progression of interrelated items held in an electronic thematic humanities repository. And it's really a sort of data mining project to begin looking at some of these massive humanities databases and figure out ways to make sense of the information that's there. And I remember from looking at the proposal in the first place that it's really a startup grant in the sense that they're trying to think about the ways that they would go about this and then hopefully use this money to do that sort of startup work and then from there apply for the sort of serious money that it would take to do this in the right way. Right. It seems like knowing where these work, he's the right person to start thinking about this or one of the right people to start thinking about this. Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad that there are these new grants, and I think one of the challenges about these grants for those that have gotten them is it's that process, as we know very well here at the Center from having done a lot of grant-funded work, it takes a considerable amount of, well, there's all this process of getting your project from a kind of startup phase really into the next phase. So moving from this startup area up through a very major digital project, there's a lot of things that need to get learned. And everything from legal questions to marketing, to to programming to hiring people. I mean, the list goes on and on. It's very challenging to fire on all cylinders for all these different skills. And I think one of the things that probably would be helpful to happen is for projects that come out of this digital humanities initiatives that are in the startup grant pool. It'd be helpful for those of them that do, you know, have some success to kind of roll up into a larger format to transition out of that kind of startup phase where, you know, you're not hiring a full-time programmer for a year, which would, you know, easily top the $30,000 that's available. But for them to have some process that you can kind of move from a startup grant up through the ranks of these larger grant cycles, I think would be incredibly helpful, even if it's only just advice on, you know, these are the kinds of things you would need. Because, you know, I'd like to see a very wide array of scholars get these grants. And I assume a lot of them won't be in, you know, great places like where Worthy works and Joanna Drucker, where they have the real expertise and a kind of standing crew of programmers, database administrators, et cetera, tech savvy people at the Institute for Advanced Technology and the Humanities. You know, a lot of people aren't going to be at that kind of a place.. I noticed that there were some independent scholars here, there were people at universities where I know there isn't a digital humanities center. So they're really building these things from scratch. And I think really a nice next phase would be, you know, how do you transition, you know, build up from one of these starter grants into something more major? You know, how do you do that? How do you get the infrastructure in place? How do you deal with all those questions? Because there are just so many that come up for these Right. ever done the calculations, but I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if some of the grant proposals, you know, that are put together cost $30,000 and, you know, putting together mock-ups and in staff time and in research and, I mean, it can cost, especially for digital projects, it can cost a lot of money just to get a good fundable grant proposal together. And that was really the elephant in the room the day that we were reviewing the projects for the panel that I was on was, okay, so we fund these and we're really happy that the NEH is providing this money and we think it's a really laudable program, but then where's the rest of the money going to come from? And for some of these projects anticipate some very substantial work down the line and who's going to provide the $300,000, the $500,000, the $800,000 necessary to realize the potential of these projects. And that was our unanswered question that day. Did the guidelines in any way have applicants estimate what the ultimate project costs would be, or was that left out? No, that was left out, but the applicants did have to at least lay out some kind of a plan for future funding. I mean, they couldn't just say, and after we've spent this $30,000, we anticipate applying for other grants. I mean, they had to have an actual plan of some sort for how they were going to go forward. But as to exactly who those people were, often it was left unknown because it is unknown where that kind of money might come from. Sure. Well, I think we'll have to keep track on some of these projects. I'd love to hear also where the projects that were funded in the fall, right? Mills, there was another set, the first set that was funded in the fall. It would be great to kind of see where they've gone and what they've produced. Maybe we'll try to delve into that and maybe even bring on some of the project directors on a future podcast. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, well, we'll have to leave it there for the news round the report is called Our Cultural Commonwealth. But the subtitle is The Report of the ACLS Commission on Cyber Infrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. And I think it's really a big topic right now of organizations like the ACLS, big private foundations like the Mellon Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation and other foundations are really looking into how to build up this cyber infrastructure. And actually, if you really want to be in the know, which I think listeners of this podcast, of course, being part of the in crowd, you can now call it CI. I just went to a meeting up in Princeton of Mellon grantees, and that's what people were calling it, CI, or cyber infrastructure. Yeah, it's kind of a mouthful. But I think, first of all, let me just read what cyber infrastructure is from the ACLS report. It says that the term cyber infrastructure is meant to denote the layer of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry, but developed for specific scholarly purposes. Cyber infrastructure is something more specific than the network itself, but is something more general than a tool or resource developed for a particular project, range of projects, or even more broadly for a particular discipline. So for example, digital history collections and the collaborative environments in which to explore and analyze them from multiple disciplinary perspectives might be considered cyber infrastructure, whereas fiber optic cables and storage area networks or basic communications protocols would fall below the line for cyber infrastructure. So I think what people are trying to get at here, and it's something that we discussed at this meeting last week, is really how to enable the scholarly process, the process of doing scholarship in an age where we have very sophisticated networks, databases, collections, tools, standards.
So I think the way you can think about it is, I think it's much like the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web, the protocols, the servers, the web browser itself, all these tools gel together to create, I think, something larger than all of its individual pieces. And of course, the individual pieces were around before the web. I mean, you had the internet and you had mainframes and all these things. But, you know, there weren't these kind of specific tools that really brought it together and made it so useful for millions or hundreds of millions of people. And I think what they're trying to get at is, you know, what are the tools, what are the resources, many of which will come out of specific scholarly practices. So I think of, in our case, we have our Zotero project at the Center for History and New Media, which is a end user tool. It's a tool used by scholars to collect, gather and collect and analyze and cite resources that they find on the web or even off the web. That's a specific tool that we really desired as historians, that we thought we needed. And we built that. But you can see already in our work on Zotero how it integrates in with the web, how it integrates with scholarly databases. And it sort of creates a cyber infrastructure or CI that really helps scholars do their work. And so I think we're really here at the beginning of this wave of trying to build a scholarly cyber infrastructure that is one that has certain aspects, certain kinds of information being traded, certain kinds of standards, and certain kinds of tools that are really oriented specifically toward academia. And I think what we wanted to discuss today for our featured story is, you know, where are we, where we can go with this, and sort of what's missing. And I can tell you without getting into the specifics of the meeting, you know, as we were joking up in Princeton, you know, what goes on in Princeton stays in Princeton. I'm not sure if that's actually true. But, you know, I think that a lot of the projects up there are at all ends of the spectrum. So it was really a fascinating series of projects that were presented. And they range from everything all the way down to these really low layers of the academic networks of, you know, data that's floating around and services that are floating around at a low level at the university. Things like student services of, you know, databases that hold information about students or professors, courseware, all these things bubbling all the way up to the actual end user and tools like Zotero. And there's just all these kinds of interaction that are happening between these various layers. And I think we have a tremendous amount of work to do to kind of link these things together. And I thought really what came out of the meeting that, you know, my takeaway for at least the production of this cyber infrastructure for scholarly work is that I think, first of all, there needs to be a lot of work done in terms of interoperability. And I think, you know, I think we're used to using tools like an EndNote, which is, you know, what Zotero is trying to be a lot better than. But, you know, you think about EndNote is a kind of silo or dead end for your research. You kind of grab stuff and put it in there. It runs on your desktop. It's a kind of, it's an application that is for you alone, but it doesn't link well into a lot of this burgeoning cyber infrastructure. There is some stuff on the web where little buttons appear that say, you know, import this item into your EndNote collection. But if you think about that in the reverse, it's not very easy to then export out of your EndNote into different formats that would be available to other users on the web to share your collection, to integrate it into courseware like Blackboard or Sakai, to automatically produce RSS feeds of bibliographies, all these other things that's sort of happening around the web in different, you know, these new Web 2.0 sites that we've talked about a little bit here on the podcast. They're not happening as much or yet in the scholarly realm. And so I think there's going to be a lot of work on interoperability. I also think things like policies and services that we share, these also need a lot of fine tuning. I mean, things like open access to collections are really kind of up in the air. And so I think there's a tremendous amount of work to be done in this area. And indeed, the ACLS report, which we'll link to from our show notes, has, I think, some really terrific suggestions. And I think it's something that Mills and Tom, we can discuss right now. I think, you know, the first one is to, you know, show what the value of this is, because it is such a, you know, daunting thing. And I don't know, I mean, have the two of you heard of this before or the term cyber infrastructure? And would you know how to describe it in 25 words or less if someone asked you on the street? Well, I've heard the term and I've heard it used and know some of the people who served on the commission. But I think that describing it in 25 words or less is difficult. And I think we can tell just from the term cyber infrastructure that the Cyber Infrastructure Commission was thinking about this for a long time and had their own struggles in defining it. I mean, cyber is not a word we use so much anymore, probably haven't used since the late 90s so much. And I think it is a kind of difficult thing to get, even for somebody working in the field, a difficult thing to get your head around. Right. In a way, I like what you were saying. Second, Dan, talking about things like interoperability, I think that's an easier thing for me to get my head around. How can we make things interoperable? That seems to be more of a mission statement to me than building cyber infrastructure. Although I guess some people need to be thinking about the bigger picture. But for me, if I can contribute to tools and to resources that promote and extend interoperability, that seems to me to be something that I can more easily get my head around. Yeah, I mean, the interoperability, it relates, I mean, they're all interconnected, but I think the policies in the state of what's currently out there in terms of infrastructure, you know, it's really hard to get these pieces to work together. I mean, there's scholarly tools and websites and so forth that are in public databases, and there's a lot that is going on in sort of the private sector. And in fact, the ACLS report, you know, the first two or three objects say, you know, making the cyber infrastructure a strategic priority, developing institutional policies that foster openness and access, and promote cooperation between the public and private sectors. That seems like, you know, a tall order right there. I mean, what we have to do is to show the way in which these things, you know, can really make a difference to even to the kind of commercial stakeholders here. So, you know, I think there's a lot to be done there in terms of just policy and working together. Yeah, I want to pick up on another piece in addition to the interoperability, which I think is really central, is early on in that ACLS definition was the question of expertise. And, you know, this is in some ways the softest piece of the whole thing because we don't know exactly what that means yet. But something that's been troubling me for a long, I guess, three, four years now is how little money is being spent in the humanities to develop that kind of expertise. I mean, you know, if you look at our center, all of us developed our expertise kind of on the fly because we wanted to, not because it was part of some degree program somewhere. And still, in history, George Mason is the only place where doctoral students are required to have some sort of expertise in digital media before they graduate. And there are, you know, around the country now a few graduate courses in digital media for historians, but nothing else comprehensive. I mean, Indiana is starting to try to put something together, and I suspect Nebraska probably will before too long with Will Thomas there. But there's still just not much investment in the development of this kind of expertise, so we're reliant on the entrepreneurs, the people who, the historians who learn PHP and MySQL or, you know, the poet who learns Python or something like that. And that's not an effective way to build a cyber infrastructure, if that's what you call it. Right. Well, I think this is definitely, at this stage, I think that's a great point, Mills.
You know, the ACLS report points out, you know, one of their eight points is to encourage digital scholarship. And, you know, I think part of the big problem right now is there's not a lot of professors out there who kind of know about cyber infrastructure, care about cyber infrastructure, know what it would do for them, and have the kind of scholarly methods that would enable them to kind of take advantage of this stuff. And so there's no, there's not, you know, graduate students and professors, you know, staging a sit-in at the president's office at their university for cyber infrastructure. And so, again, I think it's going to take a real effort to kind of build up some of this stuff from a kind of supply side so that when it gets completely built out, scholars will instantly recognize, oh yeah, this has tremendous advantage to me. And I think, you know, there are little pieces here that really do help. You know, our friends who listen to this podcast who are in the library world, you know, they're working on all kinds of interesting things to enable auto-discovery of materials in digital collections and to make that online library catalog work better with other systems both within the university and outside. So there are great projects going on to sort of integrate Google Scholar or other commercial sites in with your standard library lookup sites so you can kind of get a full view of what's out there on your research topic. And so there's little efforts here and there to expose what could really happen if cyber infrastructure all clicks together. But right now, you know, there's not a kind of coordinated effort. And I think it really needs to be, you know, I think a lot more money and kind of visibility has to happen here for there to be, you know, more in the way of demand for it also from, you know, from the faculty. And I think, go ahead, Tom. The other, I think the other part of this is, and I think Dan's right, you're right to say that the library world has to some extent done a lot more than the scholarly world, than the university community. A big part of this is that that kind of cyber infrastructure work contributing to the cyber infrastructure, building it, is valued more highly, I think, in the library community. I think until things like guidelines for promotion and tenure change in the university, there are going to be a limited number of people working on cyber infrastructure projects contributing to the infrastructure. I just think if it's not valued by your peer community, it's going to be hard to get people to do the work. I mean, that feeds right into what I was going to say, which is until such time as the leading scholars at leading graduate programs start demanding from their PhD students that these students have some level of digital expertise and start demanding from their deans and provosts that there be money to teach their students that kind of expertise. It's all, all of this work in cyber infrastructure is going to be dependent on individuals deciding, wow, I should do this. Right. Yeah, you know, I think, I think just a little bit of marketing here would kind of help out because there are cases right now, I mean, you just, I mean, just thinking of, say, something like Google Books or the Open Content Alliance where scholars can see, I mean, when I was doing final revisions on my book, I was able to look up books that I normally would have had to have gone to one of just a very few libraries that would have a copy of this. And it just happened to be that Google Books had digitized it. And I said, oh, this is great. You know, it saved me a whole trip to go check some reference in some obscure Victorian book. And then, you know, there are cases of search or federated search of being able to, for instance, in another database that I used for my research, but Cornell houses a distributed, I think along with University of Michigan and a couple of other libraries, a federated search of mathematics books that have been digitized. So I work in the history of mathematics. This is great. I'm able to all of a sudden search across sites and find things that I might not have found otherwise. So I think there needs to be some use cases, I think, foregrounded that someone could say, ah, you know, that's really what it's about. If we have those, you know, these technologies, they don't need to hear about the specific, you know, acronyms like OAI, PMH, which is what, you know, Cornell uses. So, you know, this federated search technology, they don't need to know about that, but they need to know, oh, this is helping my research in this specific way. I think really you'd start to see some light bulbs go on over people's heads. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, Dan, is without asking you to reveal the secrets of Princeton, was there much discussion about the nature of this project as being scholarly, meaning therefore exclusive of the public? Because, you know, a lot of what we've been talking about lately is in this Web 2.0 world that there's this melding of expertise and the crowd and to produce some kind of new information. I mean, was there much discussion of that? Yeah, I think there was. And I think, you know, the agreement that a lot of people came to on this is that I think a lot of what's been missing in Web 2.0 tools is a lack of kind of coming at it from a scholarly perspective. I think inevitably, you know, when we talk about open standards and tools that interoperate, we are talking about, you know, tools that inevitably will be picked up by, you know, those unwashed masses outside of the ivory tower. But I think what people were talking about was the way in which we think about these sort of infrastructural tools and standards as scholars is a little bit different than what's going on outside of academia. Let me just give you one quick example that I was sort of promoting. You think about the difference between Delicious, which I'm sure a lot of our users use, which is the, or a lot of our listeners use, which is the social bookmarking tool. And Delicious, right, allows you to bookmark these web pages. And what is it concerned with? It's concerned with the URL. That's the basic currency of a tool like Delicious. But for the Zotero project, here at the center, we focused on, you know, what is our unit? It's the actual semantic object of the book or the article that's mentioned on the web page. So we've really focused on that. And when you focus on that, you know, because that's what we care about as scholars, right? We don't care about some long string of, you know, that you would see in the URL. But we care about, you know, okay, this page on that library is about this letter or this article. And if I find it in my library and you find it in your library, we want to be able to talk about that same article. It's the article we care about, not the web page. And so that emphasis ends a scholarly tool on objects like a book or an article rather than on the URL, which is the currency of the web and a lot of Web 2.0 tools, that really changes the way the tool works. And so when we launch the Zotero server, we're going to be having, you know, people are going to be exchanging information about these objects rather than web pages. And I think that opens up a whole range of possibilities, which absolutely will be, I think, of interest to people outside of the academy, but is very different than, say, what's going on right now with Delicious. I think there's a, you know, one of the interesting things, I think, when you have these conversations, a term that comes up a lot is something like open standards. And I think there's almost an inherent conflict or an inherent difficulty in that phrase, open standards. Things like all the Web 2.0 technologies like YouTube and Delicious and all of these things, they're very open, but they're not at all standardized. And oftentimes the things that are very standardized are very closed and underused because they require a certain amount of rigor. I mean, the reason people use delicious is it's so easy to use. You know, you can tag something in a second, whereas even with something like Zotero, it takes a little more work. And I think scholars are willing to do that kind of work, but you're always then limiting yourself to kind of a smaller community. So there's kind of this tension between openness and standardization. And for interoperability, you really need both of those things, but it's hard to get both. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And that integration, I mean, I think what's really interesting about the next five years is the integration of that incredibly well-vetted professional expert knowledge with the kind of wild web and how you bridge those two areas. I think, Mills, I'm glad you raised this question. I think, you know, it is kind of a clash in attitudes and styles. And also, you know, we need to think more as scholars about the persistence of what we produce in these environments, whereas, you know, people using some of these Web 2.0 tools, they don't kind of care if it goes out of business in a year. But, you know, we care if our research is lost or, you know, we need to have certain things in place for us to feel confidence about those tools. So I think really where this cyber infrastructure is going is thinking about that, you know, how do you bring all these, you know, very structured and yes, you know, in a lot of cases, very conservative technologies from the university or that run the university. How do you get them up into today's, you know, digital world, which often is a little bit too fly by night, a little bit too unstructured in the name of ease of use of adoption, et cetera. So I think, I think it'll be interesting to follow this as it, as it gets built out. Well, and it will also be, you know, a complicating factor. And I'm sure you guys probably talked about this a little bit is that, you know, so much of that on-campus cyber infrastructure is governed by various licenses and corporate agreements and partnerships and all of that. And so it's difficult for universities, especially one like ours, which lacks a lot of resources, to figure out how to join in that kind of merging of information because that's going to cost a lot of money. I think the other thing that we have to keep in mind when talking about cyber infrastructure is I think we really need to include a larger swath of the cultural heritage in this discussion. It would be a shame if we ended up with sort of haves and have-nots in terms of cyber infrastructure. And one part of the cultural heritage that I'm thinking of here that is either being left out or just hasn't joined the discussion for whatever reason is the museum community. You know, a huge part of humanity's work is done in museums. And it's really re and in the work that we've done a c h and m with with uh... with a variety of museums it's really remarkable how far behind museums are when compared with certainly with libraries and and even with even with university and and into universities and individual scholars uh... i think the people who are concerned with cyber infrastructure and concerned with building it out really need to work harder to include those other areas of the cultural heritage. Okay, well, it'll be interesting to see what happens with this. And, you know, again, I think I would encourage listeners to the podcast to take a look at this report. It's been out for a while now, but I don't think it's really gotten as much notice as it should have. And I think we'll continue to discuss pieces of this as they come online, both from the public and the private sectors. Well, it's time once again at the end of our podcast to have a quick round-the-table discussion of sites, links, resources that we think might be of interest to our listeners. Why don't we start with Mills today? My site is swivel.com, which is a data-sharing website for data geeks like me. And it's a place where you can upload spreadsheets of information and then share them in the same way that Flickr shares photographs. You can comment on other people's data. You can manipulate the graphs of those data and have all sorts of fun with the information that's there. This is a site that's only in its preview phase. It's not even in beta mode yet, but they already have 4,200 users who've uploaded more than 3,200 data sets. So I see it as a really interesting site for people doing any kind of quantitative history or quantitative social science analysis to begin sharing their data. And can you overlay the data on top of, you know, data from one person and another person? That's part of their plan. That's part of their plan. It's not there yet. Okay, great. Tom, what do you have this week? I've got a site called LibriVox, and it's a free audiobook site, and it's produced all by volunteer labor. People can volunteer to read the text of public domain works, and they've got about 500 open free audio books that you can download and put on your iPod and listen on your way to work. Pretty heavy on 19th century, obviously, because it's all public domain stuff, but 19th century English literature. But they've got works in, it looks like, seven or eight different languages, and they've got novels, and they've got scientific texts, and they've got a whole bunch of stuff, so it's definitely worth a browse. Yeah, it's a great site. I've used that just to do some books on tape for traveling, and, you know, some of the readers that they have, because it's totally open, so anyone can read some of the chapters. And some of the people are actually very good, and then others are a little bit less good. And then sometimes you have the discordance of one chapter is read by one person, and the next chapter is read by someone else. But it's a terrific site, and they have so much up there. So I think it's a great alternative to, I guess, audible.com or buying something on iTunes. I think it's a great site. I haven't used this chance at the end of the podcast to plug some of our own stuff at CHNM, but we just had a major release or upgrade to Zotero, which I've already mentioned a couple of times in the podcast. So I might as well flog it a little bit more here before we leave. Really, the big addition, if you haven't gone to zotero.org, Z-O-T-E-R-O dot org, and picked up our tool, our research tool for the Firefox web browser, the big thing that we added is a new annotation and highlighting mode, which really gives you a full-fledged desktop environment for not only grabbing your materials off the web that you want to do research on, but then also annotating, highlighting, adding little stickies to it. It's a really terrific mode that you can use. And there's just hundreds of other upgrades that we've made and bug fixes. So if you haven't downloaded Zotero yet and you're listening to this podcast, quickly pause the podcast and go over to Zotero.org, press the download button because I'm sure you're already using Firefox 2.0 and you'll be all set and you can check out those new features as you may. So thanks once again. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Mills. Good talking with the two of you. And again, Tom can be found at foundhistory.org. Mills, it's good talking with you again. And Mills can be found at edwired.org. And I'm Dan Cohen, and I can be found on my blog at dancohen.org. We'll be back again in two weeks for another edition of Digital Campus. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself! Fear itself! Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. you
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number two for March 21st, 2007. The old and the YouTube. I'm Dan Cohen, this week's host. Well, it's great to be back once again for our second podcast. We made it to podcast number two. I guess that's a sign of modest success here in the podcast world. And I think one of the things that's been great about it is, you know, Mills and Tom are here with me again. Actually, maybe we should do introductions again. I'm Dan Cohen. And with me are the regulars, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hey, Tom. Hey, Dan. And Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hey, Mills. Hey, Dan. How are you today? Pretty good. You just got back from Cambodia. That's right. Yeah, quite a week in Cambodia. Wow. We'll have to maybe hear a little bit about that and whether you encountered any technology other than very basic ones there. As I was saying, I think one of the things we've learned here on the podcast is, and one of the things I guess we like to do at the Center for History and New Media is learn by doing. We do some theorizing, but I think doing and just trying out this podcast has been a good learning experience for us. So hopefully we'll get even more proficient at it. And I think we're learning a little bit about the genre as well. And hopefully through some more feedback from our listeners, we can buff up this podcast to a nice shine. Where we wanted to start today was to actually look back at last week a little bit. Usually we start with our news roundup, and we had so much news actually about our featured story from last week on Wikipedia. And actually, speaking of lessons from doing, I guess one of the things we learned from last week is we probably shouldn't talk about Windows Vista anytime soon again. Don't you think, Tom and Mosk? I think definitely. We got some fairly serious criticism about our long talk about Vista. I think personally it was necessary to get that over with, and I'm glad we did in the first show, but we promised no more Vista for at least a couple of weeks. Must have a lot of Mac users out there. But yes, Vista hiatus. No more Vista for a little while on this podcast. So really the story that took off, it was already taking off when we discussed it a couple of weeks ago, but the Wikipedia story, boy, has there been a lot of news over the last couple of weeks. And actually, I think a lot of it feeds right into our discussion, particularly what I think Mills was saying about learning from Wikipedia. Mills, did you see the op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kathy Davidson? I think she made a lot of the same points that you did. I did. I looked at that and I think she and I are basically in agreement on this issue and that how important it is that we teach our students how to use this resource appropriately. I was reminded of it again when I was in Cambodia because I was working at the National Teachers Training College and showing these folks there who were high school teachers in training, showing them how Wikipedia works. And they all were using Wikipedia as a source for information, both in English and in Khmer, but they had no idea that anyone could edit the entries and were, I have to say, quite surprised to find out that things could be changed so simply. So it just reinforced for me, yet again, why it's so important to teach people how to use this resource that they're using anyway. I hadn't thought about that, but as radical as Wikipedia is for Americans or American students, it must be even odder, I suppose, in countries that have had autocratic forms of government and information ministries and things like that to democratically be able to edit a source must seem very bizarre. What did the students make of it? It did seem really bizarre to them, both for the reasons that you cited, but also because they're in some ways so new to thinking critically about technology resources at all. I mean, they're still in the adoption stage and the very rapid adoption stage. And so anything that they could find online was great. And they're so starved for information resources generally that anything they could find was a wonderful resource for them to use. And so then to find out that it was a malleable resource was really a shocker. How many entries are in Chimera? It was only about 215. There's a real problem for Chimera usage on the Internet, and that is that they have this really funky character set in their really funky script which is hard to render on screen and so that's one problem the other problem was that they didn't know that that there actually was a Khmer option in Wikipedia because the choice is instead of en.wikipedia.org for English it's KM which they never thought so they never thought to look under because they're dumb the Cambodian domains are KH. So for some strange reason, Wikipedia has picked KM as its Cambodian language domain. And so it didn't even occur to them to look under that. That's fascinating. So they were using the English language version only. And did you have them edit some of the entries? I did. I had them edit one of the entries on Cambodian history, and they were nervous about it. They felt a little strange changing information on the Internet, but at the same time they got fairly excited about it and could see the possibilities of assigning something like this to their students. There are real issues of connectivity in Cambodia because an hour online in an internet cafe, I mean almost nobody has connection at home, but an hour online in an internet cafe works out to about 50 cents, which to us doesn't seem like a lot, but the average wage in Cambodia is about a dollar a day, so it's a pretty significant connection charge for the average person. Right. Wow. Sounds like a fascinating trip. And you went out into the countryside as well, and I assume there was not ubiquitous Wi-Fi in your Angkor Wat or anything like that. No, no. They don't have a hotspot on top of Angkor Wat? Not yet. Not yet. However, the tourist concession in Angkor Wat has been sold to, it's either a Japanese or a Korean company. I can't remember which now. And so before long, they probably will, given that 2 million tourists a year are now coming to Angkor Wat. And there are five-star resorts on the road to get there. So it's undergoing quite a transformation. Wow. You know, it's interesting. I think this Wikipedia story has really come out of the, you know, sort of scholarly blog community and really hit the mainstream press. It's sort of taken off. Just in the past couple of weeks, I think, we at CHNM have been contacted by several mainstream media outlets and documentary filmmakers and other kinds of people interested in this Wikipedia controversy. And I'm starting to see more and more in the circuits in the New York Times and other sort outlets. Something about the Middlebury story seems to have caught fire in the mainstream press. I think that's right. I think the mainstream press also, which by the way I happen to like quite a bit, the angle of the story that they like and the reason they like calling academics like us is they want to play up some kind of tension between those who are credentialed and have PhDs and the riffraff of this democracy of people that are contributing to Wikipedia. And I thought it really, you know, another interesting story that played into this over the last week or two since our last podcast was this very prominent contributor to Wikipedia, S.J., who claimed to be a tenured professor of theology, I believe. And some people did some snooping into his life. And, of course, he was using this credentialing of being a professor to gain reputation within the Wikipedia community. And a lot of people deferred to him. And then it turned out, of course, that he's a 24-year-old non-tenured, non-professor. And initially, Jimbo Wales, the head of Wikipedia, sort of defended SJ and the idea of online identities and pointed out how much he had done to build Wikipedia. But then he sort of, after a bunch of criticism in the press, backed away from that position and didn't like what SJ had done, publicly declared that. And SJ actually ended up resigning from the project.
We try not to be snooty about it. On the other hand, we know that there are situations where it can come in handy just from a reputational point of view even though we might not know as much as, let's say, a very committed amateur. Tom, you've written about this on your blog, but there are professors who study the Civil War who don't know, say, as much about a specific Civil War battle as a number of amateurs in our state of Virginia. Yeah, sure. I think it raises the issue of authority and how authority differs online than what authority is in the academic context. This guy, S.J., he carried with him all the authority of a tenured professor on Wikipedia, in part because he was calling himself a tenured professor, but mostly because he had contributed so much to the project, which led Jimmy Wales to defend him initially. And I think this is a tension that, you know, when we got into this last week, that our students deal with. Our students come to sources and they see, I think they do recognize authority when they see it. It's just that the authority in these different contexts can differ. And I think it's our job just to teach them how it differs and what authority means. Right. I certainly wouldn't disparage authority. It's something we trade in every day. And I wouldn't want to get in front of a class and just have it be complete anarchy. But it does, I think, raise a lot of interesting questions about what it means to be credentialed and what role that might play. And I think we mentioned this Citizendium project that Larry Sanger is doing, one of the original Wikipedia founders, who is putting in the foreground people's credentials and checking on them. It'll be interesting to see if that makes any difference to the way it's constructed and then also the way it's used as well. There was some lighter news, of course, about Wikipedia. Sinbad was declared dead over the weekend. He was dead for a whole week, wasn't he? Was it a whole week? I guess his daughter called him and said, just check down Wikipedia, it says you're dead. And he said on the phone to her that that wasn't actually the case. I suppose it's not entirely false. I mean, his career has been dead since the early 90s, I think. That's right. Maybe it was some kind of metaphorical entry. It does remind me of the very hilarious Onion headline from last year where Onion had a bold face on the front page. Onion, of course, being the satirical newspaper that comes out of Wisconsin. And they had across the front page, Wikipedia celebrates 750 years of American independence. I think that was their July 4th headline. And as historians, it gives you a good chuckle here and there. But I think those are stories, again, that mainstream press loves to pick up on. And of course, Wikipedia is littered with errors. But I think what we were discussing last week is the process of it. And I think, Mills, that's what you pointed out and what Kathy Davidson pointed out in the Chronicle. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I wish we could say that the books in our library written by reputable scholars with PhDs weren't also littered with errors. But as we know, people make mistakes now. But I think I'd like to point out that the real issue here in many ways in the public discussion is about this tension between those with authority and those who don't have it kind of credentialed yet. Right, right. Well, it certainly feeds into another story that we saw from the last week. South by Southwest was over the weekend, and I think it ended on Monday. And several of the people from the Center for History and New Media actually went, and we were alerted to what looks like one of these bear-baiting panels called Out of Control, Does Education Matter Anymore? Boy, I wish they had a podcast of this panel at South by Southwest, but the description says, do social networking tools eliminate the role of faculty and other authoritative sources? Are courses dead? Have they been replaced by referential webs and empowering wikis? Or do tools threaten the chaotic yellow learning environment where the most connected claim is given the most credence. Wow. That featured some people from UT, Adobe, and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. Has anyone heard of, did anyone report back about this? Well, from the center, one of the people who went was Jeremy Boggs over at cleoweb.org. And, you know, Jeremy thought it was an interesting discussion, but I think it was more smoke than fire. I think there was a lot of talk, I understand, about the industrial model of education represented by the university versus the new Web 2.0 model of education represented by social networking sites and Wikipedia and social recommendation systems like Delicious. And the idea was that instead of having a set curriculum, a college major with required courses, wouldn't it be better to have students recommend to each other courses, books, materials, learning modules, and kind of fashion their own curricula out of those pieces? And it does. It raises this authority and one of the one of the comments Jeremy Boggs had was if students are allowed just purely to choose their their own their own courses if they're allowed totally to go in their own directions and and and just choose courses and choose choose learning learning tracks based on based on the recommendations of their peers, they'd never learn anything about history. No one would ever choose a history course. Most students in our university and elsewhere are required to take certain humanities courses and some of them, few of them, but some of them, their interest is sparked enough to continue onto a major and possibly a graduate degree. The question with education is whether you can have a completely unmediated curriculum, and it's unclear whether that's possible. And I think they raise a really interesting point, which is about the tension between our desire to control what our students learn and our students' right or need to control their own choice of learning. And as long as we've decided that we have this model of the three-credit course and you need 120 credits to graduate with a bachelor's degree, and I'm still not sure who decided it had to be 120 credits, but that's a pretty standard model. As long as we have that kind of model, then students are really boxed into what constitutes a three-credit course, and faculty members are boxed into what could be a three credit course worth of material. My own take on this is that I think that we're going to end up in a place of compromise between these two poles, one where the faculty are entirely in charge of what students can and can't learn and one where the students are totally in charge, where I think we'll have sort of a mixed curriculum of a set series of courses that you have to have if you plan on going into a career in X. If you're going to be a civil engineer, you have to know certain things about structural tolerances and that sort of thing. If you're going to be a nurse, you have to know that human beings have two kidneys and one liver and not the reverse. Because in these fields, there are licensing exams, and we know what students have to know in order to pass those licensing exams. If you're going to be a poet or a historian, there is no licensing exam, and so it matters a lot less what the student has to know or doesn't have to know. I mean, there's no harm in a way if a student chooses to focus her work almost entirely on American history or almost entirely on African history because, you know, that's a choice and nobody's going to die as a result of that choice. So I think ultimately where we're going to end up is something where there's some kind of maybe 60 to 70 credits worth of fairly stipulated or expected work done by students and then a lot of free-form education after that. I kind of think that's where we're going to end up in 15 years or so. I think some of these questions are kind of false questions in that a lot of these things were decided by the American educational system centuries ago or certainly decades ago. If you look at the standard college curriculum for an American college student, there's a lot of choice in it. I mean, compared to European systems where you're on a set, if you're a history major, you're on a set course, you take, you read a set of books, you don't have much choice in what those are. You take standard exams, everybody takes the same exam no matter what courses or lectures they've attended. Whereas in the American system, for an undergraduate, you know, maybe half of your credits are required, but the rest are, you know, sort of liberally dispersed throughout the disciplines, and there actually is a lot of choice in the American system.
Well, I think choice of materials and courses is, in fact, part of our featured story that's coming up. So why don't we move to that right now? Well, one of the resources that is making its way into the classroom, I suppose whether faculty like it or not, is YouTube. And I think there's been a lot of news recently that we've been discussing about YouTube. Obviously the biggest news, I suppose, in the newspapers is Viacom suing YouTube for a billion dollars. But in a sort of lesser story, but I think one that we found very interesting is BBC's big deal with YouTube to provide a lot of content. And I think BBC has really been in the forefront of doing a lot of these online deals. And what's really interesting is just they have this incredible back catalog, which as historians and humanists, we find really interesting. I mean, there's so many clips from the 50s and 60s and 70s that, from BBC's back catalog, that actually they're already making available in other forms, streaming formats, but evidently they are going to put some material on YouTube, although I believe initially it's going to be more of a promotional, more promotional content. And Mills, you've spoken a little bit about this. In fact, you've used YouTube quite a bit in your classes. And I thought for our featured story, the three of us wanted to discuss a little bit about how you use video on the internet for teaching and what something like YouTube, what kind of impact does YouTube have in a teaching environment? So Mills, how did you find YouTube and why did you start using it and what are you doing now with it? Well, it's very interesting how I ended up using it in my class because about a year ago we got a grant here at the Center to start creating a website on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and this was right around the same time that YouTube was becoming really hot and trendy. Have you met them? Or knew them? and they had a lot of music videos. Heavy metal or new music? You know, I have to say I skimmed over it, so I can't tell you what their style is because I was looking for other things. I should probably go back and find out. But right away then I started seeing video clips from the Berlin Wall being torn down and a variety of other things. But what really got me excited as a historian was a particular historical video which I had taught about the events many times in my classes, but I'd never actually seen it live on video. And this is Nicolae Ceausescu's last speech in front of the Romanian people in December of 1989 when everything's coming apart for the communists in Eastern Europe and Ceausescu returns from a foreign trip. If you're a dictator, you should never go out of the country right when things are coming apart, but he made this mistake and then came back. And he gives this speech where he assembles the people of Bucharest in the main square and they know how to do this because they've been doing it for 30 years. They know where they're supposed to stand and they know when they're supposed to applaud and when to wave their flags and their banners and it's very ritualized. And he's up on a balcony above the crowd and he starts speaking and he gets just about a minute and a half into the speech and instead of the crowd cheering, you hear the catcalls coming from below and you see him him falter and look out at the crowd, and he's not sure what to do, because in his whole career as the head of the Communist Party in Romania, this has never happened to him before. And you see this indecision on his face, and then you see the Securitate agent, who looks like he's right out of central casting, come up behind Ceausescucu and whisper something in his ear and then leave through the doors behind the communist leader. And then all of a sudden the camera moves away and then you hear chaos from below and you hear Ceausescu shouting at the people to listen up. And it's right there. That's the moment when the Romanian regime starts to collapse. Well, I've read about this and I've taught about and all of a sudden, there it was on my computer screen, and I was watching it. It was a clip from Romanian state television. So for me, it was a really exciting moment to actually see this footage. So based on that, then I started scrolling around in YouTube and found all kinds of historical video that we can use in our classes. Just to give you an idea, I did a quick count yesterday on Tiananmen Square, also from 1989, there are 321 individual videos. Many of these are duplicates of the same thing, but still there are more than several hundred. On the collapse of the Berlin Wall, 371. Malcolm X speaking, 177. Martin Luther King speaking, 1,060. So, you know, there's an incredible wealth of historical resources in the YouTube database. And interestingly, I checked Metacafe, the big competitor for YouTube now, and there's nothing. Using these same searches, I found nothing. Mills, how much of this stuff is copyright? I mean, it's hard to tell sometimes on YouTube, but sometimes it's easy. I mean, how much, like, what's the proportion of the 1989 stuff that is, that's probably, should be restricted? I'd say a fairly small amount because the 1989 stuff a lot of it is either from East European state television broadcasts and so since it's state television then it's a public document or it's amateur video and especially a lot of the Berlin Wall stuff is people's video shot with their old VHS cameras and then converted to digital video and put into YouTube. The Malcolm X, Martin Luther King stuff that I cited is, a lot of that is probably copyrighted in the sense that it comes from news broadcasts from the major networks, that kind of thing. There's always been a problem with Martin Luther King video, especially the Eye of a Dream speech. So it seems like there's, you know, probably some problems with other. Yeah, probably in a gray area just because this estate owns a lot of these speeches, Martin Luther King's estate. But it does raise the question of how students today are very, they're very visual and they're used to video in a way that I suppose we aren't and I think it does have this visceral impact. Unfortunately I teach the 19th century mostly and so there's not a lot of video from the 19th century up on YouTube that I can find. But I think people tend to think of YouTube as just, you know, pranks and cats falling off of TVs and things like that. But there is this just hidden treasure trove of historical material that I had no idea, Mills, before you said that, that there was that much up there. Yeah, and, you know, there are some problems with finding it because YouTube catalogs things according to the date that they were uploaded, not according to the date they were created. And so it's often very difficult to know when a particular video clip was created unless the person who uploads it includes that kind of meta information. The other thing I would say is... Do people tag them with that information? Only a few. Only a few. It's pretty rare for that to happen. But the other thing that I think is very useful as a teaching tool is that when you show your students these... When I show them in class, I'll show them a clip from something, and then I'll point out that I'm taking this from YouTube, and underneath the video there is a discussion from the general public about this video. And so this is a way of thinking about how people in the general public respond to historical artifacts. And so it's not just here's the video, but also here's how the public or some tiny percentage of the public perceives that artifact. So that's also, I think, a useful teaching tool. You know, I think it's... Sorry, go ahead. No, no, you go. The other thing I was going to say is that I had a really interesting experience showing a clip from the Nuremberg Tribunal back last semester. And this is, it was from a newsreel done by the American government. And it's kind of classic newsreel footage of something like Nuremberg, you know, the, the, the voiceover sounding like the voice of God and, you know, the Nazi war criminals brought to justice before the world and, and all that sort of thing. And there's this moment in the, in the clip that I showed where the, the accused Nazis march from the entrance into the dock, and there is this kind of lame 1940s filler music that's used during that procession into the dock by the Nazis.
So I stopped the video and said, well, let's talk about that for a minute. Why do you think that's funny? And one of them said, well, that's just ridiculous music to put in something so serious. You should change that. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, you should strip out that sound and put in something more appropriate, like Mozart's Requiem. And then one of the other students piped up and said, or the Jaws music. And so we had kind of a laugh about what this would be like, and I said, but then it wouldn't be the historical artifact anymore. And the student who raised his hand originally said, yes, but it would be better. And I said, yes, but it wouldn't be the same. And he said, I know. It would be better. And so we had this, I think, very entertaining discussion about what does it mean to change a historical artifact? And I couldn't get them off the point that it would be better. It was like we were talking about two different things. There was a real disconnect there. I mean, this is a case where, from our discussion from last week about Wikipedia, I mean, you know, you've been advocating the students get in there and sort of correct things. And, you know, that's what they're used to is this, you know, culture of the mashup and remixing. And so that's, I suppose, you know, one of their initial reactions is let's make this better, let's mix it up with something else and in this case, that's something that clearly degrades the actual content. I mean, it also makes me wonder, maybe they're visually literate but maybe using visual resources that don't have the kind of finish or polish that MTV has, that it, in a sense, will turn them off more than a document, than a text, because it doesn't seem valid to them. Is that a possibility? I think it depends on, I think it's possible. I think it also depends on the class. Now, I was showing this Nuremberg clip in a general education Western Civ course, and so none of these students were planning to be history majors. I think I might have had a very different discussion with a room full of history majors. So, I think so I think it's interesting that all of us have been at various points surprised to find so much historical material on YouTube because it seems from my surfing of the amateur history web, amateurs have been using YouTube really since its inception as a source for historical material and they've been participating in that visual remix culture by creating historical documents, by producing historical pieces on their blogs, by embedding feeds from YouTube, doing things like presenting their top ten favorite moments in TV news with clips of Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and various other famous moments in TV news, or they've been producing the top 500 music videos of all time, doing those kinds of things. Almost, you know, really doing some historical research, going out, finding primary sources, what for them are primary sources on YouTube, providing commentary, contextualization, doing comparisons and contrasts, really doing the kinds of things that professional historians do, but doing it with these amateur resources, things that were uploaded by amateurs, tend to be very, you know, kind of pop culture resources, the things they find on YouTube, but doing some fairly interesting work. And I think it's just kind of interesting that we in the professional context have been sort of slow to take up YouTube as a resource for teaching and learning and doing history when the amateur community really latched onto it very, very quickly. Well, I wonder if we have some legacy from our own education. I mean, I remember in high school the social studies hour that we had a film was, you know was time to take a small nap or do something else. I never remember it being exciting or visually interesting. Probably the most interesting films were in physics classes where they had those fantastic 1950s and 60s films that were very, in ways to teach physics, but the history films were utterly boring. And I think some of this stuff is much more exciting and has the potential to bring video back into the classroom in, you know, K-12 and also college in ways that, you know, we didn't have before. I also think that the length is important, you know, the ability to show a number of smaller clips rather than making a class watch an hour and a half documentary where they're inevitably going to sort of phase out at some point. I think that's very interesting. You can almost use a YouTube video clip, it sounds to me, and I actually haven't done it yet, but it sounds like you can use it in the same way you'd use a short reading or some kind of smaller assignment as part of a syllabus well I think the big difference is that is that you know YouTube video versus a film strip that you we would have seen in high school or or or a videotape that we would have seen in high school I mean YouTube is really a kind of lean forward video experience whereas the film strip or the or the or the or the or the movie that we would have seen in high school. I mean, YouTube is really a kind of lean forward video experience, whereas the film strip or the movie that we would have seen was a kind of lean back experience. It's an active video experience in the way that Mills was talking about. You know, students know that they can rip out the video from the flash player on YouTube and change the music. They know that they can take the embed code and dump it onto their blog and mash it up with different videos to create a kind of historical document. You know, it's active versus passive video, and I think that's the real big difference. And I think it's also worth remembering that the mashup culture that Dan was talking about before is not really all that new. We like to talk about it as though it's new, but, you know, Matthew Brady mashed up all those photographs of the Civil War. And, you know, he moved the bodies all around and moved the rifles and that to get just the shot that he wanted. So, you know, those are, and the National Archives has done a pretty good piece on their website, or the Library of Congress has done a pretty good piece on their website about this, that those aren't accurate photographs in the sense that we like to claim material is accurate. They're mashups. Well, I suppose one of the reasons your students wanted to put the Jaws theme on that video is it's ominous to them. This is the music that they associate with something bad about to happen, like a hanging, for instance. And so they can't understand why there's sort of light, you know, coffee or tea time music twittering across this, you know, fairly serious newsreel. And so I think they're questing for some kind of, you know, greater authenticity to it in the same way that Brady was. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Yeah, and I think Mills is right too, that this is part of a longer tradition of scrapbooking and those kinds of activities, historical activities. And something like YouTube just makes it possible to do with digital video and makes it in some ways just a richer and more interesting experience. Well, I have a feeling we're going to be talking about YouTube quite a bit on this podcast. We'll leave it there for now, and I week. The way we like to end the podcast each week is by throwing out some links, some sites, some resources online that we found that we hope our audience will find interesting as well. Mills, what do you have this week? This week I want to talk about the Document Center of Cambodia. This comes out of my experience this week traveling there. The Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is dccam.org, is a joint project between the Yale University and the group of Cambodian scholars. And it's an online archive from the Khmer Rouge period, the Killing Fields period in Cambodian history. And not only is it thousands of primary sources, but increasingly they're geolocating all those sources. The maps are not available yet, but they're supposed to be sometime later this year. And so at that point, it's going to be a really fabulous GIS application as well. It's really a great online archive. Wow. Sounds very powerful too, especially as they start plotting these things and just, again, speaking of visceral reactions, just seeing all those people and data about it sounds very powerful. Yes. Tom, what do you have this week? I've actually got another podcast I'd like to recommend to people. It's called 12 Byzantine Rulers, and you can find it, it has a horrible URL, at www.anders.com slash lectures slash Lars Bronworth slash 12 Byzantine Rulers.
You can also probably just go to iTunes and search for Byzantine, and it'll probably be the only thing. I don't think there are a lot of Byzantine ruler podcasts out there. Yeah, I don't know. But, you know, in fact, this one is actually pretty popular. You know, it's really popular. We can only hope to be so popular. It's done by a guy named Lars Brownworth, and he is a high school teacher on Long Island. And he's received more than 140,000 downloads of this podcast. I was turned on to it by one of my blog readers, Tim Brixton. But it basically goes through, it's a, you know, and I think there's like 20 episodes, but it goes through 12, just as it says, 12 Byzantine rulers from beginning with Diocletian and going through Justinian to the Basils and on to the end of the Byzantine Empire. And it's kind of an old-fashioned kind of history, a kind of great man, military history type podcast. But it's incredibly well done. It's really well written, well scripted, and Mr. Brownworth really does a great job of narrating it. And I had a long drive home from New York a couple weeks ago, and I listened to almost the entire series in one sitting. It was that interesting. So a piece of non-scholarly history that's really worth checking out. Sounds great. Well, for this week I have a digital tool which comes out of a project that we're working very closely with on the Zotero project, and that's the Simile project at MIT. And in particular, I want to promote their timeline tool, which I think is just a fantastic tool that's easy to use. It creates online timelines that you can scroll around and add information to. I think it could be used in a number of different ways for visualization of information, for syllabi, for students who want to collaboratively put together a timeline of an era that they're studying. And it's available at simile.mit.edu slash timeline. Terrific resource, and we're hoping to actually integrate it with some of the tools that we're working on. So I think this is something to keep track of. Well, we all wanted to thank you once again for joining us. And again, you can find us online on our blogs. Tom is at foundhistory.org. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Dan. And Mills can be found at edwired.org. Thanks for joining us, Mills, and maybe we'll talk more about that Cambodia trip after we get off the podcast. Sounds great. And I'm Dan Cohen, and I can be found at dancohen.org. And we'll see you again in two weeks on Digital Campus. Again, you can visit us online at digitalcampus.tv. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Fear itself. Fear itself! Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. you
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself! This is Digital Campus number 23 for the for History and New Media at George Mason University. I'm Dan Cohen, always found at dancohen.org and elsewhere. And as usual, with me are the other two hosts of the show, Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hi, Tom. Hi, Dan. And Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hi, Mills. Hi, Dan. Hey, congratulations, guys. We've made it a year in podcasting. And yeah, amazing to think. And we're going to have for our feature coming up, our feature segment in the middle of the program. We'll be discussing what we've learned over the past year and some of the things that we've, I think, done right and done wrong and could improve on and maybe ask for some help from our audience to fine-tune the show into our second year. So that'll be coming up in about 15 to 20 minutes. But as usual, we like to start with the news roundup. And it was a juicy week or a few weeks of news. We're a week late on this podcast because we had spring break last week. I guess an appropriate topic then since what was on the minds of everyone on campus was the launch of JuicyCampus.com, a new wiki site where students, faculty, and others can post anonymous things about other people. Tom, you've been tracking this story for us from the CHNM newsroom. Can you tell us a little bit more about this site and sort of what's going on there and your initial thoughts about it? Well, I should say to begin that I haven't been tracking it too closely because I think... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, if you go to this site, you will probably be almost immediately offended. Essentially, it's a place to post campus gossip. And it is, as the header says, totally 100% anonymous. So essentially, it's a place where I think it's mostly students. I don't know how many professors are actually using this, but mostly students can go and post rumors about their classmates. And it turns out to be an incredibly offensive thing. There's a lot of rumors about, you know, different students' sexual behaviors. There's a lot of stuff about, you know, who's the richest kid on campus, those kinds of things. And then there's some fairly, well, fairly sinister stuff, calling people out for various things that they've done and actually posting things like who are all the Jews on campus and trying to compile lists of certain ethnic and racial minorities on campus. So right now it's only open to a select few campuses. I guess, gratefully, George Mason, I don't think is one of them yet. But it's rolling out, and it seems really popular. I mean, I just logged onto the site in preparation for the podcast, and it took forever to load. So it must be getting lots of use. But really pretty scary. Yeah, I'm having trouble loading it too. Mills, what are your thoughts about the impact of this site if it really catches on on campus? I have to say, I don't think it's going to catch on for long. I think it'll be sort of one of those hype bubbles where lots of people will go and check it out. But it has no other use value other than just spreading gossip around where something like – it's not a social network. There's no secondary potential for it other than just being sort of titillating briefly. And plus, it's so hard for me to keep up with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan that I have no time for this. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. I guess if we were to make this part of a trend, which is always dangerous to do, but, you know, it's coming along at the same time that Wikileaks.org has gotten a lot of press of, again, a kind of open, anonymous wiki like this. I guess this is more, now that I'm looking at it, it took forever to load, Tom. You're totally right. But this seems more like a message board. WikiLeaks is a place, for instance, that people have posted Scientology papers and some of those bank statements that got WikiLeaks in trouble a few weeks ago, all kinds of stuff that's posted there. It's purporting to be sort of under kind of a First Amendment, you know, airing of the dirty laundry from the corporate world or political world sort of thing. This is obviously a little bit more pernicious, and I think quite directly so. But, yeah, it seems hard to see how this doesn't have significant problems. But Mills, you brought up the social networking part. I mean, hasn't this been sort of going on just behind the scenes on Facebook in a kind of closed sort of way? I would guess. I mean, gossip has been popular since there has been print. So this is just digital print. And so, you know, I mean, I think it's just kind of a gossipy thing. And I think people will be titillated by it because they'll go and look at it and say, oh, my God, I can't believe somebody actually did that. But I also think certain students will cross the line and they'll find that their anonymity online is not what they think that it is. Just because they are able to post things quote-unquote anonymously does not mean that a search warrant won't track back to them. And so if they post something that is threatening to someone else or could lead to physical harm to someone else, they're going to find a police officer showing up at their door one day with a warrant. And in fact, that happened. I think there was just this week, a student was arrested based on something he had posted on, I can't remember which campus he was on, but arrested based on something he had posted at Juicy Campus, something threatening. And they were found by IP address or something like that? I assume so. There wasn't much information in the story I read. I mean, unless people are using high-end encryption techniques and routing their messages through various anonymous hacker servers, they're awfully easy to track back. Right, right. Well, I guess we'll keep tracking this site, but it certainly has gotten a lot of free press, including, alas, on our podcast. Well, we'll continue on the legal news roundup here. Speaking of, a student expelled for participating in a Facebook study group. I actually had a post on my blog a few months ago saying that study groups might be actually a good way to use Facebook. Mills, you were tracking this story for us. What happened here, and why was this student expelled? Well, you know, he read your blog. He thought, wow, what a great idea. I'll do it, and now I got kicked out of school, so my lawyers are going to be calling you soon. Right, right. Shouldn't have given my web address at the start of this podcast. Yeah. The case here, he was a freshman computer science student at the University of Toronto, and he created online study groups through Facebook for students in the class that they were taking. And so did essentially, as far as I can tell, did essentially what you were proposing in your blog post. And the university decided that this was aiding and abetting cheating and plagiarism and kicked him out. He subsequently had a hearing with an academic panel, you know, a faculty panel. And the most recent news, he came out of that meeting with his family saying, you know, I'm confident that that went well and I think things are all going to work out. So we'll see. But for me, from my perspective, what's more interesting is a sort of a bigger picture is here you have sort of two cultures clashing. One, the, I mean, faculty members constantly encourage students to form study groups. It's one of the best things you can do for your students, especially in a really hard class, is to get them together, working collaboratively to try to figure out difficult material. That sort of thing is encouraged. Plagiarism and cheating, obviously, are not. And so here a student comes along and takes something that we in the academy have been encouraging for a very long time, which is the creation of study groups and says, ah, here's a perfect platform for doing this. And so they form study groups and he was the one who facilitated all of this.
I mean, I don't know all of the details, so I can't pronounce whether he was guilty or innocent on this, but it's a case of, I think, a younger generation of students taking the platform, which they're very confident with and very comfortable with, and using it to do something that we want them to do, which is work collaboratively. And so the university is now trying to figure out how to match their academic standards up with this platform. Right. I mean, I did cover, there is a Facebook application called Study Groups, yes. copies as, you know, in the time-honored way of our generation and then hand out those copies. Or, you know, in the good old days, you could actually hire a transcriptionist to do it for you. But this is just – so if, in fact, he was using Facebook to facilitate cheating, well, that's one thing. If he was using Facebook to create study groups to facilitate collaborative work, well, that's a whole different thing. Right, right. Right. I think it's all about the intent. People can get together in a group and they can get together in a group for the purpose of cheating or they can get together in a group for the purpose of learning. And I think depending on their intent, I think that's what you need to look at when you're litigating or investigating these kinds of things. Well, it seems to be the intent of Apple to put iPhones in every student's pocket by the fall. And we've been looking here at the first campus, actually, to announce that they're going to deploy, I guess you have a choice of either the iPhone or the iPod Touch, which, course is the sort of iPod relative of the iPhone. It's got the same interface with those little icons, and it's got the multi-touch interface. So the first university to deploy these is Abilene Christian University, not probably the university you might think would be the first up, but Apple also seems to be talking to Stanford and MIT, Yale and Harvard about joining ACU in being a kind of iPod campus. And this also seems to be related to the launch of the iPhone SDK or Software Developers Kit, that clearly there's going to be educational applications on the iPhone and for the iPod touch as well that we'll see out by the fall. And I guess this is precisely what we were predicting at the end of last year, Tom and Mills, right? That mobile will be big. And this seems to be part of the story. What do you think the potential here is for this? And Mills, does this fulfill your vision of having a device in everyone's pocket on campus that can do all kinds of things based on location and in the classroom as well? I think it does. I mean, I think it creates the possibility of faculty members designing all sorts of interesting interactive activities where if there's a level playing field, all the students having the same technology access, then Thank you. is maybe they'll listen to the podcast and call me up. But I've already come up with a couple of really good ways of porting this sort of thing over into a history class. So much of the sort of classroom response technology work that's done right now is more in the sciences and mathematics where kind of limited response questioning is more available, multiple choice tests, that sort of thing. But, you know, I've come up with ways of doing it in the history class too. And so if everybody did have something really exciting development. And I have to say I'm really pleased that it started with a really resource-poor institution rather than Stanford or Harvard or someplace that can afford to pay for this themselves. Much better that it's starting in a place that doesn't have that kind of money to throw around. That's a great point. Tom, what's your thoughts on this program? I think it's a great program, and I'm happy that Apple has opened up the iPhone SDK. I should say that straight out. I think it is going to be a great platform, and I think we are in for a year or a couple years of some really fantastic experiments. At the same time, I think I should say that there are some problems with the way that Apple has opened up the iPhone to developers. It seems that all of the applications that you're going to be able to download for the iPhone are going to have to be downloaded through the iTunes Music Store, which sort of begs the question, does that mean you have to pay for everything? Now, you can get podcasts like ours through the iTunes Music Store, and you don't have to pay for them. The question is, is Apple going to allow free applications to be downloaded through the Music Store? And that's, I don't think, clear. Yeah, no, I think they are going to allow free applications. I mean, the applications developers will have to pay a fee to become a registered developer. And I think at the low end, that fee is $99. They will allow for the free applications. I think they do have to go through a vetting process. Right, right. They want to make sure that you're not going to run malicious code. So, yeah, the details on the SDK are pretty interesting. And I think in an odd way, Tom, I also was worried about some of the conditions there as well. I mean, you know, it would be nice to, for instance, give my students an application directly rather than have to upload it to the entire world. Right. On the other hand, I think there are some things that commercial developers are annoyed with with the SDK that actually might be great for education. And the number one thing that I saw, which was interesting, is that iPhone applications can't run in the background. That is, you have to sort of go into an application. So if you're on a phone call or something like that, you're leaving that to go into the application. The application runs, and to take a phone call or to text message, you actually have to leave the application completely. And in that way, it may be a way to sort of keep the attention of the students who won't be text messaging. I mean, if you, Mills, for instance, some of the applications that you've spelled out on your blog and in other places of, you know, for instance, the clicker kind of application. That means that in an iPhone or iPod Touch application, a student would have to go into, let's say, the History 101 application and kind of stay in there for the class if you have an exercise in that environment where, let's say, they were looking at historic photographs and had to vote on the authenticity of one of those photographs on the specific one that's coming to their phone, they won't be able to so easily quit that application and do other things on the iPod Touch at the same time. So maybe there's a silver lining here in the kind of restrictions that Apple set up. Well, I think that's something that cuts both ways on the one hand, as you were describing it, I was thinking, I'm okay with that because then they can't also be playing solitaire or text messaging their friends or whatever. On the other hand, it means that they may have difficulty then flipping over to the Library of Congress website and doing some quick research to answer questions. I'm just going to say, I just have to see how it's going to play out. Yeah, and I think the other thing to mention is that the way I understand it is that the phone trumps everything. So that if you get a phone call, the phone rings and it closes your application. Because it's a phone. Because it's a phone. And that's what Apple's trying to do with only allowing you to run really one application at a time is to preserve the user experience, right? They want it to be seamless. They don't want you to have five or six or 10 or 20 applications open at the same time and crash your phone. They want it to look and feel and work seamlessly. And the way they're doing that is to say, okay, you can only run one thing at a time. And as I understand it, the phone comes first. And so if students get a phone call during class and they've got their phone out, whatever application you're having them run will quit. And that could be a problem. But I think as Mill says, I think we're going to have to see how all this really plays out. Right. Well, this will definitely be the year of the mobile application along with that Apple iPhone SDK. There'll be the Android, the Google's effort to colonize the cell phone with applications as well. And we'll be on this for the entirety of 2008. As I said at the beginning of the podcast, this is our first anniversary of the podcast itself. Our 23rd podcast.
But not bad considering all the vacations and intercessions and spring break, so to only miss a few is not too bad. And we wanted to sort of take this first year anniversary podcast as a time to kind of do a little self-assessment, self-criticism, and also to encourage our audience to help us out and think about ways that we can improve the podcast by joining us online at digitalcampus.tv, where you'll be able to comment on some of the things we're going to talk about and make suggestions on this episode, episode 23. So let's dive right in. I guess, Tom and Mills, first of all, I guess we should discuss how we actually produce this podcast and whether it's adequate or not, something we question every week as Skype treats us well or treats us poorly. I guess that's where we should start is that we do use Skype exclusively. We tried, I think, on one of our early podcasts when we had Bill Turkle on to do this around a microphone at a table, and actually the sound quality was worse than doing it over the network, whether I'm at home or in my office. We seem to get pretty good sound out of Skype. We all have inexpensive headsets. I mean, the headset I'm using is a Plantronics USB headset that I bought for $40. And I guess the two of you, you're not using much more expensive mics. Is that right? No, I think I might even be using a cheaper one. I'm using a Logitech. And I think it was, you know, yeah, maybe $40, $39.95. Mills you as well. Yeah, I have the same one Tom has. And then we use a $10 program for recording calls in Skype, unsurprisingly named Call Recorder. And that's from ECAM, E-C-A-M-M. And you can get that program, and it just gives you a little record button. And we found actually, we looked at a bunch of different technologies for doing this, but we found this to be really a simple way of recording our calls and also adding in other guests because with Skype, we can do Skype out to a regular telephone and include people that way if they're not used to Skype. Or as was the case a couple of weeks ago in the To Read or Not to Read podcast number 21, we actually had our guests join us by Skype as well. So if people are technically literate, it's very easy to add in others. And, you know, we've gone up to a half dozen people with no problem at all or no degradation in Skype. So we record the three different segments. And then we actually then blend in the music, and Ken Albers, our manager and podcast technician, takes the raw audio that we record and masters it in Audacity and sort of lines up all the sound files and adds in the intro music, which was done, the intro and outro music, by our colleague in the history department, Mike O'Malley, who did it all in GarageBand with public domain sound files and some of his own bass lines that he's thrown in. And we should say these are all Mac programs. Right. Call Recorder and Audacity. Good point. Audacity might have a PC version, but we're working almost exclusively on Macs. That's right. I think Audacity is available on all three platforms. Linux as well. I think it is. It's an open source program. Yeah, that makes sense. So really, this is a very low-cost setup. I mean, it's a $100 setup, I guess, for everything all told. And then it just goes out. To publish these things is very easy now. We just have a WordPress blog that we host the site on, and you just attach the sound file to it and write a description, and it goes up to iTunes and to the rest of the universe over regular RSS. And we use FeedBurner to handle the podcast enclosures, which makes it very easy to not only to handle the podcast enclosure, the enclosure of the audio file, but also to track subscribers and let us know who's listening and who's having trouble and whatnot. Right. And I guess we should talk about our audience size a little bit. I think it's sort of helpful for our audience to know. We now have over 400 subscribers through our FeedBurner subscription rates. We've suspected that the subscription numbers are actually a bit higher simply because people don't have, for instance, iTunes open all the time. So we don't get a ping from everybody every day. It's probably 500, 550, something in that range. And then we have about 1,000 people listen to the podcast overall. So there's another set of audience, people who just, you know, come to the website, maybe sample one podcast or another and are not subscribers, at least at the current time. So we've been very happy with the growth of the audience. Thank you. And again, we're going to encourage everyone to criticize us this week on digitalcampus.tv and help us out. Well, I think that the main thing, you know, I was making some notes about this last night, and the thing that I think really makes a good podcast is one that stays on topic. And I think at the beginning of our year last year, we were not very good about that. We tended to wander all over the place. And as the years gone on, we've gotten a lot better about it. But I think that because we know each other very well, and for us, this is in some ways a conversation that we have in the office when we don't have our headsets on, we tend to wander around a little like we would in a normal conversation. And so the more disciplined podcasters can be about staying on topic, the better because people download a particular podcast. Those people who aren't subscribers, they download a podcast because they want to hear about that thing that the podcast cut line says it's about. And so then to have people wander off and go talk about something else can be intensely frustrating and you wonder why you did that. So I think one of the things we have to probably have gotten a little bit better at that. Tom, what would you say is the a little better in terms of staying on topic. I think we could all get a little better on one thing. One thing I know we tend to do is this. It tends to come up really quickly. Every two weeks, the podcast sort of sneaks up on me. Yeah. And I think probably we it would probably behoove us to do some more planning in advance. Maybe talk about what stories we're going to cover a couple days ahead of time, and actually really do some hard thinking on them, and maybe have a conversation amongst ourselves beforehand so we really sort of understand where we're all coming from beforehand. So maybe a little bit more preparation. In terms of the technical setup... Tom, if I could just interrupt you there for just a second. I guess we should also tell our audience that we've tried various methods of sort of sharing news stories with each other in advance of the podcast. And I guess we've now settled on using the share feature in Google Reader. Although Mills, I haven't gotten this set up with you, but you can click on a little share for items that look interesting and worthy of discussion in the news roundup, and they'll show up in the other host feeds as well. So that's something we've been using. Anyway, Tom, go ahead. Sorry about that. Yeah, yeah. And then in terms of the kind of technical setup, I do think there's more we could do with the sound. I've noticed occasionally that one thing that kind of bugs me, and we're going to see if we can fix it in Audacity, is our podcast seems a little quiet. When I'm listening to it in the car, I have to kind of jack my volume up all the way. And then I get interference, just kind of speaker hiss when I listen to it. So it's maybe quieter than other podcasts I listen to. And so I'd like to fix that. And then I do think that we could maybe, while I think our $100 setup has served us very, very well, I think we could maybe spend some time and investigate maybe a $200 setup that would give us a little bit richer, fuller sound and give our audience members maybe more enjoyable listening experience. So there are some things I think we can definitely improve. And as you said, Dan, I think I'd love to hear from audience members, even nitpicky things that we could do better because it is important to refine this. We're not professional broadcasters by any means. None of us have a background in radio or anything like that. And so there's tons we can learn.
Yeah, the sound is an interesting question because I think what we realized early on is that sound quality in a podcast is like design on a website. And there's this sort of unconscious aspect to it where people say, oh, this is something professional. You know, in the first split second, when you look at a website, you say, this is professional or this is amateur. And I think the same thing happens with sound. I mean, when you've got feedback, when you've got, you know, lower volume, when you're missing some bass levels in a podcast, the ear picks up on that really quickly and says, oh, this is really amateur-y. And so I think we probably could get better mics. What I sort of have trouble thinking about is, you know, would we want to move up to the full studio setup? I know we've got one, a media lab here at George Mason that's got, you know, soundproof booths and things like that. I think the problem is we've wanted this to be a somewhat casual podcast and that, you know, not scheduling it for an exact time. And also, we've generally done it where we're not looking right at each other. We're all in different places. And so it's hard. Yeah, exactly. Right. Um, and I've actually, oddly enough in the podcast where we have been looking at each other, I found it harder than, than when we're, um, maybe, maybe it's that I'm getting used to this setup, but I actually find a little bit easier, almost like talking on the phone, uh, when I'm not looking at someone. So, um, you you know, picking up those cues has been something that I think we've really had to learn the kind of, you know, when is a segment going to end? What's a wrap up? These sorts of things. And I've certainly struggled with trying to get transitions, you know, down as well. Well, the other question that comes up is, for me, along those lines is, increasingly, people are doing video podcasts, and whether we might want to consider that or not. I have to say, I don't watch a lot of video podcasts. Now, they do a video podcast, but in their case, there's really a purpose for video. They're doing hands-on tutorials of different web applications and other things. And so they're actually showing you something. They're moving around the screen with a cursor and doing work on the screen that needs to be seen, not heard. I don't know what my, you know, face, my ugly mug would add to our discussion, but maybe it would, and maybe people want to see that, and I think, you know, we'd be open to trying if people do. Well, for instance, I don't know if either of you have seen the website bloggingheads.com, but they get two bloggers who are then talking about a particular issue of the day that's come up in their blogs. And it's just done with whatever the webcam in their computer is. But you actually see the two people talking to each other, having their conversation. And so it can be a little more engaging as a result, but, doesn't do me any good when I'm driving. Right. That's right. Well, we could indeed have a video, which I think we could record out of Skype, as well as the sound files. And we could have people subscribe to either one. So we're going to ask again our audience to weigh in on this question. Do you actually want to see us, or can you get enough of the podcast just from the audio? Or would you really rather not? Right, exactly. So what are some of the things that we've done right? What do you think are some lessons that we've learned over the past year talk about. You know, we've tried not to just talk about the same issues over and over again. And so, I mean, we have some recurring things that we come back to, but we really have tried to have a diverse base of things to talk about. You know, we've tried not to just talk about the same issues over and over again. And so, I mean, we have some recurring things that we come back to, but we really have tried to think through having a kind of a list of, for our main feature segment, have, you know, a list of different things from podcast to podcast so that we are, you know, sometimes it's about what's happening in digital humanities. Sometimes it's about what's happening in the classroom. Sometimes it's what's happening with new technologies. We've tried to mix it up that way. And some podcasts I end up unsubscribing from. It's because they just beat the same horse over and over. Right. Yeah, I think one thing that we did right was, and I don't think we thought this out, but it turned out to be a good decision, is the format of the podcast. I think we have kind of a diverse format with the news roundup, then 20 minutes or so of the feature story, and then some picks of the week. I think that kind of breaks up the podcast and makes it seem a little, you know, it's still an hour, but it maybe goes by a little faster because there's some diversity there. So I think that was probably a good decision. Makes it easier, I think, for us as well. It kind of gives some pace and timing to the podcast. So that was a good decision. It'd be great to hear from our audience on that as well, and also about just the length in general. We generally end up around 50 minutes. Is that too long, too short? Do people want to hear more news, fewer news items? It would be good to know. But I agree with that, Tom, about the segmentation. Yeah, the other thing I guess I would like to hear from audience members, I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, really, is the introduction of guests. I think over the past six or so episodes, we've been having more and more guests on, and that's been fun for us. And I think we've had some great guests, and I think we can continue to bring on guests. I know we've had various requests from people to appear on the show, and we'd be happy to oblige if that's what our audience wants. What I don't know is whether people like – maybe people like to hear just us. Maybe it's comforting or something just to come back and tune in and hear Tom Mills and Dan. Or maybe the introduction of guests is a good thing. But we don't want to overdo the number of guests either. So what is the proper balance between having guests for the feature segment and just having the three of us? That's something I'd really like to know. Yeah, that's a great question to ask our audience. And, you know, from our end, it is a little bit difficult when we have guests, just in terms of the setup. The three of us now can all get on Skype and within five or ten minutes have all of our, we have to level up our sound so that we're, you know, not one person's too loud and no one's too weak and we try to get that all set up. But we now have that down to a science. When we add in other people, it gets very tricky as we try to figure out what the sound levels could be. I wonder also if from, you know, to ask our audience, are there topics that we've missed? I think one thing that I'm feeling, you know, that we're maybe not getting is enough feedback, I guess, from our audience in general. I thought we would be getting, you know, more responses. And I wonder if this is just a podcast thing, that when you read a blog post, you're right there, you can add a comment in. But a podcast, you're listening to it in the car or while jogging or in some other place, and you sort of have to remember to go to the website and comment. I'm sort of interested, or is it just not something that people want to comment on? I can never get a sense of why that is. I mean, I've had blog posts that have had, you know, 30 or 40 responses. And we've really only had maybe up to five or six responses on a maximum on our podcasts. So I'm wondering if, you know, our audience would like more interactive features. I mean, should we have, you know, easier ways for people to get in touch with us? Would people like to see our newsfeed as it's developing?
These are all kind of mystery questions for me as well. Well, let's see. So I guess we're going to ask for everyone's help this week. And we do hope that we get 30 or 40 or 50 responses on this. And just I guess we all want to say thanks again for tuning in. We're looking forward to another year here at the podcast. And as always, you can reach us at digitalcampus.tv and also at feedback at digitalcampus.tv, which Mills and Tom, I've noticed actually recently activity on our email address has actually picked up. So maybe that ends up being the kind of easiest way to get in touch with us as well. But through any of those venues as well, get in touch with us and we will respond to your feedback starting on Digital Campus 24 next week. It's time for Picks of the Week, which also I guess could use some commentary whether people like our picks or not, or if we're missing some area that we're not picking in. Tom, what do you have for this episode? I've actually got a post that one of our colleagues, Jeremy Boggs, wrote recently. We talked a little bit about the setup that we use for the podcast. And I think something else budding digital humanists, digital historians, people who are just getting started with web design and web development would be interested in is the setup that Jeremy uses to create websites at CHNM. He's our creative lead and our head web developer. And he has a great post recently. It was from the 2nd of March. It has a long URL, so we'll just put it in the show. Thank you. he uses, the various browsers that he has installed for testing on his machine, the hardware that he uses, the monitor setup, all of those things that he uses to build the tremendously beautiful and great websites that he built. It's really just a great place to start if you're interested in technology but aren't actually building the web software and websites yourself, start with Jeremy's post, and he'll give you some good tips on the kinds of things you need on your machine and on your desktop to do it. So it's at cleoweb.org, and the post is called Design and Development Setup. We'll put the full URL in the show notes. That's a great post. Thanks for the link, Tom. Mills, what do you have for us? Mine is actually a more, in some ways, more traditional academic site this time. It's the online journal First Monday. I don't know if you guys ever read this one or not. So the March 3rd edition of First Monday, so it's volume 13, number 3, is actually a special issue on Web 2.0. And I started reading the articles over the weekend, and there's very good stuff in there. My favorite so far is one by Anders Albrechtsland called Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. So very thought-provoking, and there are a number of really, it's a very critical appraisal of Web 2.0 and what it means, both for academics and for society as a whole. Yeah, it's a great issue. I've made my way partway through it, but it's definitely worth a look, and I think a good critical eye on what's going on right now. Well, for this week, I've got a site that I think is really helpful for a task we often have at the center, which is sort of critiquing websites and trying to fine-tune them. And we're often distributed. We have, you know, someone might be at home, someone might be in the office. We might have a developer in a third location, web designer in a fourth location. And there's a new site called Twidla, twidla.com, T-W-I-D-D-L-A.com, that allows you to load a web page into a kind of common space that you can share with others. And then gives you a kind of ability to draw shapes on it, to write text in, to put boxes around things. So if you get on the phone and then all join in one of these little forums, you can then really easily critique the web design of a site and look at it really carefully. I think it also might be useful for classrooms as well, now that I think about it. But it just got launched. They're really in kind of a beta period. But it's something that you might want to try out if you are at all involved with web design and kind of need to tweak it and have people all over the place working on that website. Again, that's at twiddler.com. So, Tom and Mills, congratulations again. I'm looking forward to another year on the podcast. I have to say, I mean, it's been a lot of fun. I have to say that sometimes I feel like my blog is work, my other writing, my publication writing is work, but doing the podcast, it is a great deal of fun. And I hope it's been useful for our audience and, of course, we want to thank as a group and hope to see all of you again in two. Fear itself. Please visit us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. You ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes. This is Digital Campus number four for April 18th, 2007. Welcome to The Social. I'm Dan Cohen, this week's host. Well, welcome to another episode of Digital Campus. We are here once again with the regulars. I'm Dan Cohen, as you just heard in the introduction. I can be found at dancohen.org. And we also have with us today Mills Kelly from edwired.org. Hey, Mills. Hey, Dan. How are you today? Good. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. A little cold, but pretty well. Yeah. We have a vicious April storm outside. And we also have with us Tom Scheinfeld from foundhistory.org. Hey, Tom. Hey, guys. How's it going? It's all right. It's all right. Good. Well, we have a lot to discuss today, so I'm going to jump right in and actually just lead off with a little bit of what happened last week, and Tom's going to talk a little bit about what he's experienced in terms of two different conferences. This has been a lot going on with things digital and academic and museum related, and I went to the meeting at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which brought together the Digital Humanities Centers. So these are centers like the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, where we work, centers at UVA, UCLA, USC, Brown, UIUC, and other places. I think there were about 17 centers that came together. It wasn't a comprehensive list of groups, and I think there'll be a larger meeting later on that brings together even more people who are working on the digital humanities, particularly those in centers like our own. But it was really nice to see everyone come together. I think it's the first time, really, that I've seen a lot of these different groups work together and come together to discuss challenges that we all face and what we do and talk to each other about specifically the ways that we go about doing our projects. So it was a really interesting meeting. And I just wanted to raise a few things with the panel today. First of all, I think it was a really interesting introduction from Bruce Cole, who's the chairman of the NEH. And he was talking about how technically illiterate he was, actually, when he began his tenure as the chairman of the NEH. And that really during his tenure, he's just seen this tremendous surge in interest in digital tools, digital collections. He mentioned that they've just digitized 30 million pages of historical newspapers and talked really about how there's this sort of whole new era of digital technology that's going to have a profound impact on the humanities. And so the first thing to say is just that this is really now, I think, on the map. And I think Tom and Mills, you're probably aware of this is, you know, we've known each other for many years and you can see really the difference between, say, five years ago in 2002 and where we are now in terms of just the visibility of this. And part of the visibility was that, in fact, the vice president of and chief Internet evangelist from Google was there, Vint Cerf. And actually, Dan Clancy, who's the head of the technical head of the Google Book Scanning Project or Google Book Search Project was there as well. So it really shows you really where things are and sort of reminded people that everything of value is not found through a Google search, which everyone giggled about. And of course, they're trying to change that by digitizing everything that they can get their hands on. And he actually came to sort of talk about a thousand year view, which I thought was pretty interesting. I mean, I don't really see, for instance, how the Google scans, which are not really that high quality, are going to really last for a thousand years. So I'm not quite sure where he was going with that. And actually, after his talk, he received a little bit of flack from certain parties in the audience who were saying that, you know, Google has its own best interests at heart and not those of libraries or universities. But anyway, and of course, Vint Cerf responded very comically to that by telling those people that he'd meet them in the alley with a pistol after the meeting. Well, I think to any historian who's going to see a sort of thousand-year view as kind of problematic. I mean, it's very difficult to see what's going to happen in 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years, never mind a thousand. But it is good, I think, that they're at least talking that way and thinking that way, whether they're actually making any progress in that direction. That's another question. But, you know, it sounds good. Right. You know, Vint was saying, well, it might be that we have to convert everything to 8-bit ASCII, which is, you know, a very basic plain text, and sort of lose all these books that have artwork or layouts with them to ensure their longevity. And I think he brought a real insider's perspective on just the technological challenges of scanning entire libraries. You know, he was talking about, for instance, images and how they've already encountered problems just with JPEGs, which, you know, is probably the single most popular image type. And yet there's actually been a lot of different implementations of JPEG, and some of them are already unviewable, and so you really start worrying about, you know, how you scan things, what the page images are in, and, you know, it was a real sort of reality check, even for a big corporation like Google. Yeah, and, you know, for me, the really, I think, exciting part about that movie was, exciting part about that movie, you can edit that out. For me, the really exciting part about that meeting was that it brought together not only people like us working in these various centers at the various universities around the country, but also some really important institutional players, people with real money to spend on this. And I think that's what's really going to make the difference over the next few years is the recognition that doing significant work in digital humanities requires money. That's right. That's right. I should have mentioned that right off the start, that it wasn't just the people from the digital humanities centers, but there were, excuse me, I think there were at least a dozen funders there, including government agencies as well as private foundations. And, you know, they talked about some of their challenges as well. And these are challenges that we've encountered too. And I thought John Unsworth gave a very good plenary address where he discussed how important it is to talk about failure, which is not something that we normally like to talk about, but happens all the time with digital projects. I mean, so many things have to go right for a digital project like a software or a major website to really be completed, to work as advertised, that I think the funders are a little gun shy about funding them. And they worry about sustainability and longevity. And the centers worry about, you know, attracting and retaining talented technical staff. So, you know, this is very difficult. And I think John had a really good suggestion, which was, you know, reporting about failures could actually be a big help for all of us, simply because it'll sort of tell you things that have gone wrong and give a sort of clue to new people working in the digital humanities, all the things that they kind of have to worry about and, you know, to ensure their project goes right. And that even in failures, there are, you know, important things to learn about methodology and technologies and management of these projects. And so I thought that was a really meeting point to the fact that we really haven't figured this thing out yet. You know, I think there are lots of different models for doing digital humanities work. And even institutionally, they function very, very differently. You know, our shop here at George Mason is very different from another very successful shop, you know, just down the road at UVA. And just in the way it's funded, in the way it's organized, in the way the kinds of people working here, the kinds of interests we have. And so there's a lot of room for failure. There's a lot of room for success.
Yeah, and I think the overall conclusion of the meeting was that the important thing about these centers is that they do have a kind of expertise that's been cultivated over the years that I think other faculty and students and others in the humanities can really benefit from, and they're not benefiting from right now. So there was a lot of discussion about internships, of faculty fellowships, of faculty members that might be at, let's say, a small liberal arts college that doesn't have a digital humanities center could spend a semester or a year at one of these centers to really learn the ropes and then sort of bring back the skills that they learned to that institution. So using them as a, you know, as John called it, they are part of the cyber infrastructure, what we discussed last week. And he saw them as a kind of critical human infrastructure to, I think, this whole practice, which is so new that we couldn't even define what it was. And I think there was a lot of discussion there as well. The funders were, a couple of funders came back to the main session after we had breakout groups and said, well, we're actually confused as to what a digital humanities center is. Is it just something focused on digital techniques or computational methods or a specific discipline? And can it be a virtual organization? So I think there were a lot of great questions that were raised. And actually, at the end of the podcast sale, I'll mention a site that we're setting up as an outcome of this meeting where people interested in the digital humanities can come and contribute to fleshing out a wiki that discusses those people working in the digital humanities, where it's being done, tools, standards, all the things that I think people want to learn about if they're new to the field. You know, it's interesting. I think that there's, and here I'll maybe segue into our discussion, short discussion about museums and the web. You know, there doesn't seem to be a kind of professional locus for digital humanities in the university community in the way that there is for, for instance, museums. You know, museums and the web is, you know, there's a couple of different conferences that people go to in the museum world. But museums and the web, if you're doing technology in museums, like, that's where you go. And everybody goes. It's incredibly expensive, so I've never been. But it doesn't seem like for digital humanities in the university that there's that kind of single locus for discussion. And it seems like that's what the NEH was trying to do with this meeting, that it seems like there should be more of one conference, the way there is the AHA conference or the MLA conference. Right. Well, there is this digital humanities meeting every year, and it's at UIUC this year in Illinois. And, you know, I think what's interesting is that of all of us at the Center for History and New Media, I don't think one of us has gone to this. And I sort of feel bad about it, but I think it's because it is a little bit off the radar. And indeed, I didn't know that there was something called ADHO, which is the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which John Unsworth and others are working to build. And I think there needs to be some publicity. I think, you know, more activity in this area of bringing together people either under that umbrella or under some other umbrella. Yeah, it seems like there's a few places where these conversations occur, but it doesn't seem like there's one that has all the buzz that attracts all the different people, both from the kind of inside crew, the few centers that were invited to the NEH meeting, but also from, you know, that attracts membership and interest from individual scholars working at smaller institutions that don't have digital humanities centers. It just doesn't seem like there is a real professional locus for this work yet, and I think that's going to be an important part. So, Tom, at the museum's meeting, what structures are in place, technological or organizationally, that help with this community building. The first is there's a group of, it's a contractor, a vendor of design services for museums, has set up a museum blog site, which is an aggregator of all the museum blogs that are out there on the web. And, you know, there's hundreds at this point. But it's a good place, a good single place to go to to look for people thinking about technology and museums. The other thing is that this Museums and the Web Conference, which has been going on for several years now, they've just started, it seems, this year. And as I said, I wasn't able to go, but they started a social networking portal for people at the conference. And it had facilities for people to engage in discussion forums, to aggregate people, blogs of people who were blogging the conference live. It had polls. It had a place to share references for articles that were cited and papers that were being given. It had a section that said, you know, who's online now so you could engage in live chats with people at the conference. It just seemed like people had put a lot more thought into how to organize a conference with the tools that digital museums people would want to use and to put those tools into place to make the conference hold together a little better. I know from some of the blogs I've read, though, that the one problem, and this is really a problem at all these kinds of big conferences, is that they had horrible web connectivity in the ballroom in which it was being held. And these hotels charge outrageous amounts of money for really crummy web connectivity, and I think they had that problem. But at least the structures were in place to make this work. And I think we would really benefit in the university community from a similar kind of conference with that kind of thought put into how to share and exchange information. Yeah, I think the crowd at my meeting at the NEH, it wasn't a big blogger crowd. And obviously it was a sort of limited crowd as a first meeting. But I think I was only one of maybe three or four people there with, you know, who were actually writing notes down for a blog post, which I'm going to get to this week and post some more detailed notes. So unlike, let's say, the museum or library community where there's lots of people blogging and very active discussions that happen almost in real time via blogs and other methods, I don't think it was really that kind of a crowd. I think a little bit more on the kind of managerial level. But I think that those structures sound really great and I think could have contributed quite a bit to the meeting. We did begin to set up a couple of wikis and I'll mention one of those later on. Let's see, are there other news items from this week? We heard that the Creative Commons initiative is creating a new unit called CC Learn, and it seems like it has a lot of potential. I think one of the first issues that they're tackling, other than just staffing it, they have an opening for an executive director, but they're trying to put together actually a license for higher education that you can use, just a single Creative Commons license for teaching materials and educational materials. And I think that's just a great idea. I think we've wondered which one of the many different Creative Commons licenses to use on different projects here at the Center. It would be terrific to have one for higher ed to sort of free up all of these things like syllabi and teaching materials that could be put on the web. Is that going to apply to student materials? I know like last week or the week before we talked about the problems of copyright of student materials. Would students be able to release their stuff under this license? I think it's an opt-in kind of a license where any course materials that you want, I suppose, sure, it could be student papers or blogs or anything like that could be put up under the CC Learn license. I do think it has to be educationally related. And so I'm not quite sure where it fits in with their existing licenses. But it's clear that they're trying to, I think, enable a little bit more in terms of open education and probably work with, I assume, OpenCourseWare and other projects that are trying to sort of expose internal university materials to a wider audience and, I think, get away from some of the silos of stuff that are behind gates at universities. Which will certainly be a great change if we can pull it off because so much good material is stuck behind those passwords and not necessarily because faculty members choose to put it behind the password, but because that's the default setting at the university. Right, and so I suppose this would be something that could be adopted university-wide.
I suppose that's the use case for it. Also this week, we saw the launch of Google My Maps, and we've been doing a lot of these Google Maps mashups, and we've discussed it, I believe, on an earlier podcast. But I think what's exciting here is, for those who haven't seen it yet, it's become suddenly much easier for people, in our case, you know, students and faculty and staff at universities or museums and libraries to sort of place little indicators of different items onto a Google map. And I think that really presents, you know, up to this point, you had to have a little bit more technical sophistication or knowledge to actually do these kinds of map mashups. But I think with the launch of MyMaps, I think we're going to see a lot more sort of bubbling up from below. I certainly plan to use it in my Western Civ class because it just makes it much easier for students to put things onto a map and to collaborate on a map and so forth. Yeah, I actually, after I read about this coming online, I sat down at the computer and did a map of all the places I've lived in the last 10 years, which are, there are a lot of placemarks, and it took me 20 minutes to do. It was very simple. That's great. Yeah, I mean, it seems pretty interesting to me. I was actually a little disappointed with the announcement. I mean, I first saw the post on the O'Reilly radar, and, you know, it said, it billed it as, you know, it adds the ability to create and share maps directly from Google site. And I was thinking of something kind of and maybe this is just because I've come to expect way too much from technology because there's just been so much cool stuff happening lately. But I was thinking I'd be able to, like, create my own maps, like actually create my own maps. And really what it is, is you can kind of share your annotations of Google's maps. So, I don't know. It's a pushpin sharer, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Which makes it sound a little less interesting. But I do think that the uses, you know, you were talking about, Dan and Mills, I think there are a lot of real uses for it. Right. Well, it'll be interesting to see how it develops and whether people collaborate on maps together and to see, you know, how it looks in the classroom. You know, whether it's simple enough that students, you know, no longer have to use the API or if they want to use Google Earth, write a KML file and these sorts of things. I think anything that sort of makes it easier for us to experiment with this is great. But I agree that, you know, if they could really release something where we could overlay a 19th century map on the current maps that they have, boy, that would be terrific. Right, and that's kind of what I was expecting. Yeah, you have to do a lot of manipulation and stretching and all this stuff. So I think for historians, yes, that would be a terrific next step. But, you know, I think this is a good first step. And, you know, of course, it at the same time puts out of business a lot of these smaller startups that were doing the same thing. But whatever. I think it's a great start for people who want to start using maps in the classroom. This week we wanted to focus on the use and perhaps the abuse of social networking in the humanities. And as I like to often joke, professors often have their own or see an axis of evil of their own, which is, of course, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia. And I think that, you know, initially we were a little bit scared of certainly of MySpace and Facebook as well. They seem like drains of time and places just where students, you know, networked with themselves, but not us. And so I think it's taken a little while for us to sort of think about the ways in which you can integrate social networking and social networking sites like Facebook into the classroom. And our thoughts about this were sort of peaked a little bit this week with a couple of things that happened. First of all, University of Michigan launched a, I believe it's a master's degree in social computing. So there's actually, I think, a first in the country degree where you can actually study the use of social networking in, I believe it's in their library and information sciences school. But interesting nonetheless, and, or not nonetheless, but interesting that Michigan, which is I think a good bellwether for the use of technology in the humanities and libraries and museums, has actually gone to this point of actually creating a sort of specialized degree in the use of these tools. And then from a more technological side, at the Center for History and New Media, we're always keeping track of what's going on with Firefox development because of our Zotero project. And just in general, we all use Firefox pretty regularly. And they had an alpha launch of Firefox Co-op, which sort of integrates social networking technologies right into their browser. And I believe this will eventually come out in version 3.0 of the Firefox browser. And it reminded us quite a bit of Flock, which is a Firefox-based alternative browser. So Flock, for instance, integrates the ability to very quickly blog on a site that you found, to connect with other people who are online, all this done right through the browser. So Flock's really been a kind of early adopter browser for a lot of people. And Firefox is now moving strongly ahead with, I think, implementing a lot of these features. Now, I have to admit a great deal of ignorance on this front, considering I do not have a MySpace page or a Facebook page. And so I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues here, Tom and Mills. You actually have these pages and actually use them. Yeah, I've been on Facebook now for about a year and a half. I did it originally. I set up my Facebook page originally because one of our former graduate students was telling me a nightmare story about someone they had been planning to hire in her company, and then they saw the person's photographs, personal photographs in her Facebook page, and after they saw those photographs, there was no way they were hiring that person. And subsequently, I had a conversation with our dean of students about it, so I thought I would just set up a Facebook page in part to show students that grown-ups also can have Facebook accounts and see what's going on there. And so I set up the page and then invited all the students in my Western Civ class that semester to add me as a friend, and I came into class the next day, and they were all freaked out, like, how did you get a Facebook account? And I said, well, I have a .edu email address and that's all that's required. Yeah, but you're a professor. And so we had a conversation about making sure that they were a little more discreet with some of the things that they were doing. So that's how I got started. But then I noticed that my students started immediately sending me messages and that rather than email, I was getting a bounce to my email account that I had a new message in Facebook. So I have now tell my students that there are multiple ways to get in touch with me. And one of them is email. Another is they can actually come to my office hours. They could send me a message through Facebook. There's just a variety of ways. But where I really saw the big change or the big sort of utility for me was when I led a study tour in Europe in January, and I had 37 students kind of spread all around various cities in Europe at any particular moment. And they were going into Internet cafes and logging into Facebook and posting messages to the group that we had created about some museum they had just been in and that everybody else needed to go check this out right away before we moved on to the next city. And I found that they were, many of them were getting, I guess, notifications in their telephone that they've gotten an email from their Facebook account, and so then they would check it out on their phone, and then they would go and show up at the museum. So it was a really, it's the way that they were getting in touch with each other. And so to be part of that communications loop was really advantageous for me, but also made it very easy for me to get a message to all of them. I mean, I could have sent a group email out, but I found that they respond to Facebook messages a lot faster than they respond to email messages. Tom, have you used it, Tom? Yeah, I have. Some of the same experiences as Mills' have.
I get the sense that email is something that they use with grown-ups, and Facebook is something that they use with their peers. And so being in that space I think really helps put you more – tie you more closely to the rest of their lives, which I think is always a good thing for education. Another thing I've noticed is Facebook has the ability to – it can pull a feed of your blog. And I've noticed that students who would never, ever read my blog or go to the website, because on my Facebook page there is a feed of my blog, I've had a couple of students come up to me and say, oh, I read your blog post the other day, and maybe they were just trying to score brownie points or something, but it worked. And, you know, and they actually, you know, like took a look at what I was writing in sort of the rest of my professional life. And so I do think this is sort of where the students live. And I think if we're going to be all that we can be as educators, I think we need to be where they are. The two of you found any disadvantages? It sounds to me like what you're both saying is this is the kind of locus or the aggregation of everything that's going on in their life. It's where they say where they are, what they're doing, kind of post reviews and news, things like that, which I understand. And actually, I sort of fear how this is increasingly becoming real time with the launch of Twitter and this new technology that allows you to very specifically say what you're doing in any moment of the day. But is that, is it sort of the aggregation of attention into these places, that it's a sort of central place for them, even if they have, let's say, a blog or something else? I think that it is. I think because they have so many different kinds of input, whether it's coming from their phone or from their email or from their IM accounts or wherever it is, at some point they have to have some kind of a nexus, one place to go to focus on and have all their other communications sort of funneled in that way. Otherwise, they have to check 14 different devices during the course of the day to find out what their friends are up to. So I think it does, whether it's Facebook or whatever site, I think it does provide that kind of easy shorthand or easy system for keeping track of all their various kinds of communications. And I actually think that's where the Firefox co-op is important. That's because it's in the aggregation of attention. Because, in fact, you know, MySpace, which was all the talk of the press when Rupert Murdoch bought it and was the place to be for kids, MySpace isn't that cool anymore. People, kids have moved off MySpace and have moved on to Facebook. And, in fact, Facebook isn't that cool anymore, and I suspect it's in part because people like Mills and I are there now. Facebook's not that cool anymore, and more and more young people are moving to new services like, I know one of the hot new ones is called Verb. Yeah, I've heard of that too. So these services are actually kind of trendy and you... Isn't that a problem though? I mean, you know, as these populations sort of migrate from one thing to the next and also lose their stuff. I mean, this is part of the problem with, you know, I'm one of these old fogies that likes email, but email is, you know, is my life and I can go back and search it and find important information and kind of remember where I was. And a lot of these other services, they're so ephemeral, both in your use of it. You might use it for a year or two, and then it becomes passe, and you move on to something else. But also the way the messages are stored and sent, et cetera, it just seems like it just goes away, and you don't have no record of where you've been or what you've said. Well, I think that's where, like, and that's where Firefox Co-op, I'm not exactly, I haven't tried it out yet, so I'm not exactly sure how it works, but if it's using the MySQLite, the SQLite backend of Firefox to retain some of this information, and so basically what Firefox Co-op will allow you to do is it will provide a sidebar with your friends from Twitter, your friends from Facebook, your friends from Verve, your friends from MySpace, all of their profiles, and will aggregate all that material in the sidebar of your browser so you won't have to go to each one of these sites. If it then saves that information, it could solve that problem. I'm not sure if that's what it'll do, but that would be a nice use of the SQLite backend. Yeah. I mean, although I worry about formats and things like that. I mean, email's a known quantity. We've had it for decades, literally. And I've got a lot of stuff. I mean, we instant message a lot here at the center. And sometimes, you know, I fail to save really important instant messages where, you know, actually decisions have been made or we really discuss some topic. And those, you know, those conversations are sort of gone. And even the ones I have, you know, I have no idea what the actual IM format is and how to search it well and things like that. I mean, maybe these things are just, you know, young person's toys for that reason. You know, there are some adult social networking services out there like LinkedIn, and none of them have really ever kind of caught on. And I think it's because, at least in part, it's probably because they just seem fleeting. Right. Well, I also wonder about, you know, I think that is a good point about, I'm not sure it's even generational. You know, I wonder about these digital natives when they're 35 or 40 or 45 and, you know, having professional careers where, you know, you can't be online all the time and, you know, you may have kids or other things going on in life that it's hard to have that full attention that I think a lot of these services require. Did you see that one guy who got fired from Goldman Sachs because he was on his Facebook account like 40 hours a week? He was working like two hours a week, and he was just spending all his time on Facebook instead of working at this very well-paid job. Right, right. Well, I think that's why I was bringing up at the very beginning of sort of this idea of Facebook being part of the axis of evil. I think it's, you know, it's that time sync aspect to it of requiring that intense participation and the peer pressure of it as well, right? I mean, you're connected up in a way that you aren't, let's say, with a blog. You know, you can post irregularly or what have you, but people feel like almost a physical presence when they're really tied into these networks. And, you know, I get LinkedIn messages, like, add me to your, you know, friends never do it. that I do think that Tom is right that each of these is a fairly ephemeral thing. I mean, Facebook has had its, I think it's already had its moment and before too much longer it will be something else and whoever invested a lot of money in Facebook will find that their investment's not worth quite as much because the trend will have moved somewhere else. But from an educational standpoint, for me, I don't know how many different technologies I've been through now. I think I started in what we might call social networking in its very beginning form with whatever Microsoft's discussion forum system was. I can't even remember what that's called now. And then on to WebCT and then eventually blogs. And I now use some social networking things and I let my students IM me. For me, it's all about finding the way that the students are communicating with one another at this particular moment and utilizing that medium to meet them where they are, as Tom said earlier, and facilitate conversations among them about the work that we're doing in class in that particular medium, and then whatever the next thing is, then we'll move on to there. I do not give them my cell phone number because I don't want them running up my minutes, but beyond that, you know, I think as educators, it really makes our job easier if we try to meet our students where they are. Mills, did you notice that, and Tom too, did you notice that the way they use their accounts changed?
I think they ignore me entirely. Oh, really? Okay, well, that's pretty interesting. Yeah, I don't think that my presence changes their behavior at all. Because I think that behavior is so firmly ingrained, I think they just pretend that I'm not there. Yeah, me too. And I just, well, I hope they haven't changed their behavior because I can't imagine what it was before. If they have, well, watch out. And where do you see this? I mean, going forward, if they do all move over to Verb or these other services, do we need to keep moving on to these things? What if they move on to Twitter or some of these even more caffeinated services? just to cell phones? I mean, is it possible we completely lose track or we just have to keep up with whatever the latest and fastest form of communication is? Go ahead, Tom. I actually saw in the history of this social networking thing, I actually saw the move from MySpace to Facebook as a good thing because I thought, I think... It's certainly better designed. Yeah, Facebook is... I can't look at Facebook. It hurts my eyes. You mean MySpace? I'm sorry. Yes, MySpace. Facebook I can look at. Yeah, MySpace... Yeah, Facebook has some structure. It has some nice tools. It's like coherent. You know, you can really... Right, right. It's organized. And so I saw that as a real positive development. If things move on to Twitter, I think we're really in trouble. I mean, I know I tried out Twitter while a bunch of our colleagues were down at South by Southwest because it was all the rage at South by Southwest. And so I was subscribing to their Twitter messages, to their Twitter streams. And I had to turn it off after about a day because you were just getting text messages like every three minutes with 140 characters of basically nothing because what can you say in 140 characters? If it moves in that direction, I think we're in trouble. But if it moves, if it continues to move in the Facebook direction, which allows for more structure, I think, you know, maybe we could be okay. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Mills. But I think we also have to keep in mind that, you know, there are a lot of other social networking applications aside from these two big networks of MySpace and Facebook. And I think Flickr is probably one of the biggest of the other ones. And there are all kinds of social networks emerging on Flickr. I just posted a bunch of photographs that I took when I was in Cambodia a couple of weeks ago, pictures I took at the Genocide Center there. And there's some group that is sort of an NGO, an emergent NGO group focusing on justice issues around the world. And they want permission to use a bunch of my photographs, and they want me to join their group, which I'm probably not going to do because I have not enough time as it is. But these kinds of networks are emerging around images, and we've already seen a number of good examples. I've written about some of these in my blog of people using Flickr as a teaching tool, and of it is just being found. And, you know, they found your pictures and you become part of the online conversation, which I think is pretty critical. I suppose, well, I'll definitely have to get a Facebook page, but for the fall, unless it's passe by that point. But it seems like from there, I think we also probably have a duty to sort of push on our students to adopt, let's say, if there is a variety of these sites, you know, move them away from Twitter, if that's exclusively what they want to use, if they have technological limits, like this 140 character limit, where we can't really have real conversations, or it seems to me like at least Facebook, you can write a pretty long post, let's say on a reading or, you know, what you did at a museum or what you like best. And, you know, I think as long as they're using technologies that allow for that kind of longer form and more in-depth conversation, then it seems like it's fine with me. Yep, I would agree. I'm not going to Twitter. Sounds good. All right, well, I guess we all pledge not to get on Twitter unless something changes. I guess I got to pledge to get off. Yes. Get off now, Tom. When I first saw Twitter, it reminded me of Ross Perot's description of NAFTA, the giant sucking sound. I could just see it sucking people's time right down the drain. Absolutely. Right after this call, it was going to be an intervention in Tom's office. Well, as regular listeners know, we like to end each podcast with a brief discussion of some of the links or resources that we found online. And hopefully we'll find that our audience find these helpful too. Tom, what did you have for this week? I actually, I have something that's not a site and it's actually not directly related to digital humanities. But I think it's something that people might find useful. I don't know how many people out there are devotees of David Allen's Getting Things Done. But a number of people I know here at Center for History and New Media are, and a lot of people kind of out there in the tech blogging community are. Essentially, it's an organizational system. It's sort of a business self-help book, which normally I shy away from. But this one particular book, Getting Things Done, is a really helpful way for managing your time and all of the things that you have to do. And I know people working with computers tend to be, you know, go through organizational systems. Sometimes it seems like one a week. And this is, and Getting Things Done is something that has really helped me and helped a lot of people I know. So I would point people to the book, but I would also point people to a new product, and unfortunately it's for Mac only, but it's called iGTD, iGettingThingsDone. And it's a Mac-only product, but it's kind of right built into the technology is this getting things done system. And it's really been a great thing for me for helping me to organize all the many things I have going on. So Thomas includes to-do lists and things like that. Right. It includes to-do lists. It includes, you know, sort of project management tools. And it logs all that activity and saves it all. As you check things off, they don't disappear. They're saved in case you have to go back to them. And it's got very good integration with Apple Mail and other email clients. So it's a really useful thing. I mean, it's not specifically digital humanities, but digital humanities people are working very hard, I know, and so it could be something that helps out. Yeah, these tools are really, I think, important. I've had a kind of love-hate relationship with getting things done. I always wanted to implement some system like that, but I somehow never seemed to get around to it, so it sounds like this software is really worth a try. Yeah, definitely. Thanks. That sounds great. Mills, what do you have for this week? My site this week is scenemaker.net. And scenemaker.net is a fairly new site that allows you to pull any video that's posted online into their system. So from YouTube or Google Video or wherever it might live, it pulls it into their system and then you can cut it into individual clips, mark up those clips with tags or text and then save them in your account and point people to your individual bits of it. So we were talking about YouTube I guess about a month ago now and I mentioned the Nuremberg Tribunal video. Well this morning I tried out SceneMaker and pulled one of those Nuremberg tribunal videos in, cut it into several pieces that I might use in a lecture where I only want to show one little 30-second clip out of the four and a half minutes, but I also have it then tagged and have some explanatory text to go with it. It's incredibly simple to use and I think could really expand the possibilities for educational uses of online video. Well, it sounds really terrific. I know we've been experimenting with various annotation systems and video clip systems, but this seems like it brings it all together and also has the virtue of being easy to use, which some of these systems don't have. Sounds great. Well, as I promised at the beginning of the podcast in our news roundup, Right.
And it's just digitalhumanities, all one word, .pbwiki.com. And we're going to be slowly building out that site. People who attended the conference, and actually the general public as well, will be building out the site with information about the digital humanities centers where it's being practiced, tools we use and that we're building ourselves, standards and other technologies that come into play, and all kinds of things like this. So it'll be, I think, a nice institutionally independent place for new, you know, people who are new to the topic and also old hats who want to see, you know, what's going on at these various centers, new projects, what people are working on. I think we're also going to have pages for individual biographies so people can add their names to the list. And so again, that's at digitalhumanities.pbwiki.com. If you want to contribute, take a look. Well, thanks, Tom. Thanks, Mills, once again, for our fourth podcast. Thanks, Dan. We us online at digitalcampus.tv where you can join in the discussion and let us know about stories and issues you would like us to cover on future episodes. Mike O'Malley wrote our theme music. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Here it goes.
From the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, this is Digital Campus, a bi-weekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Fear itself. This is Digital Campus number 32 for the 22nd of September, 2008. Going Native. I'm Dan Cohen. And we're back for yet another episode of Digital Campus. And this week we don't have guests, but it was great to have Brian Alexander from Knightly on last time. But I am here with Tom Scheinfeld. Hi, Tom. Hi, Dan. And Mills Kelly, of course. Hey, Mills. Hey, Dan. Hope your semesters are starting off well. And it was a good discussion last time about Chrome. Has anyone tried Chrome? Yeah, I have. I downloaded it onto my wife's PC, and it is very nice. It's very, very fast. And there's some new features, and the user interface is somewhat different than the conventional browser, but it's actually very, very intuitive and really, really slick. I like it. I'm really eager for it to come out on Mac and Linux so I can maybe give it a little more of a banging on, but it's so far so good. Mills, have you tried it out too? I haven't tried it yet just because our home computer, although it's a PC, is so ancient that downloading anything else onto it would kill it, and so then I use a Mac at work. Right, right. Well, not to get too obsessive about Google, but we have This Week in Google. Should we rename the podcast This Week in Google? It seems like there were some interesting Google news, but lots of other news, too. So a lot to get into. Let's dig into the news roundup, as we always do at the beginning of the podcast. Well, in addition to coming out with their new browser, Chrome, it looks like they're also expanding their digitization efforts into newspapers. Mills, you've been covering this, and you think it's a pretty interesting development for historians. I think it's a really exciting development for historians because, first of all, their plans are very ambitious, as they always are at Google, and there are just so many tens of thousands of small newspapers out there that otherwise wouldn't get digitized. So, for instance, when I had ambitions of being a news reporter back in college, I covered the Democratic National Convention for the La Crosse Wisconsin Tribune. Wow. And I'm sure you both read that on a regular basis. But the only way to – you can't actually get copies of it at the Library of Congress. The only way you can – I had to get a – I wanted to get a copy of the stories that I wrote back in 1980. And so the only way to get it was to call the newspaper in Wisconsin and ask them to be, you know, very nicely go into their morgue and dig the stories out and copy them and send them to me. So that's the kind of newspaper that's going to get scanned. And for students and for historians, access to this vast corpus of local newspapers is just going to really, really change things, I think. Oh, I see. So this isn't for the New York Times of the world. This is for something else. That's my understanding. I mean, the New York Times is already available through ProQuest and or the New York Times. And so, you know, ProQuest has all the major newspapers already locked up, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times. So my understanding is that Google's plan is to just scan as many newspapers as they can get their hands on. And with the standard sort of Google quid pro quo that they have of, you know, yeah, we'll do this for free for you. All you have to do is give us your stuff. Is there something ominous here that at least some people might pick up on, or is this just a net gain in your view? I think it's a complete net gain. Have you ever tried to work with a newspaper from 1890, let's say? Right, right. They're crumbling. Right, right. And the La Crosse Wisconsin Tribune has no resources to maintain those crumbling pages, and so all those newspapers are going to vanish pretty soon if somebody doesn't scan them. And ProQuest isn't going to do it because there's no cost recovery model in their business model for scanning small town newspapers. But Google has a whole different system. I mean, I agree that it's a net gain. It's better than what we have now. That's for certain. What I don't know about is Google has this sort of ethos of providing open access to knowledge. And while they do that and while this newspaper project will do that, it doesn't provide complete open access to that knowledge. I mean they will have some link buried in the pull-down menu of the homepage that is something like Google Newspapers. You'll go there. There'll be a search box. You'll be able to type in a simple search, and you'll get back a list of search results with links to page images of these newspapers. But what you won't get are, and Dan, you've written about this, you won't be able to get a full text dump of the content to do any kind of more sophisticated data mining on. You won't get any kinds of APIs so that you can mash this content up with other kinds of services. You won't get any rights to use these materials in other kinds of websites and to do more sophisticated interpretive things with. So they give you kind of a basic level of open access, but they don't provide any real services on top of that. And my problem with that is if the library sign up for this, it's not that they, it's not an exclusive contract. So it's not that they couldn't do something more. It's that they won't do something more. They'll think that by signing this deal with Google, they'll have done their duty. And I'm not sure that that's the case. Just providing a search box with, um, and then a list of, of hits, uh, is of hits is really the full job of these institutions and what we should be doing as cultural heritage professionals. So that's my problem with all of these Google initiatives, Google Books, Google Scholar, all of them. Well, yeah, you know, I have been writing about this. In fact, I think the very first post to my blog in 2005 was about the need for better means of access into these digitized collections, namely in the case that I did on my blog about application programming interfaces or APIs. And strangely enough, Tom, that you mentioned that, I actually just got an email this morning from someone at Rutgers University sort of asking about, well, has anything happened on this front with Google? And I said, no. You know, it's incredible. The interface to Google Books hasn't changed in years. I mean, there's a new homepage where you can kind of browse through the stacks, as it were. But there's no sophisticated interface to the collection. And one anticipates they're going to keep that stripped down, you know, and Google only interface their collection. And indeed, that is the big problem, at least for doing sophisticated kinds of research and analysis of this collection, which definitely will be incredible. So you're left with just the sort of finding the needle in the haystack use case. That is taken care of. But more sophisticated things, much harder to see how that's going to happen. Right. And what's sinister here is that the fact of the matter is that Google does have that more sophisticated access. They do have that increased access, but they're the only ones that have it. That's my problem. And these are public resources, and that's my problem with it. You know, it's interesting. I think they're a little bit, um, you know, schizophrenic about this, uh, aren't they? I mean, at the same time in this very same week, um, you know, one of the stories that came out was that they're now, uh, over at Google scholar, they're adding these green arrows next to open access, uh, articles. So when you do a search and you'll get a string of search results, all of a sudden you'll notice that there are these green arrows next to things that are open, I mean fully open, that you can go and grab and download. And so is Google just sort of schizophrenic in this way?
You know, they actually have Chris DeBono, sort of a very famous open source developer who kind of leads their efforts toward openness. And at the same time, they're sort of closed-fisted with some of their materials, particularly the kinds of materials that we're talking about right now. You know, before we get on to that, I just wanted to say one other thing about the newspapers, and then I'll let Tom answer that question. You know, yes, I think the quid pro quo issue is one that we need to think about. But I do think that eventually third-party vendors are going to start creating some of these products that we really need. But also I think it's worth noting that when it comes to newspapers, we're talking about billions of pages of information. And, you know, the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access has been pumping millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars over the last 20 years into preserving newspapers. Please let us know. year to microfilm newspapers. Okay. So that's what the, you know, that's the, that's the landscape for preserving newspapers right now is that the, you know, big cultural agencies are paying for microfilm and that's just insane. And so, yes, I'm, you know, I'm a little concerned about some of the things that Tom mentioned, but if it doesn't happen soon, these, these newspapers are just going to turn to dust. Yeah, no, I mean, I think Mills Mills, you're absolutely right. I mean, I would certainly say it's better than nothing. But when we're talking about public resources, I don't know if better than nothing should be the standard. And it's the same idea with these open access journals. You know, they put this little green arrow next to open access, which is, I suppose, promoting open access materials. And that's good for the community of scholars. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: But not necessarily so that the public, you know, for the greater good of the public. They want these other resources, the work that other institutions have done to digitize resources to be open access because they want to index them and they want to have them in their databases. And not necessarily to provide more than just the simple access that they provide now. They want to maintain the more sophisticated access for themselves and provide the public with this kind of simpler stripped-down access. And I just don't want to end up in a situation – right now we're in a situation with closed access publications where wealthy universities that have the money to subscribe to these journals, they have complete access and the rest of the public has no access. I don't want to end up in a somewhat similar situation where Google has great access to knowledge and the rest of us have kind of second class access to knowledge. It would be bad if there was one company that gave us kind of limited access but they had complete access. That I think is kind of problematic. push back against this NIH policy, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, which started requiring this year that authors place all of their text and indeed images as well from publications in an NIH database, which is hosted at PubMed Central. You know, and this was a big deal in the open access community to get these things open access, but now they're really fighting back and they've done lobbying. And indeed, there's now an introduction of legislation. I think it's the U.S. House of Representatives Bill 6845 that actually might end up really essentially eliminating this open access policy through PubMed. I mean, is that where we should be looking if we're looking for evil at, you know, really closing off access to these materials? And this was really, I think, that NIH policy, when that passed, it really filtered down. I mean, we saw after that the Harvard policy toward open access and things happening at other universities. That was a real watershed, wasn't it? Now it seems that that policy might be eroded. Well, I've got absolutely zero sympathy for the publishers on this one, and I think it would just be criminal to change the existing policy because, first of all, all three of us paid for those articles. That NIH money didn't come from the companies. It came from you and me. And so the taxpayers of the United States have a right to the access to information Yeah. It's simple and straightforward to me. But then there's another aspect to it, which is this is really a rich country problem that medical schools all around the world in third world countries depend on access to – free access to medical information like this. And they have no money to spend on read Elsevier journals. And so it's also from the standpoint of just the United States is a citizen of the world. It's a really bad idea to close access to medical information generated by scholars using money from the National Institute of Health. It's just bad. Yeah, I have to point out that I think the height of hilarity at this subcommittee meeting on this bill, again, House Bill 6845, was when Howard Berman, who I think was chairing the committee, said that, basically compared the NIH with Napster. He said that the N in NIH shouldn't stand for Napster because they were, basically, the U.S. government was running some kind of free trade site. I mean, this is medical information here that benefits the world and is paid for by the American taxpayer. Right. I think that's the key. That's the key point, that it is paid for by the taxpayer. And I think if these publishers want to control the knowledge, then they should be paying for the research, which obviously they can and don't have the money to do. But if we are paying for the research, we as taxpayers and citizens should have access to the products of that research. And these publications are products of that research. So I think this is really evil. I think the difference here, I think you're right, Dan, that probably Google is somewhere in the middle. I mean, Google's, what is their motto? Don't be evil. Maybe it should be more like don't be as evil as the publishers. But they're probably, don't be evil doesn't mean that they're necessarily good. Right, right. I think that's probably where I come down on this. Yeah. Well, finally, just to wrap up the news from this week, we saw the founding of a couple of institutions that may be important for listeners of this podcast. One actually does come out of the federal government, and this is the passage of this digital promise. This actually happened, I think, a few weeks ago, but I think we haven't had a chance to discuss it on the podcast. But there was a, I guess this is over the summer really, but we're just getting to it now. In the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, there was an establishment of a new program, which was sort of vaguely entitled the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies. And I think they're actually now in the process of trying to find funding for fiscal year 2009. So it's a little unclear what it is. They're asking for $50 million, though, so this is not small. And it will be a congressionally originated nonprofit corporation that will be located in the Department of Ed. Does anyone get a sense of, maybe we'll have to get someone on the podcast to explain this a little bit better to us, what Digital Promise is going to do? I met with some of the people from Digital Promise, I don't know, three years ago when they were just starting to try to lobby for the approval of this idea. And I think the basic premise that they have is a good one, which is that digital technology is transforming education from K to graduate school in ways that we don't fully understand and that the federal government needs to actually put some resources behind figuring out best practices in a new educational environment. And so I think that's really their basic operating premise is that existing programs through the Department of Ed or the NEH or whatever aren't really doing that. And so there needs to be this nexus within the federal government to provide funding to researchers who are looking at how education is being transformed by digital technology, whether it's second grade education or PhD education. And so I think that's a really good idea. I think that's something that needs to be studied. And those studies are going on. They're just not being funded right now, and so it would be nice to have some money, serious money, behind looking at that. How it's all going to play out, I have no idea whether it's going to turn out that way. My only concern with this is that the $50 million that goes to this will be somehow subtracted from the money that's currently going to NEH and NEA and other federal funding agencies for the work so a worry.
We're recording this, our audience should know, as the stock market tank. So, yes, everything you have will be worth the paper it's printed on, but we'll know a lot more about the digital world, won't we, when this is over. Fortunately, the stock of Digital Campus hasn't budged. Right, yeah. We haven't gone IPO yet, so I guess we're all set. Yeah, we haven't broken the buck. Right. And another institution that I guess we'll have to keep an eye on, since it seems like this Digital Promise new nonprofit corporation is just getting started and really needs funding. Well, one institution that has gotten funding, a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, is Tim Berners-Lee's new World Wide Web Foundation. You know, there's the WC3, or W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. He decided to set up something new. It's at webfoundation.org. Does anyone have a sense of why there needs to be a new institution that focuses on the web and what Tim is trying to do. Of course, our audience probably knows that Tim Berners-Lee was really the creator of the web and really invented it in the late 80s, early 90s. Stole the idea from Al Gore. Yes. Gosh. Clearly intercepted his BlackBerry communications. It says on their page that they're seeking to advance a one web that is free and open, to expand the web's capability and robustness, and to extend the web's benefits to all people on the planet. I'm not exactly sure. Again, this is sort of amorphous. Any thoughts? Yeah, it is definitely sort of amorphous. As you said, I don't really see how this differs all that much from the W3C. I don't know where the differences are. I just brought up the W3C's website, and Dan, you just read the Web Foundation's mission statement. The W3C's mission statement is to develop interoperable technologies, specifications, guidelines, software tools to lead the web to its full potential. It's a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding. It sounds very similar. Yeah, I mean, I've always seen, right, and you know, Steve Bratt, who's the CEO of the new World Wide Web Foundation, is also the CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. I've got this feeling that this new entity has something more to do with kind of cultural and political issues, you know, cross-border issues. I mean, I've always seen that, you know, when I go to the W3C site, you know, I'm often looking for, like, the publication of new web standards or those kinds of things, calls for proposals for web standards. So it kind of, it's a bit more technical. I have a feeling this is more of a cultural institution to advance the web, to keep it open, in a sense, a lobbying foundation. Am I wrong about that? In fact, the W3C has a big announcement about the creation of the web foundation. Maybe it really is the advocacy arm of the W3C. It sort of seems that way. But again, I don't think we quite know yet. Well, probably something to watch. And watch we will. So we'll keep an eye on those two foundations as they hopefully get established. Well, I suppose that one of the purposes of this new Digital Promise Act and the institution that it will give birth to is to really study the way in which digital media and technology is affecting up-and-coming generations. And indeed, there's been a lot of interest in studying these so-called digital natives, Thank you. I think that in addition, there have been some efforts here to understand this group. And probably most famously in our corner of the world, the MacArthur Foundation has put a lot of money into studying digital natives and the way they interact with, for instance, video games or the web or mobile technology. And indeed, there's another round of the digital media and learning contest for a grant competition that's coming up in the next few weeks. So we thought we'd spend some time on the feature segment on this episode of Digital Campus, talking a little bit about digital natives. And really, I think our curiosity about them was piqued a little bit more when we read Siva Vadianathan's really interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, the Chronicle Review, when he talks about this really as a myth, that maybe John Palfrey is not correct, that there isn't something called a digital native, and that the students he's encountered are all over the map technology-wise. They're not completely fluent in digital technology. They don't necessarily jump right in. And also, Palfrey himself sort of came out with a new study this week of young people aged 13 to 22, in which he sort of looked at the way in which they participated in digital technology. And he was thinking, well, maybe if we got them more interested in interacting with the web, in creating content for the web on a blog or YouTube, that they would start using this technology in a kind of better way rather than, you know, perhaps the more less learned ways that they're using the web and other digital technology right now. So I guess we wanted to start off the conversation with just sort of going around the horn. Maybe, Mills, we can start with you about what's your experience of students in the classroom? How digitally savvy are they? And is there really, let's say, a difference between your undergrad classes and your graduate classes? Well, you know, I think overall they're just not that savvy. So you would agree with Vadianathan that this is a myth? I would completely agree. I mean, I think that the students who I know, and I spend a lot of time studying undergraduate students and their interactions with technology, and, you know, in every class I teach has some kind of a technology component to it. And they struggle with the simplest things like posting a message to a blog or just simply logging in the first time to a blog. I mean, how hard is that? But for more than half of the students in any one of my classes, just setting up an account on a WordPress blog, which is about as easy as it gets, is just insurmountable. They really need me to hold their hands all the way through it. And it's sort of like 10 years ago when I was teaching elsewhere, maybe 15 years ago, and students would come to me and say, okay, I don't have an email address. Can you show me how to set one up? All the students have access to email now because our university requires it, but I think they're just not that savvy. And I think the mistake that we make as educators and as older people looking at younger people is that we see them using technology all the time. They're staring at the little tiny screen of their phone as they're text messaging somebody. They're IMing people on their computers. They're doing things in their Facebook accounts. So they're very facile users of technology to do the things that they want the technology to do, like grab a movie off of BitTorrent or establish six new friends on Facebook today or whatever it is. But that is completely different from actually being able to do anything with the technology. They can't create web pages. They don't know how to upload a video to YouTube. They certainly don't know how to edit the video if you've ever watched any of the videos they produce. They just can't do a lot of things. They can't write any HTML code. They don't learn how to program. And so in the same way that – I mean it's a little bit like me with automobiles. I'm a very good driver, I like to think. And I can change the oil in my car, and I can fix a flat tire. And that's about as far as it goes. Anything else, I have to take it to the mechanic. And our students are kind of like that. They're very good drivers of their web browsers, but when it comes to actually being able to do anything more than that, they start to struggle. And so I think it's really been overhyped. I have the same experience, Mills, and I was actually going to make the same analogy that you did about the automobile. Most people, and let's say the generation that was born immediately after the release of the Model T, I mean, those people could drive a car. They may have been able to do things like change the oil, as you said, or fix a flat tire or change some spark plugs or whatever it was. But for any major repairs, they had to bring it to a mechanic. And going even further, they certainly couldn't design a car.
And in fact, there are even specialist users, race car drivers and truck drivers, who are even better just plain users of the technology than your average driver. And so I think in many ways, it's a little much for us to expect that this technology would be any different from an earlier technology. I think probably we're in the situation where there are always going to be users and power users and then builders, and that those groups, there might not be a lot of overlap between them. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm in general agreement. I might vary a little bit in that. I mean, I do think the way in which I agree is that I think, and it sounds like this is what the two of you are saying as well, that these young people have a kind of functional view of the technology. Like if they need to do something like text message, then they'll figure that out and they'll do a lot of it. So it's sort of like their experience is a mile wide, but an inch deep. I mean, they don't understand the technology itself, but kind of they get situated in things that they need to do, communicate with their friends or, you know, do social networking sort of things, or they'll figure out how to play videos because that's something that they like to do a lot. But they're not sort of curious about what's behind it to figure out, let's say, you know, in Flash video, what the action script is behind it, or in a blog, they're not interested in the HTML. It sort of has to be put upon them to actually do a task where it would excite them. And I guess in that way, that's sort of what Palfrey is saying, is that you need to get them interested in the act of creation. That's the only way they're going to learn what's underneath the hood. You know, on the other hand, you know, I still feel a little bit, particularly between my grad classes and, you know, at George Mason, we have graduate students who range from, you know, 24 years old to 74 years old. And I still feel that there is a difference. I mean, if you look across that spectrum, the younger students, you know, there's a higher probability that they will know HTML. There's a higher chance that they've created content on the web. And so I think just in general, the numbers are going up. And, you know, I just, you know, I look at my own kids and, you know, they picked up the mouse right away. They understood how they were going to use it. And, you know, there is something I think about growing up with the technology that has an effect. Now, maybe that is fairly limited. And it kind of makes me wonder about what we should do about that, of how you get students beyond that functional stage so they're not just learning the one thing you need to start with first principles when you use technology with this group of digital natives? I don't know that we have to start with first principles, but probably at least with second ones. I'll give you an example. When I went off to college many, many decades ago, in one of my freshman classes, one of the professors said, okay, you guys are all freshmen. You actually don't know what a university research library is because you've only had high school and public library. So we're heading over to the Alderman Library, and we're going to spend an hour learning what a research library is and how it works and how you can get things out of it. And I can't tell you how many times I've blessed that professor because nobody, no other course that I took at the university offered me that sort of introduction to the library, not even my historical methods class. And so I learned the difference between a research library and my local public or high school library. And, you know, and that was fabulous. Well, I think that we have to assume that our students know that there is a thing called the Internet. And I think we have to assume that they know that you can get information off of it. But I think we owe it to them to then begin teaching them the skills to do the things that they need to do to be successful in college with that tool called the Internet and all of its various resources. And so they don't have to be able to write HTML code to be good, successful history majors, but they do have to know how to work with these increasingly massive databases of information like Google Books or the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database or things like that. So I think we can't just say, oh, go to Google Books and find what you need. I think we have to show them how that works. We have to develop exercises to teach them how to do some of these basic things. Yeah, and I would say that it is the other difference with the Internet and the Web versus other technologies like, let's say, the car. I mean, the technology is different in that it is easier to teach those kinds of things, and it is easier to get students to a point where they actually are building. I mean, you know, it would take a lot of training to teach me how to, you know, rebuild an engine block or something. But, like, you know, building a web page in HTML, you know, it's not that difficult a thing to teach. And so I think the barriers, the difference that the Internet presents is that the barriers to entry, to move from the just using stage to the actual building stage, the barriers there are much lower. And so I think if we provide help, the kind of help that Mills is suggesting, it is possible to get them to a place where maybe the place that we think they ought to be already. But isn't part of the problem here and why perhaps digital natives don't have that much technological know-how is that the progress of the technology itself continues to cover up what's underneath. I mean, you know, when we learned how to make web pages, you sort of had to know HTML, and now you can make a pretty good website using, let's say, WordPress. You don't need to know a thing about HTML. And one expects that that will continue to progress in that way. I mean, all these content creation sites, for instance, online video editing sites, you don't have to learn a complicated program like Final Cut Pro. There's some kind of simple flash-based ways of doing it. So it continues as the technology marches forward to kind of mask what's going on. And, you know, you don't need to know programming. You don't need to know these things. I would expect that would continue and that will, you know, as students grow up with the technology, the technology gets smarter and smarter and so they can remain as dumb as they'd like to be. It's interesting. I mean, I think that's a fair point. And I think that probably is true that the technology will continue to cover things up. I think, you know, somebody who might be a little older than us might say the same thing about our abilities in that I can use a text editor to write HTML or PHP or some other simple scripting languages, but I can't program the text editor itself. I couldn't build a text editor in C or whatever language it's using to do that. So, you know, maybe it is a process of covering up and covering up, but I think if we can get students in on whatever floor we're at now, they can advance to higher floors. They may not be getting in on the ground floor at the level of the kernel, but they may be able to get in at a slightly higher floor and then at least advance and keep up as things change. Well, I'm smiling as we talk about this because I'm reminded of my wife's experience with her father, a theoretical physicist and engineer at Kodak his whole career. And every time she needed help with a math problem in calculus, he would always start with, well, I think first we have to talk about integers. What is an integer? And she would just say, okay, thanks, Dad, and walk away. And so I think, and of course he programs still in machine language because, of course, that's very powerful if you can actually do those ones and zeros. But I don't need to know how to do that because, as Tom said, the technology has made it incredibly easy for me. But I think the bigger problem is that there are an incredible number of resources out there right now for students to use that they have no idea how to use. I mean, you know, my example about Google Books is one. You know, as the number of resources, historical primary sources, begins to approach a billion, what are they going to do? How are they going to figure out how to work with that?
Well, and it really suggests for, I mean, beyond, you know, us professors, I mean, I think think really suggests a role for librarians and information specialists to have the kinds of training opportunities. And I know these are out there, but, you know, I realize I don't spend a week at the library with an information specialist or librarian who really knows the ins and outs of, you know, how to do a really good Boolean search on Google or how to mine some of these databases that we've got hundreds and hundreds of databases. And, you know, undoubtedly my students are going to flounder if they just go to one of those databases and just try to plug in keywords. So it seems to me like we have almost a greater onus as educators and then also as the librarians in our audience, I'm sure, are nodding along that there's a real role there in contemporary education there in those kinds of specialties. Yeah, I think that the difficult thing here is finding that right floor, that right place of entry where we need the kind of level of sophistication that we need to get students to. Figuring out like for the gen ed curriculum, let's say, what do students really need to know about the technology and need to know how to do with the technology? I mean, do they need to know HTML? Maybe not. Do they need to know how to use something like a blog to create a website? Well, maybe. Do they need to know how to scan archival documents? Well, I don't know. But do they need to know how to use archival databases? Well, probably. I mean, finding that sweet spot is, I think, a very difficult thing. And I think if we can find, you know, come to some agreement, and maybe we never will because the technology is advancing so quickly, but to come to some agreement about what the average college student or high school senior or whatever needs to know about technology, I think that will help us assess, really, to what extent, you know, are these students digital natives or not. Well, and, you know, we actually at George Mason have, I think, a pretty good set of technology competencies that we expect all of our undergraduates to have when they graduate from college. And it's not that they, you know, and some of the, and they're at different levels, you know, most basic, like be able to send and receive an email message or be able to create and print a word process document. And they sort of progress up the hierarchy, and the expectation is that those simplest things you'll be able to do either when you arrive on campus or by the end of your first semester. And by the time you graduate, then you've progressed into the sophisticated level. And I think an awful lot of campuses around the country have some kind of set of technology competencies, but I would be surprised if more than half of the people in our department here at Mason have actually read those competency expectations. Right, right. You know, even just beyond the basic competencies, though, you know, I guess the final point I would make on this topic is that, you know, we also need to be training for exceptional use of digital technology. And there, you know, when I look around at so-called digital natives, the people we've encountered, for instance, at the Center for History and New Media, who've been doing very, very creative things, is that, you know, you'd want to have beyond just the simple stuff. You want some of these digital natives to really be exploring the boundaries because, you know, we're too old and, you know, uncreative at this point in our lives. And we need new people to come in to think about the ways in which this incredibly flexible technology can be used to advance education and learning and understanding. And so, you know, it'd be great to have more kind of advanced training or more opportunities for these students to kind of get involved, get enthusiastic about the technology. Yeah, and ways to identify them and sort of shepherd them through the training that they would need to do these more advanced things would be great if it existed. I don't think, and I know at least at George Mason, that it really doesn't. And we're identifying people kind of haphazardly. And there isn't something systematic that allows for that kind of creativity and that kind of interest to blossom. Yeah, and I'm doing an interesting experiment right now in one of my classes where the students are going to, in the second half of the semester, create a pretty good-sized Internet project. And there are 17 students in the class, and I asked them on Wednesday to – so yesterday I asked them to come to class tomorrow with a list of what they thought they could contribute to this project. Were they good researchers? Were they good editors? Did they know video editing? Could they write HTML? And so this is just a kind of random subset of 17 history majors, either juniors or seniors, and it'll be really interesting to see what they come up with. Time once again, as we do in every podcast, at the end of the podcast, for some exciting picks from our roundtable, things that you might want to take a look at online and maybe even sometimes offline. Mills, what do you have for us this time? Well, given what we've just been talking about on the need for developing new ways of teaching digital technology to today's students, I'd like to recommend everybody take a look at the National Endowment for the Humanities Teaching Development Fellowships. The first round is the deadline is actually coming up shortly, October 1, but the application is not that arduous. And this is, in my memory, the first time that the NEH has offered money explicitly for the development of teaching rather than kind of educational projects more generally. And these grants sort of focus on one particular course. They don't have to be something to do with digital, but that's our topic here on digital campus. So it is a way to improve a particular course. The one hitch is that you have to have taught the course three times already. So it's not to develop a brand-new course, but to change an existing course. I didn't realize that. So, for instance, if you wanted to digitalize some aspect of a course that you were already teaching and you taught a number of times, then this would be a great grant to apply for. And it's real money. It's enough to buy you out of a class and have a little money left over. And so it's definitely worth taking a look at. Great. We'll take a look. Tom, what do you have for us this time? Well, in the last segment, I was mentioning that it is difficult to identify those exceptional kind of creative students who really want to engage the technology and do something more with it. And this week I've got an episode of a podcast of the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Therapy podcast, episode 31, called What to Look For in Tech Staff. And it's just a discussion of the kinds of things if you're running a digital humanities center or you've just gotten a grant to do a digital humanities project and you need to hire some tech staff. Hiring technical staff can be a really difficult thing because it's hard to tell what people's skills really are. A lot of times you'll get a stack of resumes and they all have the same sort of alphabet soup on them. I know XML and PHP and JavaScript and C and C++ and all of those things. And it's hard to identify the people who really know from the people who don't and from the people who are going to be enthusiastic and creative from the people who are just going to be kind of what sometimes we call code monkeys. And so this podcast just gives some tips for navigating those waters and identifying the kinds of people who you really want to have on board for your digital humanities project or center or educational technology project. Sounds great. Thanks very much. We will take a look. Well, I'm actually going to recommend a book. Although, since this is Digital Campus, the book is freely available online. And it is the Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Susan Shribman and Ray Siemens. And kudos to them and also to Blackwell Publishing for allowing them to put it online for free. As with all of these, we'll link to this from digitalcampus.tv. It's got a rather long URL. Thank you. volume. They're all available now online, and they range from things like, you know, an analysis of what reading online is and what it means to read online versus offline, to digital poetry, to digital games, to blogging. There's an interesting chapter on the nature of blogging, to things like digital libraries and collections and electronic scholarly editions. So it's really a comprehensive volume that I think moves even beyond just literary studies and might be useful to a lot of people in our audience.
And good luck with all those natives in your classes, and we'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks on another episode of Digital Campus. Fear itself! Fear itself! Fear itself! Ask what you can do for your country. Share it, though!

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