There seems to be a significant disagreement between academic libraries and their own host institutions with regard to an important rule change proposed by the Department of Education. That disagreement has implications that go way beyond the rule itself.
It was a little while back now that a controversial blogger attacked one or more of the authors of the Scholarly Kitchen for being former academics, questioning whether such people should be working in publishing. In today’s post, Phill Jones argues that such rhetoric contributes to a stigma that is damaging to the health of academia.
Physicist Brian Greene explains a recent scientific breakthrough to Stephen Colbert.
Amazon is reportedly poised to get into the open educational resources game. This could be huge, and not just for the most obvious reasons.
A visit with Bob Dorough, 92, the man who set education to song for a generation in the US.
The Open Syllabus Project has created a database of over 1 million college syllabuses and extracted the names of the materials used in these courses. These materials are analyzed quantitatively and ranked. The creators of the service propose a new metric for the evaluation of academic publications.
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing?
Victoria Belmont talks about what happens when something you do online is taken out of context and becomes part of the internet’s permanent memory.
The musical “Hamilton” raises questions about history and historical practice that reflects what scholars are and aren’t doing.
Steven Pinker discusses a better model for more effective prose, particularly for academic authors.
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?
Celebrating Einstein’s theory of General Relativity with a well-known time traveler.
The MOOCs seem to have faded from view. In large part this is because they were so relentlessly overhyped when they first appeared. But now various forms of online education have begun to get traction in the marketplace. An essay by Clay Shirky points out how online education is operating today and its implications for higher education.
How does a differentiation between faculty on separate tracks for research or educational roles will drive change in the reward system? How might it impact scholarly publishing?
Applicants for a recent conference scholarship wrote essays that tended strongly to depict the traditional collection as dead and collaboration between librarians and publishers as essential to the library’s future. Do they herald a generational shift in mindset among librarians?