jdupuis | September 1, 2012
Patents Considered Evil
The MOOC debate
Higher Ed 2020: Epic Fail?
The Digital Age and Higher Education
Smart Writing: It’s good to be published, and better to be understood
Writing Books People Want to Read
3 Reasons Why There's No Measuring ROI On Social Media
Getting scientists to take ethics seriously: strategies that are probably doomed to failure.
Elitism, Equality and MOOCs
MOOCs and the overprepared student
Grading Clout? (using Klout to assign marks)
Learning From One Another (peer grading on Coursera)
Heard: The Sad Anthropological Truth About The Adjunct Professor Life
Bury Your…
jdupuis | August 31, 2012Yeah, it's frosh orientation here at York U starting today so I thought I'd celebrate that with links to a bunch of posts from my all-time favourite source of higher education satire, The Cronk of Higher Ed!
International Helium Shortage Leads to Massive Orientation Layoffs
“After we realized how much time our orientation leaders spent blowing up and delivering balloons, we realized we’d have to cut 40 percent of our staff,” said Lisa Brandberg, assistant director of transition programs at Cal State Yorba-Linda. “We tried to create alternate assignments, like sidewalk chalking or poster…
jdupuis | August 30, 2012
An Academic Ghostwriter, the 'Shadow Scholar,' Comes Clean
The Mechanical MOOC
Rewriting the Journal (what will online do to journal publishing)
The Siege of Academe
The Self-Centered Library: A Paradox (why do we do what we do)
Tweeting By Faith (calculating social media ROI for universities)
Streaming content: Why buy when you can borrow so much more?
Carleton U reveals new donor deal in controversial political management program
>MOOCs will mean the death of universities? Not likely
The Problems with Peer Grading in Coursera
Building a Stellar Team (building an academic executive…
jdupuis | August 28, 2012Imagine a scenario where suddenly over night all toll access publishing suddenly converts to Open Access. You go to bed and your average academic library spends millions of dollars on serials. You wake up, and the subscription bill is zero.
Now, that doesn't mean that suddenly scholarly publishing doesn't cost anything to support. It just means that the money to support that publishing is coming from somewhere other than library budgets. I would generally assume that an entirely open access publishing ecosystem would be significantly less expensive overall than the current mixed publishing…
jdupuis | August 28, 2012I saw an article in the Quill and Quire announcing the shortlist for the Lane Anderson Award, celebrating the best in Canadian science writing.
The Lane Anderson Award honours the very best science writing in Canada today, both in the adult and young-reader categories. Each award will be determined on the relevance of its content to the importance of science in today’s world, and the author’s ability to connect the topic to the interests of the general trade reader.”
The annual Lane Anderson Award honours two jury-selected books, in the categories of adult and young-reader, published in the…
jdupuis | August 25, 2012
Let's Talk about Academic Integrity, Part I: BI (Before the Internet) and Part II AI (After the Internet)
Mining the astronomical literature
26 Internet safety talking points
Save the [Insert Noun Here] (library catastrophism)
Libraries and eBook Publishers: Friend Zone Level 300
An Unexpected Ass Kicking and 7 Things I Learned From My Encounter With Russell Kirsch
Twitter Is Where Conversations Go To Die
How should academic libraries communicate their own value?
What You Need to Know About MOOC's
Ask the Administrator: What Does “College Ready” Mean?
The Post-petroleum Future of Academic…
jdupuis | August 24, 2012George R.R. Martin is the new J.R.R. Tolkien, right?
Great big, fantasy series with large casts of characters, epic battles between good and evil?
Maybe, maybe not. Tolkien certainly create a more black and white universe compared to Martin's infinite shades of gray. On the other hand, Tolkien found a very nice level of actual productivity. He basically wrote one amazing thing and actually finished it. Sure, there were a few other peripheral works that came out during his lifetime, but Lord of the Rings is it. He also wrote in an era when there was no expectation of ever becoming blindingly,…
jdupuis | August 21, 2012
Integrating Integrity (teaching research ethics to grad students)
How to Train Graduate Students in Research Ethics: Lessons From 6 Universities
Connecting With New Faculty, Or, Welcome to Our World
Why Online Education Won't Replace College—Yet
How America learned to love summer reading
Make Us Do the Math (on the recent Hacker article)
Self archiving science is not the solution
“Innovation” and governance: Ontario’s proposed PSE system overhaul
Following the herd, or joining the merry MOOCscapades of higher-ed bloggers
What’s a Board to Do? (UVa post)
Assisting Research Versus Research…
jdupuis | August 20, 2012My colleagues and I are taking our Creative Commons/Panton Principles presentation on the road to another library conference this winter. As a result, I'm still compiling more references on the topic so I thought I share what I've found recently with all of you.
Of course, suggestions for more resources are always welcome in the comments.
NLM APIs (library as data incubator)
Harvard Releases Big Data for Books
What does one do with millions of MARC records?
Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset Now Available via EBSCO Discovery Service™ from EBSCO Publishing
Harvard Publicly Releases…
jdupuis | August 17, 2012Personally, I aspire to being a Social Media Smurf.
Check out this amusing yet pointed post by Eric Stoller: You Are Not a Social Media Jedi, Ninja, Sherpa, or Guru.
A little taste:
They are everywhere. On Twitter profiles, blog bios, and Facebook pages across the social media sphere, inflated social media titles are rampant. People claiming to be experts with social media as they bask in the warm glow of 7 Twitter followers. Seriously, they are found in countless numbers on the web. Some people are even promoting themselves as Pinterest experts. That's almost as funny as the consultants who…
jdupuis | August 15, 2012
I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too)
Ebooks Choices and the Soul of Librarianship
Blogging in the classroom: why your students should write online
The Last Future
Uncovering the world's 'unseen' science (preprint)
HBO Rightly Decides Not to Cater to Cord Cutters
In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment Is All Too Real
High and low: what RIM's failure is doing to the people of Waterloo
The Online Pecking Order: 'Conventional' online universities consider strategic response to MOOCs
Digital Deadline (campuses will be completely digital in 3 years, textbooks that is)
Supporting Public Access to…
jdupuis | August 11, 2012
The Naked and the TED
The TED Takedown Everyone’s Talking About
Jonah Lehrer, TED, and the narrative dark arts
The New Republic gets Download-The-Universe-ish!
I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.
The Trouble with TED
The End of the Twilight of Doom
What’s right and what’s wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs
Peter Thiel's College Dropouts: How's That Working Out?
The Banality of Textbooks
Digital Deadline and Following the Lead of McGraw-Hill's Brian Kibby
Why I'm not mad at Amazon
What do we do and why do we do it? (philosophy of librarianship)
Cord-cutting is no…
jdupuis | August 10, 2012You all knew I was going to find something on the lighter side of all the Mars Rover/Higgs Boson hype and glory, didn't you?
But I guess you didn't think I would be able to find one that combined both of them! w00t!
Mars Rover Should Not Get So Much Attention, Say Higgs-Boson Scientists
GENEVA (The Borowitz Report)—The landing of the Mars science rover Curiosity does not qualify as a significant scientific achievement and should not be getting so much of the public’s attention, says the team of scientists who discovered the Higgs boson last month.
“People see these beautiful pictures from…
jdupuis | August 10, 2012This is the third and hopefully final summary post on the controversy at the University of Virginia surrounding the forced resignation of President Teresa Sullivan. The previous two are here and here.
Trouble With Transparency
A Much Higher Education: UVA has its president back. But the fight to save our universities has only just begun.
Being the innovation shield
After Leadership Crisis Fueled by Distance-Ed Debate, UVa Will Put Free Classes Online
Going Public the UVa Way
U-Va. parent: Online learning is an oxymoron
University of Virginia’s peaceful revolution grew strength online
Most…
jdupuis | August 8, 2012I feel a little weird reviewing this book.
It's a TED book, you see.
What's a TED book, you ask. I'll let TED tell you:
Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article -- a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime.
TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words — long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.
TED talks, in other words…
jdupuis | August 3, 2012This one is a little less on the strictly amusing side and a little more on the useful and thoughtful side for a Friday Fun post, but sometimes it's worth mixing things up a bit.
I've mostly not read these books myself but I am in the middle of the Christensen/Eyring book right now. And they all look very useful and interesting, if only as a springboard for disagreement and debate. A little bit of end-of-summer reading is always a good thing!
Without further ado, from OnlineUniversities.com, the 10 Best Books on the Future of Higher Ed.
Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money…
jdupuis | August 3, 2012This is some vacation catch-up...
Is Algebra Necessary?
Mathematical Illiteracy in the NYT
There Are Many Ways to Improve High School Education: Dumbing It Down Is NOT One of Them
Does mathematics have a place in higher education?
Abandoning Algebra Is Not the Answer
It’s Not the Algebra, It’s the Arithmetic
The challenge for scholarly societies
Concrete Options For A Society Journal To Go OA
Re-skilling for Research: An investigation into the role and skills of subject and liaison librarians required to effectively support the evolving information needs of researchers
The future of…
jdupuis | August 2, 2012
Horses, motorcars and mergers on the LIS horizon
Mergers, boundaries, and image
St. Kate’s MLIS program is going under the business school
Maker Faire KC 2012 and what it means for libraries
At Libraries, Quiet Makes a Comeback
Blogs as Serialized Scholarship
Why Millennials Don't Want To Buy Stuff
Concrete options for a society journal to go OA
I Want It Today: How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail.
Online Higher Education
Opening Ceremonies (changes in schol comm starting to seem inevitable)
Is online learning really cracking open the public post-…
jdupuis | August 1, 2012
I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With
What Filesharing Studies Really Say – Conclusions and Links
IS STEALING MUSIC REALLY THE PROBLEM?
Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered.
What Happened to Silicon Values?
A call for disruptive innovation in science publishing
what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Two big mistakes in thinking about technology in education
What's Wrong With Almost Every Old Media-Inspired New Media Startup
What Is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?
Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?
So Shiny! Lest We Not Forget, iPads Require Purpose…
jdupuis | July 27, 2012Er, this one is pretty disturbing, perhaps not suitable for summer entertainment.
But still, sacred cows are always a target here in the Friday Fun space: The 5 Most Terrifying Ways Doctors Went Crazy on the Job.
And thankfully, I'm about mid-way between checkups so I'll have plenty of time to forget about his one...
#1. The Doctor Who Gave His Girlfriend a Corpse Hand
Everyone has done something a little embarrassing in the name of love. We've all stood outside someone's window with a guitar, or, you know, lovingly dismembered a corpse to offer as a tip for our stripper girlfriend. Wait,…