jdupuis | April 11, 2011Welcome to the latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the world of higher education and scholarly publishing.
This time around it's a bit different with the circumstances being a little unusual. Last week I did a back-of-the-envelope tweet about the Twitter habits of senior academic administrators and my experiences creating a list of those administrators. The uses of social networks in education is an area that really interests me and the habits of those senior administrators was something I'd been wondering about.
Well, my old blogging buddy Stephanie…
jdupuis | April 10, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart, is from April 12, 2008.
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You know how I'm always complaining about business-y buzz/hype books & articles? How they're 1/3 repetition,…
jdupuis | April 8, 2011Hey, it wasn't me that said that. It wasn't even another academic librarian.
It was Joshua Kim in his post from today's Inside Higher Ed, 5 Reasons Librarians Are the Future of Ed Tech.
It's a great post, talking from an outsider's perspective about what librarians bring to the educational process. Kim concentrates on the role that libraries and librarians can play in moving into campus educational technology roles but really, the list he gives applies to the roles that we can play all across the various functions on average campus. Especially those we play as librarians.
Not as…
jdupuis | April 8, 2011This seems to be the trajectory for absolutely everything now, from music, to film, to internet memes, everything.
That doesn't mean it's not funny, of course.
From The Onion, Time Between Thing Being Amusing, Extremely Irritating Down To 4 Minutes
PROVIDENCE, RI--According to a study released this week by Brown University's Department of Modern Culture and Media, it now takes only four minutes for a new cultural touchstone to transform from an amusing novelty into an intensely annoying thing people never want to see or hear again.
*snip*
"The results are the same for everything from TV news…
jdupuis | April 6, 2011...Or not?
Not surprisingly, one of my professional interests is the use of Twitter and other social networks/media in higher education. And not just for educational/classroom purposes but also for outreach.
In other words, people who work at a college or university using Twitter in an official capacity to reach out to other people outside their organization. Of course, this applies to using Twitter to recruit students, to reach out to parents, to connect to similar external departments or organizations.
It also applies to outreach within an organization. For example, we use twitter at my…
jdupuis | April 5, 2011
Academia in the age of digital reproducibility
Gender Gaps (in academic librarianship)
Libraries' Digital Direction
The Physical Law of Extremes - The Digital Law of the Middle
Data on demand
"Selfless Audacity" Means Creating a Sustainable Not-a-Business Model
Canadians are also hostile to paywalls, survey finds
Mathematics journals: what is valued and what may change: Report of the workshop held at MSRI, Berkeley, California on February 14 - 16 2011
How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University
Social Web or Tempo Web?
Twitter advice for profs: keep it personal
The Natural End of…
jdupuis | April 3, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, is from May 2, 2008.
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Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We're not…
jdupuis | April 1, 2011A fun one from the Scholarly Kitchen's Phil Davis to celebrate April 1st. I've seen quite a few amusing bits out there this year but nothing that really slays me. Any suggestions for good ones that you've seen this year?
Anyways: Librarian Caught in Bed with Book
Readers of the UK Guardian and Post awoke Friday to the scandalous photo of a university librarian embracing a copy of "Eat, Pray, Love." Authorities are still investigating whether it was a personal copy.
The photo came to the attention of the press via WikiLeaks. Authorities in the UK and the US are working around the clock to…
jdupuis | March 31, 2011This series of four posts by William M. Briggs is pretty interesting stuff.
The kind of thing where I'm torn: is it the most brilliant and perceptive thing I've ever read about higher education or is it a series of slightly early April 1st posts?
Dear Internet, I really need all you people out there to help me figure this one out. Which way does it go.
And by the way, you really have to read all four posts to get the complete message. The comment streams are interesting too.
University Professors Teach Too Much: Part I
Here is what everybody knows: the best researchers are often not the…
jdupuis | March 31, 2011
Grades and what they don't mean
Would I attend my own conference? Why conferences need more diversity
Thoughts on library Linked Data
'An Unwanted Consequence'
This Is How--And Where--Science Dies In Our Classrooms
When Content is Everywhere, Marketing is Queen
Facebook Testing Instant Ads Based On Status Updates, Wall Posts
Future Tense
Lots of "People" You Interact With Online Are...Not Real
What Forty Years of Research Says About the Impact of Technology on Learning: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis and Validation Study
From Students, a Misplaced Sense of Entitlement
Strictly business?…
jdupuis | March 30, 2011Usually my Around the Web posts are full of pink fluffy bunny ain't-the-Internet-grand kind of links. Oh, sure, I do link to the occasional train wreck but that's rare. I really prefer that strategy because I tend to be an optiministic (if slightly cautious) person by nature.
But everyone loves a good train wreck from time to time. And here they are.
What's the purpose of this? To balance the tendency towards Web utopianism with a pinch of human nature. I think that on the whole the web is vastly beneficial to the world but I'm also not delusional enough to think there's no downside.…
jdupuis | March 28, 2011It's been a while since I've done one of these, so I thought I'd highlight some of my more recent musical discoveries.
Long Way Home by Kelley Hunt. So. A month or so ago I'm browsing on the second floor in a local used bookstore and some really cool bluesy music is on their sound system. I really like it but I sorta think it's Bonnie Raitt. A guy browsing nearby asks the universe, "Who is that? It's really great?" I respond, on behalf of the universe, that it sounds like Bonnie Raitt to me. He wasn't so sure. In retrospect, I guess I should have Shazam'ed it to find out for sure.…
jdupuis | March 28, 2011I read these five books over about the last year or so and they all represent something I really look for in books on complex subjects -- for the most part, they concentrate on things individual people can actually do to make a difference. In this case, a difference in the future of the planet.
Whether it's where you live, what you eat, what you buy or how you get around, the choice is ours. Each of us, me and you, can make choices that, in the aggregate, can make a difference.
Mark Bittman's Food Matters and Betty Fussell's Raising Steaks are at least as much about food and food culture…
jdupuis | March 27, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is from May 18, 2008.
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It seems that at least half the time I mention this book to someone interested in the way the web is changing social patterns the…
jdupuis | March 26, 2011
The Tim Hortons School of Probability
Innovation & Longevity in Digital Publishing: Surfing the S-Curve
Creating a Degree for 10K
Mock Rebecca Black All You Want, She's Laughing To The Bank
7 reasons people don't use twitter, and why 'It's a conversation' is the answer to all of them
Why Women Rule The Internet
Why don't journalists link to primary sources?
A return to "bursty work"
Results: What (if anything) prevents women from accepting conference invitations?
A very brief history of Scholarly HTML
Is It Time to Rebuild & Retool Public Libraries and Make "TechShops"?
To each…
jdupuis | March 25, 2011The world sometimes seems like it's becoming a stranger and stranger place on an almost daily basis. Yep we're talking about Cloud Girlfriend.
From Christopher Mims at Technology Review Blogs: Facebook Virtual Girlfriend Violates Terms of Service:
Some startups don't make it past the phase where they build a mailing list of users for their service, and if Cloud Girlfriend isn't one of them, I will gladly eat my hat.
*snip*
American males are experiencing a mancession, after all, which has made them less desirable as mates and more likely to remain in a state of indefinite adultescence. A…
jdupuis | March 23, 2011My Stealth Librarianship Manifesto post from last month continues to gather comments and page views, albeit at a slower rate than before. Of course, that's very gratifiying to see. If you haven't checked in on the post in a while, there are probably a couple of new comments with librarians' stories that you might want to check out.
To keep the idea going, I've decided to have occasional posts highlighting "stealthy librarian" posts and articles I see around the web. These are posts that highlight facutly/librarian collaboration in teaching or research, librarians integrated with business…
jdupuis | March 22, 2011
Anatomy of a Twitter Screw-up: My Own
What's the best way to not get invited back to dinner? (Talk about excessive corporate influence in American democracy.)
Smartphone users: Beware
Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation
The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku
iPads: Bane or Boon to College Teaching?
Mobile Content Is Twice as Difficult
n00b Science Blogging 101: Part 3 - Blogging in Grad School
The NYTimes: A Remembrance (What would it take for the NYT to get your money for digital content?)
Mashups Reveal World's Top Scientific Cities
'Life depends on science but the…
jdupuis | March 21, 2011In his incredibly wonderful new book, On the Grid: A Plot of Land, An Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work, Scott Huler gives us three essential take-aways:
Thank God for engineers
Get out your wallet
Let's learn to love our infrastructure. (p. 217-225)
In fact, not much more need really be said about the book. In essence it's a kind of tribute and salute to the women and men who keep our highly technoligized society functioning. The people we often forget about, whose glamour pales in comparison to movie stars, singers, politicians, even police and fire…
jdupuis | March 20, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is from June 22, 2008.
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This is a book with a profoundly split personality. It's like two books warring in the bosom of one volume. It's a bit…