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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me

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June 11, 2009

New Coalition Will Work to Bring Broadband Internet Access to the Public

A group of education, health, and library advocates has formed a new coalition to expand broadband Internet access. It will focus on how to most efficiently bring access to the public by using community institutions — including community colleges and other higher-education institutions — as a base.

The new Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition is made up of 28 commercial and not-for-profit groups, including the American Library Association, Internet2, and and Educause. It will seek federal money to provide broadband access first through “anchor institutions,” such as colleges, schools, libraries, and hospitals, since millions of people rely on those institutions already. The coalition says the high-speed connections could help schools and community colleges offer specialized courses and distance learning, could help health-care facilities make better use of telemedicine, and could help colleges and universities advance research.

“There’s not enough money in the stimulus bill to bring fiber optics to everybody’s home,” said the coalition’s coordinator, John Windhausen Jr. “One of the best ways is to bring the broadband to where the most people are likely to get it.”

“It would bring better education, higher quality research, and more collaboration,” said Gary Bachula, Internet2’s vice president of external relations. “You will get the most bang for the buck by reaching those institutions.” —Marc Beja

May 1, 2009

Amazon Offers Educational Grants for 'Cloud Computing' Access

Amazon, the online retailing giant, is now offering educators, researchers, and students the chance to apply for free access to its hosted computing, or “cloud,” services, the company announced this week. The services can be used to work with massive amounts of data that would jam a regular desktop computer.

The company is offering computer-usage credits, worth up to $100 per student, to instructors who wish to utilize its cloud services in the classroom. Grant applications are available through Amazon’s Web site. Amazon says its hosted services are already being used at institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Oxford.

For example, Oxford scientists at the Malaria Atlas Project—an effort to map the geography of the disease in order to drive prevention strategies—use Amazon’s hosted services to store, share, and analyze data. –Steve Kolowich

April 21, 2009

United Nations Opens World Digital Library

In the latest and perhaps broadest effort to provide instant access to scholarly resources, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization today inaugurated its World Digital Library, a Web site that allows visitors to browse through a trove of artifacts spanning the history of civilization.

The site, four years in the making, brings together historical manuscripts along with secondary literature describing them—translated into seven different languages. The library includes scanned documents from 27 libraries in 19 countries so far, including a manuscript from ancient Japan that is believed to be the first novel ever. James H. Billington, the U.S. librarian of Congress, who heads the project, says all countries are welcome to contribute. The idea is to use Web technology to put all of mankind’s most precious artifacts in a single, shared repository. —Steve Kolowich

April 20, 2009

Students Lose, Fair Use Wins in Suit Targeting Anti-Plagiarism Tool

Students have suffered another defeat in their legal fight against the company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors.

A federal appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that the Turnitin service does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty.

The opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit “will be cheered by digital fair-use proponents,” says the E-Commerce and Tech Law blog.

Last year’s decision in the plagiarism case — and I’m plagiarizing here from The Chronicle’s account of it — was seen as carrying wider implications for other digital services, such as Google’s effort to scan books in major libraries and add them to its index for search purposes.

The legal battle began in 2007, when four high-school students sued iParadigms, the company that runs Turnitin, arguing that the company took their papers against their will and profited from using them. The students’ high schools required papers to be checked for plagiarism using Turnitin. The service adds scanned papers to its database.

U.S. District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton had found that scanning the student papers to detect plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. Mr. Hilton ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works,” and that the new use “provides a substantial public benefit.”

Steven J. McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design, reacted to the latest development in the case by calling the fair-use analysis unsurprising “but welcome.”

“In particular,” Mr. McDonald wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle on Monday, “it underscores that the copyright owner’s rights are simply not absolute and that ‘transformative’ uses deserve protection themselves.”

More than 450,000 educators and millions of high school and college students use Turnitin, according to a company fact sheet.

Last week’s opinion also reversed and sent back for further consideration the lower court’s decision on counterclaims made by iParadigms. The company had put forward a claim against one of the plaintiffs under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA. iParadigms said it was forced to launch an investigation — spending numerous man-hours in the process — after the student allegedly gained unauthorized access to Turnitin.

The E-Commerce and Tech Law blog called attention to the reversal, saying it “could leave Web users open to getting smacked with a large CFAA award whenever a company suspects someone has gained improper access to its Web site.”

Robert A. Vanderhye, the plaintiffs’ pro bono lawyer, acknowledged that the bulk of the opinion was a “stinging defeat.” But the lawyer has not surrendered yet. He plans to petition for a rehearing.

He argued that the court did not decide the issue of Turnitin sharing papers with third parties. If a student’s paper is flagged as unoriginal based on an earlier paper, he said, the company will turn over that earlier paper to an instructor upon request.

“This is not a complete, total defeat on the copyright issue,” he argued. “That issue is still outstanding,” he said, referring to the question of whether Turnitin infringes a copyright if it sends a complete paper to a third party. “They didn’t decide that issue.” —Marc Parry

March 23, 2009

MIT Professors Approve Campuswide Policy to Publish Their Scholarly Articles Free Online

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is known for its ambitious effort to give away its course materials free online, and now the university is giving away its research, too.

Last week MIT’s professors voted unanimously to adopt a policy stating that all faculty members will deposit their scholarly research papers in a free, online university repository (in addition to sending them to scholarly journals), in an effort to expand access to the university’s scholarship. The policy is modeled on one adopted last year by Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At MIT, like at Harvard, professors can opt out of the policy if, for instance, a journal their paper is accepted to does not allow free publication of articles.

Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publishing, said the move was a sign of growing momentum for open-access policies. “It’s a strong signal that these measures have faculty support,” he said. “The more momentum there is for open access, the more it looks like a mainstream idea,” he added. “There’s no doubt that it started out as a fringe idea.”

He said there were now about 30 colleges and universities around the world that have adopted similar open-access policies for their research, and he pointed to a list of such policies maintained by ePrints, a company that makes open-access archiving software. Most of those institutions are in Europe, and many of the U.S. colleges that have jumped in have adopted policies only in a school or department.

In the past, some publishers have expressed concern about university open-access policies — especially some scholarly societies that publish journals and worry about whether giving away articles will undermine their ability to keep their publishing efforts afloat. —Jeffrey R. Young

February 26, 2009

Oregon State U. Releases Photo Collections to Flickr Commons

In an effort to broaden access to its image archives, Oregon State University has become the first university to join Flickr Commons, a section of the popular photo-sharing service devoted to making historic images available to the public.

“We’re always looking for new areas of engagement, new avenues for putting our materials out there,” said Tiah Edmunson-Morton, reference and instruction archivist at the university’s Valley Library, in an interview today. “It seemed a base to reach a whole new set of users.”

Flickr, the image- and video-sharing site owned by Yahoo, opened the Commons last year as a space where archival institutions—like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, which are both using the service—can post photos and visitors can comment on them. “The key goals of the Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer,” explains a message on the site’s home page.

So far, Oregon State has chosen to contribute digital images from the strongest areas of its photographic collection—natural resources, environmental history, forestry, and agriculture. The institution’s first post consisted of 116 photos of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, collected by the forestry historian Gerald W. Williams.

“These same images sat in our own Flickr account—and people looked at them sort of, but nobody commented on them and nobody tagged them,” said Ms. Edmunson-Morton. “When we launched into the Commons, it was literally shocking: Our first week, we had 15,000 image views. And we hadn’t that many in our other Flickr account, total.” Oregon State’s non-Commons account had been open for seven months.

“I think too often historical images and archives are put of a shelf and not used,” she said. The easier the access, she added, the more likely professors may be to incorporate these photographs into a lecture or students to peruse them in their free time. –Steve Kolowich

February 10, 2009

MIT Tops Rankings of University Web Sites

The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, has released the latest edition of its biannual Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, which seeks to measure “the performance and impact of universities through their Web presence.”

According to the group’s Web site, the rankings—which Cybermetrics began publishing in 2004—were originally conceived as a way of promoting open access to academic materials online. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose OpenCourseWare project boasts the world’s largest collection of free teaching materials, tops the list.

Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Cornell University round out the top five. American universities are the strongest performers: The University of Toronto, at No. 24, is the highest-ranked institution from outside the United States, and the University of Cambridge, at No. 28, registered as the highest-ranked European institution.

The Webometrics rankings score each university on four criteria, including the number of links to the institution’s Web site from other sites. These “inlinks” are ostensibly a good way of evaluating a site’s general impact on the Web community. —Steve Kolowich

January 27, 2009

New Low-Cost University Plans to Use Social-Networking Tools

The new University of the People, an online institution that promises to offer courses for minimal cost to students thanks to free online materials and social-networking tools, will most likely have more symbolic significance than practical impact on the higher-education landscape.

The university got a big write-up in The New York Times, but some education bloggers, including Seb Schmoller, have expressed skepticism about the project, started by the entrepreneur who runs Cramster, a service that some describe as offering homework help by publishing the answers to problems in popular textbooks.

One key aspect of the project is the notion that with so many quality course materials published free online by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others, some entity should come along to add a teaching component so that students could get college credit on the cheap. University of the People plans to essentially encourage students to teach themselves by working in groups, under the guidance of instructors — many of whom are expected to be retired college professors — who will moderate.

A project that we wrote about last year, called Peer 2 Peer University, proposed the same basic idea.

University of the People will be a nonprofit entity. Though it will not charge tuition, there will be fees to sign up ($15 to $50) and to take exams ($10 to $100) — which sounds like the budget airlines that offer low fares but charge for each piece of luggage and every drink. Clearly the costs will be far lower than those at traditional institutions, though.

For starters the new university will offer only two degrees: a B.A. in business administration and a B.Sc. in computer science. To be admitted, students must prove they graduated from high school, can speak English, and have consistent access to the Internet. A statement on the university’s Web site says it plans to apply for accreditation but does not have it yet.

It seems that either University of the People, or P2PU, or some yet-to-be-created institution, will find a way to offer a radically cheaper college degree using online tools. The new models will probably take some time to mature until the right mix of teaching and self-study is perfected. —Jeffrey R. Young

October 28, 2008

Blackboard Announces Free Tool to Interconnect Its Software With Moodle, an Open-Source Competitor

Blackboard has taken another step toward making the next version of its course-management system work alongside open-source competitors. The company announced today that it is working with Iowa State University to create a software plug-in for the company’s course-management system so that it can integrate with Moodle, a popular open-source alternative. The move comes just three months after the company announced the creation of a similar connection tool for Sakai, another open-source course-management system.

The new software tool, called the Learning Environment Connector for Moodle, will let students access course Web sites created with Moodle from within the Blackboard software interface. The goal is to let students see all of their course information in one space, regardless of which software was used to produce the Web pages. “They’ll have a single place to sign on to get to our Blackboard presence and our Moodle presence,” said Randal Dalhoff, assistant director of academic technologies for Iowa State University’s Information Technology Services, in an interview.

The tools are designed to work with the next versions of the company’s software, which it is calling Blackboard NG, for next generation. College officials expect the first of those versions to come out early next year, although Blackboard officials have not announced a release date. Iowa State has been given an early copy of Blackboard’s forthcoming software so that its programmers could build the tool. Mr. Dalhoff said the university would give the Connector software free to any college that wants it.

He said Blackboard officials had asked the university earlier this year if it would be interested in taking on the project, and university officials decided to do so. “To me it’s the thrill of putting something together, and as programmers we thought this would be a fun project to do,” he said.

Some colleges have expressed skepticism at Blackboard’s move to link with open-source platforms, in part because of the aggressive tactics the company has taken against commercial competitors. The company successfully sued one of those competitors, Desire2Learn, for for violating Blackboard’s patent on a system of delivering course materials online, though some college officials feel the patent is overly broad. The patent office is reviewing whether the patent was issued properly, which depends in part on whether other colleges or companies were already using similar technology before Blackboard filed for its patent.

“I’m not a Blackboard advocate, but I’m not a Blackboard putter-downer either,” said Mr. Dalhoff. “We’re not tied to Blackboard. If some day something really came out that is better, or prices got out of range, who knows what we might do?”

A couple of departments at the university already use Moodle, he said, even though the central IT department does not officially support it. Most professors at the university use Blackboard.

No one course-management system is best for every department or for every professor, said Mr. Dalhoff. “Having a choice will be better for campuses than really settling on one.” —Jeffrey R. Young

October 17, 2008

Curious About Game Theory? Milton? Yale Has a Free Course for You

Yale University is adding eight courses to its free online offerings, the university announced.

The courses, which were recorded as taught, are available in video and audio formats from the Open Yale Courses Web site, which the university says is among the most often visited of all its Web pages. For each course the university also posts searchable transcripts, syllabi, reading assignments, and additional materials such as problem sets.

Seven courses were already online. The new additions are: “Frontiers of Biomedical Engineering,” taught by W. Mark Saltzman; “Game Theory,” taught by Benjamin Polak; “Financial Markets,” taught by Robert Shiller; “Milton,” taught by John Rogers; “The American Novel Since 1945,” taught by Amy Hungerford; “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era,” taught by David Blight; “Introduction to Ancient Greek History,” taught by Donald Kagan; and “France Since 1871,” taught by John Merriman. —Lawrence Biemiller

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