Digital Librarian Initiative

It's not a MOOC in the purest sense (or at least not all of it), but multiple media are reporting that Georgia Tech and Udacity will be offering an Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) degree using the Udacity platform. Students will pay $7,000 for the degree, and Tech is planning on accommodating 10,000 students over the next three years.

Well, apparently, this meme (acronym PLN) can be traced back to the late nineties at least.  Mybrain bumped into it only recently in a blog post by an MLIS student who learned it in a course by Tame The Web's Michael Stephens at San Jose State Univers

This morning I spotted an article in The Next Web by Emil Protalinski about a deal Coursera struck with Chegg that will allow Coursera students the opportunity to use electronic textbooks and other class materials from six publishers during their MOOCs for free.

In this report, two librarians from the Catholic University of America, offer a current overview of what digital humanities is and how libraries relate to it.  They cite a CLIR report which says that librarians could offer the following types of skillsets: "domain (subject), analytical, data management, and project management expertise."  These two authors say that data management may offer the most opportunities for engagement.  They link to CLIR's Digging into Data Challenge website which lists open data repositories that librarians could work with. 

The Library of Congress has epublished a lot of blog posts and recently an e-compilation of these posts on personal digital archiving.  They deal with preservation of personal digital photos, documents, emails, and social media.  They recommend libraries host "personal digital archiving" events for users and offer

This article in Al Jazeera by an anthropology Ph.D. argues that adjuncts are indentured labor, if not brainwashed members of a cult called academia, and the move in MOOCs away from personal interaction of professors with students further debases the value of adjuncts if not all teaching faculty. 

Katie spoke today (4/23/13) in the Research Commons.  I learned that except for Prof. Allen Tullos who serves as "senior editor," the operation is in the hands of graduate students like Katie.  She named about three others.  All of them are in American or Southern Studies here. 

She described Southern Spaces as a peer-reviewed open access multimedia online journal.  It started back in 2004 which makes it fairly early among such journals and fairly long-lived. 

PBS MediaShift posted an interesting article by Jonathan Stray today about The Overview Project, a tool that journalists can use to mine information from multiple sources. The algorithms remove stop words and sort the documents into categories based on their content; the system doesn't take word order into account, so it looks at how many related words the documents have to help sort them.

The chapter on faculty views of the role of the libraries shows some declining confidence compared to previous surveys.  Here's one example.

The project's lead promoter, Robert Darnton (Harvard Library director) describes the utopian vision and the practical challenges of getting there.  Here's a brief vision statement:  "The Digital Public Library of America... is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge."

Cost is pretty high, not even including faculty time. 

A professor of the humanities at Columbia writes that MOOCs' promise to increase the productivity of professors is like a promise to increase the productivity of prostitutes in that some consumers would object to the whole idea. 

In this long article, the author offers a great lesson in how to decode some of the buzzwords of the internet era to reveal their potential political impact on consumers.  Morozov traces the career of Tim O'Reilly and deconstructs two of his meme marketing campaigns: "open source" and "web 2.0." Morozov argues, for example, that O'Reilly's open source ideology is Randian, technocratic, and anti-consumer,  promoting internet freedom so that software engineers could do whatever they wanted with the data they sucked up from consumers.  The true he

OCLC has posted a summary and video playlist here and linked to their "HangingTogether" blog which has two posts by Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC's senior program officer for research on the event: 1) An introduction and 2) "MOOCs and Libraries: Copyright, Licensi

Yesterday, Prof. Steve Everett in the Coursera panel demonstrated and recommended this app -- Air Sketch by qrayon.  It turns the iPad into a "wireless whiteboard" where you can project the iPad screen to a computer attached to a projector as long as you're on the same wifi network.  You can sketch with finger or stylus on a blank screen or show/annotate an existing pdf, image, or photo. 

Tim

Twitter is abuzz with comments from librarians and others interested in Elsevier's official acquisition of Mendeley, which was rumored some time ago. If you're interested in following the conversation, you can follow the hashtag #mendelsevier.

From the New York Times: "Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.

“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.