Blogs

Apple's announcement shows us one of three routes we can take toward the future of knowledge and education. Will academics follow the path blazed by Apple and Kindle and use these open publishing platforms to buy and sell - or will they feel educational materials are more valuable if untethered from the digital marketplace?

The culture, law and politics of copyright are starting to get interesting. The Obama signal not to support SOPA over the weekend, the Web Blackout of sites in protest of that proposed legislation yesterday at the same that the Supreme Court decided to uphold Congressional action in support of copyright protection demonstrate in the political realm the kind of instability that culture has experienced over copyright for almost a generation.

When I was pregnant, I listened to rapper 50 Cent’s song “P.I.M.P.” so often that my husband worried our daughter’s...

“Daddy, I figured it out!” I never get tired of hearing that.

Eric Stoller's 1/16 post "Where are the Radical Practitioners?" struck a nerve with much of our community, and at this writing some 40 people are debating and discussing the questions that Eric raised.

Consider this post to be the last time I write about Vimeo.

The People have sustained libraries longer than the companies that legislate against libraries and the Internet have been in existence. There is no reason we can't spend our money differently to sustain a model that respects openness and sharing to advance knowledge for all - if we choose to.

Researching and writing a dissertation can be one of the most exciting parts of graduate study; that final stage as we move from student to colleague. I behave as professionally as I can in all of my dealings with my committee members,* but recently I encountered a situation that I did now know how to handle at first. Two of my committee members completely disagree about something in the first draft of one of my chapters. After a brief moment of panic, some of which was aloud to one of my supportive peers, I realized that this particular problem has a couple of possible solutions. The easiest and perhaps most common solution when committee members disagree is to do what your committee chair wants. After all, this is the main reason that committees have chairs--someone has to make the final call when ideas conflict. In this post is advice from a professor who has served on many committees.