Peter Murray

Pull quote: "Mr. Wesch is not swearing off technology—he still believes you can teach well with YouTube and Twitter. But at a time when using more interactive tools to replace the lecture appears to be gaining widespread acceptance, he has a new message. It doesn't matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student." - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "Several scholars have also examined how hazing rituals tend to vary among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Lawrence C. Ross Jr., author of The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities, has written that hazing among white students often involves excessive alcohol consumption, whereas hazing among black students typically involves "brutalizing pledges."" - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "The market for free online courses is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open courses to anyone who wants them. Some of them have forgone the support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the ever-growing field—the companies’ names can sound similar or stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with their free online courses" - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "On Monday The Chronicle posed some of those questions to two leaders of the new project: L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They stressed that the new project, called MITx, will be run separately from the institute’s longstanding effort to put materials from its traditional courses online. That project, called OpenCourseWare, will continue just as before, while MITx will focus on creating new courses designed to be delivered entirely online. All MITx materials will be free, but those who want a certificate after passing a series of online tests will have to pay a “modest fee.”" - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "Australian outfit Bridge 8, who have the admirable mission of devising “creative strategies for science and society,” and animator James Hutson have created six fantastic two-minute animations on various aspects of critical thinking, aimed at kids ages 8 to 10 but also designed to resonate with grown-ups. Inspired by the animation style of the 1950s, most recognizably Saul Bass, the films are designed to promote a set of educational resources on critical thinking by TechNYou, an emerging technologies public information project funded by the Australian government." - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "For Penguin, that issue was OverDrive's relationship with Amazon. A 2011 arrangement made library lending possible on the Kindle. Publishers have objected to the library loans being executed through Amazon's servers -- imagine walking into your public library then finding yourself at the Target checkout counter." - Peter Murray

Type Report Author Geneva Henry Pages 17 Date 2012 Feb 2 Institution Council on Library and Information Resources / Digital Library Federation - Peter Murray

Where did my tax dollars go? [interactive visualization] - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "Bethel University in Minnesota was losing applicants due to confusing admissions Web pages. Michael Vedders, director of Web services, explains how the college turned the site around." - Peter Murray

"My Blackberry Is Not Working!" - Blackberry, Apple and XBbox360 humor from BBC One | YouTube - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "On May 12-13, 2011, the Library of Congress hosted a two-day meeting on JPEG 2000. The inspiration for the summit was the JPEG 2000 for the Practitioner seminar (Part 1 and Part 2) held at the Wellcome Library in London in November 2010, and the genesis was discussion of JPEG 2000 within the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Still Image Working Group." - Peter Murray

There are oodles of meaty copyright issues in the case — including many that one would not think would still be unresolved at this late date. ReDigi is arguing that what it’s doing is protected by first sale: just as with physical CDs, resale of legally purchased copies is legal. Capitol’s counter is that no physical “copy” changes hands when a ReDigi user uploads a file and another user downloads it. This disagreement cuts to the heart of what first sale means and is for in this digital age. ReDigi is also making a quiver’s worth of arguments about fair use (when users upload files that they then stream back to themselves), public performance (too painfuly technical to get into on a general-interest blog), and the responsibility of intermediaries for infringements initiated by users. - Peter Murray

Dangers of Fracking - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "Prime Minister Petr Nečas has announced that the Czech Republic will follow Poland and suspend ratification of ACTA, which has become a local lightning rod after 22 EU countries signed on last month. Ratification still needs to take place in various national parliaments." - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "An eight-member federal jury in East Texas deliberated Thursday for just a few hours before concluding that all of Eolas’ asserted claims of ownership to technology allowing access to the interactive web were invalid. That means the three upcoming trials that were scheduled to rule on infringement and damages, for Google, Yahoo and other companies, have been canceled. The eight defendant companies who resisted the lawsuits won’t pay anything to Eolas or its partner, the University of California, for using the web." - Peter Murray

Carl Grant's thoughts on the possible competitive advantage of a new ILS - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web. His trip is part of an effort by a group of internet companies and retailers trying to defeat two patents — patents that a patent-licensing company called Eolas and the University of California are saying entitle them to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video." - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "As a result of this agreement, the CDL will assist with PKP’s ongoing development and support of its open source software suite — Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS), and Open Harvester System (OHS), with Open Monograph Press (OMP) due for release in the coming year." - Peter Murray

Code4lib 2012 tweets - Google Docs - Peter Murray

Pull quote: "But the OPEN Act is at least something to build on, and its sponsors have indicated they are flexible. The music and motion-picture industries should be reaching out to the saner members of the tech industry to collaborate in making it better, instead of demonizing it as if it were written by Blackbeard himself. The online industry is not a monolith. Internet companies that have made fortunes building paid venues — Apple (proprietor of iTunes) and Microsoft (Xbox Live) and Netflix, among others — have been pretty quiet during the angry backlash against copyright laws. They have a financial stake in protecting intellectual property." - Peter Murray

Apple released version 1.0.1 of its iBooks Author program. There’s no new code, only a new license agreement. The sloppy language in the original license agreement is cleaned up, but the fundamentals are unchanged: Apple retains exclusive rights to anything an author wants to sell in its new format. - Peter Murray

Steal This Column [on #SOPA, #Wikipedia's response, and the alternative OPEN bill] | New York Times op-ed by Bill... - Peter Murray

HTML5 Microdata and - Peter Murray