Copyright and Academia

Lawrence Lessig, long-time advocate of the relaxation of copyright legislation, argued at the 2009 Educause Conference that:

“If copyright law, at its core, regulates something called ‘copies,’ then in the analog world… many uses of culture were copyright-free,” he explained. “They didn’t trigger copyright law, because no copy was made. But in the digital world, very few uses are copyright-free because in the digital world … all uses produce a copy.”

According to InsideHigherEd, which reported his speech, he concluded by calling on scholars to resist the application of copyright law to the results of their research.  It’s a good piece, and one you might enjoy, particularly in connection with the Baraniuk speech we watched on open-source education.                                              read more—>

Maybe Open-Source Learning…

…is closer than we think.  Utah University Press joins University of Michigan Press in publishing books in digital format, as a way to remain active publishers of scholarly research                                                                                                                                                                                                         Read more —>

Degradation of Labor

You might find this review of Harry Braverman’s analysis of labor in the twentieth century interesting, in the light of our readings on work, remuneration and conditions of labor.  This review suggests that what we are seeing now, in the first decade of the 21st century is the culmination of a much longer process, mediated through several different “technological” revolutions.   I found this point particularly thought-provoking:

“Braverman emphasises that there is a gulf between the ‘social forms’ of labour – the value and status that is accorded to different activities – and the concrete forms of work which are often very similar or even identical, though workers are still differently classed, belonging to ‘services’ or ‘industry’. The rise of automation and a higher ‘scientific-technological’ element to production and the growth of lowly paid work in the service sector are directly connected and not just coincidental. Thereby capitalism is capable, as Marx already foresaw, to create poverty in the midst of plenty, and because of that burgeoning industries in one sector at the same time contribute to the production of a surplus army of labourers and thereby to poverty on quite a grand scale.”

Read more–>

Bonjour International URLs

ICANN announced that it will now be possible for those who do not use the Latin alphabet to type URLs in their own languages.  According to the NPR report, an estimated 1.6 billion people do not use the Latin alphabet yet have been forced, until now, to type URLs in that alphabet.  International character domain names are now up for grabs, although problems may still arise for those languages that write right to left…                                                                                  Read more –>

E-Books & the Brain

The New York Times today includes op eds from several writers about  reading on screens.  Maryanne Wolf , the John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University, compose particularly provocative ideas.  You might think about your own reading practices and pleasures in the light of their comments —>read more

Tweet Aloft

Twittering en route

Mashable reports that a new service from Lufthansa will update twitter and facebook with the location  of your flight…check out the service at MySkyStatus

A Challenger to Google?

Here’s a short paen to the search service Kosmix:

Google: It’s not me, it’s you

I’ve experimented with the service and it scores high on serendipity, which is a big plus, but seems less useful for in-depth searching and exploration.  What do you think?