Digital scholarship

The music industry argues the file-sharing site LimeWire should pay for copyright infringement for 11,000 songs, and even the judge thinks the labels are insane.

Thus there is no guarantee of upward mobility, even with that highest of educational attainments, the PhD. Ultimately this represents not only a change to the perception of doctoral education but also to our understanding of the benefits of education in general, and its role in the assumed social contract; namely “Educate yourself, work hard, and you’ll get ahead”. Earning a PhD is still one way to achieve this, but the academic profession itself is no longer an epitome of its realization since the old arrangement has begun to break down. Caveat emptor is a warning that now applies to education as to other “goods”, but the fact that it must be made explicit tells us something about the nature of the times. Education is more of a risk, even as it becomes more of a necessity.

Academic spring campaign aims to make all taxpayer-funded academic research available for free online...

Most universities are using social media in one way or another but are they doing so effectively or could more talk than action eventually lead to fatigue?

Danah boyd's "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics" is a speech delivered at SXSW and Webstock New Zealand (that's where this video comes from). Danah first defines a culture of fear ("the ways in which fear is employed by marketers, politicians, technology designers [e.g., consider security narratives] and the media to regulate the public"), then shows how "attention economics" can exploit fear to bring in attention ("there is a long history of news media leveraging fear to grab attention") and how this leads fear to dominate many of our debates:

Academics, some from the University of Lincoln, concerned about rising tuition fees set up a university where students can learn for free.

Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to determine if using Twitter – the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue – for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades. A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities. This study provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role.

Background Today has seen the release of a Bernstein Research investment report by Claudio Aspesi, entitled Reed Elsevier: Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck?  It contains some stark ...

Yes, you read that right. According to a memorandum issued last week by Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council, the cost of its peer-reviewed journal subscriptions has become prohibitively expensive.

To review: academics who publish provide free material and free labor to big publishers like Elsevier who take this free material and package it into things like journals that are then sold at great expense to places like libraries. And by "great expense" I mean tens of thousands of dollars per journal per year. More on that below.

I've only just come across MathOverflow - good example of experts sharing their knowledge, and maybe influence here could relate to promotion?