technology

Magazines on the Web

Blogger Will Richardson pointed to this interesting adaptation of a magazine to the web. This reminds me of some of the early digital applications that replicated real world aspects online - ie a notebook-style interface for an academic website. Some of these same approaches are still valuable today and the link above clearly underscores that.

Blogging Helps Job Candidates

This post references another blog post and a free WSJ article about how recruiters are starting to check out the blogosphere to get a more accurate picture of potential job candidate than interviews or resumes provide. Will that mean people will now set up blogs with a facade or alternate personality? Just wondering. On the surface, it can be an excellent tool to really understands if someone will fit within an organization.

digital archives

I noticed a conversation at Cliopatria when I was web-surfing yesterday. It connects to yesterday's post here. Here's my comment via Cliopatria:

For those of us who teach in rural areas and/or at institutions with smaller libraries, the digitization of historical sources has not only greatly expanded the possibilities for both students and researchers but also allowed more efficient travel because of finding aids and indices made available online.

A good point is made that students, like other humans, often gravitate toward the path of least resistant. (For example, it's usually easy to catch them cheating off the internet since most don't even scroll past the first page of results on the search engine for their topic.)

Therefore, it's our job as teachers, instructors, and professors to teach students how to discern good sources from less reliable and/or appropriate sources. Even before the internet, I'm not confident that most students spent an adequate amount of time in libraries or archives since, just like now, they often left their work until the last minute.

Those students and individuals who are conscientious will want guidance as to what types of sources that are availalbe to them - whether in print or online - are reliable and most appropriate according to the experts. The internet also makes it much more posssible for those with this expertise to share it beyond the limited bounds of printed journal articles not available to everyone.

Also see the AHA blog for a related discussion we all need to be involved in: http://blog.historians.org/articles/159/aaup-calls-for-cautious-approach-to-open-access

The Future of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Here is a copy of the comment that I have submitted for posting to the AHA Blog Entry entitled, "AAUP Calls for Cautious Approach to Open Access."

Some of the proposed approaches to addressing important issues surrounding digital scholarship appear to be constrained by attempting to work within the existing approaches to publication. With decreased funding for traditional print publications that also ultimately restricts access as most university and college libraries are forced to decrease their subscription budgets,  we should be focusing more on the historical knowledge that could not only be more widely disseminated via new media versus print media but also how a wider scope of individuals with expertise in a particular scholarly area, including the teaching of history, would be able to more fully peer review the new historical knowledge that could then be made more widely available.

Heretofore, the composition and peer review of any new knowledge in history has been primarily conducted behind gated doors. Some of those doors appeared to be at least partially open, but that was usually only to a few within a small circle of mentors and/or colleagues and would certainly not be considered to be “wide open” to anyone and everyone with a potential interest and expertise in the topic or subject at hand. Furthermore, the existing publication apparatus presents significant lag time between formulating and developing ideas and having them published in the wider world due not only to peer review but also to the essential business end of physical publication.
 
As Professor Rosenzweig mentions in the article referenced above, reviews are an important component of any aspect of scholarship. One new media case that he mentions that is worthy of further discussions is H-Net Reviews [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/]. This online system has greatly shortened some of the wait time in many scholarly areas and made reviews available to a much wider audience – most notably those without access to university libraries providing access to a wide range of journals. Because H-Net Reviews is a much newer approach than the established gatekeeping of the print journals, its dynamics of figuring out how to handle the large volume of books available for review and matching them with the most appropriate and qualified reviewers is both similar and different than its print predecessors. Does a wider audience also mean a wider definition of those qualified to review books? On the other hand, is getting the discussion going sooner rather than later not another important component to consider?  These are certainly issues we need to deal with in our discussions about the future of publishing any and all types of scholarly works in history.

With traditional publishing avenues becoming increasing constrained by increasing costs, it is important to consider where we go from here as this blog discussion does. However, we must also do more to think “outside the box” and start from scratch when we begin to think about how new knowledge is created. As a field, history has normally been a solitary writing enterprise in contrast to many other areas of study that primarily rely on more visibly collaborative writing efforts to produce new knowledge. This alone makes any new approach more challenging. How much involvement of others do we want as we think historically and produce knowledge that is worth publishing in any format? Do we want the doors wide open at least at the beginning of the formulation of historical scholarship? As individuals, how much do we need to guard our intellectual property so that our ideas aren’t co-opted by someone else in the competitive race for degree completion, tenure, and/or promotion? Thinking aloud on blogs has already greatly opened the doors to a wider audience but how does the new media-produced new knowledge add to what we need or want to know about history? Or, is it more important to make sure more people know about what other historians are thinking about so that shared interests and shared expertise can produce greatly enhanced scholarship in both the short run and the long run.

In other words, we have traditionally staked out our intellectual territory by writing articles and/or books because the inherent peer review in the print world is the ultimate stamp of credit and everyone coming later has to argue in light of what the previous person has published on the issue. How does this change in the new media world? Creative Commons [http://creativecommons.org/] and its numerous licensing options do offer some alternatives even though many historians are still uncomfortable even with this level of thinking outside the box. Is there a way to use this type of licensing (Creative Commons or something similar) to protect our ideas in the same way that print does? Or does this same protection still represent the gated doors of the traditional print publishing world?

As historians, we need to discuss what we have to gain and what we have to lose from more open access to scholarship in our field before others determine that access for us.

Snap previewing

Via jill/txt, I discovered this interesting feature that allows the viewer/reader to instantly preview the linked site without having to go to it. With blogger, code has to be put in the template but Typepad allows it to easily be added as a widget - a much easier and less confusing process - especially for those who primarily focus on the content of blogging rather than the programming.

Teacher Blogs

This article from USA Today presents a varied overview of why teachers blog.

Blogging the Middle East - educational approaches

From the same blog, an approach to teaching about blogs by using a current event like the crisis in the Middle East to better illustrate the roles blogs play in our current culture. Simply brilliant!

Pew Study - Blogging

This is worth a read.

Teachers and Blogging

Some observations on teachers maintaining blogs.

Blogging in Microsoft Word 12

testing the office 12 blog posting tool

via mamamusings

Not very long ago, I was invited by one of the MS Word product groups to join a discussion about blog posting functionality in the Office 12 version of Word. It was a lively and interesting meeting, and I came away cautiously optimistic about their plans.

Now that I’m running v2 of the Office 12 beta, I’m able to test the posting functionality. Setup was surprisingly smooth—it offers wizard-like options for the main hosting services (Blogger, TypePad, Spaces, etc), but also supports the MetaWeblog API, so I was able to quickly and easily input the information for my Movable Type blog.

All in all, I’m very favorably impressed with what they’ve done. Now I hope the Mac team implements something similar in their next release!