I want to share the news about Writing Spaces. Thanks to the many wonderful proposals by people in our field (over 100), there will be two volumes published in the Winter of 2010. From the Writing Spaces announcement:

Each volume will contain 25-30 essays on topics such as writing as a process, invention, primary research, collaboration, web 2.0 technologies, revision, citation, peer response, new media, rhetorical theory, writing centers, topic development, conducting secondary research, ethnography, metacognitive/reflective writing, and personal narrative writing, to name a few.

The U.S. Copyright Office recently had a hearing to consider fair use exemptions for the DMCA. One of the exemptions brought up was to allow circumvention of DVD copyright protection in order to make clips for educational use. As one would expect, the MPAA was resistant to this idea. Public Knowledge (and others) have reported that the MPAA demonstrated an alternative method of using a camcorder and tripod to capture the clips off of a TV screen.

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

As Martine Courant Rife pointed out, this method is "like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it." I'm certain most of us in education agree with Martine and find the MPAA's method ludicrous. But if it's fair use for educators to record short clips off of the screen for educational purposes, it's fair use for our students, too.

Now, IANAL, but it seems to me the MPAA has opened a door for a wider fair use practice. Screen size shouldn't matter, right? Perhaps we should test this and send legions of students into the movie theaters armed with video recording devices. Maybe that potential fair use instance might make the MPAA reconsider again their stance on allowing DVD DeCSS.

Congratulations to our own Matt Barton for winning a small reoccurring role in the new Stargate Universe series to premier this fall on SciFi Channel. Matt will play the character of Mondain Minax, a cyber-space explorer and weirding weapons expert who lives more in VR than RL. Minax is a member of the crew of the alien Sontarans space vessel Zero Wing (veQDuj'oH Dujllj'e') which acts as a foil to the Stargate Universe crew during episodes 3, 7, & 11.

Ars Technica reports, "Only four freshmen showed up at the University of Virginia in 2007 without a computer of their own, and the school has decided that it's no longer worth the expense of running campus computer labs."

That's a surprise. Who would have thought only 4 out of over 3,100 students would show up without a computer? And on the surface, this definitely sounds like a great cost cutting measure.

Nevertheless, if students are still using the labs with that kind of laptop proliferation--and assuming it is more than just for printing--then perhaps there is still a need? For instance, I've seen many students with laptop problems (I'm always surprised, too, at how abused some of their machines seem to be). Batteries often die during the day. Labs will continue to be a valuable resource when their personal machines don't work.

And if the lab equipment is removed, I hope that the lab space is reserved for student laptop use. One of the biggest complaints my students have at GVSU is that it is hard to find a place to work with their laptops. Technology funding will also be necessary to provide more AC outlets for students to charge their machines when studying and during class.

Thanks to Open Education News for clueing me into this recent news item from the University of New Mexico. Members of the UM PIRG group staged a protest over the state of textbook publishing by creating a textbook graveyard on their campus for the books that the campus store would not buy back. And the students have a solution, "At UNM, we're trying to get professors to sign an open-source textbook commitment and try and get them to switch their textbooks over to something more affordable and easier to obtain."

My first thought was let's have National Textbook Graveyard day every spring time to protest the state of publishing and promote open access textbooks. But then this got me wondering about the huge recycling problem colleges would have if millions of out-of-date textbooks were deposited in the middle of campuses across the country. Hmmm...that raises another issue connected to the textbook buyback market that I've never seen discussed. Isn't the rapid releasing of new editions--thus making the older versions worthless--an environmental sustainability issue? What about the thousands of trees that this market system is using each year? What about the energy used in the production and distribution of those texts? The energy and time necessary to recycle them?

Yesterday, we went live with an open access textbook project--Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. This is a new book series which will contain peer-reviewed collections of essays--all composed by teachers for students--with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. Our mission is to build a library of quality open access texts for the writing classroom as an alternative to costly textbooks. The first volume (or two) will focus on first year composition; with later volumes, we hope to have special collections for the writing in the disciplines, professional writing, creative writing, and other classrooms.

Writing Spaces is a good bit different from Wikibooks because of our essay format and, I also believe, a better fit for academics who need clear evidence of contribution and peer review to receive credit for their work in tenure and promotion reviews. As a consequence, this is a model which might also work well for other disciplines.

So for all you Kairosnews readers who have been strong open access and open source advocates, we hope you'll join with us in making this project a success by submitting a proposal for an essay for our first volume. Please check out our CFP.

Lessig has posted a request for Creative Commons users to complete a questionnaire regarding the term "noncommercial."

If you are a CC user, take a few minutes and complete the survey.

BTW: I've always been bothered by CC's definition of noncommercial use because it attempts to define the character of the use (through the use of the term "commercial advantage") rather than just making it about free access to the work. I don't care at all if a for-profit entity uses my work as long as they are not charging for access to it and it is clearly licensed. For those that are interested, here's the relevant paragraph from the legal code of one of the licenses:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

OpenOffice 3.0 has been released. In addition to the traditional Windows and Linux versions, Mac fans will be glad to hear that there is now a native OSX version. See Ars Technica for more details or go straight to the download page.

BusinessWeek reports that IBM has been experimenting with social bookmarking and social networking systems in house. Beehive, their social networking application, has 30,000 employees using the software.

Kairosnews editors have been planning on exploring how social networking might be effective for this community as well. Once Drupal 5x contributed modules necessary for building such a site get converted to Drupal 6x, expect to see major changes here on Kairosnews.