Thanks to all of you who participated in the Survey on Open Source Adoption and Usage. We have included the results of the survey (with any identifying comments redacted to ensure confidentiality) on the OSAAC website, located here: http://rhetoricalcommons.org/OSAAC/node/22. We have done some data analysis and are also providing the raw data in Microsoft Excel (.xls) format. In the near future, we will include an analysis of these findings in a joint publication.

Once again, thank you for your participation.

Ben McCorkle, Asst. Professor of English, OSU Marion, mccorkle.12[at]osu.edu

Greetings. We are conducting a preliminary online survey aimed at assessing the role of open source software in the scholarly and pedagogical practices of the Rhetoric & Composition and English Studies community. As a scholar and teacher of Rhetoric & Composition and/or of English Studies, you are being invited to participate in this survey. Please take a few moments to respond to this very brief ten-question survey on the subject at the link provided below.

Hi All,

I'm coordinating a year-long Electronic Pedagogy workshop series for postdocs at Georgia Tech. One of the goals of the series is to have the participants propose, conduct, and publish (or at least submit) some sort of research project in the field of electronic/digital pedagogy. These projects can be classroom practice based, theory based, etc. The participants are teaching in Tech's fyw program.

I'm compiling a list of journals that deal with the topics of composition, electronic pedagogy, etc. So, what are your favorite journals?

From the SHARP List.

CALL FOR PAPERS

"Using Digital Archives in the Classroom"
SHARP 2007 Conference
Minneapolis, Minnesota
July 11-15, 2007

This year's SHARP conference theme is "Open the Book, Open the Mind," which will highlight how books develop and extend minds and cultures, and also how they are opened to new media and new purposes. With this in mind, I will propose a panel on the most current form of literary media: digital archives. Subject to acceptance by the SHARP conference committee.)

There has been a proliferation of digital scholarly projects published as open-access resources, i.e., freely available on the Web. For example, the Poetess Archive (http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/), Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org/), the Rossetti Archive (http://www.rossettiarchive.org/) and the Emblem Project Utrecht (http://emblems.let.uu.nl/index.html). These projects involve digitizing, standardizing presentation and offering search capabilities of printed literary materials. Essentially, scholars and students can discover or create relationships among the literary documents that would have been impossible to create (or at the very least, overwhelmingly time consuming) through printed facsimiles or archival work. However, these digital resources beg the question: How are they being used by scholars and college students?

For this panel, we will explore the use of these open-access projects, as envisioned by the project's creators or as actually used by faculty outside of the project. Discussion of digital projects from any literary historical period or literary genre are welcome. Actual assignments and exercises will also be useful. Though theorizing digital humanities is useful for part of the panel's discussion, it will not dominate. Proposals discussing pedagogical uses of social spaces on the Web are also welcome, e.g., Wikipedia or MySpace.
 Along with your proposal, please include a brief biographical statement as well any requirements for AV equipment.
 Please submit emailed proposals (of 300 words) by October 20, 2006 to Katherine D. Harris, San Jose State University at kharris@email.sjsu.edu.

 For further information about the 2007 SHARP Conference in Minnesota see here: http://www.cce.umn.edu/conferences/sharp/ If you would like to join SHARP, please go to: http://sharpweb.org/join.html

 Dr. Katherine D. Harris
   Assistant Professor
 Dept. of English & Comp. Lit.
 San Jose State University
 One Washington Square
 San Jose, CA 95192
 Phone: 408.924.4475
 Email: kharris@email.sjsu.edu
 http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/

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Along with your proposal, please include a brief biographical statement as well any requirements for AV equipment.
Please submit emailed proposals (of 300 words) by October 20, 2006 to Katherine D. Harris, San Jose State University at kharris@email.sjsu.edu.

For further information about the 2007 SHARP Conference in Minnesota see here: http://www.cce.umn.edu/conferences/sharp/ If you would like to join SHARP, please go to: http://sharpweb.org/join.html

Dr. Katherine D. Harris
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English & Comp. Lit.
San Jose State University
One Washington Square
San Jose, CA 95192
Phone: 408.924.4475
Email: kharris@email.sjsu.edu
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/

The EFF has a handy guide to blogger rights. It's a bit skewed towards political bloggers, but is still a nice primer. The site also has some good links to EFF classics like How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

If you're teaching a course that uses blogs or a course that explores the use of blogs, the EFF's "new" page looks to be a nice resource for students and for class/blog discussions. If admins in your department or university are worried about blogs and legal issues then send them to EFF or summarize EFF's position and remind them of the pedagogical benefits of blogging.

Bill Thompson over at the BBC has a piece up over impending changes at Wikipedia. It seems the roll out of the German version will include a whole new level of admin. control. Gone, it appears are the days of "publish and edit." As Thompson asks

The large number of control features that are being added to Wikipedia, raise an interesting question for all who care about the site and its content: when does the Wikipedia stop being a wiki and just become another website?

Thompson is right to pose this question about what is it that makes a wiki a wiki? Does requiring new stories and edits to existing content make Wikipedia something less than a wiki? If every addition and edit needs to be vetted by an admin, then as Thompson says,

that's hardly the basis for a revolution in the way human knowledge is gathered and distributed, is it?

While I'm no wiki purist, it does seem that adding a layer of admin.

Via Boing Boing I found this James Boyle piece about open v. closed networks. Boyle has some interesting things to say about why so many policy makers and business leaders don't like open networks.

we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard).

Just a bit of news from the UK. The BBC reports that

The Open Rights Group (Org) was founded last year on the back of an online pledge from 1,000 people to fund the group with £5 a month each.

To date 650 people have honoured that promise, enough to create part-time roles for two staff members.

ORG bills itself as the British version of the EFF. The article also references Billy Bragg's success at getting MySpace to step back from claiming exclusive rights to music and media uploaded to the site.

The Georgia Tech Library is running the following notice

Because of recent problems with systematic downloading of IEEE and ASCE journal articles that resulted in the suspension of our access, the Library has implemented downloading limits. We will continue to monitor this situation. Please note that downloading entire collections of data or entire issues of a journal or conference is a violation of copyright law and a violation of Georgia Tech's licenses with publishers.

Yet another reason why we need open content. Subscription prices are rising at a rapid pace. Every university I've been at has sent out "surveys" to find out which journals we "really" need because costs are outstripping budgets. Now we get "downloading limits" with no specifics about those limits. What if I'm interested in an entire special issue? Do these "downloading limits" mean I can only see one article per day? Per week? Per month? Soon to come, printing limits, time limits on how long one can read an article--already in use via NetLibrary, and perhaps even citation limits. Digital collections are great, but not when they come with high prices and restrictions. It appears the Georgia Tech Library is only borrowing the journals.

The Center for American Progress has a proposal for granting individuals a tax credit for work done on open source projects, up to "20 percent of [. . .] out-of-pocket costs." Corporations and self-employed folks can already write off their expenses, but this proposal would allow the "hobbyist" to do the same. While the proposal does talk a bit about the cultural and social benefits of open source, the manin trust is on the economic benefits of open source.

[It] enhances the development and dissemination of knowledge and ideas more broadly. Since the benefits to the broader software development community and the economy as a whole go well beyond the users of an individual software product, a policy that subsidizes open source development would increase economic efficiency.