t's a little late to try to circulate this ad (deadline is tomorrow), but I'm going to do it anyway. CCCC is looking for a web editor:

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is seeking applications from CCCC members for a new position as CCCC Web Editor (to be distinguished from CCC Online Archivist). The CCCC Web Editor’s term will be three years (non-renewable) beginning as soon as possible after the application deadline and ending in December of 2011. This is a volunteer position.

Actual programming or Web building is not required. Instead, the CCCC Web Editor will have the responsibility of orchestrating uses of new Web building structures made available in the coming months (e.g., blogs, Wikis, Face Book and so on), moderating new community spaces, publishing relevant information, and working with NCTE/CCCC to develop a stronger Website with new features. We anticipate that after the initial restructuring period, no more than 5 to 10 hours per month will be required of the Web Editor's time.

Persons interested in applying for the CCCC Web Editor position should send a cover letter of application to be received no later than October 1, 2008. The applicant letter should be accompanied by the applicant's CV, one sample of published writing, and a one-page statement of the applicant's vision for transforming the CCCC Website into an active community space. Two reference letters from CCCC members attesting to the applicant's qualifications can be sent under separate cover. Please do not send books, monographs, or other materials that cannot be easily copied for the Search Committee.

Applications should be mailed to Kristen Suchor, CCCC Web Editor Search Committee, NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801-1096; faxed to (217) 328-0977; or emailed to cccc@ncte.org.

I originally intended to post this as a "be part of the solution" exhortation, as several of us have expressed criticism of how CCCC has used the web in the past. For example, when they started a blog, some of us weren't impressed. I took a look at the CCCC blog right before writing this post, though, and I was very impressed. The blog had lain fallow throughout late 2006, all of 2007, and the first half of 2008, but now Joyce Middleton has started a series of posts titled Conversations on Diversity. She's featuring essay-length posts by -- so far -- Victor Villanueva, Krista Ratcliffe, Malea Powell, Paul Kei Matsuda, Haivan Hoang, Jonathan Alexander, and Mike Rose. Check it out; I will very likely be assigning this series of posts in my pedagogy classes.

Cross-posted at CultureCat.

I thought some of you would be interested in this story about file sharing of PDFs of textbooks. I found the story on FARK, and while I know the comment thread is long, it's worth reading; it's remarkable, some of the ingenious scams these students and former students have concocted to save money on books. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: it's time to make textbooks affordable.

You guys are going to be very excited about this. Via Creative Commons comes the Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs. I'll give you the first part of the faculty statement, which you can sign on the site:

Given that the cost of college textbooks has become a major affordability issue for low and middle income students, adding to the potential that these students will either drop out, take on additional loan debt to pay for textbooks, or undercut their own learning by forgoing the purchase of textbooks; and,

Given that textbook publishers have not responded adequately to these concerns, but have continued to exacerbate this problem by raising prices and employing practices such as unnecessarily issuing new editions of textbooks; and,

Given that faculty and students both share a concern about textbook affordability and its impact on student success; and,

Given that we must address this problem without undermining the academic freedom of faculty to choose course content;

Therefore, we state the following:

Read the rest...

Thought folks here would be interested in the material in the latest Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Here are the articles that interest me most, but they all look great:

Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances
Hugo Liu
A social network profile's lists of interests can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. Based on a semiotic approach, different types of taste statements are identified and further investigated through a statistical analysis of 127,477 profiles collected from MySpace.

Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com
Dara N. Byrne
Participants on BlackPlanet are deeply committed to ongoing discussions about black community issues. However, none of these discussions moved beyond a discursive level of civic engagement, suggesting that the potential for mobilization through social networking online has not yet been realized.

The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses
Minjeong Kim
Using a mixed-methods approach, this study characterizes Creative Commons (CC) licensors, the ways that they produce creative works, and the private and public interests that CC licenses serve.

What do the following images suggest about argument on the internet?

Discussing these images might be a good classroom activity.

How cool is this?

The mission of The Ohio State University Press is to disseminate the best scholarship as widely as possible. Towards that end, we are making the complete texts of certain books available from our website. You will need the free Adobe Reader or some other PDF-enabled program to read the text.

All titles available this way, whether old or new, have gone through the exact same peer review process as our printed books. Any book that carries our imprint—no matter what medium is being used—has been approved by our Editorial Board after a thorough vetting process.

All such works remain under copyright protection and may not be used for any commercial purpose.

What a boon for teachers and students in literature courses. I'd love to see other university presses follow suit.

In 2003, SixApart released Movable Type version 2.6, which included options for Creative Commons licenses. At the time, I was (and still am) very impressed that Creative Commons licenses were built right into the code of a popular weblog software application. Yochai Benkler's framework of layers is applicable here; Movable Type has Creative Commons embedded into the logical (code) layer. Creative Commons' own use of metadata for RSS and searchable CC-licensed content is an instance of this as well.

I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that WordPress has a plugin that lets you choose a CC license within WordPress also, but will a WordPress user please confirm this? I have a wordpress.com account, and I poked around in the dashboard but couldn't find CC license selection anywhere in the options. Drupal has a Creative Commons module.

Finally, are there other weblog software apps which have CC license selection built into the core software code, or which have CC license selection plugins? Doesn't LiveJournal have a CC option now that they're affiliated with SixApart? This information will help me with a paper I'm revising.

Calling Planet Drupal and other experts -- Sharon could use a little help. I'll admit that I don't know how to install or upgrade Drupal myself; other people do it for me. I say that if Sharon actually installed Drupal herself, she's plenty tech savvy, and I'm impressed. From her post:

Perhaps the answers to my questions could be summed up with "People who aren't tech savvy ought not to be using Drupal," but I'm going to ask anyway. Does anyone have suggestions for ways to simplify the use of Drupal.

I'd like to add modules for wysiwyg text editing and other user-friendly options. I've found the Drupal handbooks and the Drupal discussion groups and reviews of various add-ons. The instructions themselves are not all that intuitive, though, and they seem to presume that they don't have to list all of the necessary steps in the process because anyone using this software would only need a brief prompt in the right direction.

About the wysiwyg text editor, I know Kairosnews used to have that, but I looked in the modules and couldn't find it. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough or wasn't looking in the right place, though. Did something happen to that feature? (Cross-posted)

Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps you assemble and organize a bibliography, and it seems to be similar to CiteULike in some ways. I've installed it, but I haven't used it. Does anyone else here use it? Can you recommend some specific ways to use it? Zotero is just one of those things, like Quicksilver, Dreamweaver, and DevonThink, that I don't get (yet).

Here's a great idea: a petition you can sign for "the re-introduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which calls for open public access to federally funded research findings within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal." The petition is sponsored by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? The existence of this petition makes me want to learn more about the Federal Research Public Access Act.

(Via Dorothea Salo.)