technology and culture

28 Jul

The Open Rights Group (Org) One Year On

in copyright, eff, intellectual property, politics, technology and culture

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.

05 May

Notes from Next/Text Rhetoric

in blogs & cms's, books, composition, technology and culture, wikis

Ummm, hope ya like code...I could NOT figure out how to fix this so that the html didn't show up.

 

What follows are my notes on the Next/Text meeting for Rhetoric and Composition. At first I was really vigilant about preceding people's comments with their names or initials, you know, so they'd get credit for what they said. But then things got so rapid-fire that I got lazy about it. These notes represent what we, as a group, said, and each of us made contributions: myself, Cheryl Ball, Cindy Selfe, Daniel Andersen, David Blakesley, David Goodwin, Geoffrey Sirc, Janice Walker, Jeff Rice, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Karl Stolley, Kim White, Michael Day, Victor Vitanza, and Virginia Kuhn. To give a little background, Next/Text is one of the projects of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which is part of the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Next/Text is focused on classroom textbooks in particular. Our meeting was devoted to imagining how we in rhetoric and composition would go about creating a completely new electronic textbook -- new, as opposed to CD-ROM companions to print textbooks: your basic linear, text-with-images, PDF-esque, "take a book from the tradition of print, digitize it, and smack it up on the Web."