Rich Beckman, the new Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami, started a series of multimedia workshops at his former institution, University of North Carolina. He's relaunching them at UM. While the main focus is on journalism, these intensive courses also look interesting for computers & writing folk, so here's the link for the website describing them and giving registration information. Also, what could be better than Miami in January?

New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for March 2008: a review of 'The Way North' Joel Weishaus.

"The page as a whole... is giving off all sorts of different signals about its content, and the experience of reading it is dominated by moments of transition, from one voice to another, one type of discourse to another, and one text-style to another. The overall impression is that this is not the kind of smooth, homogenous discourse we are used to reading in print, but the text equivalent of a collage."

To read the whole review, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewthewaynorth.php .

I'm in the midst of preparing for our open source application workshop for Computers and Writing 2007, so I thought I'd share two things I found this week that would assist educators in setting up a multimedia lab with software that doesn't require purchasing the expensive Adobe Creative Suite:

• Ubuntu Studio is a version of Ubuntu Linux configured with many multimedia applications. Now that Dell will be offering Ubuntu, one would hope that those machines should support Ubuntu Studio, too, without hardware conflicts. How much cheaper would a computer lab be if software licensing was not a cost?
• As an alternative for the lab that already has Windows XP machines, check out Roll Your Own Creative Suite at ZDNet.co.uk. Some of the apps are open source; others are freeware.