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.

From the Chronicle -- an interesting power play for control over intellectual property:

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

This from HigherEd.com:

Blackboard, the dominant player in course management software, has the ability to inspire devotion and, for the more fervid open-source adherents, not a little contempt. So today’s announcement may cause a stir among those more apt to liken Blackboard to the devil than a gentle giant: The company is partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai, one of the primary open-source alternatives.

The whole story

Lee Drutman has a good review in the July 5 LA Times of a book with a really long title. In fact, since I am on the internets so often doing the google and other stuff, this title is actually longer than my attention span enables me to read.

Just in case Matt Barton is too shy to mention it himself, his recent book Dungeons and Desktops has been slashdotted.

Kairos: the Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy announces a new venue for learning and research, the PraxisWiki. The editors are opening PraxisWiki to graduate courses addressing research in computers and writing. PraxisWiki offers an opportunity for graduate students to engage in online scholarly collaboration with colleagues from other programs and the Kairos Praxis editorial staff.

I noticed Trent Baston has been writing some interesting opinion pieces for Campus Technology. Yesterday's article was "Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?" Here's the teaser:

Academics have long talked of the "academic conversation." Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them?

See also these recent articles:

Firefox 3 has just been released to a massive wave of early adopters, and, based on my experience with the betas and now the production version, I can attest to its performance improvements and cool new interface. However, I ran into a problem when installing Firefox 3, wherein all of my Firefox 2 bookmarks were lost. For all the open source folks here, I thought I'd post a link to mozillaZine's solution to the bookmark problem.

"The mouse did seem to be waiting: instead of scampering into the darkness it held itself almost completely still, except for small attentive movements of its ears and the constant trembling of its whiskers."

On the run from Urizen's henchmen, the children undertake a hazardous underground journey. At the bottom of a frozen cavern, they find out more about one of the clue cards.