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The Wired Campus

July 2, 2009

Advocates for the Blind Sue Arizona State U. Over Kindle Use

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University for its use of the Amazon Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, saying the device cannot be used by blind students.

The groups say the Kindle has text-to-speech technology that reads books aloud to blind students, but that the device’s menus do not offer a way for blind students to purchase books, select a book to read, or even to activate the text-to-speech feature, according to a joint statement by the two groups.

In a lawsuit filed last week, a journalism student was also named as a plaintiff.

“While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me,” said the student, Darrell Shandrow, in the groups’ statement. “These texts will not provide the access and features available to other students.”

In a statement to the Library Journal, a university spokeswoman, Martha Dennis Christiansen, did not answer any specific questions pertaining to the lawsuit.

“Arizona State University is committed to equal access for all students. Disability Resource Centers are located on all ASU campuses. The centers enable students to establish eligibility and obtain services and accommodations for qualified students with disabilities,” she said. “These efforts are focused on providing the necessary tools so that all students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to be successful in their academic pursuits.”

The complaint asked the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate similar practices at Case Western Reserve University, Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College. —Marc Beja

Posted on Thu Jul 2, 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comment [30]

A California Dream: Saving State Universities With an Online Campus

Of the four universities linked originally by the proto-Internet in 1969, two of them were part of the University of California system: the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses. Now, as the system grapples with a staggering budget crisis that might close institutions and forever alter what’s considered one of the crown jewels of public education, a proposal comes suggesting that salvation lies in going online.

A new cyber-campus “would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and ‘anytime’ options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system,” wrote Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the system’s Berkeley campus, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. “Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors, and adjunct faculty.”

“UC-XI,” which is what Mr. Edley calls his vision for an 11th system campus, can be built upon social networks that connect students to instructors and to one another. Hard-to-virtualize facilities like science laboratories could be opened up at night or on weekends. And, Mr. Edley says, the faculty can step up to ensure “UC-caliber instruction and learning.”

Mr. Edley does acknowledge that there have been some failures in online education, “but none involved degree-granting instruction by a premier institution with the kind of market appeal that UC campuses enjoy.” Well, the Board of Trustees of the Illinois system, which sent its expensive GlobalCampus online project back to the drawing board earlier this spring, might disagree. And one can argue about the definition of “market appeal,” but officials in Texas and Utah, both struggling with online-education initiatives, clearly thought their institutions had a certain cachet, at least within their states. But Mr. Edley prefers to focus on more successful ventures like Britain’s Open University and the for-profit University of Phoenix.

“We’ve had decades of increasing dysfunction in Sacramento and smoldering doubts in some quarters about the value of supporting public education,” Mr. Edley writes. “Now comes the resulting surge in victims — present and future — in families and throughout the economy.”

Online learning, he concludes, could save the California dream of a top-notch education for all. The best offense in a crisis, he concludes, “is often innovation.” —Josh Fischman

Posted on Thu Jul 2, 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comment [13]

Are Scholarly E-Mail Lists Fading in an Era of Blogs and Twitter?

Some professors are unsubscribing from scholarly e-mail lists because they say that discussion has shifted to academic blogs, to social networks like Facebook, and to Twitter. In response, the groups running some of the largest academic e-mail lists are adding Web 2.0 features to their mix of services. Many devoted fans of e-mail lists, meanwhile, say that the form is far from dead, and that discussion on e-mail lists are richer than what’s happening in the blogosphere or other new forms.

The latest installment of The Chronicle’s College 2.0 column argues that e-mail lists may soon occupy a space like radios did in the television age, sticking around but fading to the background. Are e-mail lists still part of your online diet?

Posted on Thu Jul 2, 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comment [7]

July 1, 2009

David Wiley: The Parable of the Inventor and the Trucker

Here’s the first post from this month’s guest blogger, David Wiley.

Summer is a time to take a step back and review campus policies while fewer students are on campus. As you do, please consider this parable of the inventor and the trucker.

Once upon a time there was a brilliant inventor. Day and night she dreamed and schemed, until one sunny day she had a “Eureka!” moment. She sketched out the design of a breakthrough product, and worked and reworked it by showing it to friends and getting their feedback.

When she was satisfied that the design was ready to take to production, she began contacting venture-capital organizations and banks. It was a long, painful process, but finally she acquired the money she needed to put her ideas into motion.

Money in hand she began searching for employees – production specialists, designers, marketing experts, and others. Finding the right people for the enterprise proved more difficult than finding the money to start the enterprise, but at last she succeeded in hiring the right people.

They all set to work. It was alternately glorious and tedious, fulfilling and demoralizing. There were false starts and breakthroughs; there was tension and laughter; there were tears of frustration and tears of joy. They persevered through it all, and at length the day arrived when they had a product ready to ship.

Relieved and ecstatic, the inventor began contacting shipping companies. But she could not believe what she heard. The truckers would deliver her goods, but only subject to the most unbelievable conditions:


  • The inventor had to sign all the intellectual-property rights to her product over to the truckers.
  • The truckers would keep all the profits from sales of the inventor’s product.
  • The shipping deal had to be both exclusive and perpetual, never subject to review or cancellation.

Every shipping company she contacted gave the same response. Dejected, but unwilling to see the fruits of all her labor go to waste, she eventually relented and signed a contract with one of the companies.

This parable is, of course, a story about a researcher and her interactions with academic-journal publishers. While the scenario is all too familiar to us as academics, the parable hopefully sheds some light on the way academic publishing works. As a faculty member, I am expected to:


  • Come up with original ideas for useful research.
  • Find grants or other financing with which to conduct the research.
  • Identify and hire graduate students and other professionals to help conduct the research.
  • Participate in actually conducting the research.
  • Determine what the results of the research mean for my field and for society.
  • Write up the results of the research in a clear and communicative manner.
  • Surrender all my rights to the written results of my research to a publisher who will sell my work and make a huge profit by so doing.

And when I say a “huge profit,” let me provide a concrete example. Reed Elsevier reported profits over $800-million from its Elsevier publishing division in 2008. Not over $800-million in total revenue – over $800-million in profit.

How does a company make such an incredible amount of money? By persuading you and I to do their work as volunteers. We not only write the articles they publish, but we also volunteer our time to review the papers they publish. And then, inexplicably, our universities pay publishers exorbitant subscription fees so that we can regain access to the results of our own research, writing, and peer-review efforts.

Unfortunately, this lunacy is the water in which all academic fish swim, making it sometimes difficult to recognize. There was a time in the past when publishers held a monopoly on distribution and academics had no method of disseminating their work that did not involve giving away their rights and interest in their own work. The Internet has changed the status quo, however, and each of us now has equal access to a means of distribution exponentially more powerful and affordable than the paper-based distribution of yesteryear.

Since we faculty already write and review the articles, and we have direct access to the most efficient distribution system in the history of humanity, why are we still handing over billions of dollars of increasingly scarce resources to journal publishers? You will find that the answers to this question have nothing to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge or the economics of those activities.

I believe that colleges should take some time this summer to consider how they might shake up the old publishing system and encourage free open access to their professors’ research articles. Institutions like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and most recently the University of Kansas have made great strides in improving the dissemination of their faculty’s research output while simultaneously helping faculty members reclaim their interests in their own work by adopting “open access” policies. Perhaps it’s time for your university to consider an open-access policy, too. —David Wiley

Posted on Wed Jul 1, 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comment [21]

Introducing Guest Blogger David Wiley

Wiley
David Wiley

Welcome to our new guest blogger, David Wiley, who we’ve featured in past articles for his innovative experiments in open education.

Mr. Wiley is an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, where he studies open education and walks the talk by doing open teaching of his BYU courses. He’s also tinkering with new open textbook models as “chief openness officer” of Flat World Knowledge and as a member of the board of the Open High School of Utah. This month Mr. Wiley will be sharing some ideas here on Wired Campus. Thanks for joining us, David.

Posted on Wed Jul 1, 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comment [1]

June 30, 2009

Students and Faculty Members Are Among Competitors for $30-Million Space Prize

Robots could roam the Moon within the next three years, thanks to scientists and students across the world who are vying for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30-million international competition to collect data and images with robots and send them back to the earth.

“The Moon is the hottest real estate in the solar system right now,” said William Pomerantz, senior director of space prizes at the XPrize Foundation, which is sponsoring the competition. “Every major space agency across the planet is looking to go back to the Moon, which means every university that has space research is focusing on the Moon.”

To win the prize, teams must safely land a robot on the Moon’s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and send a specified package of data, called a “Mooncast,” back to Earth. Mr. Pomerantz said the “Mooncast” would likely be one gigabyte, which translates to about 15 or 20 minutes of high-definition video and a collection of panoramic pictures.

The first team to complete that task by December 31, 2012, will win $20-million. The second team to land will win $5-million, and another $5-million will be awarded in bonus prizes. If no prize is claimed by the first deadline, teams will have until December 31, 2014, to claim a reduced prize of $15-million.

Mr. Pomerantz said the vehicles would be the first to land on the moon since 1976, and that the U.S. hadn’t seen any live or new surface data since 1972. “We’re hoping to show that these robots have capacities to show real scientific research,” Mr. Pomerantz said. “We want to inspire and educate people in same way Apollo did.”

Of the 19 teams, which must get at least 90 percent of their financing privately, several include groups of students or faculty members paired with researchers. About 30 universities are involved with the teams, Mr. Pomerantz said.

They include Omega Envoy, led by students at the University of Central Florida; Astrobotic, led by William L. Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the University of Arizona; Stellar, whose team includes several faculty members from North Carolina State University and Duke University; Jurban, comprising researchers and a consortium of historically black colleges and universities; Italia, an effort by four Italian universities, and Independence–X Aerospace, which has a partnership with Malaysia’s MARA University of Technology.

“Tranquility Trek” is the name of the first mission for Astrobiotic, scheduled to begin in May 2011, and researchers plan to use the robot to inspect the historic Apollo 11 site. Team Jurban plans to launch September 12, 2011.

The competition is “a wonderful stepping stone as we try to move out further into the cosmos,” Mr. Pomerantz said. —Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Tue Jun 30, 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comment [1]

An Unusual Attempt to Shape a High-Tech Future, Singularity U. Gets Under Way

Moffett Field, Calif. — An unusual new academic institution called Singularity University, run by a well-known entrepreneur and a futurist known for his claims that computers will soon outsmart human beings, welcomed its first class of students last night. But first the new students posed for a class picture and had a “spit party,” where they submitted saliva samples to have their DNA sequenced.

The premise of the university is that a range of technological fields — including nanotechnology, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence — are advancing more rapidly than many people realize. They’re accelerating exponentially, the university’s leaders argue, and so big changes may soon seem to sweep in all at once, even though initial developments happened less quickly.

The university’s goal is to train emerging leaders in business, government, and academe to prepare for what’s ahead — and possibly dream up a few new technological applications. The institution’s first program — a nine-week summer session — offers students a survey of the latest developments and trends in several high-tech disciplines, taught by experts from universities, government agencies, and technology companies. Classes are taking place at NASA’s Ames Research Center here, set in the heart of Silicon Valley. Google is a corporate sponsor, and the company gave every student a cellphone running the company’s Android operating system.

Peter Diamandis, the university’s founder, said at an opening ceremony on Monday that the institution is meant to supplement more-traditional options. “Today’s institutions of greater learning — where you go and get your doctorate degree — teach you to focus so narrowly,” he said. “Where do you learn to pull way back and think about the biggest issues on the planet? That’s what we hope to bring you here today. Not to compete with the great institutions out there but to give you a different way of thinking.”

Forty students were selected for the inaugural class, though leaders hope to expand that to 130 next summer. Tuition is $25,000 for the summer.

Mr. Diamandis modeled the institution on another one he created, the International Space University, a graduate-level training center to which NASA and other space agencies have sent students for 22 years.

For Singularity University, Mr. Diamandis teamed up with Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist who argues that by 2030, a moment — the “singularity” — will be reached when computers will outthink human brains.

Mr. Kurzweil goes further than many academic researchers in his predictions of what the future will look like — and how fast it will arrive. In his latest book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, which he wrote with the physician Terry Grossman, he predicts that computers and human bodies will soon intermix, greatly extending lifespans. “Instead of repairing our genetic code, we will eventually be able to completely replace our DNA with microscopic computers whose code could be wirelessly reprogrammed to quickly address threats, such as a viral infection or cancer,” he wrote.

In an interview with The Chronicle on Monday, Mr. Kurzweil said that he believes such new technologies are sure to come, but that how they will be used is far from certain. “I think it’s important that people be aware of these exponentially growing information technologies and their power, for both promise and peril, so we can harness the former and control and harness the latter,” he said.

He seems as concerned about the dangers as he is excited by the promises. “We’re democratizing the tools of destruction, and there are things we can do about that, but we need to do them,” he said. “We are reprogramming biology away from heart disease and aging. But the same tools could be use by a bioterrorist to reprogram a virus to make it more deadly.”

“It’s potentially more dangerous than an atomic bomb, and the tools to do it are much more widespread,” he said. “It’s not so easy to create an atomic bomb — Iran still doesn’t have one. But the tools to create a bioengineered biological virus are in a typical college bioengineering laboratory.”

Several students and instructors said they were not here to enact Mr. Kurzweil’s visions. “We’re much more for the practical and pragmatic technologies that are five to 10 years out,” said Sterling Wright, a teaching fellow for the university.

Jessica Scorpio, a student from Canada who founded a nonprofit organization, said she sees “huge potentials” in emerging technologies and is hoping to find new ways to use them to help people. For her, the idea of a “singularity” is not her reason for attending, despite the university’s title. “If you call it ‘Emerging Technology University,’ that’s not a catchy title,” she said.

As for the “spit party” where students had their DNA analyzed, Ms. Scorpio said it was a good bonding experience, and a way to think about medical technologies on the horizon. “It was actually hard for me because I got a lot of bubbles in the tube, but you had to have nonbubbly saliva,” she said. —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Tue Jun 30, 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comment [8]

June 29, 2009

U. of Kansas to Make Research Available Free Online

The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.

“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”

The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in place by next year.

After Harvard University passed a similar plan last February, faculty members at the University of Kansas began to research how they could adopt one.

In April the University of Maryland rejected a plan to allow for open access to its research journals. Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publishing, wrote that the reason many of the faculty voted against the plan was because they feared that the policy would limit the freedom of professors to submit work to journals, or that it would harm subscriptions to other journals, and that there was no specified opt-out clause. The University of Maryland’s proposal was not a mandate, but a suggestion.

“Ironically, because the Maryland policy mandated nothing, there was no need to build in a waiver provision,” Mr. Suber wrote. “Hence, no one could point to an explicit waiver option to answer fears that encouragement might harden into an expectation.”

A. Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said that similar issues arose there but that after the faculty members were able to ask questions of the university senate, their fears of publishing restrictions were dispelled. Faculty members can request a waiver if they do not want their work to be used, he said.

“Anybody who is in academia should be aware of and concerned about the commercialization of academic publication,” Mr. Peterson said. “Academic communication should not be about typing in your credit-card number. It should be something we’re trying to share globally.”—Marc Beja

Posted on Mon Jun 29, 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]

Brigham Young U. Lifts Ban on YouTube

YouTube will make its debut in classes at Brigham Young University this fall, after administrators decided to lift a nearly three-year ban on the video-sharing Web site.

As of last Friday, students and faculty and staff members could access YouTube from anywhere on the campus, said a university spokeswoman, Carri Jenkins. Previously, students could choose to view YouTube off the campus, but the site was restricted from all campus computers, including those connected to the Internet in campus housing.

“We looked at the increasing opportunities for educational material and information on YouTube, particularly to be used in the classroom by students and faculty,” Ms. Jenkins said.

The university first restricted access to YouTube in 2006, after administrators said certain content could be found offensive and was inconsistent with the university’s mission statement and honor code, which requires faculty and students to avoid online content that is not “virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy.”

The university reconsidered the ban earlier this month, following complaints from professors and shortly after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an official YouTube channel, Mormon Messages.

To help students filter the content they can now access on YouTube, the university now provides BeSafe@BYU, which lists its Internet policies and offers tips for dealing with violent, pornographic, and profane material. —Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Mon Jun 29, 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comment [10]

Microsoft Unveils New Research Tools at Its Annual TechFair

A number of new technologies in computer graphics, online searching, and workplace collaboration — many of which may soon become available to colleges and universities — were on display Wednesday at the Microsoft Research TechFair 2009, in Washington D.C.

Many of the 13 projects on exhibit — all of which are under development in Microsoft’s six worldwide labs — involved workplace communication and research. Project designers say the tools could help make academic collaboration, either between students and professors or among universities, much easier.

“Our goal really is, how can we further research, how can we further education, how can we really change the way people think about the work that they do?,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

Highlights from the fair included:

The Social Desktop
It’s easy to share a link to a Web site because of its URL, but there’s no way to link directly to items stored on a computer’s desktop, said Cezary Marcjan, principal software design engineer for Microsoft Research.

Mr. Marcjan’s project, Social Desktop, adds URLs to files and folders on a computer desktop, allowing other users to access them — and add comments or make changes — using any type of browser.

“Especially if people are using different operating systems, it becomes very, very hard,” Mr. Marcjans said. “This way, we can just publish this content and ask people for annotations, and we can collect those items on the desktop.”

Viveri: A Platform for Search Incubation
Scott Imig, a senior software-design engineer, calls Vivieri, Microsoft’s ongoing search-engine project, a “platform for new search ideas.” Vivierie collects content from multiple sites and can present that data in typical search-engine style or in a topic-specific form. Results from a general search may be listed or categorized by Web site, Mr. Imig said, but topic-specific searches can be represented as word clouds or other interactive features.

Mr. Imig also says researchers are experimenting with ways to use tools like OpenSearch and RSS to sort search results intelligently.

For highlights of the research behind other projects including Social Views of E-Mail and the Research Desktop, watch our video coverage of the fair:

—Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Mon Jun 29, 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comment [4]

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