What does open access cost? arVix

Article in the Chronicle on Cornell University looking for additional institutions to help maintain arXiv which "is going well." I went back to one of Jennifer Howard's earlier items on arXiv.org: "[arXiv.org] holds nearly 600,000 e-prints of research articles, many of which appear there before they make their way through the formal journal-publishing process. It costs Cornell about $400,000 a year to maintain arXiv... Calling arXiv “a lifeline” for areas of the world with limited access to scholarly publishing resources, Ms. Kenney emphasized that arXiv will continue to be open access. Individual users will not be charged to submit or to review its contents..." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/cornell-library-proposes-new-model-to-keep-arxiv-going/20673 (January 21, 2010). Even distributing material for free entails costs.

Kno e-reader tablets

The Kno Ebook Reader due out soon is designed to work well with e-textbooks from publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Wiley. So... students will be expected to purchase an expensive tablet AND the expensive online textbooks? (Perhaps not: Seems that it will load PDFs as well.) The features including support for notetaking with both stylus and keyboard, backup to the cloud, ability to highlight and add notes - on a 14 inch screen. It sounds...expensive. No mention of ADA compliance though they must have thought of that. Can it read to you? (Can I IM my friends and facebook and load up on music files?) Weight: About 5.5 pounds - which is a pound heavier than my quite old, but still functioning HP tablet pc. Well, the plethora of tablets coming out in the next few months is just mind-boggling!

C&RL News for November 2010 - QR Codes and Transliteracy

C&RL News showed up in the mail today (in print(!)) with a couple of articles I'm really enjoying. Tom Ipri "Introducting transliteracy: What does it mean to academic libraries?" http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/10/532.full.pdf+html. "Transliteracy" is an great word - and now that Ipri's article is out, I'm especially pleased that Susan Ariew mentioned it in our "Best Practices in Information Literacy" workshop for the TLT-Group last month (http://bpil.wikispaces.com/). Ipri says "In the transliterate world, creating a social network of experts is held in high regard.
What is important is not just transferring information but creating an information narrative that evolves over time and adds value." This is a VERY nice fit with some of principles being discussed over at the PLENK 2010 (Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge MOOC.)
The other article that caught my eye right away: Robin Ashford "QR codes and academic libraries: Reaching mobile users" http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/10/526.full.pdf+html. I read the description of Alexander Street Press' Music Online using QR codes to send playlists to your mobile device where they are available for 48 hours. I logged on to the USF Libraries and sure enough - one of my old playlists with Music Online zapped right to my iPod Touch (though once I got distracted and turned off my iPod Touch... well, I'm not sure how to get back to that playlist that's supposed to be available for 48 hours... I'll have to give that another try.)

PKM Inc.

From a PLENK 2010 blog post: Rita Kop discussed her discomfort with "personal knowledge management" which she describes as yet another business term that has made its way into the social sciences. Tony Ratcliffe replied that PKM is an important concept because individuals need to organize their knowledge and think of themselves as "Me Inc (Incorporated)." "You should think of yourself as a business and look after your own needs." That sounds even MORE scary business-like to me even though when I think about the way the university works, individuals have that entrepreneurial spirit and who don't depend on the goodwill of others seem to do well. It would be nice to see a "we" in there someplace as in sharing is learning and learning is sharing. See http://ritakop.blogspot.com/2010/11/feeling-uncomfortable-with-personal.html. However I do see that when I think "PKM", I too connect it up with capitalist terms like "productivity." Maybe there are some more agrarian concepts to adopt? Could we think "personal knowledge harvesting" instead of "data mining"? Maybe there are some terms related to canning fruits and vegetables?

The Internet is a Ponzi scheme of human knowledge

Quote from Sketchbook by Ivan Brunetti: "Sometimes I think the entire Internet is an elaborate Ponzi scheme of human knowledge." (from p. 107 December 21, 28 New Yorker from 2009). This quote seemed like a good counterpoint to today's PLENK2010 Elluminate session with Harold Jarche. Some points: Drink from the firehose. (I guess the question is how much of what we drink from the firehose is junk? What filters do we need in place?). Leave some time for reflection. Use a blog for reflection and (based on comments from some participants) don't censor yourself too much. Put your ideas out there and be willing to accept critiques. Downes noted that sometimes he goes back and puts an "update" at the end of an old blog post if he's changed his mind about something. Another thread from the Elluminate: How can we change the established concept of and what happens at a "university"?

George Siemens Questions I'm no longer asking

Siemens post on "questions I'm no longer asking" is great! I'm very fond of this one: "Is online learning more or less effective than learning in a classroom? Who cares. That question is irrelevant. Society answered the need to use technology through its broad adoption of the web/internet/online medium." Right on! There's thousands of articles comparing online courses to face-to-face courses. (See the No Significant Difference web site) The question has been answered over and over: people can learn in online courses. Let's move it along.

PKM and PLEs

This week's PLENK 2010 topic is Personal Knowledge Management. I was attracted to this article: Personal Knowledge Management: A Strategy for Controlling Information Overload by Jason Frand and Aura Lippincott from February 4, 2002.
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/researcher/articles/info_overload.html until they recommended thinking through a file management structure. I'm too disorganized. I'm looking for things for myself, but I'm also looking for things for others. Too many categories! I've been very pleased with Evernote. I could organize the notes into files - but I don't have to. I can add tags (keywords) to my heart's content and that seems to work reasonably well for me. Nevetheless... I sometimes see something interesting and get interrupted - phone calls are the worst! and that's it. I have a site that I remember interested me recently. It was a link from a link maybe from a tweet(??) Something from a graphic novel or a cartoon about soldiers and something about the nature of war...(???) I cannot recall enough about it to find it(!) I hope that item shows up again.