Category: Podcasts

Digital Campus #31 – Back To School

On our first podcast of the school year, Bryan Alexander, the Director of Research of NITLE, joins us. Bryan closely follows emerging trends in academic technology on his terrific blog, and he lets us know what he thinks the critical trends are for the coming year. Google’s new web browser, Chrome, is the main topic in the news roundup as we try to figure out what impact it will have on academic web design and application development. A wide-ranging podcast covering the web, mobile technology, ebooks, virtual reality and much more. Join us for another year of Digital Campus! [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Digital Campus #29 – Making It Count

Tom, Mills, and I take up the muchdebated issue of whether and how digital work should count toward promotion and tenure on this episode of the podcast. We also examine the significance of university presses putting their books on Amazon’s Kindle device, and the release of better copyright records. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Happy 4th of July!

Digital Campus #28 – Raising the BarCamp

On this episode of the Digital Campus podcast, Tom, Mills, and I think in greater depth about whether the stodgy academic conferences we often go to could be (at least partially) recast into more informal affairs along the lines of THATCamp, a “barcamp” or “unconference.” We also look at the upcoming iPhone 3G (soon to be the cell phone on campus at its lower price) and what mobile apps might mean for teaching and learning. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Digital Campus #27 – All Atwitter

Yes, I’m now on Twitter if you would like to follow me there as well as here. And that controversial but increasingly popular microblogging service is the feature topic on this week’s Digital Campus podcast. Mills is the prosecution, Tom is the defense, and I’m stuck rather ambivalently in the middle. It makes for a good conversation, so check it out. We also discuss Microsoft’s exit from book digitization, among other stories from the past few weeks. [Editor’s note: We recorded this podcast before THATCamp, which we’ll discuss on the next podcast.] [Celebratory note: congrats to Digital Campus manager Ken Albers on the birth of his son, Timmy!] [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Digital Campus #26 – Free for All

On this episode of the Digital Campus podcast we wrestle with how to keep open access/open source educational resources and tools sustainable for the long run. Mills elaborates on some of his ideas about a “freemium” business model for higher ed, and Tom and I explain the dilemma from the perspective of large academic software projects. We also debate whether laptops are a distraction in the classroom, among other topics in the news roundup and picks of the week. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Digital Campus #25 – Get With the Program

We were incredibly lucky to get two of the most sophisticated programming gurus in the humanities, Bill Turkel and Steve Ramsey, on the podcast this week. Bill and Steve are both committed to teaching other humanities scholars how to get started with programming, and they provide a number of terrific points and insights into the process in our feature story. If you’ve ever wanted to pick up programming or know someone who does, it’s definitely worth a listen (or worth passing on the link). We also take a look at the launch of Google App Engine, which raises questions about outsourcing, and myLOC.gov, which raises questions about whether digital collections should have their own personalization tools. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Digital Campus #23 – Happy Birthday

It’s hard to believe we’ve completed our first year of podcasting over at Digital Campus. One of our strongly held beliefs at the Center for History and New Media is that new media requires practice as much as, if not more than, theory, and that has certainly been the case with the podcast. Tom, Mills, and I have learned a lot over the last year—not just technical knowledge about how to put together an audio file, but also a great deal about the nature of podcasting, its advantages and disadvantages, and how it might fit into the academy. If you listen to DC #1 vs. DC #23, I hope you’ll agree that we’ve improved a bit along the way. The podcast has also been a great deal of fun, giving me the chance to think aloud and have an enjoyable conversation with two friends and colleagues as well as occasional guests.

On this anniversary edition of the podcast we ponder what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong, and ask for our audience’s help in contributing suggestions and critiques. You can add your thoughts in the comments for the episode, or email us at feedback@digitalcampus.tv.

Thanks for listening over the last year, and I hope you join us over the next year and beyond as we continue to discuss how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. [Subscribe to the Digital Campus podcast.]

Digital Campus #22 – Demanding Print on Demand?

This week on the podcast we look at the merits of print on demand, and investigate whether it can have an impact on academia. The podcast includes a wide-ranging interview with Yakov Shafranovich, a software developer who specializes in print on demand services including PublicDomainReprints.org, covered in several prior Digital Campus episodes. We also debate the importance of Harvard’s move toward open access to its faculty’s scholarship.

Video Intro to Omeka

One lesson from the Zotero project has been the wild popularity and usefulness of video introductions or screencasts to help people understand and get started with a new piece of software. Text explanations and manuals just do don’t as good a job as showing software in action.

This month’s THAT Podcast from Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester walks the viewer through the installation and customization of Omeka, which Jeremy and Dave work on, and which just launched recently. (And it’s off to a fantastic start, with active forums and nearly 300 downloads in under a week, a very large number for an institutional web app.) It also includes interviews with Tom Scheinfeldt and Sharon Leon, the directors of the project.

THAT Podcast on Omeka 1

THAT Podcast on Omeka 2

The podcast is filmed in part in the Center for History and New Media‘s “Owl Lounge,” a favorite brainstorming site at the Center. And yes, Dave and Jeremy are already showing off some of the Omeka swag, including t-shirts and laptop stickers.

The Omeka and Zotero teams are currently out in force at the packed Code4Lib 2008 conference in Portland, Oregon, where they will each be presenting and hacking.

Digital Campus #21 – To Read or Not To Read

We’re excited to have two terrific guests on the podcast this week, Sunil Iyengar of the National Endowment for the Arts and Matt Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland. Sunil and Matt debate the NEA’s recent report, To Read or Not To Read, which generated a lot of headlines and hand-wringing when it was released last month. (Blog subscribers may remember my critique of the report.) We also cover Microsoft’s courtship of Yahoo and what it means (if anything) for campuses, provide an update on a problematic U.S. House of Representatives bill, and dissect the new Horizon Report on digital technologies that will affect universities in the coming five years.

Coming up next time on Digital Campus: a discussion with Yakov Shafranovich, the creator of PublicDomainReprints.org, which was covered on Digital Campus #19 and 20.