A group of libraries which collaborated in the Google book-scanning project is launching a massive digital library, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Content for HathiTrust is drawn from local backup copies generated during the past years of scanning.

The project is called HathiTrust, and so far it consists of the members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a consortium of the 11 universities in the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago, and the 11 campuses in the University of California system. The University of Virginia is joining the project, it will be announced today, and officials hope to bring in other colleges as well.

According to Hathi's site, this draws on libraries' deepest roots and modern practice:

the HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries. UC’s participation will be coordinated by the California Digital Library (CDL), which brings its deep and innovative experience in digital curation and online scholarship to the HathiTrust.

The project is developing an API so that other people can write programs accessing Hathi-held content.

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2008/10/red-blue-roun-8.html

A visualization of American political polarization is available through a new study. Valdis Krebs updates his earlier Amazon.com book-purchasing analysis to show ideological difference:

(via Reason)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/nyregion/08video.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=games&st=cse&oref=slogin

A new computer game designed to teach math is being offered in New York City schools this fall. Dimension M, a commercial product, has been piloted during 2008 with several local schools. It creates immersive environments, within which students solve math problems.

This game appears during a week when the American Mathematical Society finds American math teaching to be falling behind other nations'.

(via ACM TechNews and Smartmobs)

http://markets.nitle.org/markets/15372

The latest NITLE prediction markets proposition concerns the current economic crisis, from a teaching and campus perspective:

Will at least 1/2 of college campuses create digital learning objects about the current economic crisis by December 2008?

If you're already signed up to trade, click directly on this link and express your thoughts.

If you haven't traded before, please sign up here to start trading.

http://blog.babbel.com/%E2%80%9Etrying-to-get-them-use-modal-verbs-while-they-are-being-chased-by-a-bear%E2%80%9C/

A liberal arts language teacher is interviewed about using a computer game in the classroom. Dickinson College's Todd Bryant describes deploying World of Warcraft, touching on student reactions, faculty responses, pedagogical practices, and other issues. (Sound file here)

At the end, Bryant considers two ways this sort of teaching could manifest in the near future:

We see these virtual worlds go in different directions. Second Life, which is kind of a stand-alone thing with user content creating a whole world, there are kind of add-ons like Lively with Google which are basically attached to sites like Facebook. And then you have the games like World of Warcraft. I don’t know, if one or two of those will shake out, but what I hope for sure is, that whatever format it is, that it takes some division between the languages. If it is like Second Life where everyone can go over the entire space, it’s going to be hard to recreate that immersive experience that we did with World of Warcraft in German.

http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/worldwidepanorama/wwp/index.html

World Wide Panorama is a collection of photographic images, stitched into wide views, and plotted on a global map.

Photography is taken once per year, on a solstice, and submitted by people worldwide. Images are portrayed using Quicktime VR.

(thanks to Sean Connin)

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3370/microsoft-and-universities-will-study-using-games-to-teach-middle-school-students

A multi-campus, Microsoft-supported project will study how to use games to teach math and science. The Games for Learning Institute is a consortium,

involv[ing] New York University and a consortium of other institutions — the City University of New York, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Parsons the New School for Design, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Columbia’s Teachers College and NYU’s Polytechnic Institute are also involved.

Microsoft put up one half of the $3 million cost for the multi-year plan.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/knol-debates-see-both-sides-get.html

Google launched learning materials for the economic crisis today. This page is cast as a debate about competing policy responses to the financial meltdown:

The "bailout" of the US financial sector
The emergency economic stabilization act is law. Now what?

It's an instance of Google's Knol service, which launched earlier this year. A Knol Debates site is up, suggesting more such content to come. Google Moderator is used to sort comments and questions.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/06/forget-the-blackberry-application-center-the-berrystore-will-have-better-apps/

Not one, but two different online application stores are launching for the Blackberry mobile device. Research in Motion is launching their own store, shortly, the Blackberry Application Center. Meanwhile Berrystore is already selling and accepting programs.

http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2008/10/social_not_working.html

While Web 2.0 platforms grow in use worldwide, they remain confined to early adopters when it comes to science faculty, according to Nature's online publisher. Timmo Hannay identifies emergent practices, like open notebook chemistry, but sees them still limited to a small number of scientists.

For every scientist who sees it as self-evident that they should be using these tools, or promoting open information-sharing, there are dozens who just don't see the point. For every publisher or librarian who 'gets it' there are many who don't – at least not fully and not yet...

In a conservative establishment like science, it's harder still. In some ways science – as an continual, collaborative, global endeavour – is the ultimate wiki. But this analogy misleads people into assuming that adoption of new tools and approaches by scientists is a foregone conclusion. It's not.

(via Institute for the Future)

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september08/markey/09markey.html

Teaching information literacy to undergraduates via a Web game is the subject of this D-Lib article.

[A] research team at the University of Michigan School of Information developed the Defense of Hidgeon, a web-based board game. We opted for a game in lieu of other approaches because what people are doing when they are playing good games is good learning.

The article concludes by arguing for three principles guiding educational game design, namely that good games should:

1. count... toward students' grades in the course


2. give... players mastery over one key concept at a time


3. [generate a] payoff for leaving the computer behind

This video shows gameplay. Game was launched one year ago.

(via Educause Connect)

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/iphone-the-inci.html

An ebook reader for the iPhone has been downloaded in numbers rivaling Kindle purchases, suggesting the electronic text reader market is growing rapidly.

Stanza, iPhone’s free e-book reader application, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and is installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to the app's creator Lexcycle.
This number is greater than a recent Citigroup estimate of 380,000 Kindles that it predicts Amazon will sell in 2008, reports Forbes.

(via Digital Curriculum Center, Connecticut College)

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2008/10/google_maps_ascent_continues_b.html

MapQuest remains the most popular Web mapping service, but Google Maps is closing in, according to a new report. Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft Live Local trail in third and fourth place.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Signposts-on-the-US-Governments-Trail-of-IT-Failures-64704.html?wlc=1223219068

Why do IT projects fail? This article explores reasons for US federal government computing project failures. Some of these reasons can be applied or translated to academic projects. These include stakeholder turnover, the persistence of waterfall structures, scope creep, and lack of end-of-project attention.

In fact, some of these will sound all too familiar to academics.

(via InstaPundit)

http://www.youtube.com/UCLA

Another American university is publishing content through YouTube. UCLA now has a channel, stocked with course and campus videos. Course content, to pick one example, has its own channel: http://www.youtube.com/uclacourses.

(via Open Culture)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/technology/internet/02skype.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Some Skype messages are being monitored by China, according to a human rights group. Not voice messages, but text conversations conducted via a Skype partner:

The activists, who are based at Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on politics and the Internet at the University of Toronto, discovered the surveillance operation last month. They said a cluster of eight message-logging computers in China contained more than a million censored messages. They examined the text messages and reconstructed a list of restricted words.

The list includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party, according to the researchers. It includes not only words like democracy, but also earthquake and milk powder. (Chinese officials are facing criticism over the handling of earthquake relief and chemicals tainting milk powder.)

The list also serves as a filter to restrict text conversations.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/02/sony-announces-prs-700-reader/

The new Sony e-book reader, the PRS-700, now has a touch-sensitive screen interface. Such interfaces seem to be on the rise, for mobile devices, as the iPhone and Android have made a splash.. Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, has announced a touchscreen phone.

And the ebook market is apparently heating up, as Sony fights back against the Kindle.

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/macs-now-have-8-of-pc-market-472692

Eight percent of computers accessing the Web run Apple's OSX operating system, according to a new survey by Net Applications. Machines running Microsoft's operating systems count for over ninety percent, but just barely: "90.3% of people are still using Windows machines – which is a drop of nearly half a per cent on August figures."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10056852-93.html

The United States Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decided yesterday not to raise royalty fees. CRB froze them for the near future, but established a first fee level for ringtones.

After Apple's threat earlier this week to close iTunes if fees went up, some see this as a victory for that company's tactics. Other digital music providers also stand to gain.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/30/technology/itunesthreat.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008093014

Apple threatened to close its iTunes music store if music royalty fees increased. The National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) has asked the United States Copyright Royalty Board (CRP) to raise rates paid to copyright holders for digitally publishing music. According to CNN, "The publishers association wants rates raised from 9 cents to 15 cents a track - a 66% hike."

For Apple, that could eat up that company's profit in iTunes' music sales. For the music industry? The NMPA's president describes this as "literally a fight for the survival of our industry."

The CRP is expected to rule on the fee request today.

Previous Liberal Education today posts: on the Copyright Royalty Board, on iTunes.