Blog Juice for Educational Technology

The EFF has a handy guide to blogger rights. It's a bit skewed towards political bloggers, but is still a nice primer. The site also has some good links to EFF classics like How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

If you're teaching a course that uses blogs or a course that explores the use of blogs, the EFF's "new" page looks to be a nice resource for students and for class/blog discussions. If admins in your department or university are worried about blogs and legal issues then send them to EFF or summarize EFF's position and remind them of the pedagogical benefits of blogging.

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Bill Thompson over at the BBC has a piece up over impending changes at Wikipedia. It seems the roll out of the German version will include a whole new level of admin. control. Gone, it appears are the days of "publish and edit." As Thompson asks

The large number of control features that are being added to Wikipedia, raise an interesting question for all who care about the site and its content: when does the Wikipedia stop being a wiki and just become another website?

Thompson is right to pose this question about what is it that makes a wiki a wiki? Does requiring new stories and edits to existing content make Wikipedia something less than a wiki? If every addition and edit needs to be vetted by an admin, then as Thompson says,

that's hardly the basis for a revolution in the way human knowledge is gathered and distributed, is it?

While I'm no wiki purist, it does seem that adding a layer of admin.

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Via Boing Boing I found this James Boyle piece about open v. closed networks. Boyle has some interesting things to say about why so many policy makers and business leaders don't like open networks.

we still do not understand the kind of property that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded. For that kind of property, control makes more sense. We still do not intuitively grasp the kind of property that cannot be exhausted by overuse (think of a piece of software) and that can become more valuable to us the more it is used by others (think of a communications standard).

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Just a bit of news from the UK. The BBC reports that

The Open Rights Group (Org) was founded last year on the back of an online pledge from 1,000 people to fund the group with £5 a month each.

To date 650 people have honoured that promise, enough to create part-time roles for two staff members.

ORG bills itself as the British version of the EFF. The article also references Billy Bragg's success at getting MySpace to step back from claiming exclusive rights to music and media uploaded to the site.

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The Georgia Tech Library is running the following notice

Because of recent problems with systematic downloading of IEEE and ASCE journal articles that resulted in the suspension of our access, the Library has implemented downloading limits. We will continue to monitor this situation. Please note that downloading entire collections of data or entire issues of a journal or conference is a violation of copyright law and a violation of Georgia Tech’s licenses with publishers.

Yet another reason why we need open content. Subscription prices are rising at a rapid pace. Every university I’ve been at has sent out “surveys” to find out which journals we “really” need because costs are outstripping budgets. Now we get “downloading limits” with no specifics about those limits. What if I’m interested in an entire special issue? Do these “downloading limits” mean I can only see one article per day? Per week? Per month? Soon to come, printing limits, time limits on how long one can read an article–already in use via NetLibrary, and perhaps even citation limits. Digital collections are great, but not when they come with high prices and restrictions. It appears the Georgia Tech Library is only borrowing the journals.

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