Kindle Fire: Amazon's tablet is out!

Amazon announced yesterday the release of the Kindle Fire, its new tablet. It will be available on November 15 at $199.  

Authors sue the HathiTrust

The HathiTrust is an initiative from a variety of academic institutions to 'build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials'.

On September 12, the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors filed a law suit against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University for copyright infringement. 

This page has the legal documents and various reactions to that lawsuit.

E-textbooks: another project

Indiana University has released a summary of two years of research on their E-Textbook project.

About 60% of the students surveyed said they preferred the e-textbook to a paper textbook, although this ranged from a high of 84% to a low of 36% depending upon the course.

Factors influencing preference for e-textbooks:
Ability for instructor to annotate and share with the class:	69%
Sustainability (reducing paper)	67%
Cost	64%
Weight of Books	61%
Student Annotations	60%

See also Chronicle article on the topic:

The university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

Hacking the Academy

Hacking the Academy, a book crowdsourced in one week

In May 2010 the two authors Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt asked online:

Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

They picked the best submissions (over 300 received in one week) and posted the volume online. Click here for more about the methodology. This initiative comes from the University of Michigan Digital Culture project.

Here are some shortcuts to the main chapters:

• Hacking Scholarship
• Hacking Teaching
• Hacking Institutions

From Scroll to Screen

We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

Full NYT article

Data Storage - Infographic

Via Rackspace blog

The Case Study and the Tablet

The B-School Case Study Gets a Digital Makeover

'Tablet technology is beginning to transform case studies from straightforward narratives into complex and changeable plots—a metamorphosis nearly a century in the making.'

This BusinessWeek article describes how some B-schools are using digital tablet platforms (iPads, Kindles) to deliver course materials and case studies in particular.

Google Scholar Citations

Google's answer to ResearcherID?

We use a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author. You can quickly identify your articles using these groups. After you identify your articles, we collect citations to them, graph these citations over time, and compute your citation metrics.

Full Google announcement - Help & FAQ page
Sample pages:Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Alonzo Church

This is still in development and open only to a small number of users. You can still sign up to be notified when the service is open to all.

Under attack: Sony, CIA....JSTOR?!

Corporations and government have recently been under intense hacker attacks and now Academia is also a target: programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz has been indicted for illegally downloading millions of articles from JSTOR via a MIT account.
This statement from the US justice department states:

AARON SWARTZ, 24was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million

JSTOR is not pressing charges and has issued this statement. 
See also New York Times article: Internet Activist Charged in MIT Data Theft

Google+ Project

Google's new project Google+ while still available 'on invitation only' is growing fast and is already considered for use in the classroom according to this article.

It is also starting to get less enthusiastic coverage

Interactive tour.