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In January, a series of agreements were announced in which universities pledged not to use Amazon's Kindle or any similar devices "unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision."

The iPad, by contrast, has technology that can talk a blind person through whatever screen icons their fingers are touching, Mr. Danielsen said. Since the device's debut, several colleges have announced formal campus iPad initiatives.

"It is unacceptable for universities to use emerging technology without insisting that this technology be accessible to all students,"

"The key here is fully accessible, not in-part accessible," Ali said. "Blind users cannot navigate t

e menu. They couldn't fast forward or even know which book they were reading."

Barnes & Noble's Nook, and the Intel Reader. But the jury is still out on just how effective those digital tools are in helping struggling readers.

Foss, who himself has dyslexia, created the Intel Reader, a mobile e-reader that can take pictures of text and then convert the text into an audio file within seconds. Students can also change the size of the text on the screen and the speed of the voice that reads the text aloud.

Last week 34 mathematicians issued a statement denouncing “a system in which commercial publishers make profits based on the free labor of mathematicians and subscription fees from their institutions’ libraries, for a service that has become largely unnecessary.”

For 2010, Elsevier reported a 36 percent profit on revenues of $3.2 billion

2,400 scholars

ycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday

2,000 journals

high prices

realistic

SOPA, PIPA

What we’re using now to facilitate the delivery of electronic content is broken. The current methods are very ex

e’re broke: How many of you have indoor basketball courts in your library? Overdrive does. 300% is as bad as it’s gonna get: It’s going to get worse before it gets better. It has to be so bad that the public starts to roar. If gas prices went up 300% there would be riots in the street The publishers are forcing us to prevent you from owning these. Sarah has talked to the publishers – they actually don’t care.

About articles rather than ebooks, but still relevant, rsinger alerts me to deepdyve. Described by some as a “netflix for scholarly articles”, it looks to me like they actually probably charge per-item fees rather than netflix’s flat rate for certain use limits model, but I’m not sure.

At one point, in the early days of digital online databases, libraries mostly paid per-use for online/digital fulltext. (And in some cases even per search). Then at some point  (around 15 years ago?) we started shifting to paying flat rate contracts for unlimited access to provider’s online collections.

It’s interesting to see the pendulum swinging the other way, and libraries wanting to go back to use-based/per-use charges. Harvard is recommending it for scholarly journal content.

It’s my understanding that the shift from per-use charges to flat charges was actually pushed by libraries (can anyone around then confirm this?).

Meanwhile, David Walker pointed out to me that the Copyright Clearance Center’s “Get It Now” service , which charges per-download for particulating publisher content, could be considered not just as an alternative to ILL, but as an alternative for libraries to flat rate “platform” licensing for scholarly content.

Overall, UW-Madison libraries spent a total of $6,541,217 on 64,421 serials (periodicals such as paper and electronic journals, magazines and newspapers from a vast array of publishers) during fiscal year 2010.

 “Authors have complete control over where they decide to send their papers. If one day, everybody decides not to send to Elsevier, but to open access journals instead, it would be done.”

The boycott began with a Jan. 21 blog post by Timothy Gowers, a British mathematician who channeled his concern about Elsevier's practices and prices and sparked an international boycott that has gained more than 6,000 signatories, including dozens from UW-Madison.

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands.

ibrary, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership,  reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

The Faculty Advisory Council to th

Moodle 2.0 support coming in SLOODLE 2.0

Second Life places some challenges for educators, such as the high requirements for computer hardware and network speed.

Second Life places some challenges for educators, such as the high requirements for computer hardware and network speed.

The visual context of the virtual world generated a sense of presence and shared space which make students feel that they have experienced the benefits of a real class.

A derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original, even when not functionally necessary

Apple iCal This is without a doubt the hot topic at the moment when skeuomorphic design is being discussed or debated. With the release of OS X Lion, Apple decided to bring the look and feel of Calendar for the iPad to it’s desktop counter-part iCal.

iBooks iBooks for iOS simulates a lot of the elements of reading physical books, from the wooden bookshelf that all of your titles appear sit on, to the action of turning pages, and being able to see what’s on the next page gradually before you’ve actually completed the action, just like real books

Cell phone and wireless laptop internet use have each grown more prevalent over the last year. Nearly half of all adults (47%) go online with a laptop using a Wi-Fi connection or mobile broadband card (up from the 39% who did so as of April 2009) while 40% of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32% of Americans who did this in 2009). This means that 59% of adults now access the internet wirelessly using a laptop or cell phone—that is, they answered “yes” to at least one of these wireless access pathways. That adds up to an increase from the 51% who used a laptop or cell phone wirelessly in April 2009.

April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252