Group items tagged

FoldiMate, a home robot designed to fold your clean clothes all by itself with professional skill and quality results. About the size of a standard domestic washer or dryer, the appliance will apparently grab garments within its reach, pull them inside its innards for processing, then spit out piles of smartly stacked and crisply folded clothing.

This has been a tough week for open education, at least in higher education.  First came the news that Georgia Tech has taken down a 14-year-old student wiki site that allowed discussions and collaboration across courses and across semesters.  Next came the news of more details on proposed intellectual property laws in Congress, dubbed SOPA for Stop Online Piracy Act, that are being drafted in a draconian manner to protect content providers while taking away reasonable “safe harbor” protections for internet site operators.  Despite the nominal differences in these two pieces of legislation, I think that the Georgia Tech FERPA decision has shown just how dangerous SOPA could be to higher education.

Bryan Alexander recently summarized a Google+ hangout discussion on the topic of SOPA’s potential affect on higher education, and I think the group hit on some very important points. Under the bill’s terms aggrieved IP holders can cut financial support to such sites, or have them shut down, or have their Web locations blocked at the Domain Name Services (DNS) level.  The US attorney general can apparently create a blacklist of offending Web sites.  Internet service providers (ISPs) would no longer have “safe harbor” protection; instead, they would be liable for content whose publication and access they facilitated. [snip] Safe harbor - this may be the crux of the matter for schools.  If ISPs no longer have safe harbor protection, campuses acting as ISPs will have extra incentive to police existing content, and to enforce more scrutiny of new creations. IT departments will have more work, much as librarians.  Financially strapped institutions will have additional problems. [snip] Fair use - SOPA makes no provision for that 1976 doctrine.  Indeed, schools might find supporting fair use less appealing if infringement risks are more salient.    Risk aversion might lead to decreased fair use claims.

Public libraries in rural areas really don’t have a large enough donor base to make extensive fundraising worthwhile. The other problem public libraries have with outside fundriasing is that if you start taking in a lot of major gifts and donations, then your steady stream of revenue, the local government, may just wind up cutting your funding.

“Students who pick their major based solely on postgraduation salaries, as opposed to passion for a field, will in all likelihood struggle in both school and career.”

would agree that public librarians questionably need a library specific degree, or a degree at a graduate level anyway, as evidenced by the wealth of paraprofessionals who often do at least as good a job in that setting, though for management I think you would want someone trained in public management with library experience. In an academic setting, there is a credibility issue that begs credentialling in the areas of research and education, and credentialling to a higher standard than is now present in library schools, hence the inadequacy of the degree university libraries particularly, or at least that degree alone. The degree needs to be reinvented and would best partner to at least confer joint degrees in librarianship and business, education, and other disciplines

What interests me is not just the explosion of the printed word but the inspirational library spaces created to curate them.

As a space, it is about inspiring young people.

The senior school library continues the journey. Here we aim to combine the power of the story with a concept premised on the Cabinet of Curiosities. Curiosity in its purest sense where a student's learning is entirely unrelated to examination specifications and is encouraging learning for its own sake. The first cabinet being mooted relates to an evening next term where the films of Charlie Chaplin will provide both entertainment and a cultural reference point. Our Curator of the Cabinet of Curiosities is tasked with supporting this with the curation of a range of objects which will stimulate interest and encourage inquiry. Our approach is unashamedly about inspiring a love of learning.