Supporting Academic Creativity With Online Tools

May 11, 2011 by Brian Hughes

A presentation on some intersecting interests.

Publishing with Libraries

April 2, 2011 by Brian Hughes

Last week I attended the annual Association of College & Research Libraries conference in Philadelphia. Julia and I presented a poster on Pressible, and how our library is using it to expand the publishing possibilities available to our community.

Fig. 1: a flattering tweet about our poster session

I attended panel and paper sessions on “embedded librarianship, “building lean and mean web project teams,” and “connecting to the campus through creativity.” And Julia and I went to the great keynote on “declaring interdependence” by Raj Patel, the author of several books about food, economics, and democracy. Overall, it was a great day to think about libraries, information, and related educational issues.

I came away from the conference with a lot of different ideas. Instead of trying to make sense of it all (from project ideas to criticism), I’m just going to list a few:

Co-blogging. Librarians can support student writing projects by helping to host, edit, and collaborate around public blogging.
Augmenting reality. It would be cool to have an augmented reality mobile app for “seeing” alternative social perspectives. This app could make new kinds of choices possible by making them visible (e.g., choosing where to eat, shop, and hang out). But how could the data be generated, and by whom?
Reader advocacy. How can books better, and more directly, promote social action?
Cultivate a constituency. To strengthen democracy, all educational institutions need to cultivate student activism and civic-mindedness.
Pressible TV. What if made a short video of the daily headlines on Pressible? Could it better serve an audience that wants to read less but still be up to date about the community? If we had this stream of content, what else could we do with it (besides featuring it on the network site)?

Looking back at my notes, I see the theme of scholarly publishing emerging. Most of the sessions I attended touched on opportunities and problems around publishing—from the perspective of either a librarian, student, or scholar. I think these ideas stand out to me because there are so many opportunities around publishing at colleges and universities, not only “scholarly” publishing per se, but “educational” publishing more broadly.

The theme of our Pressible poster reflects this: our idea of “small ‘p’ publishing” is about creating new opportunities for students, researchers, teachers, and professionals to learn from and with each other. New technology and a lot of old-fashioned hard work is making it possible. And now that it’s possible, and on the rise, it only remains to be seen if these new avenues of publishing can have a positive impact on learning, and even a transformative impact on the education sector.

Overall, Thursday’s program was a very interesting and dense (sadly it was the only day I was able to attend the conference). I was appreciative of the conference organizers who clearly follow the “less is more” maxim when scheduling paper and panel sessions—the sessions I went to were attended by hundreds of seemingly attentive, inquisitive conference-goers. This alone left me with a positive feeling about the future of libraries.

Lastly, some quotes from Raj:

On the Dustbowl: “It isn’t an example of the ‘tragedy of the commons‘ because people were forced to enact the counterproductive behavior.”
On democracy: “Apparently the voting public thought Obama would be the pizza delivery dude of change.”
On hedge fund managers: “Luck [of class, education, and ability] isn’t the thing that should entitle you to that kind of money.”

Hey, I’ll be the first to admit, these were not ideas I expected to come from a library-related conference.

An irony of scholarly attribution

April 15, 2010 by Brian Hughes

I have been thinking about the academic honesty issues for a while now. So far my best ideas are in my draft essay, Challenges on the Horizon for Scholarly Attribution (another Knol experiment).

My interest in academic honesty came out of my exploration of the copyright wars, and my subsequent considerations of ownership in academic culture. Policies about scholarly attribution (acknowledgements, citation, and so on), for example, are the result of beliefs about the importance of acknowledging ownership of ideas – at once protecting authors’ livelihoods as well as allowing us to trace the history of an idea through multiple author’s works.

I have struggled to untangle these two goals not only to better understand the intention behind academic policies, but also their effects. My purpose is twofold: 1) to suggest that AHPs reveal a conflict between the scholarly and educational goals of academic culture, and 2) to show how limitations conceived by intellectuals under the sway of copyright law have a dramatic negative impact on educational opportunities.

From the abstract of my essay:

This essay explores how new tools demand that educators rethink the goals and effects of policies that prescribe originality in scholarship. The example of appropriation in art, and the conflict between appropriation and copyright law, will not only suggest how new tools can allow individuals to overcome limitations of policy to a productive end, but how we may value originality differently as a result of technological change.

An additional sidenote about my interest: those familiar with copyright law (and especially those who are critical of it) can appreciate the irony that academic honesty applies to ideas themselves – which is not the case with copyright. Thus, academics have seemingly gone one step further than so-called capitalists to protect themselves and their trade at the cost of individuals’ ability to freely “create culture.” This is perhaps my strongest motivation to continue to create an analysis of this urgent matter. I believe that the future of education depends on ending this embargo on unattributed intellectual production. (Which is not to say that attribution doesn’t have a proper role in education.)