OLDaily By Stephen Downes July 30, 2002 Princeton Says a Few Students Had Access to Yale Web Site Princeton University says blame the students. Give me a break. "Princeton and Yale have said that 14 of the 18 entries were made from computers in the Princeton admission office, but they have not said how many were by [Admissions Director Stephen] LeMenager, who has told The Yale Daily News that he was just testing the security of the site." By Karen W. Arenson, New York Times, July 30, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Personal Media and the Human Community Drawing from his own experiences with a project called the Star Festival, linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa engages new media from the point of view of rejoining humanism and technology. In mass media, he argues, there is a clear demarcation between producer and consumer. But in new media, "the ultimate goal is to make the reader be no longer a consumer, but a producer of the content....The idea is simple: Break down the distinction between the producer and the consumer of the media." By Shigeru Miyagawa, Technos, December 31, 200-31 8:33 p.m. [Refer][Research][Reflect] A Role for SPARC in Freeing the Refereed Literature Two years ago, Stevan Harnad proposed that, instead of trying to replicate, in a low cost fashion, the existing system of online journals and subscriptions, we should scrap the system and turn to a form of self publishing. This made sense: academic authors get paid what they were paid before (i.e., nothing) while the cost of posting a paper under the new scheme is substantially less than the cost of purchasing a journal subscription. Be sure to keep reading this item below the SPARC mandate for a snappy account of what's wrong with the current system in a nutshell along with an impressive list of links. By Stevan Harnad, American Scientist Eprint Forum, June 18, 2000 [Refer][Research][Reflect] The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper And what do you know? Yesterday, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) released a major white paper that which asserts that institutional repositories are a natural extension of an academic institution's role as a generator of primary research, and envisions such repositories as critical components in the evolving structure of scholarly communication. I would like to go on record as endorsing this proposal, no, as enthusiastically endorsing this proposal. This is, after all, what I have been doing with my own web site for many years. By Raym Crow, SPARC, July 29 [Refer][Research][Reflect] The Caffeine Machine Ah, if only this could be my next computer. By Nick Pelis, Pimprig, July 7, 2002 [Refer][Research][Reflect] Cosmology on the Internet: Distance Education for the Gifted and Talented It's the rare paper that will teach me something new about cosmology, but this paper recently listed at LearnScope did. Specifically: "the curvature of our universe could be measured by examining how pi varies as larger and larger circles are drawn within it." Brilliant! Anyhow, this paper describes and explains the model used to organise, sequence and deliver the Cosmology Distinction Course to highly gifted and talented senior secondary school students in Australia. You'll find many nuggets in this item, including one that shows that discussion list chit-chat preceeds serious interaction. Ignore the publication date; it's wrong (there are references from 1999) and the paper is worth reading anyway. By David H. McKinnon and , Astronomical Society of Australia, December 31, 200-31 8:33 p.m. [Refer][Research][Reflect] Know a friend who might enjoy this newsletter? Feel free to forward OLDaily to your colleagues. If you received this issue from a friend and would like a free subscription of your own, you can join our mailing list at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/website/subscribe.cgi [ About This NewsLetter] [ OLDaily Archives] [ Send me your comments]