Posts

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Slashdot | Using Copyrights To Fight Intelligent Design

Read this article: Slashdot | Using Copyrights To Fight Intelligent Design. Brilliant! Basically, it’s about using academic standards and copyright to fight intelligent design (a very good idea).

For those of you not familiar with the current state of affairs in K-12 education, states (driven in no small part by the Federal ‘No Child Left Behind’ law) are aligning just about everything that happens in a classroom to curriculum standards. Standards are more or less agreed upon curricula. While many of the standards are developed by the states themselves, most are at least derived from national standards. National standards are, for all intents and purposes, copyrighted books.

By not allowing Kansas to align intelligent design stuff to their copyrighted standards, they force Kansas to either abandon intelligent design, or a set of rigorous nationally recognized standards. Brilliant!

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Making Digital Reference History…well, at Least Reconstructing It

First the facts, then the plea, then the larger picture.

Facts:
I’ve put up a website to allow the VRD community to add events, articles, people and other to an interactive timeline (surrounding the VRD conferences…more on that later). It is anonymous and pretty informal. People go to the timeline at http://askeric.syr.edu/VRDTimeline and they can add (or edit) items they feel should be part of the history of virtual reference (at least over the past 7-10 years). You can browse the timeline, and I even put up an RSS feed and a cloud view of the entries.

Plea:
I need folks to add things they feel should be part of this timeline. I also need folks to vote for items they feel are particularly significant. While the timeline is centered on the VRD conferences, I’m really hoping to build a more comprehensive view. If you wrote an article in virtual reference…add it! Started a service – add it! I’m very interested in the people you feel shaped the past 7-10 years in virtual reference (people seem reluctant to add those). I’d really like this to be a resource of and for the community.

Larger Picture:
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that this has a VRD perspective (particularly the conferences). This is because I’m hoping to use this data as part of the next VRD book from Neal-Schuman. The next book will be more of a continuous narrative, and less proceedings (it will include articles from this year’s conference). The idea is to capture the evolution of digital/virtual reference over the past decade. In the text will be people profiles, important articles, and a good dose of “movement building” activities and descriptions. I’d hope to really reflect the community, and hence the desire to have the VRD community add information and vote.

So please add and vote.

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Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good

200510261103
In the spirit of sharing ideas early (even before they are fully developed), I’m posting a prospectus I put together on building an Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good. Maybe it already exists and I just don’t know about it, that’s why I put them into the public realm for comment. I think it is a good idea, but I’d be interested to see what others think:

Developing an Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good

A Brief Prospectus
R. David Lankes, Syracuse University
[email protected]

Vincent and Didi Frochette lost their son Lukie to a rare form of cancer. In memory of their son they formed a charitable foundation to raise money for the Syracuse Childrenâ??s Hospital. Each year they hold a golfing event and want to put up a website to both advertise the event and recognize sponsors. Both Vincent and Didi had full time jobs, and no technology experience. Imagine if they could go to a place on the web and with three clicks of a mouse and 5 minutes time build a web site. Not a simple 1 page brochure on the web, but a website that allows Vincent to blog about the upcoming event; allowed the couple to upload pictures of the current and past events, allowed them to set up e-mail accounts and listservs for volunteers, and ensured their site conformed to standards for disabilities, usability.

Funding agencies are taking scarce funds from program activities and devoting it to building project websites. While there may be projects where the construction of highly unique web resources is key to the success of a program activity, in many cases funds for web sites lease web server space, hire designers, and train staff in how to build web pages. If the primary purpose of funding organizations is to promote Internet literacy, this makes sense. Otherwise these dollars represent money that could be spent on program objectives.

Continue reading “Open Infrastructure for the Greater Good”

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VRD is Coming

Trolly
Lankes is gearing up for the 7th Virtual Reference Desk Conference – this year in San Francisco! Every year has provided the best information on virtual reference, and set the agenda for the whole reference community for the year. There will be a lot of news and events at this conference. You shouldn’t miss it.

Check out the conference website http://www.vrd2005.org

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New Book on the Way

Book
I opened up my mail on Saturday, and what did I see? The new Neal-Schuman Catalog! While a new catalog of books is always a reason for celebration, this one had my new book on the cover.

The Virtual Refernce Desk: Creating a Reference Future is the latest of books coming out of the Virtual Refernce Desk Conferences. This one was co-edited by myself, Eileen Abels, Marilyn White and Saira Haque.

I checked and as of this morning it wasn’t on the web site, but coming soon.

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Lankes Joins TRB Planning Group

TRB will convene a spring, 2005 meeting of a multidisciplinary group to present their applications of environmental geospatial information for transportation, discuss common approaches and issues, and consider methods to facilitate adoption by other organizations. Participants will represent expertise in information technology, geospatial information technologies and environmental applications in transportation. State and Federal natural resource agencies, regulatory and permitting agencies, and non-governmental organizations will be represented.

A planning team including Lankes will organize the meeting, determining the type of applications, the participants and issues to be addressed. Representatives from private sector software and application developers may also be invited to discuss the future direction geospatial information science in environment. The product from this meeting will be a TRB electronic circular that will include application case histories and a summary of the collective discussions

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StoryStarters Edging Towards Beta

Cathy has good progress on refining the underlying database code on StoryStarters. We’re hoping to let it out for beta testing very soon (Monday). We’re also meeting on Thursday to talk about how we transform StoryStarters into a targeted digital reference system.