Farewell to the Printed Monograph

I read Farewell to the Printed Monograph (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/23/michigan) in Inside Higher Ed today with a fair bit of sadness. And a little skepticism. I do understand the economic reality that is prompting this announcement but I have a couple of concerns:
1. I haven’t met anyone yet who actually prefers to read an entire monograph on [...]

Creative Commons

The following link is to a very nicely done explanation of Creative Commons licensing. What is that? This is an important tool for higher education because it allows academics and others to control the copyright of their own works. Most importantly, it can allow the author/creator of a work to specifically allow certain kinds of [...]

Magic Fulltext Access Cookie

In an oped piece for Inside Higher Ed, Alex Golub laments that he has lost access to full-text resources through his alma mater, the University of Chicago. He discusses how he used to view this access as a privilege that he enjoyed for having attended this elite school, especially given his current underprivileged position at [...]

Citizendium – Academic Wikipedia!

Here’s a follow-up to an earlier post, (http://rhondagonzales.wordpress.com/2006/10/30/can-wikipedia-ever-make-the-grade-chronicle-of-higher-ed-discussion/). While some studies have shown that Wikipedia is similar in reliability to traditional encyclopedias including Britannica, many academics have still felt nervous about the fact that anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. While the content is usually accurate, it is often incomplete and, what’s of more concern, it [...]

Preventing Plagiarism

No matter how hard a professor tries to prevent plagiarism, some enterprising students will find a way to cheat.
I would offer our faculty the following rules of thumb:
1. Structure the assignment so that the grade is based on demonstrating understanding of how the final product or correct answer was achieved rather than just the final [...]

Google Books

People are talking about an article that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday in defence of Google Books. One of our librarians, Karen Pardue, sent it to me today. You can read the article on Washington Post Web site.(You may be asked to create a free account before you can access the article.)
The author [...]