A couple of interesting recent pieces related to technology and academia.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education (I believe a subscription is required): Presidential Posts: "It seems like everyone has a blog these days —even college presidents. Some are snores. But here are a few that are not..."
Especially see Doc Durden's Guide to Good Grammar: Personal Pet Peeves Presented for Public Perusal (by William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College) and Flow of Ideas (by Richard F. Celeste, president of Colorado College).
Also from CoHE (subscription required): Digital Dissertation Dust-Up:
Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble.Nothing unusual about that.
But it wasn't that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it.
Her thesis is not a printed document. It was born digital, in a multimedia format full of film clips, hyperlinks to other parts of the work, and other uses of electronic media.
There was no way to measure the margins to make sure they met the university's specifications, which are notoriously strict at many institutions. But that was a minor concern. The biggest issue was copyright. Citing a snippet of text in a printed thesis is standard procedure, but including a piece of video or a still picture, which Ms. Kuhn says is critical to explain her points, can raise the ire of copyright holders, and sound the alarm among university attorneys.
...The form of Ms. Kuhn's dissertation is based on that of a regular book, but with many nonstandard features. Its online pages are heavy with text, like a printed book, but when a user moves the cursor over the pages, hyperlinks pop up, leading to embedded information. And images, when clicked on, open windows containing more-detailed captions, or a film clip, or citations. An electronic "sticky note" feature lets users record comments and reactions for their own later reference....
(Related story: USC Fellowship Promotes Multimedia Dissertation)
Posted by perry032 at May 2, 2006 08:47 AM | TrackBack