We are members of NITLE now, which means we get access to all sorts of goodies and resources that we small liberal arts types can share. Right now, the goodie I’m exploring is http://meet.nitle.org, which is a place we can go to get free video conferencing capabilities. We will have a Linfield room of our own soon (yes, Virginia!). That will give us the power to use video cams, audio, white boards, PowerPoints, or whatever else we want to share at a distance. Some of the EMS folks and I tested it the other day with a nice gentleman from the Grinnel English department, and were fairly impressed with it. It’s easy and reasonably good. Next up, classroom videoconferencing testing.

I work in a library nowadays, so I’m learning some interesting things about scholarly communication. The academic publishing system we have relied on for decades in now in disarray due to paper costs, transportation costs, an intellectual property climate that heavily favors publishers over authors, and so on. One of the librarians got me to go to a scholarly communication conference with her and I learned a lot about the issue, especially how important technology resources are to helping resolve the problem. Now we can push for open access e-journals, help authors negotiate author rights via web education sites and intellectual property resources such as SPARC and Creative Commons, and even push us to radically rethink the way we create and share documents (wikis, Google Docs, and so on). It is this last bit that has me most excited – though we are a long way off from achieving anything like it. We have faculty desperate to hold onto their positions and thus who are intent on maintaining the status quo – at least until they retire. We have publishers desperate to keep making money, sometimes a really shameful amount of it (it turns out chemistry publishers are the worst of the lot). And last but not least, we have greedy and unscrupulous people who will steal the content of others and try to parlay that into some kind of advantage for themselves. Until we have these obstacles addressed, we won’t truly be an open and free academic universe, but I’m all for getting started down that road. Think of the benefits to society! What if we could all engage and share and muddle forward together on ideas, tapping the power of our collective brains rather than just relying on an archaic and hegemonic intellectual heirarchy? I don’t fear the unwashed masses so much as many of my academic peers do – I think it’s easy enough to drive away the cretins just by using big words in any written discourse.