Accidental Pedagogy

Blogging at Technology Across the Curriculum

II am also blogging at the Technology Across the Curriculum blog. It is hard to know what really belongs where but in general that is where I will post on information/technology/research literacy issues. It will also be where I talk about some of the interesting work being done at Mason on digital literacies.

Obama in word art

From the blog Neoformix via Data Mining a cool representation of Barack Obama in word art.

George Mason releases statement on Endnote-Zotero suit

Mason has released an official statement about the suite filed by Thompson-Reuters against us over the free and open-source  software Zotero which they see as infringing against their Endnote product. The statement reads

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community. As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote.

As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

 I really like the statement and am rather proud of my institution, the approach that they're taking and their reasons for taking it. As faculty ask me about what they should do I am encouraging them if they have not already to start using Zotero. We have too many tools that lock up dat- the Roach Motel model where you can put data in but not take it out is all to0 much alive and well in academic technology (hello, course management systems).