My colleague Ben Showers has recently been looking across the work taking place around digital books in all their forms: open textbooks, digital monographs, epub, web-based books. For educational institutions the need to keep up with the content needs of learners and researchers is paramount but so much is happening at the moment, with hardware, … Read more
‘The grid? Shouldn’t they all be doing cloud computing now?’ As a JISC programme manager working with the National Grid Service (NGS) project people ask me this question more and more often. ‘Absolutely’ and ‘not at all’ is the seemingly contradictory answer I usually give, for instance the other week when I mentioned I would … Read more
At ALT- C I participated in several discussions around open content, and then this week we ran the closing programme meeting for Phase Two of the HEA/JISC OER programme. I feel that a new perspective on academic-created open content is emerging. I think it’s sometimes useful to think in terms of foreground and background: most … Read more
Greetings from Blue Ribbon Meeting again. http://brtf.sdsc.edu/index.html Some interesting angles emerging from a variety of participants. Heard from Thomas Kalil this morning who works as a policy staffer at the White House in the Office of Science and Technology. (Is he perhaps what they call a ‘policy wonk’ … I don’t know. I should have paid closer … Read more
I’m in Washington to attend the US Symposium of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. Symposium programme – http://brtf.sdsc.edu/symposium.html This is the end of a two year process of enquiry and analysis where 14 experts have had a series of meetings to consider what the economic implications are, and what economic … Read more