Accept no substitutes

Day: March 30, 2005

Hole in Skype and Open Space Tech

Brian tried to do a 6 person (I was one of those involved) 2 continent Skype conference to plan a Podcastercon. One obvious catch to this is that the originator needs to be on a very fast connection since he seems to be acting as a hub for the conference. The other is that if one person has a bad connection, all suffer.
The short of it is that we ended up on a conventional phone conference system with a lot of us using SkypeOut (in particular Cameron Reilly in Australia).
We could have moved over to text conferencing, but the Mac version of Skype doesn’t yet support multiple person text conferencing. That’s in Skype for other platforms so it should be coming to the Mac version soon. Half of us were (are) using Macs.

Jeff De Cagna pitches using Open Space Technology, which isn’t so much technology as a process for self-organizing at a conference.

Jones on Library Cuts in Daily Tar Heel

Took a call last night at 5ish from a Daily Tar Heel reporter, Greg Steen, about the state budget cuts and how they might affect the Academic Libraries. I did say things about digital access and how with digitization the wealth held in the Libraries are easily accessible to all the citizens of the state especially K-12 students and teachers and of course citizen researchers.
Here’s the article and here’s what I ended up having said (I actually said all this too):

Paul Jones, clinical professor in the School of Information and Library Science and in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, expressed concern that a lack of resources will affect others besides students and professors.

“One of the strengths of our library has been the outreach to public schools and citizen researchers,” Jones said.

“When you buy those books, you’re investing in knowledge that ripples through the state, not just knowledge in one guy’s mind.”

Jones said he believes that having to search for resources will distract professors from completing their duties.

“How do you want professors spending their time: trying to finagle ways of getting books or actually reading those books and developing ways of teaching in the classroom?”

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