Jeffrey Young asks "What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?"

And continues:

"That's the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press."

The article is in today's Chronicle of Higher Ed, titled "Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better." The book to be reviewed is "Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego.

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin and several colleagues also fun the blog "Grand Text Auto." The blog offers an academic take on interactive fiction and video games, and is read by academics, readers from the video-game industry and video-game players. The plan is to publish parts of the book on the blog and request comments. The publisher, MIT Press, will, simultaneously, have the book peer-reviewed in the traditional way, allowing for "side-by-side comparison of
reviewing old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the
new method 'blog-based peer review.'"

Complete article at:
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1322n.htm

Posted by hope at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There have been several stories in the news lately about colleges partnering with Apple to offer podcasts of lectures or other audio content through iTunes. (see below for example) Aside from the questions these partnerships raise about Apple, marketing, and iPod dominance, they also raise questions about how the CTL (LRG? UVM?) might enable this kind of activity. Should we be encouraging UVM to make it's intellectual capital available this way? How can we support this? What hurdles must be cleared to make the process easier? How do we get beyond the "early adoptor" stage?

roanoke.com - New River Valley Current-Apple isn't just for teachers anymore -- iTunes service to debut at Radford in fall

Posted by hope at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John sent me this great interactive game for learning colors. COLOR box : a color theory game looks kind of like tetris, but instead of focusing on shapes, the object of the game is to use the additive color system to combine colors of adjacent blocks.

Posted by justin at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by justin at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)