Doug's Meme Mix

HASTAC has announced its first Scholars forum of the year. The focus is Openness in Academia. Scholars are discussing blogging, online personas, sharing information and syllabi, open access to publications, using Openness as a practice, pedagogy and a politics. AAD graduate student, Tomas Valladares, is a HASTAC scholar

Questions being discsussed include:

Openness in research and publishing: How can new academics gain prominence in their field while still embracing openness? How can academics and scholars who are committed to openness negotiate this in their interactions with institutions that rely on scarcity and closed access?

Openness in professional and personal identities: To what extent is privacy at odds with openness? How can academics make decisions about how public to make their engagement with non-academic communities and networks? What is the value of or drawback to developing anonymous or pseudonymous identities, and do these conflict with the spirit of openness?

Openness in teaching and learning: How can we engage openly and transparently with our colleagues about what happens in the classroom? How would this affect our students?

Openness in policy: Is openness a threat to the university model? How can institutions embrace openness and still remain necessary?

Access the forum at: http://www.hastac.org/scholars.

Ai Weiwie’s remarkable “Sunflower Seeds” has been installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.

“Sunflower Seeds” consists of one hundred million hand craftet sunflower seeds. Read Evan Osnos description of the project here. Initially visitors were encouraged to walk through the seeds. There are now reports that is no longer possible because of health hazards associated with the resulting dust.

While we were in Beijing in September the ChinaVine team had the opportunity to visit his studio / gallery / courtyard complex in the Dashanzi Arts District.

Jon Stam hacks a view-master to create an imaginary museum. “The Imaginary Museum project consists of two parts: a private viewing space through which the use of digitally modified View-Master with micro LCD screens, and the curation of digital collections which appear inside the viewer when each collection disc is inserted.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9u-oS3Vw04[/youtube]Barbershop Punk is a new documentary addressing net neutrality and free speech. The film is described on its website as “Following one man’s personal quest to defend what he believes to be his inalienable rights, Barbershop Punk examines the critical issues surrounding the future of the American internet and what it takes to challenge the status quo.”