Course Website Home and Latest News

See our Delicious posts. Now linked to from the Quick Links area.

Chicago STC Scholarships

November 10, 2008

From STC Chicago:

Time-Wasters from YouTube

November 11, 2008

• Digital TV Conversion PSA
• Senator Stevens on the Internet (it's not a big truck)

11/11/08 Class

November 5, 2008

Fred and Cynthia have agreed to do back-to-back State of the Art presentations on 11/11. Please look at the calendar this week for Cynthia's readings (Fred posted his last week); also, be sure to post your Reading Responses as usual, and keep up with the Richard Florida book.

IIT Policy Announcement

October 30, 2008

New IIT Copyright Infringement Policy

Provisions in the Higher Education Act of 2008 require universities to implement programs to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. In order to comply with this federal mandate, as has been previously reported, the Dean of Students will be enforcing a new disciplinary procedure for computer users for whom the University receives a copyright infringement (DMCA) notices. If IIT receives a DMCA notice from a content owner, then the person to whom the IP address and/or computer system is registered and to which such notice is attached, will be charged with violating the University's Use of Computer Resources Policy and the Code of Conduct set forth in the Student Handbook, and he or she will be subject to disciplinary procedures.

You should read these disciplinary procedures, which are contained in the Student Handbook under the heading "Disciplinary Proceedings Regarding Receipt of Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice".

Finally, please note that IIT is not policing the internet usage of students; rather, these procedures are in place to respond to the University's receipt of DMCA notices.

Doug Geiger
Dean of Students

Event Announcement

October 22, 2008

The Society of Typographic Arts is hosting an awards reception in the MTCC Ballroom on November 5th. Click the link for more details, including $25 student pricing.

Guest Speaker; Calendar Revisions

October 21, 2008

Tonight we welcome attorney Colin Stolley, who is currently in-house counsel at 01.com, inc. He will be discussing issues related to intellectual property law and taking our questions. We'll end class in 237 a little early tonight and go to the BOG to continue to the discussion.

Also, I've made some substantial changes to the reading assignments at the semester's end in Rise of the Creative Class. Be sure to have a look before you start reading (which begins officially next week).

Lawrence Lessig: Ending Political Corruption

October 9, 2008
The author of our next book will be speaking at the MCA on October 30th.
Lawrence Lessig: Ending Political Corruption October 30, 2008, 7:30 pm For tickets, please call 312.494.9509 or go to www.chfestival.org. Tickets are $5 in advance, $10 at the door --CynthiaL

Thanks for this note, Cynthia. Unfortunately, Lessig's part on the program is already sold out!--KS

Standards, Standards Everywhere

October 7, 2008

Bridie's presentation on standards and Electronic Health Records (EHR) complements much of what we read in the last section of Benkler. And as luck would have it, Professor Vivian Weil, who directs IIT's Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, will be giving a paper about "voluntary standards of care" and nanotechnology at our department's Humanities Colloquium. The Colloquium meets this Friday at 2pm in the conference room off of the main office.

Also, and on a completely unrelated note, here are some links we'll look at tonight:

• Nine Inch Nails - Remix Site
• Nine Inch Nails - The Slip, "free" as in "free beer" album, licensed under CC
• Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV, not free album, but first one licensed under CC

Big Thanks

To everyone in class. I appreciate your thoughtful comments and note taking as we explored open source and how it relates to digital archives. Kelly S

Class title

September 30, 2008

John wrote a follow-up to Fred's question about the requirement of ISPs to retain internet data.

First State of the Art, Bringing the Discussion Back to Tech Comm

September 23, 2008

We begin tonight with John's presentation and discussion of open-source journalism, and then move onto discussing the first half of Part II of Benkler.

Part of what I want to emphasize tonight, after John's time, is whether and why this course has any meaning to people in technical communication. Why are we doing this? What, if anything, does this material add to our sense of technical communication as a profession and a field?

Also, in lieu of Reading Responses for next week, I would like you to respond to three other people's responses using inline comments; I know that Benkler is dense and challenging, and far more time consuming than was Raymond. So the idea this week is to let you get caught up in the reading, while also examining and responding to some of the very thoughtful responses your colleagues have written.

As you write your comments, sign them with your initials and a link to your home page on the wiki (the link is important for keeping people straight; for example, Kelly Schaefer and I have the same two- and three-letter initials, but our home pages are different and therefore distinguish the initials we would leave with comments). Use the wiki linking markup for this; e.g., to leave my initials, I use --[[KarlS KS]], which renders as

--KS

Simple.

Social Opportunity

September 23, 2008

Mark your calendars and plan to attend the Humanities Open House tomorrow, Wednesday, September 24 from 4pm to 6pm in the Kemper Room Art Gallery on the 2nd floor of Galvin Library. Hors d'oeuvres, soft drinks, and beer/wine will be served. Come meet new and returning Humanities faculty, staff, grad students, and undergraduate majors.

Two Opportunities, and Requesting Page Deletions

September 23, 2008

1. Eben English, a Reference & Digital Services Librarian at Galvin Library, has grant funding to pay students to mark up texts for IIT's Voices of the Holocaust project, using XML and specifically the Text Encoding Initiative's XML schema. Email me for details, and I can put you in touch with Eben.
2. Experimental Sound Studios is looking for a PR Manager whose responsibilities fit right in line with the abilities of students in tech comm, particularly regarding website maintenance and so forth. Again, email me at karl.stolley at gmail for details.

An Auspicious Evening to Discuss Benkler (Let's Play)

September 16, 2008

With all of the turmoil on Wall Street due to the "information economy," particularly the financial sector, it's perhaps appropriate that tonight we start discussing Benkler's Wealth of Networks.

After our discussion, though, we're going to engage in some structured play with open source software. In particular, we'll work with the Windows distribution of XAMPP, which we will make secure.

Then, everyone will pair off and work to install one of the following web-based open source software packages, or another piece of open source software of your choosing:

• WikkaWiki (the software the course wiki runs)
• MediaWiki (the wiki software behind WikiPedia)
• WordPress (blogging software)
• Drupal (content management system)
• Joomla (another content management system)

Then, take some time to work with the software; mess around, try and break it. The goal of this is to help you gain some first-hand experience with popular, web-based open source software so that you can better connect with the course content and readings.

Also, see John's post below about the readings for next week, which he's also linked from the calendar.

Readings for next week's presentation

September 16, 2008

Next week I will be giving a presentation on open source, or 'citizen,' journalism. Please read through this article, Constructing a framework to enable an open source reinvention of journalism (it's not as long as it looks!). Also, please browse NewAssignment.Net and watch a couple of the videos. JP

In the Thick of It

September 2, 2008

Tonight we'll be discussing the first chunk of readings from Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. As luck would have it, another open-source project is exploding on the scene: Google's "Chrome" web browser, which I posted some things about at my Delicious account. Of particular interest (though the server is being overwhelmed, so be prepared to wait) is a comic book Google has sent around, and which this enterprising person has posted.

Amidst all of this, we have some large questions to tackle (in addition to your own) tonight in discussion:

• What is "open source," at least as we come to the definition from Eric Raymond (cf. The Open Source Definition at opensource.org)?
• What is an operating system, and why all of the hoopla (yes, hoopla) around Linux in its early days (and even now)?
• What are the roles and histories of language, community, and culture around "open source"?

Also, we need to get everyone on the calendar for the State of the Art project; we'll take some time to talk in small groups and as a class, and determine a way forward for this project.

First Night of Class

August 26, 2008

Welcome to the course wiki website for COM580: Open Source in Technical Communication.

Because this site is central to the work of the course, you'll want to bookmark it for future reference; beyond containing the policies for successful completion of the course, it also contains the course calendar with each week's class agenda and readings and activities for the next meeting. We'll go over both the policies and the calendar tonight--and talk about how you, the members of this class, will play a significant role in completing the calendar.

Because you will be actively shaping the course, one of the other important orders of business tonight will be for everyone to register on the wiki. A top-secret password will be given in class that you'll need to register; please set your username as your first name and last initial (e.g., Karl Stolley is KarlS). This will keep help everyone clear on who's doing what on the wiki, while also avoiding having this site show up in a Google search for your full name.

(By next week, edit your page with a short introduction to the class, and then add your name on the Course Members page in alphabetical order. See the WikiHelp page for more information on using the wiki.)

Also, if you don't have a Delicious or other social bookmarking account, you'll need to register for one. You'll use the tag open-source to mark links you find that are of relevance to the class. Starting next week, your "open-source"-tagged Delicious bookmarks will appear on the wiki.

2008 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS)

August 26, 2008

Have a look at the call for papers for this local conference, and please consider submitting. It's great experience to have as graduate students, and I'd be very proud to see IIT Tech Comm/Humanities students on their program. The deadline for submitting a proposal is August 31; the conference itself is November 1-3, which is over a weekend.