Professor Sells Lectures Online

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Slashdot | Professor Sells Lectures Online

“Students at NCSU have the option of purchasing the lectures of a professor online. The Professor did this as a way to help those that missed class, didn’t take good notes, or from another country and have trouble understanding an English speaking Professor. The reactions on campus were mixed among the students as some saw it as a great way to keep up with things should real life interfere and others see it as something to pay for on top of the tuition cost at the university.

Each one cost $2.50 for the entire lecture. Some students feel it should be free or cost less. The professor brings up a point that doing this takes extra effort and it’s only fair that they should have to pay for that extra time and effort needed to put the lectures online for sale such as editing, recording equipment, etc. No one is forced to purchase the lectures, they are only an additional option that students will have.

Quote Dr. Schrag “Your tuition buys you access to the lectures in the classroom. If you want to hear one again, you can buy it. I guess you could see the service as a safety net designed to help the students get the content when life gets in the way of their getting to class.”

Any thoughts on this one?

Catspaw’s Guide to Banned Books

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

I was about to post on this, cause i read it on /. but then I realized that everyone was doing it, so I’d just point to someone who had more spare time than I do… like Catspaw!

Nearly half of Radcliffe Publishing Course’s “top 100 novels of the 20th century” were banned at some point. This is not an occurrence from distant history. This is still happening today.

This week Google is promoting the American Library Association’s “Celebrate your Freedom to Read” campaign against banning books.

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Catsy seems to be cutting in on Rochelle’s job of being a force for good.

Amazon order

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Ordered some movies:
1 of: Purple Noon
1 of: Blood And Donuts
1 of: Rocky Horror Picture Show (Widescreen)
1 of: Sahara (Widescreen)
1 of: Petrified Forest
1 of: Delicatessen
1 of: From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (Widescreen)
And some CDs…
1 of: Ha! Ha! Ha! (Rm) (Expanded) (2 [Original recording remastered]
1 of: Systems Of Romance (Rm) (Expan [Original recording remastered]
1 of: Ultravox (Rm) (Expanded) (4 Li [Original recording remastered]

Puppy smoothies: collaborative wikis

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

From First Monday:Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis, via Jeremy

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.