This post began as a reply to John Degen’s blog post about the Book Liberator. In particular I want to respond to the idea that photographing books is somehow an attempt to steal control of a book’s soul from it’s author, that doing so is a violation of human rights as set forth in the [...]
One of the biggest difficulties in open web education is building your project in such a way that it engages everyone rather than only the group of technologically savvy people who already understand the value and values of the open web. That is why we built Wikiotics from the ground up around materials and contributions [...]
As many of you may know, I’ve been working on a language education project for the last two years, ever since running into a wall with my own Chinese studies. That project is called Wikiotics, a combination of “wiki” and “semiotics“. So far we’ve spent our time building tools for creating interactive language lessons like [...]
Last night a local census taker came to my door and asked me a number of personal questions. As anyone reading this likely knows, I care deeply about my privacy, but I was happy to fill out the census. This might seem counter-intuitive, especially given all the apparent controversy over giving personal information to the [...]
If you spend some time in the ebook community you inevitably run into Distributed Proofreading, the collaborative proofreading group that supplies Project Gutenberg with high quality text versions of Public Domain books. They are a small community of dedicated editors doing good work. Unfortunately, they are also becoming irrelevant to most of the issues in [...]