Stephen Downes wrote:
> - I have worked at four institutions in the last fifteen years, and
> without fail, when I move from one institution to another, my original
> institution has removed my internet content, wiped out my email
> address, and effectively eliminated my presence
Yep, same with me - although I've only been at two institutions in that
time, I've been on scads of projects (a real alphabetti spaghetti of
acronyms), and every time a project's ended the deliverables have been
filed into a dusty corner and forgotten. I wish I'd taken your approach
and put them on an institution-independent server, though that could
lead to, erm, 'IPR issues'.
This is the main reason I welcomed Jorum's formation years ago, and
volunteered to be a guinea pig (sorry, 'early adopter'), in the hope
that future projects I work on, I'll be able to stash the goodies I
sweated cobs over in a place where they'll be available and, I hope,
used.
> - my online work has also outlived most every initiative that has been
> created to provide a 'permanent' home for such work; projects in
Canada
> like CAREO and eduSource are now history. I'm sure people in Britain
> can create their own list of shuttered initiatives. Who is willing to
> bet their academic record that JORUM will last longer that they do?
I don't have an academic record to bet, so I'm safe in that regard ;). I
did ask the Jorum folk at ALT-C about the future, and as ever JISC is
still funding the project short-term. Why the flip can't JISC think
long-term? Fund short-term and all that happens is that the project
spends valuable time rebidding for funding and valuable staff go walkies
because of an insecure future. The essence of Jorum is that it is
long-term, as nobody will contribute to it otherwise. JISC plainly
recognise this as it's a condition of JISC projects these days (such as
the CETLs) that outputs be deposited with JISC for posterity and reuse.
It's bonkers to continually make it sing for its supper.
Just my 2 Euro's worth as a grunt who's been on scads of JISC fixed-term
projects...
Cheers
Fred Riley
Learning Technologist
School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy, University of Nottingham
Vcard: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/about/fr_uon.vcf
>
> For these reasons and more I consider it well worth the money I spend
> every month to maintain my website and pay for my server traffic. Like
> most academics, my living room is also cluttered with books, software
> and gadgets I paid for with my own money, rather than go through
> increasingly restrictive institutional policies and rather than face
> the risk of losing them suddenly.
>
> I do not dispute the worth of institutional archives of valuable
> material. And there may be times and places where these material
> contained in these archives ought to be deemed canonical. But these
are
> few and far between. In the meantime, people will continue to have
> incentive, and will increasingly have sufficient resources, to
maintain
> their own online presence.
>
> Institutional archives should recognize this as a fact. They should
> focus on downloading copies of original works for preservation (just
as
> Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ does).
>
> Instead, therefore, of creating a set of requirements and impositions
> on academics, provision of access to this record would be an
invaluable
> service to academics (certainly I've had occasion to recover lost
> material from Internet Archives, mostly because some institution
> deleted it).
>
> -- Stephen
>
>
> On 09/16/2010 4:15 AM, Leslie Carr wrote:
>
>
> On 15 Sep 2010, at 16:29, Louise Egan wrote:
>
>
> The recent ALT-C 2010 <http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2010/>
> conference saw the final six winners in the Jorum Learning and
Teaching
> Competition <http://www.jorum.ac.uk/altcCompetition.html> present
> their resources, and receive their prizes, with those taking the top
> three places announced at the gala dinner
>
>
> This competition is designed to promote people sharing learning
> resources, and that's fantastic.
>
> Since this is a repositories list though, I feel duty bound to
> point out that none of the six winners' resources are actually
> deposited in the Jorum repository (just metadata records with a web
> link to the actual location). While there's nothing wrong with that
> (sharing links to material is a perfectly fine, noble and helpful
> activity, especially in education) I can't help but feel alarmed that
> the winning resource is not located on an institution's servers, but
on
> the author's personal website which is headed with the comment "This
> website is currently under development. In the meantime, you might
like
> to check out my page at academia.edu instead."
>
> Since one of the raisons d'etre of repositories is to provide
> persistent, safe access to valuable material, perhaps the competition
> organisers might work with the winner to obtain a copy of the winning
> resource, in case her website development takes a turn for the
> unexpected :-)
> --
> Les (preservation curmudgeon) Carr
>
>
>
> --
>
> Signature<file:///C:/downes-sig.jpg> Stephen Downes
> Research Officer, National Research Council Canada
> 100 rue des Aboiteaux, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada E1A 7R1
> Website: http://www.downes.ca ~ Email: [log in to unmask]
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