Comments on: The Paperless Dorm Room

By: irisira

irisira — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:14:18 +0000

My boyfriend is an English professor, and as noted above in this post, he does not allow laptops in his classroom, unless the student can show an actual, documented need for it. Why? Because students who bring laptops into wireless classrooms rarely do so to take notes, but rather to email their friends, watch YouTube, and update their Facebook status.

For the record, in his years of teaching, he has not *once* been challenged on this policy.

By: Brian Gray

Brian Gray — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:28:08 +0000

Ohio has seen steps towards this with our Ohio Textbook Portal at http://textbooks.uso.edu/

By: Abalone Beads

Abalone Beads — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:14:48 +0000

In all honesty this is a brilliant idea. Except to put it into effect you’d have to have a centralized or partnership of publishing houses putting this into actual usage. The movement from paper to digital is probably still many many years into the future and I doubt people are ready to leave out the hand of royalties.

Of course there will always be pirates, but setting them at prices that are meant to ignore pirating would probably give them a better gross. There is just simply too much security and paranoia to have this work.

By: libwitch

libwitch — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:18:23 +0000

I was cringing before I even got the end of the first paragraph – on my campus, we are constantly under demand by students to get more computers, because so many of them come to campus without them; and we simply don’t have enough to meet demand.

And then I realized he was from SUNY and I wanted to cry. I *am* at a SUNY. With the financial situation our students and their families are in, I only forsee fewer and fewer of them coming to campuses with their own machines.

The money will still be coming from somewhere for something -and SUNY is currently not getting any – what part of this does not he not understand?

By: Laura Wimberley

Laura Wimberley — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:24:26 +0000

Of course, the examples Storch does give are no great shakes either. Huck Finn and The Federalist Papers are public domain - freely available in authoritative versions at Project Gutenburg for any enterprising faculty member to do exactly what he's describing. The fact that so few do should tell him something.

By: stevenb

stevenb — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:21:12 +0000

Did you mean “Harvard Law Review”? I don’t see any mention of Harvard Business Review in Storch’s article. Perhaps it’s not all that different if Harvard, in general, has similar policies for its publications. Harvard aside, Storch’s idea is interesting but I wouldn’t give it much of a shot of ever happening. Events of the past few years have suggested that individual publishers, rather than giving their content to aggregators who can then sell it to IHEs at FTE prices, prefer to create their own systems so they can sell it directly to IHEs for whatever price the market bears. So the trends suggest things are moving in the exact opposite direction Storch recommends. Barbara, I’m no fan of the HBR folks either. They pulled the full-text of HBR from ProQuest years ago when EBSCO flooded them with money – creating a “if you don’t subscribe to Business Source Premier you don’t get the HBR in full-text” situation. Not good for B-school libraries. Then again, when you start seeing HBR even when it isn’t there – maybe you are getting a little obsessed with those guys.