new jersey cutting online library database funding this friday

by Bill Posted on February 28, 2008

This Friday, Feb. 29, 2008, the New Jersey Knowledge Initiative (NJKI) is going to have its $1 million FY2008 funding is going to be cut from the state budget. As a result, students, faculty, and staff at colleges and businesses that are associated with NJKI, which includes my institution, will no longer have access to the following online journal databases:

  • Academic Search Premier
  • school & public library access only
  • Business Source Premier
  • Business Source Corporate
  • CINAHL
  • MEDLINE
  • Biomedical Reference Collection Comprehensive
  • Nursing & Allied Health Comprehensive.

This is, of course, an abomination. The result is essentially the cessation of knowledge acquisition and will drastically transform curricula, teaching, and learning throughout NJ colleges and universities.

To help keep this resource for New Jersey, please call Governor Corzine’s office at (609)292-6000, as well as Senator Richard Codey (609-292-5215) and Assemblyman Joseph Roberts (609-984-8290) and ask that they support any legislative action that restores the full $1 million to the Knowledge Initiative in FY2008.

Update: You can also contact online at http://www.state.nj.us/governor/govmail.html, then select “Commerce” as your topic, then “Small Business” as your sub-topic.

In protest, I would also encourage other libraries in NJ (and throughout the world) that are not going to have their access cut to open access to those at colleges and universities who are having it cut. The education of our students should not be truncated by short-term political goals to fund tax breaks for home owners. Please forward this as far as you can.

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from new jersey to the world

by Bill Posted on February 27, 2008

via PostSecret

Greetings from New Jersey post card with It hurts our feelings when you make fun of us written on it

One of the greatest culture shocks of my life (that is, after the shock that came from moving to Cincinnati after an unbroken year in Europe) came when I moved to Texas and it was not because of the politics or the history or anything, but the fact that there is so much pride in the state—pride that I came to share and miss having. Growing up in New Jersey was often an exercise in rationalizations for the license plate tag, "Garden State," explaining away the factories of Elizabeth, asserting that New Jersey is lush and beautiful—which it really is. I swear! And, of course, we have Bruce. But, we will never see the shape of the state of New Jersey engraved in the concrete of highway overpasses like they have in Texas. Indeed, installing the engraved Texas state shape and the lone star seemed to be a priority over just about everything else in the construction project, so proud the state and the workers and the citizenry were of their state of residence. And no matter how much I miss Austin, TX, and its parks and paths and waters, we who hail from the Garden State do feel a bit of pain when, as the post card reads, you make fun of us.

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anticipating the future

by Bill Posted on February 27, 2008

In two of my classes this semester, Writing for Electronic Communities and Technologies and the Future of Writing, we spend some time thinking about mid-20th century predictions about the future of electronic technologies. We read Vannevar Bush’s (1945) "As We May Think," view Doug Englebart’s (1968) presentation that introduced the mouse, word processing, as well as many other personal computer technologies; and in WEC we read Understanding Me which is a collection of Marshall McLuhan’s speeches and interviews. Now, thanks to a brief discussion on the techrhet list, we have another text to watch and consider:

What I find fascinating about this video—from a Philco-Ford production "Year 1999 A.D."—is how the producers have attempted to transform existing technologies to function (and to a lesser extent look) as they imagine they would in the future.

Bolter (who we also read) writes about remediation as a cultural competition between or among technologies (I’ve read it so many times I have no idea if that is actually his or my words anymore) in which we see features of the old technology reified with the new. In this video, however, we see something different: a kind of anticipated remediation before the technologies or the cultures have been invented for remediation to take place. The 1960s microfilm technology, which was obviously used to project the imagines on the couples’ screens, is trying so hard to be something it is not—and the actors (including a young Wink Martindale) are trying to interact with the current technology as if it were more advanced that it was. It is too bad, as well, that though technology was to advance as such a rate by 1999 gender roles seem was to stay the same.

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students march 7.3 miles to vote

by Bill Posted on February 20, 2008

I love readings stories like this (and it makes me proud to have been a Texan for a least a little while). Via Crooks and Liars via Burnt Orange Report blogging about an article in the Houston Chronicle, thousands of students from Prairie View A&M University yesterday marched 7.3 miles to vote in protest over a county decision to have only one early voting location:

Early voting starts today in Texas. In Waller County, a primarily rural county about 60 miles outside Houston, the county made the decision to offer only one early voting location: at the County Courthouse in Hempstead, TX, the county seat.

Prairie View A&M students organized to protest the decision, because they felt it hindered their ability to vote. For background, Prairie View A&M is one of Texas’ historically Black universities. It has a very different demographic feel than the rest of the county. There has been a long history of dispute over what the students feel is disenfranchisement. There was a lot of outrage in 2006, when students felt they were unfairly denied the right to vote when their registrations somehow did not get processed.

aerial photograph of students from Prairie View A and M University marching down the highway to vote

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