By Rory Mir/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The sudden move to remote education by universities this year has forced the inevitable: the move to an online education. While most universities won’t be fully remote, having course materials online was already becoming the norm before the COVID-19 pandemic, and this year it has become mandatory for millions of educators and students. As academia recovers from this crisis, and hopefully prepares for the next one, the choices we make will send us down one of two paths. We can move towards a future of online education which replicates the artificial scarcity of traditional publishing, or take a path which fosters an abundance of free materials by embracing the principles of open access and open education.
The well-worn, hefty, out-of-date textbook you may have bought some years ago was likely obsolete the moment you had a reliable computer and an internet connection. Traditional textbook publishers already know this, and tout that they have embraced the digital era and have e-books and e-rentals available – sometimes even at a discount. Despite some state laws discouraging the practice, publishers try to bundle their digital textbooks into “online learning systems,” often at the expense of the student. However, the costs and time needed to copy and send thousands of the digital textbooks themselves is trivial compared to their physical equivalent.

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Posted on October 30, 2020

By SIU Press
“When it came to the Wild West, the 19th-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok’s story was no exception. Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive,” SIU Press says.

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Posted on October 29, 2020

By Dan Falk/Undark

Rita Colwell is a pioneering microbiologist whose work on cholera helped illuminate the interplay between the environment and public health.
She was also the first woman to serve as director of the National Science Foundation, and is currently a Distinguished University Professor at both the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In her half-century-plus in the sciences, Colwell has also seen very clearly the array of obstacles confronted by women as they try to navigate a traditionally male world. (When she applied for a graduate fellowship in bacteriology, she says was told, “We don’t waste fellowships on women.”)
Colwell’s new book, A Lab of One’s Own, co-authored with writer Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, documents much of what she has seen and heard over the years, from sexual harassment to the invisible structural obstacles placed in the way of women working in the sciences. (The book’s subtitle is “One Woman’s Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science.”)

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Posted on October 25, 2020

By The Chicago Public Library

“With over 80 locations, millions of books, movies and CDs, and serving the entire city of Chicago, it’s a big job to move library materials every day! Have you ever wondered how your books get to you? Watch this behind-the-scenes tour of one of the hidden secrets of CPL – the sorting machine!”

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Posted on October 22, 2020

By SIU Press

“For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before,” SIU Press says.

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Posted on October 12, 2020

By Elizabeth Oh/New America

On September 14, several legal advocacy groups filed a whistleblower complaint against ICE, accusing the agency of systematically administering forced hysterectomies to immigrant women at its detention facility in Ocilla, Georgia. While the details of this latest case are alarming, they are consonant with the United States’ history of a violent and increasingly carceral immigration regime.
Despite the quintessential melting pot rhetoric, immigrants to the United States have long had to contend with xenophobia, racism, and economic exploitation. This legacy has been reanimated and exacerbated under the Trump administration, which has heightened immigrant communities’ economic precarity and vulnerability to state violence. And this had been made worse still by the spread of COVID-19, which has hit immigrants, particularly detained immigrants, particularly hard.
To unpack some of this history, I interviewed Alina Das, law professor at New York University School of Law, co-director of the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, and author of No Justice In The Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants. We discussed the development of American immigration law, how we got to our current detention-deportation system, and how to fight back.

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Posted on October 5, 2020