Don't know much...

A NY Times story on another depressing survey about how little students know about history. What's interesting about this one -- besides it being sponsored by a group skeptical of No Child Left Behind -- is that it includes literature. It turns out that students don't know much about literature, either. It's nice to be included.

Update: You can download the report here.

In the Times

I hope you caught the story on teaching The Great Gatsby at Boston Latin (well-known urban school). It gives a small window into the teaching of fiction at the high school level, something I think college teachers (especially me) know too little about.

I also liked this story on the semicolon on the NYC subway.

Digital Litearcy and the Wikipedia

David Parry from academhack has a new editorial at Science Progress that advocates for the importance of digital literacy and uses the Wikipedia as a model. Good reading.

Adaptation news

In order to stave off disappointment, I generally keep my expectations of films (and, well, most things) low, but I am pretty excited to hear this.

Archives wiki, open access publishing

The American Historical Association has launched an archives wiki. Obviously, the focus are historical archives, but this could be of use to literary scholars as well. (And of course suggests that a literary manuscripts wiki would be useful.

Today's New York Times has an article about the possibility of open access publishing at Harvard. (Thanks to Prof. Rusche for pointing that out.)

Online Citation Manager/Social Networking

I just read an article from last week's Chronicle about CiteULike. CiteULike more or less works like del.icio.us, but it is for academics to tag what they are reading recently. It doesn't appear to have as much functionality as Zotero, which I wrote about last September. But--unlike the current version of Zotero--it is a shared resource. Others can browse your articles and you can browse theirs. What's more, the site draws from Emory's sfx service, and therefore can link you more or less directly to the full text of an article if we have access through our library's databases.

Based on what each tool can currently do, CiteULike is a much more useful tool for research. It allows you to watch what others are reading and to take your references with you (because they're all online). Zotero has a better interface, in my opinion, and is more full featured. But until the next big release, it is tied to your local browser. And that's more or less what EndNote is.

I don't know that I'm going to start using CiteULike regularly. But that's got more to do with my not having internet access of my laptop than anything else.