The following lists our times and locations for the remainder of the semester.
2/08: Monday, 8:00 PM, North Lounge Johnston Student Center
2/15: Monday, 8:00 PM, 104 Johnston Student Center
2/22: Monday, 8:00 PM, 145 Squires Student Center
3/1 through 5/3, excluding Spring Break: Every Tuesday at 8:00 PM in 104 Johnston Student Center

Sorry for the inconvenience this causes. Next semester’s schedule will hopefully be more consistent.

Due to bureaucratic error, we have moved our meeting location from Torgerson 3180 to Squires Cardinal. The meeting time and day have not changed. The room should be more comfortable than our old meeting place, however we do not have a projector anymore.

We will have a table at Gobblerfest. If you are in the Blacksburg area, feel free to stop by.

• Date: Friday, August 28th
• Time: 2:00pm-7:00 pm
• Place: Outside Squires Student Center

The IRC applet on the IRC page has been changed from Mibbit to qwebirc.  This was done for two reasons:

1. Mibbit is proprietary, while qwebirc is licensed under the GNU GPLv2.
2. Mibbit was not working (it never worked for me anyway).

Like Mibbit, you will need a Web browser that supports JavaScript to use qwebirc.  NoScript users should whitelist freenode.net to use the applet.

Virginia Tech has made it official: Scholar will be replacing Blackboard completely by Fall of 2010.

Scholar will become Virginia Tech’s online system for learning and collaboration, after three years of development and evaluation, with full implementation by Fall 2010, announced Provost Mark McNamee and Vice President for Information Technology Erv Blythe. Learning Technologies will discontinue Blackboard service at that time.

Scholar is the Virginia Tech label for the community source software Sakai. Sakai is a platform for innovation jointly developed through collaboration among several universities including Virginia Tech, along with Michigan, Indiana, Virginia, Cambridge, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, Rutgers, Yale, Georgia Tech, University of Cape Town, and others. By keeping development within the academic community, control of ongoing development and improvements remains within and serves the academic community.

Faculty may start using Scholar at any time.

Richard Todd Sexglasses, friend of our chapter, is interviewing various local and underground musicians about various issues relating to the free culture community. The topics include file sharing, sampling, cover songs, “bootleg” copies, and other issues, and how they feel it affects them and their music. The interviews are up on our university’s radio station’s (WUVT) Web site, as part of the WOOVE.

Here are the interviews so far:

Dead Western
Justin Duerr of Northern Liberties
Matt Garfield (no relation to this poster) of Mose Giganticus
Chris Johnson of Ghost Mice

More should surface over the summer.

Remix artist Girl Talk is coming to Virginia Tech, sponsored by the Virginia Tech Union.

• Date: Thursday, February 26th
• Time: 7:30pm
• Place Squires Commonwealth

As of January 29th, the URL that originally hosted the Blackboard portal now hosts a new portal that allows everyone to log in to the new Scholar platform. Right now Scholar is only being used for student projects and faculty “Short Courses,” but I have talked with a Scholar developer and he says that Blackboard is planned to be phased out within two years. The old Blackboard portal has been relocated from https://learn.vt.edu/ to https://blackboard.lt.vt.edu/.

Yesterday, skyfaller (Nelson) brought to my attention that Virginia Tech has a new student journal called Public Knowledge, which promises to use CC-BY for its articles:

Authors retain copyright of their submissions and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.

The journal’s copyright page also says that submissions are non-exclusive, so publications in other journals are allowed as well, provided that they are published in Public Knowledge first:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

This was mentioned in Free Culture News a while ago, but it’s worth mentioning here because it applies specifically to Virginia Tech.

Virginia Tech, after years of using the proprietary Blackboard software, is now working on their own implementation of Sakai called Scholar. Scholar right now is accessible to anyone with a Virginia Tech PID, and hopefully will be set to completely replace Blackboard in the future.

Thanks to kiran for bringing this up.