By Robert Talbert. I am very excited to present this next installment in the 4+1 Interview series, this time featuring Prof. Eric Mazur of Harvard University. Prof. Mazur has been an innovator and driving force for positive change in STEM education for over 25 years, most notably as the inventor of peer instruction, which I’ve written about extensively here on the blog. His talk “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” singlehandedly and radically changed my ideas about teaching when I first saw it six years ago. So it was great to sit down with Eric on Skype last week and talk about some questions I had for him about teaching and technology. More...

By George Williams. Here in the United States, as winter storm Pax wreaks havoc, I find myself temporarily stuck in Baltimore (where it is supposed to start snowing in a few hours) and unable to get home to Spartanburg (where it has been snowing for hours). The reason I’m here is to lead a workshop on “Designing Accessible Digital Projects” at the 2014 meeting of WebWise, which — as Sharon Leon wrote 2 years ago — “is a conference sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Services for their grantees and other library, archives, and museum professionals.” More...

By Megan O'Neil. The White House released on Wednesday a framework of best practices in cybersecurity designed to help businesses and organizations protect critical infrastructure and intellectual property. While the education-technology consortium Educause maintains a cybersecurity guide that dates back a decade, the new framework could still prove useful in higher education, where chief information and chief security officers cite cybersecurity attacks as a growing problem. During the last year, many colleges, including Stanford University, have acknowledged network breaches. More...

By Tim Goral. Online lectures, classroom capture, MOOCs, e-books and other digital content mean that questions about intellectual property rights are on the rise. Kevin Smith will help guide attendees through the legal landscape in his UBTech featured session “Yours, Mine or Ours? Intellectual Property in a Digital Age.”
Smith is the director of copyright and scholarly communication at Duke University.
Although that title may be a bit out of the norm, Smith says it is becoming more common, especially at larger research university libraries. More...