I’m currently putting together my course materials
for spring semester. I should have been doing this all weekend, but I got
sidetracked by my desire to produce a non(a)-refutation
of a certain proposal for dealing with land disputes. So I’m doing it now. And
I have to do it now because I’m enrolled in a course tomorrow for how to set up
a web-based course, which sort of needs course materials.

Anyway, the only reason I’m telling you all this is
that I had a thought for how to deliver some of the course materials. Rather
than putting together a photocopied reading pack, I thought it would be a
better use of resources to put PDFs of all the readings on a CD-ROM. The cost
of a reading packet is often over $20, the cost of a CD-ROM is sometimes under
20 cents (if you shop around a bit). And of course this saves a lot of paper.

I would just put everything on the web, but I don’t
have ‘original’ PDFs for some papers, so I’m just photocopying them and
scanning the photocopies into a PDF. This works, and the quality is as good as
you’d normally get in a course reader, but the sizes get rather large. Demonstratives got
converted to an 18MB file this afternoon. I wouldn’t want to download that on a
slow internet connection.

So, I was wondering whether anyone had tried this
before, and whether there were any problems you’d experienced if you had. I’d
also like to know of any problems you could tell a priori will
arise, because my a priori
reasoning skills aren’t what they used to be.

In other technology news, the webpage scanner I’m
using to keep up the philosophy
papers blog is still malfunctioning. If it hasn’t improved by Wednesday or
Thursday I’ll start using a different service. It seems that all the other programs
that do the same job are more expensive (the one I’m using is free) and have
fewer features, but if they are less buggy that might be reason enough to stick
with them.

Tomorrow’s update will be delayed because I’ll be
in this web design course all day, so for now I’ll just link to the one thing
that I got sent this afternoon as a new update, a short story
about Clark Kant by Adam Morton.