Clay Shirky, who lit us all up a few years ago with his "Ontology Is Overrated" talks/post (and pissed off a few librarians . . .)  has come out with a new work, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizing (Penguin Press 2008). We might want to consider giving it to our college/university presidents.

Luke Fernandez reviews a recent Moodlemoot in San Francisco. Listening to Martin Dougiamas and John Seely Brown about the promise of social constructivism and communal learning, Fernandez gets religion...almost. Read his account of the good in Moodle and the things Moodle would do well to remember in its creation of communal learning environments.

Creativity often involves integrating two (or more) familiar entities in some felicitous way way. As the Internet becomes an operating system, mashups promise to be an important locus of creative development. At the recent NERCOMP SIG, "Educational Mash-ups 2," a number of presenters offered persuasive evidence that educators are already making good use of mashups, even if it is also clear that as a group we have only begun to explore what we can do with them. Over the course of the day (April 28, 2008 in Portsmouth, NH), the SIG presenters also gave participants the opportunity to reflect on the limits of what is and is not a "mashup" as well as on the question whether mashups will ever be something that the "masses" can create.

Gail Matthews-DeNatale blogs the digital humanities research (DHR) session at the  2008 NERCOMP Conference. Project leaders from Brown, the University of Vermont and Wheaton talk about DHR and student and faculty engagement, how to achieve sustainability and scale, and perhaps most important: how to get these fascinating projects done in the first place. 

Not so long ago, the stereotypical computer gamer was a geeky adolescent male who basked in the glow of a computer screen for days at a time, living on nothing but junk food and soda. But these days, as I observe my two daughters, I know that computer-mediated games can be a healthy pursuit and that they are now central to the lives of many youth. For example, my 10-year-old spends hours playing online Webkinz games to earn "cash” so she and her 9 year-old sister can purchase furniture for the house of their stuffed animals' avatars. The youngest also desperately covets the Wii, longing for something to do that's more "active and interesting” than TV.

My daughters are teaching me that digital games can be multi-faceted, social, compelling, and intellectually stimulating worlds. In comparing the richness of good digital games with the mind-numbing worksheets that my daughters bring home each day from school, it's apparent that educators have a great deal to learn from computer games. In early October, 2007, a group of NERCOMP workshop participants met in Southbridge to do just that.

In reviewing Our Cultural Commonwealth, the report on cyberinfrastructure and the humanities commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Gary Wells notes "both the allure and anxiety of radical and disruptive change," and wonders if the academy and the broader public will be up to the cultural and financial challenges.

Greg Crane shares his insights in a review of an important report on data-driven scholarship and the supportive infrastructure it requires.

The notion that education liberates runs deep in the digital storytelling movement. Small wonder then that liberal arts educators take such an interest in the project. Anyone planning to use digital storytelling, however, faces a number of non-trivial challenges, some logistical, some pedagogical, some bureaucratic:

• How does one run/structure a workshop?
• Who are good candidates for participation?
  
• What tools should participants use?
• How, if at all, will the stories be published?
• What about copyrighted content?
• How might digital storytelling be incorporated into a syllabus?
• Can digital stories be 'scholarly'?

All of these questions surfaced to varying degrees over the course of the SIG.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007. 228 pp. Hardcover $22.95. ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5

Andrew Keen insists he is neither anti-technology nor anti-progress. Yet this veteran of the dot com era begins his recent book, The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday/Currency, 2007), sounding much like a high-culture snob pooh-poohing the vulgar masses for having appropriated the Web as their own and, in the process, wreaking potential destruction on our economy, culture and values. Keen's polemic hints less at neo-Luddite dissent than at an underlying bitterness and resentment--at his own gullibility at having been so easily sucked into the Internet dream, and also at those who have taken the technology out of the hands of professionals like himself ("I almost became rich" [p. 11], he confesses in the beginning of the first chapter). Drawing on 19th-century evolutionary biologist T. H. Huxley's "infinite monkey theory," Keen fears what lies ahead when the masses are empowered with far-reaching technology. As the author describes it, Huxley's theorem asserts that if infinite monkeys are provided with infinite typewriters, one of these monkeys will eventually create a masterpiece. Keen updates and reverses the theorem, replacing monkeys with humans and typewriters with networked personal computers; and "instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys--many with no more talent than our primate cousins--are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity" (pp. 2-3). By the end of the introduction, a reader would have just cause to feel a bit insulted.

But if you haven't tossed the book out the window just yet as one extended tantrum--and are willing to patiently look past the author's continued candor on the infinite monkey metaphor--you begin to encounter a number of points that are likely to give you pause, possibly in alarm.