MICHAEL ROY
Editorial Note: The Long Path to Building a Commons
NMC Call for Proposals: New Challenges, New Ideas (deadline is Friday)
Below is a last-minute reminder of a chance to present works and insights at one of NMC's regional conferences. The deadline is Friday, so get out your pens. The themes seems right on, and the crowd is always interesting and engaged.
New Challenges ... New Ideas
The 2006 Fall Regional NMC Conference at Trinity University
San Antonio, Texas, November 8-10, 2006
Proposals for presentations are being solicited now through this coming Friday, September 15th for the 2006 Fall Regional NMC Conference, to be held November 8-10, 2006, in San Antonio, Texas. Join keynoters Aaron Delwiche (http://delwiche.livejournal.com/) and John Lister, aka Pathfinder Linden of Linden Labs, creators of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com), on the program of this important exploration of solutions to the challenges that face us all in higher education.
Befitting the rich traditions of Trinity and its sister institutions across the southwest, the conference will bring together scholars and technologists from across the world to explore new ideas, discuss the issues which surround them, and share stories of successful efforts. We will be staying on the River Walk, an area steeped in the rich cultural history of old San Antonio.
NMC Regional Conferences are one-of-a-kind events, each very much a reflection of the host institution. In fall 2006, the NMC comes to Texas for a very special regional event to be held on the campus of Trinity University (http://www.trinity.edu).
The ongoing theme of the NMC's series of regional conferences is "New Challenges ... New Ideas,†and this year, three challenges in particular will provide the spark at the core of the program.
§ The Future of Scholarship
The future of scholarship is evolving, and evolving rapidly. Contemporary writing and other creative works have seen considerable scholarly experimentation, but all areas of scholarship are seeing examples that diverge from traditional forms and take advantage of affordances offered by emerging media and tools. This track is designed to highlight exciting new forms of scholarship that are arising, and to showcase model practices. At the same time, the goal is to look not only at the promise and potential of these developments, but also to encourage frank discussions about the challenges they pose, especially for aspiring scholars.
§ Bringing Virtual 3-D Worlds to Reality
The science and technology underlying virtual worlds have long made these metaverses rich landscapes for explorations of 3-dimensional forms in science and engineering. Recently, with the influence of immersive gaming technologies, we have also begun to see them develop as compelling social spaces. This track is devoted to an exploration of emerging practices in the use of these spaces, including experimental worlds created with new tools like Croquet, commercial metaverses like Second Life and World of Warcraft, as well as the range of supporting concepts and assessment strategies.
§ Embracing the New Web
The web is undergoing yet another transformation, one being driven by the tremendous impact of social networking and folksonomic tools. Community-driven sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, and others that have almost no content of their own, yet have become some of the most popular and most-visited sites on the web. How are these approaches going to impact the way we develop content for college, university, or museum web sites? What are the implications we should be considering, and what are the unresolved issues?
Find complete information about the conference, including full details on travel and lodging, by visiting the conference website at http://www.nmc.org/events/2006fallregional/
We encourage you to submit a proposal for a session in one or more of the conference tracks. Sessions can include demonstrations, panel discussions, and descriptions of work being done on your campus or solutions to challenges you face. Ample time should be allowed for questions and group discussion, as informality and candor are the hallmarks of our conferences.
Submitting a Proposal
Proposals should be submitted online using the NMC's proposal submission system:
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006fallregional/submit_proposal.shtml
For full consideration, proposals should be submitted no later than September 15, 2006, as the review and selection of session proposals begins on that date.
Questions or ideas for potential sessions should be directed to Rachel Smith, rachel@nmc.org, or via phone at 512 445-4200.
We're not playing around here!: The pedagogical potential of computer and video games.
Wednesday, Dec 20:
As part of the Global Kids' "A World Fit for Children Festival" this Wednesday, MIT's Henry Jenkins is visiting in world the Global Kids Island on the Teen Grid to talk about "We're not playing around here!: The pedagogical potential of computer and video games."
The New Media Consortium is helping out by providing a live audio stream into Second Life for Henry's remarks; the audio stream will go to both the Teen Grid and the NMC Campus so us "non-teens" can listen in. Join us in the Huntley Ballroom this Wednesday. At 2:00 PM, there will be some live music DJ-ed by one of the Global Kids teens. Henry's remarks will start at 3:00 PM (all times PST). Apparently his remarks may be interspersed with some rounds of dancing (?) and more music. The dance floor will also be available in our ballroom.
The GK event has been part of a UNICEF project to help teens learn more about global issues. This month they have been working in teams to build SL exhibits that can provide some answers to deal with world problems.
For more, see:
http://www.nmc.org/sl/2006/12/14/jenkins/
http://www.holymeatballs.org/second_life/unicef/
Process for publishing a new issue
As we complete our third issue, I thought it might be helpful to document our process for publishing a new issue.
- Generate a table of contents.
- Write a letter from the editor for sending out via email and/or posting on the web.
- Send advance copy to editors and advisors.
- Get latest spreadsheet with all AC members and send out TOC/Letter to all AC members.
- Send out to relevant lists (we should put names to this)
- all frye list
- nitle-it
- clac-reps
- nercomp (what is the address?)
- nmc list
- hopkins401
- oberlin group (need a library director for this)
- scholarship of teaching and learning list(s): john?
- CIO list (ravi?)
- others? please make suggestions....
-- mike
Call for Proposals: Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges
One of the claimed distinctions of the education offered at liberal arts colleges is that the faculty there are genuine teacher-scholars, dividing their time equally between their research and undergraduate instruction. On the surface, these are ideal circumstances for many to begin to engage in thinking about their teaching as a form of research. Yet we wonder: How many of these faculty will shift the focus of their research toward the practice of teaching within their chosen disciplines? How many of our institutions' tenure and promotion committees will accept such scholarship as a substitute for traditional scholarship?
Updates on the state of Cyberinfrastructure (by way of the Coalition for Networked Information)
The following set of links/announcements from CNI's
Clifford Lynch help to frame many of our recent posts about the future
of publishing, scholarly communications, and our course management
platforms in the context of cyberinfrastructure.
Provosts for Open Access
Inside Higher Ed has run a nice piece entitled "Rallying Behind Open Access" announcing an open letter written by a group of Provosts from some very high-end schools. The letter supports Senate Bill 2695, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA), which would require the on-line, open access publication of federally-funded research within six months of publication. The letter is worth reading, and sharing on campus as part of your scholarly communications education program.
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- Visit http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/28/provosts
Use Web 2.0 to Plan Web 2.0
Scholarly Communications in the 21st. Century: Two Important Announcements
Gaming to Save the World
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- Visit http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5517415
Call for Reflection, Documentation, Analysis, and Critique: Reviewing Academic Year 2005-06
Summer is nearly upon us. Before we all head for the beach (or into the morass
of some interminable system "upgrade"), this is a perfect time to
reflect on the past
academic year. We suspect that somewhere on your campus, someone did
something interesting with technology in the service of liberal
education. We want to uncover those stories of innovation, and to share
reflections on how these innovations worked ( ... or didn't). We are also interested in more theoretical thought pieces that tackle
some of the larger, important issues that surround our domain.
Academic Commons (http://www.academiccommons.org ) is designed to share
such news and analysis within our community, via essays, reviews,
interviews, vignettes, showcases, and more. And we offer a
not-inconsequential honorarium for most of the pieces we publish.
Don't like to write? Please consider sending us ideas, links,
suggestions for people to interview or a website to feature, or send
this query to someone on your campus who might like an opportunity to
contribute to this conversation.
To help you understand what we are looking for, we've created our Suggested Themes at http://www.academiccommons.org/themes06. The themes are:
- Open Source / Open Access (aka the "free as a free kitten" issue)
- Educational Gaming
- New Media and Higher Education
- Emerging Literacies and Pedagogies
- So What? The Unbearable Burden of Assessing Technology in the Classroom
- Social Software (aka web 2.0): Challenges and Possibilities
We are eager to hear from you! Look for our new issue just in time for
the Fall semester. And don't forget to wear a hat. And sunblock. Lots
of sunblock.
Enjoy.
Sincerely,
The Academic Commons Editorial Staff
Outline of CLAC Talk
Here is what I think we agreed to in terms of an outline for our talk.
- Introduction
- Who we are
- Why you might contribute?
- How you could change your daily habits to incorporate these into your workflow/your staff's workflow?
- Overview of LoLa
- video
- materials from CLAC schools
- editorial workflow
- future directions
- Overview of Academic Commons
- sections of the site
- materials from CLAC schools
- how to contribute
- Call for proposals/themes
- Audience Participation (by way of this forum)
- Materials from your campus that could be contributed to LoLa
- Stories from your campus for Academic Commons
- Review
- Potential LoLa contributions
- Potential Academic Commons contributions
- What can WE do differently to make it easier to get people to contribute?
- Is this a viable way to enable CLAC members to engage more deeply with the academic missions of their members' institutions? If not, what are other ways to support this conversation?
The Open Education Movement is Gaining Speed, but Potential Roadblocks Lie Ahead
- To bring people back into the educational equation - particularly those who have been "shut out†of the traditional publishing world, like people who don't read and write English, scientists and engineers out in industry, and talented K-12 teachers.
- To reduce the high cost of teaching materials.
- To reduce the time lag between producing course materials and textbooks and getting them into the hands of students.
- To enable re-use and re-contextualization such as translation and localization of
course materials into myriad different languages and cultures.
He lists the challenges that this movement faces, which include the familiar problems of:
Learning the Love of Learning: Newman's Ideal Updated
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- Visit http://liberalarts.wabash.edu/cila/home.cfm?news_id=3470
Announcing the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
(IJ-SoTL) at http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/ will be published by the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Georgia Southern University (Statesboro, Georgia, USA) with the inaugural issue scheduled for January 2007.
The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is becoming an international movement or momentum for an evidence-based approach to teaching, and may be the best way for both individual faculty, and a campus as a whole, to improve teaching effectiveness by learning more about how students learn in significant, enduring ways and how to teach for such learning. The Center for Excellence in Teaching seeks to encourage campus conversations about teaching, learning, research and SoTL and supports the work of faculty engaging in formal and informal inquiries and research into the learning of their students.
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- Visit http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/
The Book Brand: NetGen's View of the Library
OCLC recently published a report with the admittedly less-than-thrilling title "College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources" which examines the information-seeking habits and preferences of 400 international college students. They surveyed college students from Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States about what they think about libraries and search engines. The results are somewhat suprising, in that the library turns out to not be as irrelevant to students' intellectual lives as much of the NetGen literature suggests. The authors of the report do suggest, however, that the library has a marketing problem, in that its 'brand' is the book. They write:
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- Visit http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm
The Social Life of Books: An Interview with Ben Vershbow
Ben Vershbow , a fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, is interviewed in this month's Library Journal in an article entitled "The Social Life of Books". In the interview, Vershbow does a nice job of highlighting many of the Institute's concerns and activities. Their work focuses on, as one might guess, the possible futures of the book. They divide their time between dissecting various experiments in electronic books, writing soon-to-be-released software for creating networked texts, devising grand new schemes for new types of publications, and in thoughtful worry over how corporations like Amazon and Google are taking the field in the wrong direction. Of particular interest to educators is the next/text project, which is exploring what networked textbooks might become.
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- Visit http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6332156.html
The Future of the Catalog
OCLC's Lorcan Dempsey, by way of his blog, provides us with a useful set of ruminations about how to think about the future of the library catalog, and a framework for asking that question in a broader context. Along the way, he also places a number of other library services (Interlibrary Loan, Federated Search) into that framework, providing useful ways to think about all of the evolutions implicated in the suprisingly rapid transition to a more fully networked information system. On the catalog, he writes:
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- Visit http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001021.html
Opportunity is Knocking: Will Education Open the Door?
Toru Iiyoshi, who directs the Knowledge Media Lab at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, has written a provocative essay entitled Opportunity is Knocking: Will Education Open the Door?. Iiyoshi argues that the wide-spread adoption of open educational resources is stymied by three major hurdles. The first is that we don't do a good job of describing how to use educational resources in such a way that someone else can adapt and adopt them. He writes "although the tools and resources are readily available, transferring practical knowledge about how to use them is not easy.... Thus, a crucial task before us is to build intellectual and technical capacity for transforming "tacit knowledge" into "commonly usable knowledge." Second, the academic reward structure has stacked the deck against pedagogical innovation by not rewarding the sharing of information about teaching. He writes "If there are no incentives for faculty to use and enrich open educational goods to transform their teaching and student learning, pedagogical practice will always struggle to advance." Third, the deck is further stacked by virtue of our existing organizational structures and publication schemes. He writes, "...we must look beyond institutional boundaries and connect efforts among many settings and open source entrepreneurs."
The Good Fight: Open Access & Anti-elitism
Michael Carroll, Law Professor at Villanova University School of Law , Creative Commons Board Member, and Blogger, turns up the heat in the on-going debate over pending federal legislation that would force open access to research supported with federal money. He suggests that publishers, not content to settle for the obvious economic arguments against open access, have begun working a less savory side of the street: an appeal to elitism. He writes:
Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?
Charles Bailey , who runs Digital-Scholarship.Com , has posted a pre-print of his contribution "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" to the forthcoming Information Technology and Libraries . Bailey via his blog provides a nice synopsis of his piece:
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- Visit http://www.digital-scholarship.com/cwb/DigitalDystopia.pdf
Social Bookmarking 101
Education Commons Live!
In the ensuing discussion, we got to find out what some of our readers think when they come to Academic Commons: that the lights may be on but nobody seems to be home.
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- Visit http://educationcommons.org/live/
The Visual Resources Environment at Liberal Arts Colleges
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- Visit http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/transformations
2020 Science -- Microsoft Report and Nature Issue
[CNI-ANNOUNCE] 2020 Science -- Microsoft Report and Nature Issue
Clifford Lynch from CNI sent the following along on CNI-Announce, CNI's always-useful announcement list.
[CNI-ANNOUNCE] 2020 Science -- Microsoft Report and Nature Issue
Microsoft Research has issued a report on the practice of science in 2020 that emphasizes the growing role of information technology, e-science and related developments. You can find information about the report here
http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/background_overview.htm
Welcome!
Welcome to the group page for the ethnoproject website. You can find out more about the ethnoproject at http://www.ethnoproject.info.
-- mike
Connecting Technology & Liberal Education: Theories and Case Studies
NERCOMP is hosting a day-long event called "Connecting Technology & Liberal Education: Theories and Case Studies" . It will take place April 5, 2005 from 9:00-3:15 at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Campus Center
DESCRIPTION:
Nearly all institutions of higher education profess commitment to the ideals of liberal education, although these ideals are often expressed in ambiguous language. In this session, we will consider various definitions of liberal education, explore how liberal education's goals might be both supported and changed by information technology, and outline strategies for evaluating the efficacy of various approaches to teaching the liberal arts. We will also showcase the recently launched Academic Commons (http://www.academiccommons.org) and demonstrate ways in which it can serve as a platform for ongoing investigation into these questions.
Learning and Technology: Implications for Liberal Education and the Disciplines
The American Association of Colleges and Universities is holding a three-day conference:
Learning and Technology: Implications for Liberal Education and the Disciplines
Network for Academic Renewal Conference
April
20-22, 2006
Seattle, Washington
Early Registration Deadline: March 29,
2006
Student-Generated Timelines
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- Visit http://timeline.cer.jhu.edu/
Cyberinfrastructure = Hardware + Software + Bandwidth + People
Technology as a Liberal Art: Making the case by positive and negative example
Laura Blankenship's (aka Geeky Mom ) recent piece "Technology as a Liberal Art " in InsideHigherEd.Com asks (and answers) two useful and interconnected questions: Are the effects of technology's integration into the liberal arts curriculum at odds with the fundamental mission and methods of liberal education? And what remains common to the liberal arts educational experience after the changes wrought by desktop computing and the web? In her view, technology has improved matters considerably. She points to two positive examples of how faculty are using technology in ways that are consistent with good liberal arts teaching (a chemist using podcasting and blogs, an English professor using audio commentary), and then has some fun describing the technology improvements made at her alma mater compared her experience as a student there fifteen years ago, when she had to do word processing on a VAX. One question did come to mind: who are the people on the other side of this debate? Where can we find people who are willing to go on record saying how technology is ruining the liberal arts? (This would be a good opportunity to use the commenting feature of Academic Commons fellow readers.)
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- Visit http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/29/blankenship
Next Steps After The First Workshop
"Rethinking Information Spaces: A workshop on participatory designâ€
As the final activity at the workshop, we went around the table and everyone said what they were going to do next.
Themes
This is the current list of proposed themes for upcoming Academic Commons issues.
Notice to SIG Coordinator (boilerplate)
Notice to SIG coordinator:
Dear X,
We have selected your upcoming NERCOMP SIG <title> as an event that we will cover as part of an on-going series that provides the higher ed community with high-quality information about trends and issues in computing, information technology, librarianship, student learning, and faculty development.
Invitation to SIG Reporter
Dear <x>,
I am writing to ask if you would be willing to report on the upcoming NERCOMP event <name of event>. as part of our on-going series that provides the higher ed community with high-quality information about trends and issues in computing, information technology, librarianship, student learning, and faculty development. The report that we want you to write will appear on Academic Commons (http://www.academiccommons.org) and will provide a summary of each session, links to relevant materials, suggested readings, and commentary. Examples of past reports that we have published can be found at <tk>.
Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control
Published by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, and written by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles, the report summarizes the results of research done by the Center that looked at a range of artists and academics who ran into trouble with fair use in the early part of the 21st century, either by being the recipients of DMCA cease and desist orders, or who were sued for copyright infringement. While the report paints a fairly dreary picture of our present culture (described derisively as the culture of clearance), the authors do make some concrete suggestions that could help turn the tide in favor of fair use.
MediaCommons Project Moves Forward
Our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book have been busy. With the support of the MacArthur Foundation and the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC, they have just launched Making MediaCommons, a planning site where the MediaCommons project will begin to develop in public.
The site consists of three simple parts:
1) A weblog where founding editors Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College) will think out loud and work with the emerging community to develop the full MediaCommons vision.
2) A call for "papers"--scholarly projects that engagingly explore some aspect of media history, theory, or culture through an adventurous use of the broad palette of technologies provided by the digital network. These will be the first round of texts published by MediaCommons at the time of its launch.
3) In Media Res--an experimental feature where each week a different scholar will present a short contemporary media clip accompanied by a 100-150 word commentary, alongside which a community discussion can take place. In Media Res is presented as just one of the many possible critical activities that MediaCommons could eventually host. With this feature, they are also making a stand on "fair use," asserting the right to quote from the media for scholarly, critical and pedagogical purposes. Currently on the site, you'll find videos curated by Henry Jenkins of MIT, Jason Mittell of Middlebury College and Horace Newcomb of the University of Georgia (and the founder of the Peabody Awards). An open invitation has been issued for more curators.
Out of this site, the real MediaCommons will eventually emerge. The launch is planned for 2007, as early as Spring and as late as Fall, depending on community response. Already there are some quite interesting conversations taking place within, including a fascinating exchange about YouTube's potentially-stifling role in the emerging landscape of media criticism.
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- Visit http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org
Hypermedia and Discovery Based Learning: What Value?
Gabriel Jacobs recants or at least converts his guarded optimism in 1992 for the prospect of technology to "allow learning truly to mesh with the free association characteristics of the human mind" to a harsh critique of the often naive acceptance by many that educational technology must be good because it encourages active or discovery-based learning.
His criticism is not so much leveled against technology per se but against constructivist learning theory. As he puts it, "constructivist epistemology calls for a multiplicity of perspectives such that learners have a range of options from which to construct their own knowledge. But many basic techniques and skills, and much knowledge, whether or not deeply understood by students, can be effectively taught only by explanation, not by promoting free exploration; otherwise one is building on sand."
His solution does not necessarily call for the outright abandonment of educational technology, but rather new ways of thinking about how one teaches, with or without technology. He writes,"Within the problematical interplay of technological change and educational values, a predicament which is qualitatively different from previous areas of disquiet in the history of education, and with which all educators are now obliged to grapple, any application of the time-honoured method of remembering before discovering will for my part be welcomed."
The essay is interesting both as a critique of constructivism and a particular way of deploying technology, but also as a potential critique of liberal education. To what extent do our students need a foundation of facts and skills before they can become critical thinkers?
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- Visit http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet21/jacobs.html
Academic Commons Table of Contents: December 2005
Interactive Reading, Early Modern Texts and Hypertext: A Lesson from the Past by Tatjana Chorney, St. Mary's University (Nova Scotia)
We hear a lot these days about the empowering shifts in readers' abilities to construct meaning and to change the "original" text made possible by new technology. But the phenomenon is at least as old as the early modern period, when it was used to good effect by writers like John Donne. Tatjana Chorney argues that "studying the dynamic of interactive reading is. . .not only a look back on past practice but also a model for studying integrative teaching and learning in a global world."
Technology as Epistemology by Peter Schilling, Amherst College
Peter Schilling acknowledges that "To say 'new technology is changing the way we think' is as obvious as it is ambiguous." But he also probes
Heterotopic Space: Digitized Audio Commentary and Student Revisions
Introduction
We are embarking on a project that involves an english professor asking his students in his theater class to work with digitized video of performances to create multimedia presentations that will be presented during class, and perhaps will have a life outside the classroom on a website of some sort.As a way of helping the professor think about the organization of this assignment, we would like to create an inventory of such assignments that have been done on other campuses. Our intent is to publish this inventory so that others who might be formulating similar assignments might have some ideas about what the issues are, what works, what doesn't work, etc.To create this inventory, we would like to know the following:1. Would you like to help contribute to the construction of this inventory? (If so, let me know!)2. Are there faculty on your campus who have asked students to create multimedia materials as part of their coursework? Can you give us a brief description of the assignment and the context? Would you give us contact information, or be willing to contact them?3. Are there articles already published that document this work that we should be reading?Once we have a list of people to contact, our intent is to collect the following info (and this might change if others want to participate in this inventory and want to ask other questions)1. Name of courseImage Project Survey Instrument
This is the full-text of the survey instrument used by the Image Project to explore how faculty at a number of liberal arts colleges in the northeast are using digital images in their teaching.US Government Releases National Broadband Plan
Posted March 19th, 2010 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1805 Page ViewsImage Project - Privacy Options
Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning Center for Educational Technology - Wesleyan University
PRIVACY POLICY & OPTIONS
People who fill out the survey may choose from one of these three options
A. My responses may be identified with my name and shared with other project participants.
B. My responses may be identified with my name, but please share them only with the project's executive committee.
C. I want my responses to be anonymous.
All responses may be quoted anonymously in subsequent reporting on this project, but no personal or institutional names will be used without a respondent's express approval. Should the authors of a project report want to attribute your comments, they will contact you for permission.Symposium on The Future of the Digital Commons, Thursday Sept 22, 2005, MIT (Cambridge MA)
Posted September 16th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 3433 Page ViewsFree / Open to the Publis / No Registration --
Arguments and legal confrontations over the control of music, writing and visual materials have become a permanent feature of contemporary life and will almost certainly enlarge and intensify in future years. As corporate producers and distributors  including some universities and private libraries  move aggressively to claim ownership of digital content of all kinds and as some industries lobby for building surveillance principles into the operating systems of computers, others defend an alternative vision. This alternative embraces ideals of sharing and civic community and warns that recent extensions of copyright threaten creativity and the free exchange of ideas. Is there a future for this idea of a digital commons? Is the American tradition of free public libraries a valuable precedent for the digital age? Is the commercialization of cyberspace already a problem for those seeking reliable information? Are there features or tendencies inherent in digital technology that will always challenge and even undermine efforts to control information or charge a fee for accessing it? Our speakers and our audience will engage these and related questions.CogDogBlog
Posted August 11th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1608 Page ViewsAlan Levine's blog provides regular commentary on his daily interactions with a wide range of cutting-edge technologies in his work developing and deploying instructional technologies in the Maricopa Community College system. Both insightful and funny, Levine pulls no punches as he reflects on the relative merits of the myriad approaches we all are experimenting with in our efforts to improve education through technology.
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- Visit http://www.cogdogblog.com
D-Lib Magazine
Posted August 4th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1841 Page ViewsD-Lib Magazine focuses on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues. The magazine is published eleven times a year and is released monthly, except for the July and August issues which are combined and released in July.
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- Visit http://www.dlib.org
Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning
The following study, "Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning," was commissioned by Wesleyan University in collaboration with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE).
The study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format. However, while changes in the teaching-learning dynamic and the teacher-student relationship were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. These topics include the quality of image resources, image functionality, management, deployment and the skills required for optimum use (digital and image "literaciesâ€).
This report is rooted in faculty experience in "going digital,†as shown in four hundred survey responses and three hundred individual interviews with faculty and some staff at 33 colleges and universities: 31 liberal arts colleges together with Harvard and Yale Universities. Two-thirds of the survey respondents worked in the arts and humanities, 27% in the sciences and 12% in the social sciences. These faculty were self-selected and mostly convinced of the digital promise of abundant, fluid resources. They wanted to communicate both their enthusiasm for their endeavor and their frustration at the pace and quality of their transition to teaching with this new format.Examples (rough cut)
Gutenberg-e electronic monograph series (www.gutenberg-e.org) publishes an ongoing series of digital-only history monographs that incorprate many of the things you discuss (take a look at the Gengenbach book "Binding Memories" for a particularly compelling example of non-linear narrative and architecture in historical writing).
University of Virginia Press E-Imprint devoted to original digital publishing in the humanities (http://www.ei.virginia.edu/),
Valley of the Shadow project from the Virginia Center for Digital History (http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/research.html). provides another fascinating example of use of digital technology in promoting humanities research, education, and publishing
Innovate: A Journal of Online Education
Posted August 1st, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 4215 Page ViewsInnovate is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed online periodical (ISSN 1552-3233) published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and governmental settings. Our basic assumption is that innovative uses of technology in one sector can inform innovative uses of technology in each of the other sectors.
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- Visit http://innovateonline.info/?view=issue
The Design of Advanced Learning Engines: An Interview with Clark Aldrich
Posted August 1st, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1930 Page ViewsClark Aldrich, described by Fortune magazine as one of the top three e-learning gurus, discusses the gaming future of education, proposing that while teachers can suggest some promising paths for the use of games and simulations, for this promise to be delivered, we must invest on a massive scale in creating new software that challenges older learning paradigms and older formats. Includes lots of provocative quotes and makes the claim that "... schools and corporations are, basically, enemies of each other today. Schools have an impossible task. They teach stuff that, for the most part, enterprises don't value, other than the most basic competencies."
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- Visit http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=211
Places to Go: Connexions (from Innovate On-line)
Posted July 15th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1507 Page ViewsThe prolific Stephen Downes writes up this learning object authoring and sharing facility, giving it a luke-warm review. His main criticism: it doesn't play well in the world of RSS and OAI, and its authoring tools are too complex. Ideally, making learning objects, says Downes, ought to be as easy as creating a blog post. Would that that were so!
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- Visit http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=200
draft website outline
Home
I'm working on an outline for the Ethnography Project Website. Here is a proposed set of top-level items.
Overview of project.About
History of project. People involved, Thanks to funders, etc.Projects
Projects that result from initial grant, plus clearinghouse of works-in-progress and completed projectsConsultants
List of folks you can hire to help plan a project.Readings
a) readings about ethnography in generalNew Web Services for Teaching and Learning
Posted November 29th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 2186 Page ViewsNITLE 's Bryan Alexander provides an overview of Web 2.0, that ill-defined trend that has dinosaurs like me awake at night worrying that their focus on old-fashioned (Web 1.0) technology may soon make them (me!) extinct. He reviews the leading products and services that collectively define Web 2.0: wiki, blog, microcontent, RSS, folksonomies, social bookmarking, and aggregators. For each, he then speculates on how these new ways of creating, discovering, sharing, and analyzing information might change what happens in our classrooms. Collectively these technologies and their uses represent a major challenge to business-as-usual in academe. Web 2.0's core ethos and the texts it creates are radically distributed, non-hierarchical, non-authoritative. It is the culture of rip, burn, and mix, of peer-to-peer, of Just Do IT, and then let's see what happens. No more peer review. No more controlled vocabularies and professional cataloging. No more centralized authority (the library, the publisher, the news network) filtering what you see. The ideological challenge that Web 2.0 presents to academic culture is compounded by the technology challenges of integrating Web 2.0 services into campus systems.
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- Visit http://newsletter.nitle.org/v4_n4_fall2005/web_services1.php
Welcome!
This is a space where we'll be posting and commenting on various and sundry Web 2.0 applications as they relate to higher education. The goal is to quickly take the pulse of who is doing what with various tools (wikis, blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking, aggregators) with an eye towards understanding what we ought to do next with this powerful but disruptive technology shift.
Introduction
I created this forum as a place to store our notes, documents, plans, etc. for the AC coverage of NERCOMP sigs.
- mike
Retro-tech as Solution to Information Overload
Posted November 26th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 2430 Page ViewsFrom the "We make our buildings, then our building make us" Department...
Retro-tech as solution to Information Overload
The time-management maniacs over at 43 Folders pointed to Paul Ford's recent piece on NPR entitled Distracted No More: Going Back to Basics . Ford provides an all-too-familiar criticism of the web: it is a time-sink and a major distraction. He isn't against distraction altogether, and muses eloquently on the importance of random associations that appear as one writes and thinks. His issue with the web is its superficiality, a sense that it is broad but not deep. His solution: retrotech. He hasn't given up on the web, but when he wants to do some serious thinking and writing, he takes out a low-tech laptop with a black and white screen and no internet connection, and boots up wordperfect for DOS. What's interesting about this is that he doesn't advocate a return to really old technology (the pen and the notepad), but older technology that doesn't afford the same level of immediacy and access. What does this mean for us on campus who are bathing every last inch of our social spaces with wireless internet? Who push laptops like drug-dealers push their wares? How does the web handle the human need for reflection?
For those of us who sometimes work the Information Literacy side of the street, Ford's piece and its link from 43 Folders is suggestive of new ways of thinking about information literacy and liberal arts education. What if part of information literacy has to do with the selection of the appropriate technology (both hardware and software) for a given task? In a world awash in too much unmediated information, should we be paying more attention to the time management gurus (Stephen Covey, David Allen), whose work increasingly has to do with managing the flow of information in your life? Allen's latest title "Ready for Anything " could almost be an advertisement for what we want to say about our graduates, suggesting that there may be a strange confluence between some of the claims we make about liberal arts education and the goals of content-neutral time management systems.
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- Visit http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5025301
Technology & the Pseudo-Intimacy of the Classroom: an interview with Jerry Graff
Posted July 25th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College1 Comments | 13068 Page ViewsGraff's interest in 'teaching the conflicts' as a way of rescuing higher education from itself has recently been replaced by a profound worry that higher ed is becoming increasingly irrelevant to American culture. We checked in to see what role Graff thinks technology might play in these unsettling times.Robert Bechtle Retrospective & the Pachyderm Project
Posted July 5th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 6430 Page ViewsThe San Francisco Museum of Modern's Art (http://www.sfmoma.org/ ) retrospective on the work of Robert Bechtle explores Bechtle's life and work through videos of the artist working in his studio, as well as photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and other primary source materials from his personal archive. A gallery of artworks zoom-enabled for closer inspection shows highlights from the artist's 40-year career. Accompanying the show is a nifty web application that provides access to a wide range of multimedia materials. This application is a preview of some of the new features that will be available in the 2.0 version of Pachyderm Project (http://www.nmc.org/pachyderm/index.shtml) which is a project being managed by the NMC (http://www.nmc.org)
Library of Congress Photos on Flickr Report (via CNI-Announce)
Posted December 11th, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1307 Page ViewsRecipients of Third Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration Announced
Posted December 10th, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College1 Comments | 2335 Page ViewsOpen Access to Scholarship: An Interview with Ray English
Posted December 11th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 10097 Page ViewsOberlin's Library Director talks about the importance of the Open Access movement to higher education in general, and liberal arts education in particular, and talks about what we can do to help this important movement succeed.
About The Commons
With Academic Commons, we seek to form a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals who will help create a comprehensive web resource focused on liberal arts education.
American Association of Colleges and Universities
Posted May 17th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1685 Page ViewsFrom the website: AAC&U is the leading national association concerned with the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education. Its members are committed to extending the advantage of a liberal education to all students, regardless of their academic specialization or intended career. Founded in 1915 by college presidents, AAC&U now represents the entire spectrum of American colleges and universities—large and small, public and private, two-year and four-year. AAC&U comprises more than 1000 accredited colleges and universities that collectively educate more than five million students every year.AAC&U organizes its work around four broad goals:
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- Visit http://www.aacu.org/
Is Debate Upstaging Dialogue?
Posted June 11th, 2005 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1690 Page ViewsRichard Gunderman of Indiana University's School of Liberal Arts asks hard questions about how faculty may allow debate (more light than heat) to interfere with the more important work of encouraging dialogue, which he characterizes as more heat than light. While some of us may take issue with Professor Gunderman's notions of truth and beauty, and the possibility of 'genuine conversation,' the essay (the second of a three part series that the Center of Inquiry at Wabash College ran within its Liberal Arts Online monthly publicaction) rings true when one thinks not only of the changing nature of classroom discourse, but also of how certain technologies, in particular email, tend to interfere with more nuances, and often result in misunderstandings and conflict. Is it the technology or the general culture that is causing this decline?
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- Visit http://liberalarts.wabash.edu/home.cfm?news_id=2331
Webcast on Open Education Thursday October 2, 2008 @ 11 AM PDT
Posted October 1st, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College1 Comments | 2284 Page ViewsCall for Reflection
Posted December 20th, 2006 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 2084 Page ViewsAs the fall semester comes to an end, and the year 2007 approaches, the editors at Academic Commons write to ask you to consider taking some time in the month of January to reflect on what has happened this year on your campus and in your various professions. Please consider using the Academic Commons website to share your news and experiences about new systems implemented, about new pedagogies enabled by these systems, and how they may have helped (or not!) transform in some interesting way how our students interacted with the curriculum this year. We are interested in victories small and large--or, yes, spectacular failures, as even those can provide a wealth of information.
Fair Use and the Future of the Commons: A HASTAC.org Scholars Discussion Forum
Posted October 27th, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 2898 Page ViewsThe Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
Posted March 24th, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 4000 Page ViewsThe folks at the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory aka HASTAC (http://hastac.org) have posted a draft of a paper entitled "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age." The paper will evolve through online collaboration and conversations, and will be published in its final form as part of the Occasional Paper Series on Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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- Visit http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about/
The Great Wikipedia Debate
Posted March 27th, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 3326 Page ViewsMiddlebury College's Department of History made headlines at the end of January when they announced a ban on the use of Wikipedia as a reference. Later in February, a Classics course at Oberlin College was required to use Wikipedia for a research assignment. These stories are but two of many that have prompted educators across the country to debate the value of Wikipedia as an educational tool. What are it strengths, its limits? When, if ever, is it appropriate to use Wikipedia for research? Should we be using it in the classroom at all?
This coming Thursday (29 March 2007), the first Language Lab Unleashed! of the spring will feature Don Wyatt (chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College), Elizabeth Colantoni (Professor of Classics at Oberlin College), Laura Blankenship (Senior Instructional Technologist at Bryn Mawr), and Bryan Alexander (Director of Research at NITLE) for a discussion on the potential uses and abuses of Wikipedia in the educational arena.
The show will begin promptly at 8pm ... for details on how to join the live conversation, please visit:
http://www.languagelabunleashed.com
--via Language Lab UnleashedHASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition, Second Round
Posted August 19th, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1614 Page ViewsOur colleagues at HASTAC have announced their second round of competition, this time centered on participatory learning.
bFree: Blackboard Extraction Tool from University of North Carolina
Posted April 2nd, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 35314 Page ViewsOne of the laments many faculty express at the migration of course materials from the open Web to course management systems is that it is harder to find examples of syllabii from colleagues at other institutions, since for the most part, Blackboard courses don't show up via Google.
The ITS department at University of North Carolina has just released a nifty new tool called bFree that takes the contents of a Blackboard course and creates a free-standing website out of it. While one wonders how it handles the parts of a course that really shouldn't be on the open Web (copyrighted materials, private information for student eyes only, etc.), this seems nonetheless a welcome development. Using bFree can perhaps turn the tide of encroaching invisibility, providing access to the materials presently hidden behind the CMS firewall.
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- Visit http://its.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/
There's imagination happening here: Extolling the Virtues of the ARG
Posted May 3rd, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College1 Comments | 1564 Page ViewsBen Vershbow from the Institute for the Future of the Book has posted a nifty review/preview of the World Without Oil, the social consciousness-raising ARG (alternate reality game) that recently launched. His posting is interesting both for what it has to say about ARGs and their power as a narrative form, but also for its critique of Second Life. He writes:
"This couldn't be more unlike the whole Second Life phenomenon (which, as you may have noticed, we've barely covered here). Instead of building a one-to-one simulacrum of the actual world (yeah yeah, you can fly, big whoop), this takes the actual world and tilts it — reinterprets it. There's imagination happening here. "
What Are You Doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest Web sensation.
Posted May 2nd, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1712 Page ViewsThe list of tools to help you avoid doing meaningful work just got longer. Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), a platform that blurs the lines between blogs and instant messaging, provides an outlet for anyone who wants to tell anyone else who might care what they are doing at that very moment. In his essay "What are you doing? The allure of Twitter, the latest web senstion" Slate's Michael Agger does a nice job of describing what this new world is like, and wonders out loud about how all of this might help us live more purposefully. Agger doesn't ask how this might be useful in an educational setting. Twitter strikes me as interesting, not as a tool I would use, but rather--for the anthropologists and sociologists--a phenomenon to understand. Why would we want to share our thoughts and ideas with complete strangers on an hourly basis?
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- Visit http://www.slate.com/id/2163861/
TinyURL makes URLs Tiny
Posted June 20th, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 2192 Page ViewsTired of trying to send links to colleagues and students via email and having them break because of the length of the URL? TinyURL is a nifty service that tames beastly URLs. Put in a long URL and presto! A tiny URL comes out the other end. They also have a nifty Firefox plugin that allows you to accomplish the same task without ever having to go to the TinyURL site. Of course it would be better if everyone stopped creating such awful URLs in the first place, but in the mean time, this is a handy way to provide links deep into impenetrable websites.
Two for One Special: Convergence of New Report and New Tool for Scholarly Communication
Posted August 25th, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 2297 Page ViewsThe Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, in partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book , has published an interactive, publicly-commentable edition of the the Ithaka report, "University Publishing In A Digital Age." The report is presented in CommentPress, an open source theme for the WordPress blog engine that allows paragraph-by-paragraph commenting in the margins of a text, in development by the Institute for the Future of the Book. Please spread the word and join the discussion.Roy Rosenzweig
Posted October 12th, 2007 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College2 Comments | 2467 Page Views
Roy Rosensweig, one of my heroes and mentors, passed away this week. His friend and colleague at the Center for History and New Media Dan Cohen noted this on his blog, where tributes to Roy are accumulating. It would be hard to overstate Roy's importance to his field. His vision, energy, and generosity will be greatly missed.
Why IT Matters to Liberal Education
Posted February 1st, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1557 Page ViewsDaniel Sullivan, the president of St. Lawrence University, recently published an essay in the Educause Review entitled "Why IT Matters to Liberal Education" . In the face of the latest backlash against bulging IT budgets reinforced by books such as Nicholas Carr's "Does IT Matter?" , Sullivan's essay is useful because it articulates not only why IT does matter for higher education in general, but specifically looks at the connections that exist between the goals of liberal education and the instrumental value of various technology, services, and facilities that can help achieve those goals. My favorite quote from the essay has to be
"The role of technology in liberal learning is decidedly as complex as the university's mission" which at one level seems like a dodge, but at another level explains why the activity of explaining why IT matters requires more time and attention than many have to attend to. He goes on to document the particular challenge of doing IT on a small campus (lack of economies of scale), but suggests that even in the face of that challenge, it is a critical mistake to not understand the strong connections between IT and the evolving 21st. century liberal education.Gutenberg-E Goes Open Access (But Not Because of Its Success)
Posted February 26th, 2008 by Michael Roy, Middlebury College0 Comments | 1679 Page ViewsHASTAC's prolific blogger Cathy Davidson reblogs the Chronicle's recent piece on Gutenberg-e's recent announcement that they are going open access. Her post coins two new terms -- New Technology Utopianism and Old Technology Nostalgia -- that she then uses to explain why it is that Gutenberg-e missed the boat when they thought that it would be cheaper to publish high-quality history on-line. The blog entry is worth the read for many reasons, including its concluding sentence: The failure of Gutenberg-e's economic model may yet yield its biggest triumph: open scholarly access.
Academic Commons is a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals interested in two interlocking questions: how do creative uses of new technology and networked information support the current project of liberal education, and, perhaps more interestingly, how do they force us to re-think what it means to be liberally educated? Learn more.
