Change or die is the message to college officials.  In her article for FastCompany, Anya Kamenetz explores the power of edupunks, the progenitors of a high-tech educational remix.  Says Jim Groom, an educational technologist who coined the term, "Edupunk is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."

Supercomputers are increasingly part of the cyberinfrastructure at campuses, big and small.

Doesn't the title say it all? In this week's Chronicle, Jeffrey R. Young discusses a new movement underway to "teach naked," that is, a call to give up the Powerpoint.

Nicholas Carr's new piece in The Atlantic (July/Aug 2008) raises provoking questions about the effect of the internet on human cognition and progress. Are we embracing artificial intelligence at the expense of human intelligence?

Luke Fernandez offers a cautionary tale on the dark side of technology.

Daniel 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.

The Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) announced the release of the first Metaverse Roadmap. The roadmap is designed to predict the changes in technology that will occur over the next ten and twenty years. It provides explanations of all data sources and narratives to help envision what these future developments will mean for business and society.

The University of Michigan has created a graduate program in social computing, solidifying the topic as a topic of interest to a critical mass of researchers. This article in the Wall Street Journal points to many indicators that social computing and social software is becoming popular. It's a recognition, I think, that social networking, blogging, and the Wikipedia are part of the permanent infrastructure of our lives.  

The 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.

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.

The recent Games for Change Conference was covered on NPR, featuring interviews with the developers of games such as Darfur is Dying and Peacemaker. The premise of these games is that to reach the Net Generation with socially progressive ideas, you need to engage them with their favorite interactive media. Since one of the familiar objectives in many of our campus' strategic plans is to develop the next generation of leaders, and to ensure that our graduates participate effectively in the political process, these new models of developing thoughtful and yet engaging game environments to teach progressive values seem worth paying attention to, both for the lessons they teach, and more generally as models of platforms for thinking about future educational environments. 

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: 

We've all learned the hard way about the trouble with technology for technology's sake. But what about the fate of learning for learning's sake?  Boria Sax's recently published Learning the Love of Learning: Newman's Ideal Updated  looks squarely at the tradition of learning for learning's sake, and finds reason to not abandon this seemingly quaint ideological position. As part of Liberal Arts On-Line, a series from the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College that looks at various--and at times competing--issues and ideas surrounding what people mean when they say 'liberal education' or 'liberal learning,' Sax's essay provides a quick romp through 2,000 years of educational history, defending the oft-attacked irrelevance of arcane scholarly pursuit from both the pragmatists who want to see what it can do to improve the world beyond the Ivory Tower, and the deconstructionists, who see worrisome dragons within the idealist claims that knowledge is an end in itself. What I had hoped for (given Sax's authority in the world of on-line learning) was both a critique of how technology might be excacerbating the problems caused by disciplinary super-specialization, and also how it might help to re-build what he calls 'the village square' function in cyberspace.

In this brief overview of the Open Education movement, Rice University's Richard Baraniuk frames the opportunities and challenges that face initiatives to globally share self-created educational materials. He writes that the goals of this movement are:

• 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:

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."

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:

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.)

From the article:

A scholar of Japanese history at Bowdoin College has developed an innovative website that gives new meaning to the term "web scrolling." Thomas Conlan, associate professor of history and Asian studies recently launched Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, an interactive website that brings to life a famous set of Japanese picture scrolls.

GIS use in the classroom is extending beyond geology, geography, and archaeology into other less-science based disciplines.

The Bowdoin News archives from March of this year contains an interesting article describing professor Patrick Rael's "The Civil War Era" class. Students used GIS to process US Census Bureau information from the 1790s, mapping out the election that gave Abraham Lincoln the presidency. From the article:

"Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology - a software system that allows users to convert data into detailed maps - his students mapped out voting and demographic information from the period to visualize the impact of social forces, such as early industrialization and slavery, on voting behavior....Rael's project demonstrates the possibilities of GIS-based scholarship and teaching in the humanities, a growing trend among colleges and universities....GIS is crossing disciplines and is being used in areas such as healthcare, law enforcement, environmental research, sociology, and land planning."

NITLE '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.

From 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. 

The Campus Technology Newsletter sent around an interesting article on Wikis in academia. Subtitled "All Users are Not Necessarily Created Equal," it describes the steps that a team at the The Center for Scholarly Technology at the University of Southern California went through to identify and and implement a series of approaches to use of Wikis for teaching and learning.

After this summer's Chronicle article "Bloggers Need Not Apply," which discussed the dangers of such a "public display of a [job] applicant's personal eccentricities,"  Slate's "Attack of the Killer Blogs" points out yet another pitfall -- "Many [academics] perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?"

Kairos Web continues to publish some of the best work about teaching, learning, and technology; Volume 9.2 (Spring 2005) focuses on "Writing in Globalization." I especially appreciated Virginia Kuhn's Visual Work: Visual Projects in the Writing Classroom, for it considers crucial issues of just what we want to mean by "writing" these days.

"I firmly believe that just as yesterday's writing classrooms helped to prepare students for their other college classes by both honing their critical thinking skills as well as their verbal literacy, today's writing instructors are in a position to teach students the type of multimodal literacy...

Richard 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?