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.

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.)

LINK: http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@424.c9CMbu8k7E9.5@.775e9244/48

Tessa Jowell, the UK secretary of state for culture, media and sport, has weighed in on the blogging code of conduct debate from a few weeks back, stating that she welcomes and supports the initiative. From her article "Civility in 'Ourspace' " on The Guardian's website: "The wonderful, anarchic, creative world of the blogosphere shouldn't be a licence for abuse, bullying and threats as it has been in some disturbing cases...There is a need for serious discussion about maintaining civilised parameters for debate, so that more people - and women and older people in particular - feel comfortable to participate."

An interesting open source development in the U.K. announced last week; from the press release:

The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration.

The American Council of Learned Societies seeks to advance humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and social sciences and to maintain and strengthen relations among the national societies devoted to such studies. Established in 1919 as a federation of 12 learned societies, ACLS has grown since its founding to represent 69 scholarly organizations, embracing all fields of the humanities and related social sciences, and totaling approximately 300,000 scholars. As the pre-eminent private representative of humanities scholarship in the United States, the ACLS carries out its mission in a variety of programs across many fields of learning. 

The ACLS has developed and administered numerous specific programs that have served the interests of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in general, of individual scholars, and of the nation. Central to the ACLS throughout its history have been its programs of fellowships and grants to support research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. ACLS's international programs both promote the study of world areas and provide opportunities for scholars for research and scholarly exchange.

ACLS's support of humanities research naturally includes concern for the cycle of scholarly communication upon which the researcher enterprise depends. The ACLS Conference of Administrative Officers--the convocation of the executive directors of the Council's member societies--has scholarly communication and the digital promise as an established thread of its conversations. Since 1950, the ACLS has issued a major report each decade on some aspect of the scholarly communication cycle: libraries, publishing, and new information technologies. In 2004, the ACLS appointed a commission of digitally-engaged scholars and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The commission worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal. The report, entitled Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, was released December 13, 2006 in print and online versions.

The ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), which launched in September 2002, is a digital collection of over 1,500 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twelve learned societies, nearly 90 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office. HEB now adds approximately 300 books annually to the collection, as well as a carefully selected list of new XML titles that have the potential to use web-based technologies to communicate the results of scholarship in new ways. 

A discussion of cyberinfrastructure would be incomplete without noting the Mellon Foundation; their grants have made possible many of the advances covered within Academic Commons.

 From their website:

"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation currently makes grants in six core program areas: Higher Education and Scholarship; Scholarly Communications; Research in Information Technology; Museums and Art Conservation; Performing Arts; Conservation and the Environment."

"Within each of its core programs, the Foundation concentrates most of its grantmaking in a few areas. Institutions and programs receiving support are often leaders in fields of Foundation activity, but they may also be promising newcomers, or in a position to demonstrate new ways of overcoming obstacles to achieve program goals."

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: 

Clark 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." 

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.

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:

The Humanist List calls attention to the new edition of a Scandinavian journal, Human IT, which includes some work in English, notably an essay by Daniel Paul O'Donnell. O'Donnell discusses his editing of the Old English poem Caedmon's Hymn  based on "SGML-encoded diplomatic transcriptions of all twenty-one known witnesses to the poem." O'Donnell attempted to create a filter that allowed readers to choose different features and versions of the text. But in this essay, O'Donnell rethinks the need for the human editor and discusses "a system in which the computer would generate, but a human edit, the final display texts presented to the reader."

O'Donnell moves toward  the somewhat obvious point that "technical advances of the last eight years have greatly improved our ability to extract and manipulate textual data--and our ability to build editions in ways simply impossible in print." But he finds particular significance in meeting his original two goals: "a method for avoiding reinputting primary source documents" and "a description of the locus of editorial activity." O'Donnell concludes with an intriguing note for producers and consumers of digital tets: "in an increasingly collaborative and interactive scholarly world, it appears that the ghost in the machine may reside in the stylesheet."

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:

Middlebury 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 Unleashed

While focusing on financial aspects of implementing new technology  in higher education, this CNNMoney article contains some interesting statistics regarding the relevance of podcasting and "web 2.0" in higher education. In particular, it illustrates the increasing demand for access to "a next-generation learning environment" from incoming students (something I have personally predicted over the past several years).

• Research and Demonstration Projects
• Building Digital Resources
• Library and Museum Collaborations
• Collaborative Planning Grants

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

• 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:

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.

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

Seb Schmoller's Fortnightly Mailing continues to be good reading, casting a wide net over interesting conversations on both sides of the Atlantic. The October 17 issue includes an intriguing piece, "The Web is Not Just a Better Printing Press," which notes a recent presentation by Nature Magazine's Timo Hannay at Harvard's Berkman Centre. The blog entry says "if you are interested in publishing, Open Access, e-research, how research is done (not just scientific research), blogging, the future of the Internet, Second Life (where Nature has an island, and is trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases) etc., you should spend an hour or so" with the Hannay materials. What's especially interesting about this are the developments in how we circulate information: Hannay's slides, a video transcript of the talk, and contemporaneous notes from the convener are all available.  

Ben 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. "