THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING:
Part One: A day-long symposium on connecting space, information/technology, and policy/practice

In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive.

This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons, brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus.

Date: May 19, 2009

Place: Norwood, MA

(Register by going to nercomp.org )  

Part Two: The Reader

The symposium is the first step in the building of a reader/anthology that will bring together the best writing and thinking on these interconnected topics. You can find the prospectus at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df2dswdk_947fsr9bzgh .  

Part Three: the bookmarks

To build up (and potentially sustain) this collection, we're using delicious, the social bookmarking tool, to allow any and all to propose materials for inclusion in the reader. To propose something, either add academiccommons to your network, or just tag the resource for:academiccommons . Extra credit if you write into your link description something that helps explain why this might be useful, and double extra credit if you use any of the tags we've invented for the project to help speed our work along. You can see the tags we're using to start off at http://delicious.com/academiccommons/bundle:future%20of%20everything , while we've written more detailed instructions on how to propose materials at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df2dswdk_59fmkp54hq  . If you aren't a delicious user, you can use the on-line form at  http://tinyurl.com/acfoeresource to propose materials as well.