While Nicholas Carr is decrying the supposed effect Google is having on our brains, he stumbles through a quote by Nietzsche to a friend on the effect a typewriter was having on his writing. The intriguing part of the quote is “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

This Article originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on June 16, 2006.
While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work.

Joe Ugoretz discusses how a new group of internet tools--Google, Wikis, Flickr and others included in the family of social software”--provide new methods of creating, sharing, categorizing, accessing and critiquing content, while lacking a central authority or a hierarchy of editorial control. Joe presents some suggestions “for how we, in the academic world, the college context, can use these tools to the advantage of our teaching and our students’ learning.”