Integration of learning | Academic Commons

Cyberinfrastructure For Us All: An Introduction to Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture

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Made possible by dramatic advances in networking technologies, cyberinfrastructure promises to combine new computing capabilities, massive data resources and distributed human expertise to enable qualitatively different creative product from new generations of "knowledge environments." Introducing this timely collection of observations on how this will affect liberal arts disciplines and institutions, David Green reviews the distance we've come in the last 15 years and identifies the main themes of the essays, interviews and reviews that follow.

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The (Uncommon) Challenge of the Cultural Commonwealth

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Gary Wells, Ithaca College

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In reviewing Our Cultural Commonwealth, the report on cyberinfrastructure and the humanities commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Gary Wells notes "both the allure and anxiety of radical and disruptive change," and wonders if the academy and the broader public will be up to the cultural and financial challenges.

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Beyond the ACLS Report: An interview with John Unsworth

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka

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John Unsworth chaired the ACLS Commission that authored Our Cultural Commonwealth. In a conversation with Kevin Guthrie, he offers his own well-developed definition of cyberinfrastructure, talks about why and how the needs of the humanities should be considered separately, and explains how the report's framework has been useful already in developing new implementation strategies.

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Cyberinfrastructure as Cognitive Scaffolding: The Role of Genre Creation in Knowledge Making

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Janet Murray, Georgia Tech

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This gripping account describes what the process and products of a new cyberscholarship might look like in the age of the Semantic Web, in which cyberinfrastructure’s potential as a "facilitator of a vast social process of meaning making" might be further developed.

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Cyberinfrastructure: Leveraging Change at our Institutions. An interview with James J. O'Donnell

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture

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Provost O'Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word, is fascinated by how "institutions full of creative, innovative, iconoclastic people" are paradoxically "bastions of conservatism." Guiding us through the texture of change since the Internet hit 15 years ago, O"Donnell posits that incremental change is perhaps the best we can do until the fundamental instruments of scholarly communication and the academic reward structure change: "until the problem we have to solve is defined persuasively enough that we get enough people interested in solving it."

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College Museums in a Networked Era--Two Propositions

Posted December 16th, 2007 by John Weber, Skidmore College

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The director of Skidmore College's Tang Museum proposes a dynamic new relevance for the college museum, whose tasks of addressing students' visual literacy and in more effectively deploying the multisensory exhibition in global curricula could be dramatically facilitated through cyberinfrastructure.

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Profiles of Key Cyberinfrastructure Organizations

Posted December 16th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture

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We present here a collection of short profiles, specially written for Academic Commons, on key service organizations and networks that will be poised to assist and lead others who are working to bring a rich cyberinfrastructure into play. Some are older humanities organizations for which cyberinfrastructure is a totally new environment, others have been created specifically around the provision of digital resources and support.

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Joyce Ray

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local institutions and organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; to enhance learning and innovation; and to support professional development.

In the Knowledge Society of the 21st Century, digital content will be created, managed, preserved and disseminated within an infrastructure that is seamless and virtually invisible to users. The future digital environment will include digital representations of accumulated historical knowledge as well as vast amounts of new content. Future generations of users will build on this existing information and preserved digital content to create new knowledge and forms of expression. Libraries, museums, and archives are vital components of the emerging cyberinfrastructure.

Cultural heritage institutions are developing digital repositories to manage and preserve collections converted from analog formats as well as those that are digital-only. They are also leading efforts to develop tools, standards, and best practices to improve the management, discovery, presentation, and use of digital content. IMLS provides grant opportunities to libraries, museums, archives, and institutions of higher education for research, demonstrationl, and implementation projects to enhance library and museum services and for programs to educate the next generations of library and museum professionals. IMLS grant programs that support cyberinfrastructure include:

National Leadership Grants

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

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

HASTAC

Posted December 16th, 2007 by Cathy Davidson

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HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Since 2003, HASTAC has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

In 2006-07, over eighty HASTAC centers worked together to produce courses, seminars, workshops and public events on the theme of "In|Formation." Topics in that theme were: InCommon, Interplay, InCommunity, Interaction, Injustice, Integration, Interface and Innovation. The project for 2007-08 is a series of ad hoc podcast Town Halls on any topic of social and political importance to new technologies. All podcasts will be advertised and archived on the HASTAC website. In addition, in 2007-08, HASTAC will host the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million competition sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning. To become part of HASTAC, simply register to the http://www.hastac.org/ website and contribute.

Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg are cofounders of HASTAC.

Open Source Software Tools: Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration

Posted December 11th, 2007 by David Green, Knowledge Culture

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Tim Berners-Lee presented the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) yesterday at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). $650,000 in prize money went to 10 nonprofits for "leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities."

While more information is available on the CNI site, the winners are as follows:

American Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY: www.movingimage.us) for the development and release of the OpenCollection museum collection management system (www.opencollection.org) [$100,000].
Duke University (Durham, NC: www.duke.edu) for leadership and development work on the OpenCroquet open source 3-D virtual worlds environment (www.opencroquet.org)[$100,000].
Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: www.openpolytechnic.ac.nz) for leadership and development work on several open source projects including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (http://eduforge.org/projects/nzvle/) [$100,000].
Georgia Public Library Service of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, GA: www.georgialibraries.org) for the development and release of the Evergreen open-source library automation system (www.open-ils.org) [$50,000].
Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT: www.middlebury.edu) for the development and release of the Segue interactive learning management system [$50,000].
Participatory Culture Foundation (Worcester, MA: www.participatoryculture.org) for the development and release of the open source Miro media player (www.getmiro.com) [$50,000].
Talboks-och Punkstkriftsbiblioteket (The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille: Enskede, Sweden: www.tpb.se) for the development and release of open source tools supporting the Daisy Project for talking books for the visually impaired [$50,000].
University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana, IL: www.illinois.edu): one award for the development and release of the Firefox Accessibility Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1891) [$50,000]; and one award for the development and release of the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project (www.openEAI.org) [$50,000].
University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario: www.utoronto.ca) for the development and release of the ATutor learning management system (www.atutor.ca) [$50,000].

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