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.