What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward? David Green and Michael Roy share some ideas in the July/August 2008 EDUCAUSE Review.

The Fall 2006 issue of AAC&U's Peer Review examines a range of current issues concerning the role and use of technology in student learning and also addresses how these technologies can advance liberal education learning outcomes. Much of the issue is online, but several key articles are not--so you still need the paper copy!

The online articles include David Shi's "Technology and Integrative Learning: Enabling Serendipitous Connectivity across Courses," "Harnessing Technology to Improve Liberal Learning"--an interview with Steven Sachs, and Charles Hannon's "Service Learning in Information Technology Leadership." Jack Meacham offers a "Reality Check": "Questioning the Best Learning Technology," in which he confesses, "Yes, I continue to use a variety of technologies in my teaching, but less so than a few years ago, for often the students can best be stimulated by sharing a good story with a twist or sketching a simple table or diagram with chalk. The criterion for bringing technology into my courses should always be: will this enable me to pose questions that better engage my students, spark their curiosity, and push them to think critically and, ultimately, to learn?"

A new, international, peer-reviewed, open access eJournal entitled International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
(IJ-SoTL) at http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/ will be published by the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Georgia Southern University (Statesboro, Georgia, USA) with the inaugural issue scheduled for January 2007.  

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is becoming an international movement or momentum for an evidence-based approach to teaching, and may be the best way for both individual faculty, and a campus as a whole, to improve teaching effectiveness by learning more about how students learn in significant, enduring ways and how to teach for such learning.  The Center for Excellence in Teaching seeks to encourage campus conversations about teaching, learning, research and SoTL and supports the work of faculty engaging in formal and informal inquiries and research into the learning of their students.

Infobits, published by the Center for Instructional Technology at UNC Chapel Hill, has a number of interesting bits in the May issue. The issue points to a piece (in pdf format) by Walt Crawford, "Books, Blogs & Style" (Cites & Insights, vol. 6, no. 7, May 2006) that meditates on how medium affects message. Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, publishes this free online journal of "libraries, policy, technology and media." 

The Humanist List notes that the latest edition of the Swedish journal Human IT focuses on "Dynamic Maps." It's a fascinating issue (all in English this month), and, as guest editor Patrik Svensson points out, a soundly interdisciplinary enterprise. The issue includes the following articles:

 

• Editorial: Dynamic Maps
• Zachary Devereaux & Stan Ruecker
  Online Issue Mapping of International News and Information Design [Refereed Section]
• William E. Cartwright

Inside Higher Education gives a good digest of "The State of Open Source Software," a report recently published by Rob Abel for the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). Abel's report draws on a survey of more than 200 higher education officials  responsible for software selection at a range of  institutions. According to the report, two-thirds said they have "considered or are actively considering” using open source products; only about a quarter of institutions are implementing higher education-specific open source software. Inside Higher Education quotes Kenneth Green,  founding director of the Campus Computing Project, as calling the mindset toward open source "affirmative ambivalence.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Apple Computer is releasing iTunes U (http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/itunes_u/), a service that allows colleges and universities to record, upload, and store course lectures in Apple's popular iTunes Music Store.  The Chronicle article is available to non-subscribers and reports that colleges can customize their iTunes U site with school colors and logos.  Stored lectures can be made public or restricted to certain groups.  Access to lectures can be controlled using existing college user ID's and passwords.

From the Humanist List:
The special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews entitled "Digital scholarship, Digital Culture" (30.2, June 2005) is now available freely online.This issue contains the lectures from the series by that name, held at King's College London, during the 2003-4 academic year.

• Stanley N Katz, "Why scholarship matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century"
• Michael S Mahoney, "The histories of computing(s)"
• Gordon Graham, "Strange bedfellows? Information systems and the concept of a library"
• Yorick Wilks, "Artificial companions"
• Ian Hacking, "The Cartesian vision fulfilled: analogue bodies and digital minds"
• Timothy Murray, "Curatorial in-securities: new media art and rhizomatic instability"
• Jerome McGann, "Culture and technology: the way we live now, what is to be done?"

FibrecultureJournal is a peer reviewed journal from Australia that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of:

D-Lib Magazine focuses on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues. The magazine is published eleven times a year and is released monthly, except for the July and August issues which are combined and released in July.