The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is funding a new center at University of California-Irvine's Digital Media and Learning Research Hub to nurture exploration of and build evidence around the impact of digital media on young people’s learning and its potential for transforming education. See www.dmlcentral.net for more information.

Beginning in March 2009, Stanford has brought a handful of high-profile scholars to the social networking site in an effort to "make its discoveries and knowledge easily and widely accessible online," according to Ian Hsu, the University's director of Internet media outreach. For more, see Stanford's press site: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/may6/facebook-050609.html . 

THE SUMMER INSTITUTE AT WALLENBERG HALL 2009
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California
ePortfolios, Learning Spaces, and Digital Media Production

"Adrian Sannier, technology officer for Arizona State University, discusses strategies for putting in place ground-breaking plans that will serve the next generation of students. These are actionable visions that include strategic technology choices--advancements that may be unfamiliar or even unpopular at first, but which carry enormous potential."

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

ARTstor is a non-profit organization created with several aims:  

1) To aid in the transformation of education in the arts and humanities through the innovative use of digital technology;

2) To achieve economies of scale and reduce costs for the community by providing digital images for teaching and scholarship;

3) To facilitate efficient dissemination of content from a broad range of time periods, cultures and disciplines, making accessible large portions of our cultural record scattered across libraries, museums, archives, galleries and private collections around the world; and

4) To work with the community to find answers to commonly shared problems, including the development of standards and best practices for the creation of useful visual materials.  

As of July 2007, 750 colleges, universities, schools and museums have access to ARTstor's evolving library of close to 600,000 images and its accompanying software tools.

ARTstor seeks to play a role in the international network connecting educational institutions with content contributors, ranging from artists (such as the Roy Lichtenstein Estate) and photographers to museums (such as the Getty) and libraries (such as the Harvard College Libraries). In doing so, we work with the community to develop policies around sharing image collections, as well as to develop and enhance harvesting software and schema that promote interoperability (such as the Open Archives Initiative and CDWA-Lite), leading to the aggregation for users of images from disparate sources. We believe the coming years will bring continued expansion of an ever more decentralized environment. ARTstor's role in such an environment will not be that of the single source of image content, but rather that of a value-adding node in this increasingly networked environment. Toward this aim, much of our time has been spent creating or improving upon existing inter-relationships and networks, building bridges across the community and demonstrating both the potential and the challenges of facilitating the use of digital images. 

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.

NITLE is a non-profit initiative focused on advancing learning through the use of digital technology. NITLE's participating institutions represent more than 100 primarily smaller independent colleges and universities in the U.S. and world-wide.

NITLE provides professional development programs and managed information services that strengthen higher education by enabling the collaborative sharing of resources, expertise and effective practices. In addition, using collaborative technologies such as multipoint, interactive videoconferencing and open-source systems for learning and collaboration, participants in NITLE programs and services are able to engage in on-going, peer-to-peer exchange across disciplines, professions, and institutions and to build communities of practice that create and share solutions for learning that are useful and relevant to smaller, teaching-centered colleges and universities.

NITLE's programs--both face-to-face and virtual--engage faculty, instructional technologists and librarians in reflective discussion and hands-on practice focused on good teaching and the appropriate use of technology as well as effective, mission-centered strategies for adopting instructional technologies and enterprise tools on campus. NITLE's services lower institutions' risk in testing and adopting technology systems by aggregating community needs and providing managed services that meet those needs. NITLE services currently provide its participating colleges with access to multipoint, interactive videoconferencing (MIV); open-source learning management systems (Moodle and Sakai); and institutional repository services (DSpace).

In all its activities, NITLE leverages the expertise inherent in its participant community and provides a forum and resources to enable the strategic understanding and effective adoption of digital technologies.

For more information, visit www.nitle.org or subscribe to NITLE's blog, Liberal Education Today.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.

We have recently launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI)--aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. DHI is particularly interested in helping the development of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities as described in Our Cultural Commonwealth, the ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR) is a software engineering project that is leveraging the latest informatics research to innovate essential technology for a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Under the direction of Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil and John Unsworth, the SEASR team is developing software that:

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

SEASR's software research and development environment will enable existing applications (e.g., Wordhoard; Nora; MONK: Metadata Offer New Knowledge; IMIRSEL: International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) to more actively, precisely and comprehensively analyze information extracted from large collections in a variety of formats (i.e., digital libraries, databases, archives, mixed media, and even custom data). SEASR offers a range of data synthesis improvements, from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation.