Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool released under a creative commons license that holds a great deal of promise for digital storytelling in education.  A free download is required to create and read Sophie projects.  The idea of the book is the central concept.  The creator can simply drag and drop components (text fields, comment fields, etc.) or resources (images, audio, video, etc.) onto a page.  Objects and pages can all be resized.  There is also a timeline feature that lets you start and stop audio or video as well as make any resource appear or disappear from the page.  The comments component also merits special mention.  While the book is downloaded to the readers machine, their comments can be read by anyone else who "opens" the book.  It's a powerful concept combining an easy to use multimedia interface with the communicative properties of a blog.

The Japanese virtual world Meet Me has been released.  It's the same basic idea as Second Life with some key differences that should be very beneficial for teachers of Japanese

• There are rules governing behavior.  It's not the wild west you'll find in Second Life.
• It's intended only for a Japanese audience, so you can be reasonably sure people you meet in the environment are Japanese.
  
• It's a virtual representation of Tokyo and could easily be used as an example of Japanese modern culture.

The download is free, though you do have to register with your email address.  Also, for XP you have to make a change in the Control Panel to read the Japanese characters in the environment. Go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Advanced Tab >  then for the drop down list set "Select a language for non-unicode languages” to Japanese.  Thanks to Takeshi Sengiku at Gettysburg for find this.

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is an umbrella organization formed in 2005 initially to coordinate the activities of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (founded in 1978) and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (founded in 1973). In 2007, the Canada-based Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH-SEMI) joined the Alliance.

Devoted to the encouragement and exploration of the digital humanities in all its forms, ADHO's activities encompass the publication of

peer reviewed journals:

The American Council of Learned Societies seeks to advance humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and social sciences and to maintain and strengthen relations among the national societies devoted to such studies. Established in 1919 as a federation of 12 learned societies, ACLS has grown since its founding to represent 69 scholarly organizations, embracing all fields of the humanities and related social sciences, and totaling approximately 300,000 scholars. As the pre-eminent private representative of humanities scholarship in the United States, the ACLS carries out its mission in a variety of programs across many fields of learning. 

The ACLS has developed and administered numerous specific programs that have served the interests of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in general, of individual scholars, and of the nation. Central to the ACLS throughout its history have been its programs of fellowships and grants to support research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. ACLS's international programs both promote the study of world areas and provide opportunities for scholars for research and scholarly exchange.

ACLS's support of humanities research naturally includes concern for the cycle of scholarly communication upon which the researcher enterprise depends. The ACLS Conference of Administrative Officers--the convocation of the executive directors of the Council's member societies--has scholarly communication and the digital promise as an established thread of its conversations. Since 1950, the ACLS has issued a major report each decade on some aspect of the scholarly communication cycle: libraries, publishing, and new information technologies. In 2004, the ACLS appointed a commission of digitally-engaged scholars and charged it to recommend how the humanities and social sciences could develop online research environments that would empower scholars and students. The commission worked over two years to present a guide to achieving that goal. The report, entitled Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Final Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences, was released December 13, 2006 in print and online versions.

The ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB), which launched in September 2002, is a digital collection of over 1,500 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twelve learned societies, nearly 90 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office. HEB now adds approximately 300 books annually to the collection, as well as a carefully selected list of new XML titles that have the potential to use web-based technologies to communicate the results of scholarship in new ways. 

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., supports higher education and advanced research primarily through programs in academic libraries and allied institutions. CLIR convenes meetings to articulate concerns shared across multiple communities; commissions and publishes reports on topics of interest to the library and information research communities; provides support for graduate students and recent graduates of doctoral programs in the humanities; and runs the annual Frye Institute in cooperation with Emory University to train future leaders of college and university libraries.  

CLIR's agenda for the next five years reflects past and ongoing transformations resulting from advances in information and communication technologies. It has six interdependent components: cyberinfrastructure, preservation, scholarly methodologies, future library, leadership and new models of research. Cyberinfrastructure establishes a foundation that enables modes of technology-mediated research and models of scholarship. Computationally-intensive research methods and associated models of scholarship occasion needs for new leadership as well as new institutional roles for libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions. These organizations will be key to managing the enormous quantities of data, which has resulted from technology-intensive investigations together with related forms of scholarly expression. CLIR's long-standing commitment to curation and preservation of analog and digital data positions the organization to take a leadership role in ongoing national discussions. CLIR is deeply committed to identifying strategic approaches and partnerships that leverage social, intellectual and organizational resources across institutional and disciplinary boundaries on behalf of the public good. 

The Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, working in collaboration with the Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP) between the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), is leading an NSF-sponsored publication effort called Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch). The goal of CTWatch is to establish an online forum for ideas and opinions on topics of importance to the cyberinfrastructure community, providing a new source of information and analysis concerning the latest innovations in cyberinfrastructure technology.

To create the kind of productive mix of news, information and dialogue that rapid progress in shared cyberinfrastructure today requires, CTWatch developed CTWatch Quarterly, an on-line serial publication modeled on a more traditional academic journal. CTWatch Quarterly is designed to be published on-line and is made available in both HTML and in a high-quality PDF format intended for printing on demand. Each issue of revolves around a particular area of interest for the cyberinfrastructure community and is organized by a guest editor who is a leader in that field.

The focus topics (and corresponding guest editors) for 2006-7 included:

Ithaka promotes innovation in higher education by helping pioneering initiatives to thrive. Leaders of new not-for-profit projects, and their funders, must navigate a challenging path from early-stage funding to long-term viability. At the same time, long-established institutions are finding that they must fundamentally rethink the way they serve their constituents in a changing world. Ithaka supports entrepreneurial leaders in higher education with a range of services.

Research Services
Our research group works to understand how new technologies are changing higher education and how colleges and universities can best manage these changes. Its work is guided by an advisory committee of community leaders, and it is presently emphasizing three areas of interest:

A discussion of cyberinfrastructure would be incomplete without noting the Mellon Foundation; their grants have made possible many of the advances covered within Academic Commons.

 From their website:

"The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation currently makes grants in six core program areas: Higher Education and Scholarship; Scholarly Communications; Research in Information Technology; Museums and Art Conservation; Performing Arts; Conservation and the Environment."

"Within each of its core programs, the Foundation concentrates most of its grantmaking in a few areas. Institutions and programs receiving support are often leaders in fields of Foundation activity, but they may also be promising newcomers, or in a position to demonstrate new ways of overcoming obstacles to achieve program goals."

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.