I read through most of The Power of Pull (Economist review) earlier this summer and have been thinking through the implications of the book's ideas for higher ed and libraries. The book contrasts the old way of doing business or getting where an agenda is "pushed" down from above to "pull", which the authors define as “the ability to draw out people and resources as needed to address opportunities and challenges.”
The idea is that in today's network world, innovation can happen much more quickly when people at the cutting edge of a field collaborate with others that share their same passions.
In one sense, this book is advocating that business innovation happen more like innovation in the academy: sharing knowledge is the way. On the other hand, they are very critical of education that is programmed or 'pushed' from above.
The book also emphasizes the importance of geography and the serendipitous encounters that can happen with those in close proximity. Even in this networked world, they argue that living among those with similar passions is highly beneficial. Perhaps the intellectual connections and community of the liberal arts campus can model this phenomenon. The authors argue that networked technology can enrich our connections to people in a certain place: one might maintain meaningful connections in a handful of cities and better coordinate in-person meet-ups with mobile tech.
They argue that "knowledge flows" have overtaken "knowledge stocks" in importance. Big repositories of knowledge don't give a business (or perhaps a university) a major advantage anymore. It's having access to the knowledge flowing at the cutting edge that really enables innovation. They emphasize the importance of transferring tacit knowledge between individuals at the edge of a field. Another argument for the opportunities that the liberal arts provide for close encounters with experts in a field. At a presentation the other day at the Lewis & Clark Fall Retreat on faculty/student research, a biologist said that once a student begins working at the cutting edge of knowledge, a switch is flipped and their passion for learning changes in a dramatic way.
Towards the end of the book, they talk a lot about "shaping strategies" and "shaping platforms": Shaping strategies being a way of moving an entire industry or community to a new model, and the platform being some system put in place to do so. In the library context, this made me think that a big platform like WorldCat could have a bolder shaping aspiration behind it. Project Bamboo seems like an attempt at a shaping platform.
I was excited to see that one of the book's authors, John Seely Brown, is a NITLE fellow. Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for pointing this book out at an Orbis Cascade presentation in July (see also his blog post on the book).
Showing posts with label NITLE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NITLE. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
open access and institutional repositories
I have been watching with interest as some liberal arts college libraries adopt faculty resolutions on open access and commit to archiving preprint versions of journal articles in their institutional repositories. Oberlin did this not too long ago, and Rollins passed a resolution in February.
I spoke with Jonathon Miller about the Rollins initiative at the NITLE Summit in New Orleans last month. He said that one key to their success was that a couple faculty champions backed the process. Faculty were motivated to support the proposal because of a.) an awareness of the financial problems related to the current systems of scholarly communication and b.) a motivation to more widely disseminate their work, especially to scholars without access to pricey journals.
While I am supportive of such resolutions, I do question whether associated mandates to deposit scholarship in an institutional repository make sense. As an alternative, I would propose adopting a faculty resolution in support of open access with a mandate (or at least a suggestion) that faculty deposit preprints of articles in an appropriate disciplinary repository like arXive. It seems to me that most faculty work fits better alongside other work in the same discipline rather than alongside mostly unrelated work done at the same institution.
Institutional repositories can be beneficial as a way of showcasing and tracking the scholarly output of an institution. But I think that newer platforms like Vivo and BibApp that support scholarly bibliographies but also aim to achieve broader things like scholarly reputation management and the fostering of interdisciplinary connections are a potentially more effective way of doing this.
I spoke with Jonathon Miller about the Rollins initiative at the NITLE Summit in New Orleans last month. He said that one key to their success was that a couple faculty champions backed the process. Faculty were motivated to support the proposal because of a.) an awareness of the financial problems related to the current systems of scholarly communication and b.) a motivation to more widely disseminate their work, especially to scholars without access to pricey journals.
While I am supportive of such resolutions, I do question whether associated mandates to deposit scholarship in an institutional repository make sense. As an alternative, I would propose adopting a faculty resolution in support of open access with a mandate (or at least a suggestion) that faculty deposit preprints of articles in an appropriate disciplinary repository like arXive. It seems to me that most faculty work fits better alongside other work in the same discipline rather than alongside mostly unrelated work done at the same institution.
Institutional repositories can be beneficial as a way of showcasing and tracking the scholarly output of an institution. But I think that newer platforms like Vivo and BibApp that support scholarly bibliographies but also aim to achieve broader things like scholarly reputation management and the fostering of interdisciplinary connections are a potentially more effective way of doing this.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Semantic Web at Liberal Arts Colleges
As a NITLE online seminar, NITLE's Director of Research Bryan Alexander gave a great overview of the semantic web and potential applications in academia. It was impressive how much he fit into an hour long session. Today, I was thinking about how this would have made a cool day long workshop, but then we really would have needed to move from the theoretical to the practical.
I think that as more academic content gets marked up semantically, it should change the way we do research. Searching and organizing content as one does academic research should get more sophisticated.
We could start marking up data in our digital collections using RDF. Looks like there is a good way of doing this for creative commons data. Search engines are starting to use this information more.
I think that as more academic content gets marked up semantically, it should change the way we do research. Searching and organizing content as one does academic research should get more sophisticated.
We could start marking up data in our digital collections using RDF. Looks like there is a good way of doing this for creative commons data. Search engines are starting to use this information more.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
future scenarios for the college library
I'm giving a talk on cloud computing at a library/IT conference sponsored by NITLE in next week at Centre College, located in Danville, KY, the heart of Kentucky Bluegrass country.
One of the things I'd like to discuss is possible futures for college library and IT departments given current trends in cloud computing and digital technology more broadly. Guess this ties back to that "core vs. context" session at the NITLE Summit. My idea is to present two visions of the future: a "dark" future and a "bright" future, the dark one making the case that libraries and IT department will basically shrink in size and importance, the bright one supporting the idea that their role will in fact strengthen in importance and influence.
A college library in 2020, the dark scenario:
In this case, libraries play a much less important role in bringing people and information together. Electronic access to book and journal content through open access academic publishing models combined with new models for purchasing content on an on-demand, per individual basis have removed the library as intermediary. Because the network allows it, smaller actors with specific needs now purchase, license, and manage content in more focused ways. Faculty license access to research databases for specific courses and maintain their own mini digital libraries in the cloud. Students purchase e-content on their own as they do their research, similar to the way they buy textbooks.
The library still exists as a rump organization. Physically it serves as a somewhat charming study hall. Much space formally devoted to books has been cannibalized by various other interests on campus. The library still provides a few general purpose electronic research tools to the community as a whole, doles out micro-credits to purchase electronic content and maintaining a small collection of print materials for those disciplines still interested in the physical book. The reduced physical and electronic collections and correspondingly low usage statistics have led to smaller staffs in all library departments supporting the discovery-to-delivery chain: acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, systems, circulation, and ILL.
With more sophisticated search systems, finding basic academic articles and books on a topic has gotten easier and this has undermined the role of reference/instruction librarians. Students still need help with research, but because librarians no longer manage the most important research sources, their tacit authority in this area has waned. Students turn to other figures on campus for research help such as the faculty, more senior level undergrads, graduate students, etc.
Compared to other library departments, special collections has fared rather well, maintaining their existing staffing levels. The digital environment has amplified the impact of their work, making it visible to a wider audience and because it is of a unique nature, it faces little competition from the network. Nevertheless, their ability to grow is hampered because they are disconnected somewhat from the teaching mission of the institution. Efforts offer digital archiving services for various constituencies have fallen flat as most campus departments prefer self management of digital archives in the cloud.
A college library in 2020, the bright scenario:
In this case, the role of the library as information provider and mediator stays strong and even grows.
The library still maintains its role as purchaser and provider of information for its institution for several reasons. The marketplace for academic information products remains complex, with many different commercial and non-profit providers, a wide range of formats, both physical and virtual (many of which we've never heard of right now), knotty copyright restrictions, a wide range of purchasing and licensing options. The library is needed to manage this complexity. This environment is also ever changing and consequently the library has a particularly important role in providing access over time to information in out-of-date format.
Furthermore, there is continued consensus on the value of giving students in an institution a bundle of information sources in which they can explore freely without incremental cost. Finally, a general inertia in academia, and the publishing and library worlds prevents too much change in they way academic information is bought and sold. The libraries love their budgets too much, and so do the publishers, and the symbolic value of the library prevents most schools from being too ruthless with budget cuts.
For these reasons, staffing in the entire discovery-to-delivery chain has remained fairly strong, though the roles have shifted somewhat from lower-paid physical processing positions to somewhat fewer higher paid, higher skill digital content management positions. Circulation and traditional acquisitions and book processing work have fallen off with less printed content being purchased. ILL has become mostly irrelevant but for esoteric items, as economical digital purchasing/delivery of per-item content has taken over.
Collection development has shifted away from picking individual books to purchasing and licensing aggregated sets, and the management of these sets is done using a globally connected integrated library systems, where much of the management data is already populated. Managing (or synthesizing) this content requires strong analytical skills and the positions in charge of this work are fewer than the old paper acquisitions/serials management jobs but pay more and require more knowledge and skills. The systems work required to specialize and mobilize this content for the college lightens as it shifts to the network level.
As digitally formatted information becomes more of the norm, the outside demand for expertise in older printed and digital information formats unexpectedly grows and some librarians specialize in this kind of expertise. For instance, there is now a "printed materials" librarian specializing in book preservation and the nuances of the traditional codex. This person works in special collections and the main collection, which more and more is about book as art and artifact rather than book as just information delivery device.
Because of the very complex information environment, the demand for reference and instruction increases. As scholarship and scholarly communications evolves in the digital environment, navigating it becomes ever more complex. Expectations for what constitutes a college research project increase, with faculty demanding more than the traditional 10 typewritten page paper. Some of these increasing expectations could include: the increased use of images, multimedia, sophisticated manipulation of statistics, mining digital archives, and actually making the research a public contribution to a body of work. These increasing expectations correspond to the types of demands placed on students when they go to work in 21rst century organizations after graduation. Faculty, already overworked, are even more so in 2020, and they need to leverage the library and librarians to make these complex research projects happen.
The evolution of research, scholarship and teaching in the digital environment creates new opportunities for what would have been cataloging and systems personnel in the old library. Faculty together with their students are creating organic niche digital collections of knowledge that they build on over time. Digital initiatives librarians and metadata experts serve as consultants in the construction of these archives, which provide a Web 2.0 style participatory style of learning and advance knowledge in their own right.
The physical library, while perhaps relinquishing some of the space formerly occupied by physical books and journals, becomes ever more the congregating space for this type collaborative learning and scholarship, and can now incorporate an array of student support services. The library remains a sanctuary for individual study and learning but also a collaborative place.
Special collections enjoys ever more relevance in the long tail world, especially as it makes it case that it's presence on the network increases the institution's prestige globally. As the web matures and people began to miss material from earlier decades that is suddenly lost, digital archiving becomes a high priority and a role that the library can fill for the college. Some of the positions devoted to circulating and processing print materials are re purposed in this area.
Overall, the library plays a bigger, better role than ever on campus.
***************
Next up, the two scenarios for IT. And then a prescription to make the bright scenario happen. Actually, no, I'll be making the case that the library has some influence over which of these plays out but that much of it is out of our control.
One of the things I'd like to discuss is possible futures for college library and IT departments given current trends in cloud computing and digital technology more broadly. Guess this ties back to that "core vs. context" session at the NITLE Summit. My idea is to present two visions of the future: a "dark" future and a "bright" future, the dark one making the case that libraries and IT department will basically shrink in size and importance, the bright one supporting the idea that their role will in fact strengthen in importance and influence.
A college library in 2020, the dark scenario:
In this case, libraries play a much less important role in bringing people and information together. Electronic access to book and journal content through open access academic publishing models combined with new models for purchasing content on an on-demand, per individual basis have removed the library as intermediary. Because the network allows it, smaller actors with specific needs now purchase, license, and manage content in more focused ways. Faculty license access to research databases for specific courses and maintain their own mini digital libraries in the cloud. Students purchase e-content on their own as they do their research, similar to the way they buy textbooks.
The library still exists as a rump organization. Physically it serves as a somewhat charming study hall. Much space formally devoted to books has been cannibalized by various other interests on campus. The library still provides a few general purpose electronic research tools to the community as a whole, doles out micro-credits to purchase electronic content and maintaining a small collection of print materials for those disciplines still interested in the physical book. The reduced physical and electronic collections and correspondingly low usage statistics have led to smaller staffs in all library departments supporting the discovery-to-delivery chain: acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, systems, circulation, and ILL.
With more sophisticated search systems, finding basic academic articles and books on a topic has gotten easier and this has undermined the role of reference/instruction librarians. Students still need help with research, but because librarians no longer manage the most important research sources, their tacit authority in this area has waned. Students turn to other figures on campus for research help such as the faculty, more senior level undergrads, graduate students, etc.
Compared to other library departments, special collections has fared rather well, maintaining their existing staffing levels. The digital environment has amplified the impact of their work, making it visible to a wider audience and because it is of a unique nature, it faces little competition from the network. Nevertheless, their ability to grow is hampered because they are disconnected somewhat from the teaching mission of the institution. Efforts offer digital archiving services for various constituencies have fallen flat as most campus departments prefer self management of digital archives in the cloud.
A college library in 2020, the bright scenario:
In this case, the role of the library as information provider and mediator stays strong and even grows.
The library still maintains its role as purchaser and provider of information for its institution for several reasons. The marketplace for academic information products remains complex, with many different commercial and non-profit providers, a wide range of formats, both physical and virtual (many of which we've never heard of right now), knotty copyright restrictions, a wide range of purchasing and licensing options. The library is needed to manage this complexity. This environment is also ever changing and consequently the library has a particularly important role in providing access over time to information in out-of-date format.
Furthermore, there is continued consensus on the value of giving students in an institution a bundle of information sources in which they can explore freely without incremental cost. Finally, a general inertia in academia, and the publishing and library worlds prevents too much change in they way academic information is bought and sold. The libraries love their budgets too much, and so do the publishers, and the symbolic value of the library prevents most schools from being too ruthless with budget cuts.
For these reasons, staffing in the entire discovery-to-delivery chain has remained fairly strong, though the roles have shifted somewhat from lower-paid physical processing positions to somewhat fewer higher paid, higher skill digital content management positions. Circulation and traditional acquisitions and book processing work have fallen off with less printed content being purchased. ILL has become mostly irrelevant but for esoteric items, as economical digital purchasing/delivery of per-item content has taken over.
Collection development has shifted away from picking individual books to purchasing and licensing aggregated sets, and the management of these sets is done using a globally connected integrated library systems, where much of the management data is already populated. Managing (or synthesizing) this content requires strong analytical skills and the positions in charge of this work are fewer than the old paper acquisitions/serials management jobs but pay more and require more knowledge and skills. The systems work required to specialize and mobilize this content for the college lightens as it shifts to the network level.
As digitally formatted information becomes more of the norm, the outside demand for expertise in older printed and digital information formats unexpectedly grows and some librarians specialize in this kind of expertise. For instance, there is now a "printed materials" librarian specializing in book preservation and the nuances of the traditional codex. This person works in special collections and the main collection, which more and more is about book as art and artifact rather than book as just information delivery device.
Because of the very complex information environment, the demand for reference and instruction increases. As scholarship and scholarly communications evolves in the digital environment, navigating it becomes ever more complex. Expectations for what constitutes a college research project increase, with faculty demanding more than the traditional 10 typewritten page paper. Some of these increasing expectations could include: the increased use of images, multimedia, sophisticated manipulation of statistics, mining digital archives, and actually making the research a public contribution to a body of work. These increasing expectations correspond to the types of demands placed on students when they go to work in 21rst century organizations after graduation. Faculty, already overworked, are even more so in 2020, and they need to leverage the library and librarians to make these complex research projects happen.
The evolution of research, scholarship and teaching in the digital environment creates new opportunities for what would have been cataloging and systems personnel in the old library. Faculty together with their students are creating organic niche digital collections of knowledge that they build on over time. Digital initiatives librarians and metadata experts serve as consultants in the construction of these archives, which provide a Web 2.0 style participatory style of learning and advance knowledge in their own right.
The physical library, while perhaps relinquishing some of the space formerly occupied by physical books and journals, becomes ever more the congregating space for this type collaborative learning and scholarship, and can now incorporate an array of student support services. The library remains a sanctuary for individual study and learning but also a collaborative place.
Special collections enjoys ever more relevance in the long tail world, especially as it makes it case that it's presence on the network increases the institution's prestige globally. As the web matures and people began to miss material from earlier decades that is suddenly lost, digital archiving becomes a high priority and a role that the library can fill for the college. Some of the positions devoted to circulating and processing print materials are re purposed in this area.
Overall, the library plays a bigger, better role than ever on campus.
***************
Next up, the two scenarios for IT. And then a prescription to make the bright scenario happen. Actually, no, I'll be making the case that the library has some influence over which of these plays out but that much of it is out of our control.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
NITLE cloud computing event report
Checking in from sunny Orlando Florida. I caught a ride from the Convention center zone to Rollins College in Winter Park Florida for the NITLE cloud computing event today. Overall, Rollins has a charming campus. The on- campus food wasn't bad either.
We heard a couple Google Apps migration stories from some CTOs. In one case, Wesleyan U, the school was only planning on switching students over, whereas at Macalester they had switched the whole enterprise, students and staff. Interestingly, in the Macalester case, the switch was done in a matter of days as the old email system failed. It seems that a crisis situation really served as an important catalyst and brought the community together. Now Macalester is ahead of the curve as it takes advantage of the whole Google Apps suite.
Jerry Sanders of Macalester said that with Google Apps, IT's role had become more "consultative" and "less reactive." It was now more about discussing the possibilities with these new web 2.0 applications than troubleshooting problems. He likened this shift and the renewed sense of unknown possibilities to the introduction of personal computers and the advent of the web.
We heard from the D-Space federation, who has some plans to enable D-Space to run on cloud-based storage. I continue to think that D-Space is not the right model for digital repositories in these times. It was designed before the Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing era and remains positioned as an isolated silo of data for supporting a single institution.
David Young, CEO of Joyent, gave his view of the cloud. Joyent provides infrastructure for some huge applications on the web. He disagrees with Carr's view that the cloud will be dominated by a few small companies and sees it as a more heterogenous beast. It was kind of fun to listen to an industry insider throw around jargon like "cloud stack" and "cloud primitives." A couple quotes:
Finally, we heard form Lee Dirks of Microsoft's Education division. He said that MS sees academics as "extreme information workers." Microsoft has developed a few open source applications based on their Sharepoint platform that are designed to facilitate research, including software that can do conference planning and facilitate peer review. I was a little skeptical of some of these scholarly collaboration platforms--how far beyond more generic collaboration software do they take it? I'd have to have a closer look.
The day ended with some heated dialogue about information privacy and security concerns when using SaS providers. Many of the CTOs felt like it would be a big hurdle to get their campus legal counsel to agree to putting their data on external servers, but pretty much all agreed that this was the direction things are going.
We heard a couple Google Apps migration stories from some CTOs. In one case, Wesleyan U, the school was only planning on switching students over, whereas at Macalester they had switched the whole enterprise, students and staff. Interestingly, in the Macalester case, the switch was done in a matter of days as the old email system failed. It seems that a crisis situation really served as an important catalyst and brought the community together. Now Macalester is ahead of the curve as it takes advantage of the whole Google Apps suite.
Jerry Sanders of Macalester said that with Google Apps, IT's role had become more "consultative" and "less reactive." It was now more about discussing the possibilities with these new web 2.0 applications than troubleshooting problems. He likened this shift and the renewed sense of unknown possibilities to the introduction of personal computers and the advent of the web.
We heard from the D-Space federation, who has some plans to enable D-Space to run on cloud-based storage. I continue to think that D-Space is not the right model for digital repositories in these times. It was designed before the Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing era and remains positioned as an isolated silo of data for supporting a single institution.
David Young, CEO of Joyent, gave his view of the cloud. Joyent provides infrastructure for some huge applications on the web. He disagrees with Carr's view that the cloud will be dominated by a few small companies and sees it as a more heterogenous beast. It was kind of fun to listen to an industry insider throw around jargon like "cloud stack" and "cloud primitives." A couple quotes:
cloud computing=aggressively distributed
a cloud should abstract away all consideration except the application and its operationYoung seemed a little concerned that some cloud providers where creating a situation where they would lock users into their platform...perhaps Amazon is trying to do this with its EC2 virtual machines. He said that Joyent's philosophy was "openness is lock in," akin to Southwest Airlines' flexibility in reservations. Using open application stacks like RoR keeps users loyal...plus the more data users put on your servers, the less likely they are to move (the dirty secret of cloud providers).
Finally, we heard form Lee Dirks of Microsoft's Education division. He said that MS sees academics as "extreme information workers." Microsoft has developed a few open source applications based on their Sharepoint platform that are designed to facilitate research, including software that can do conference planning and facilitate peer review. I was a little skeptical of some of these scholarly collaboration platforms--how far beyond more generic collaboration software do they take it? I'd have to have a closer look.
The day ended with some heated dialogue about information privacy and security concerns when using SaS providers. Many of the CTOs felt like it would be a big hurdle to get their campus legal counsel to agree to putting their data on external servers, but pretty much all agreed that this was the direction things are going.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
thoughts ahead of NITLE Cloud Computing Event
I'm attending the NITLE "Changes in Provisioning and Supporting Enterprise Technology Tools" event at Rollins College next week. The leader of the even t asked us to send our comments and questions ahead of time, which I have neglected to do up to now.
This event is devoted to discussing the implications of the "Big Switch" for information services at liberal arts colleges. What are some of the big issues in my mind regarding this transition?
- I see strong parallels between the challenges faced by libraries and IT departments in the move towards cloud computing. The web has allowed the aggregation of more and more content via licensed electronic resources. Along the same lines, IT departments now have increasing opportunities to purchase software as a service from companies like Google.
- It is questionable how much value the library and the IT department can add to these external services and content. In order to be viable, we need to demonstrate our expertise in the selection of these services and in their integration within our local environments.
- We also need to educate our communities. We need to work on raising expectations about what's possible with the extremely deep and powerful resources emerging on the network.
- IT operations and libraries face increasing competition from "free" consumer oriented services in the cloud that compete with institutionally provided ones: Google Docs vs MS Office, Google Scholar vs library research database, Google Books vs. library catalog, NetVibes/Voicethread/Google Groups, ____Web 2.0 app vs. of Blackboard, Flickr vs. of ContentDM, Google Research vs. DSpace, etc.
- With the web as the medium, it becomes that much easier to take the IT department (or the library for that matter) out of the loop when provisioning software or academic content. The HR department, the development office, or an academic department can select content or services over the Internet that meets their needs. User communities for cloud software and services can easily transcend institutional boundaries and make what used to be isolated choices seem less so. Nick Carr recently discusses how cloud computing is exerting a centripetal force throughout the web as a whole, with a trend toward centralization. In the context of an organization, it's exerting a centrifugal force: it is now much easier for a department or professor to deploy a multi-user application (eg VoiceThread, a NITLE favorite) without the participation of the IT department.
- In some ways, small colleges should be able to benefit from these developments, as they decrease our competitive disadvantage due to our size. With more and more resources on the network, we should be able to provide "research level" computing and library resources. In the fast changing environment, should also be nimble enough to capitalize on opportunities quickly.
- Open source projects like Moodle have worked well in the last decade, but in some respects they will have trouble competing against network level applications that feature a single, continually updated installation and benefit from the network effects of a centralized user base. Open source projects need to be reinvented to take advantage of the cloud computing model.
I have a feeling that some of the event will be devoted to discussing the practical application of some of these "cloud" applications like Google Apps for education.
As an example from the field, I would offer our library's transition to WorldCat Navigator for the Summit consortium and soon WorldCat Local for our local catalog. It's a move that moves our library catalog functionality from our local ILS server to a network level application. As I've discussed in previous post, it's as much about sharing data as it is about sharing an application.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
NITLE workshop on cloud computing
NITLE is hosting a workshop on cloud computing (focusing on the EC2 platform) and having a post-EDUCAUSE meeting on changes related to supporting enterprise applications
Also, its interesting that this is using a commercial entity for "cyberinfrastructure" rather than something designed specifically for academic research (though these projects could be more administrative than academic in nature).
Server virtualization, software as a service, cloud computing, and open source software systems are all key technological and business factors that are dramatically changing how campuses select, deploy, and support enterprise software systems. This event will illuminate the fiscal and operational implications of these innovations for campus computing and library units. Featured presentations will include reports from campuses that have been investigating and exploiting these innovations.It's great to see NITLE taking these issues head on. It'll be interesting to see if some colleges come up with interesting ways of using EC2. A researcher at a small college using powerful remote computers that their institution would never be able to provide is really what cloud computing is all about.
Also, its interesting that this is using a commercial entity for "cyberinfrastructure" rather than something designed specifically for academic research (though these projects could be more administrative than academic in nature).
Monday, April 7, 2008
NITLE Summit
Mike Wesch of "The Machine is Us/using Us" fame, gave a great talk at the NITLE Summit on the ways he believes digital technology changes learning. A major point was that the "sage on the stage" lecture model just doesn't make sense anymore. Knowledge is no longer scarce--the professor no longer has the kind of authority that they used to.
Not sure how much I buy the part about lack of authority. There were always ways to challenge a professor's authority in the past. To do so is still hard. To challenge a professor's knowledge and authority, you need much more than just information--you need knowledge and understanding of that information, and digital technology doesn't endow students with that. And the professor still sets the agenda for a course and hands out the grade. But the point about the lecture as a somewhat outmoded vehicle for instruction in higher ed is well taken.
On a more practical level, one thing that was striking about this guy was that he cobbles together his own learning management system out of freely available, open Web 2.0 tools: Zoho databases, WetPaint wikis, YouTube, Netvibes, etc. Bryan Alexander, in his intro to Wesch, referred to him as a "faculty member from the future." One might say that he represents the beginning of a third stage in the evolution of teaching technology:
When someone in the room, which was full of educational technologists, among others, asked, "what can we do to help faculty like you", Mike's memorable quote was: "Get out of my way!"
Not sure how much I buy the part about lack of authority. There were always ways to challenge a professor's authority in the past. To do so is still hard. To challenge a professor's knowledge and authority, you need much more than just information--you need knowledge and understanding of that information, and digital technology doesn't endow students with that. And the professor still sets the agenda for a course and hands out the grade. But the point about the lecture as a somewhat outmoded vehicle for instruction in higher ed is well taken.
On a more practical level, one thing that was striking about this guy was that he cobbles together his own learning management system out of freely available, open Web 2.0 tools: Zoho databases, WetPaint wikis, YouTube, Netvibes, etc. Bryan Alexander, in his intro to Wesch, referred to him as a "faculty member from the future." One might say that he represents the beginning of a third stage in the evolution of teaching technology:
- from individually managed, desktop teaching tools like Word, Powerpoint that confine information to the teacher's personal information space and rely on the lecture to get that information across
- to institutionally managed, server based tools like Moodle, WebCT, BlackBoard that can serve to share and discuss information within a particular course or institution
- to systems that are managed at the network level and in some cases (like Wikipedia) serve to share knowledge globally
When someone in the room, which was full of educational technologists, among others, asked, "what can we do to help faculty like you", Mike's memorable quote was: "Get out of my way!"
Friday, January 11, 2008
NITLE workshop on Scholarly Collaboration
I attended a good workshop put on by NITLE about two weeks ago in sunny Claremont, CA at Pomona College. No good excuse for not posting this earlier.
A few particularly interesting things that I've picked up at this workshop:
A few particularly interesting things that I've picked up at this workshop:
- got a look at CommentPress, mentioned in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
- a recent white paper on fair use, published by ARL, suggesting that academics should take a more aggressive stance on what's eligible for fair use protection; could have some implications for some digitization projects.
- Homer Multitext project: an effort sponsored by the Center for Hellenic Studies to present multiple historical manuscripts of the Illiad and the Odyssey alongside each other. Faculty and students at liberal arts college have been heavily involved in the project. The fellow presenting on it made the case that this style of digitization was could be contrasted with the Google Books project: careful, thoughtful, interpretive, scholarly rather than scanning by the dump-truck load.
- Anarchist Archives: a good example of a thematic digital archive sponsored by a faculty member; the model of a faculty member curating a digital collection is an interesting one; I can see some possibilities for it at Lewis & Clark
Saturday, May 12, 2007
NITLE
I've learned a great deal about NITLE recently, as I'm going to be the new campus liaison for L&C.
Interestingly, NITLE is an "incubated" organization by a larger nonprofit known as ITHAKA. ITHAKA is behind projects such as ARTstor and JSTOR.
The chief benefit of NITLE, in my mind, is that it allows cooperative technology work among institutions with similar missions (liberal arts college). Even though our regional cooperatives (like Orbis Cascade Alliance) work superbly in many instances where geography is key (physical resource sharing), I think it can make more sense to collaborate based on mission on these more content and teaching-and-learning focused initiatives.
I particularly like the discipline focused programs that NITLE offers: Al-Musharaka (Middle Eastern Studies), Sunoikisis (Classics), foreign languages, and a couple digital collections: IDEAS and REALIA. The organization also has its fingers in many other pies. These programs, plus quite a few others, reflect a pretty creative, innovative group.
Interestingly, NITLE is an "incubated" organization by a larger nonprofit known as ITHAKA. ITHAKA is behind projects such as ARTstor and JSTOR.
The chief benefit of NITLE, in my mind, is that it allows cooperative technology work among institutions with similar missions (liberal arts college). Even though our regional cooperatives (like Orbis Cascade Alliance) work superbly in many instances where geography is key (physical resource sharing), I think it can make more sense to collaborate based on mission on these more content and teaching-and-learning focused initiatives.
I particularly like the discipline focused programs that NITLE offers: Al-Musharaka (Middle Eastern Studies), Sunoikisis (Classics), foreign languages, and a couple digital collections: IDEAS and REALIA. The organization also has its fingers in many other pies. These programs, plus quite a few others, reflect a pretty creative, innovative group.
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