The Library in the New Age

"Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?"

" 'Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures' is a three year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives."

Julie Frechette"Like most faculty members, when I obtained my teaching position, I was asked to type a few sentences about my scholarly interests for the requisite college Web page. Semester after semester, I promised myself that I would revise my description so that it wasn’t laden with academic prose and one-dimensional representations."

The REAL brain drain: Modern technology - including violent video games - is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist
Susan Greenfield
The Daily Mail, May 9, 2008
"Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis."

"Blogs and Wikis and 3D, Oh My!"from Inside Higher Education, May 9 2008
"But even if it is unusually well-known, Volokh has the characteristics of most successful academic blogs: Its contributors are scholars and experts in a given field, and they use that expertise to provide on-the-spot analysis and running commentary on issues that matter. They interact with readers who comment on posts and build on (or push against) each other’s insights. Not unlike peer review ... except on a potentially wider scale, and in public."

A simple question from Girish Shambu: Why do you blog?

"How I fell in love with Wikipedia" -- April 10, 2008. The Guardian, UK.

The Charms of Wikipedia
Nicholson Baker
New York Review of Books, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2008, March 20, 2008
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Human Smoke, Baker's latest non-fiction work about selling WWII as a good war.

"Facebook unveils instant message feature"
Elizabeth Landau
CNN.com, 8 April 2008
"Facebook is a platform that allows people to connect in much deeper and more visceral ways than a standalone IM client ever could. Why just talk to someone when you can experience them? That's what Facebook allows people to do."

"Fetal Subtraction: Sex Selection in the United States"
William Saletan
Slate.com, 3 April 2008
"Technology can coax cultures one way or the other by making it easier to do what you want to do, with less difficulty and without other people knowing about it."

"Why Digital Avatars Make the Best Teachers"
Jeremy Bailenson
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 April 2008
"Virtual technology can guarantee that no child gets left behind."

"What Happens in a Virtual World Has a Real-World Impact, a Scholar Finds"
Andrea L. Foster
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 April 2008
"As the director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Mr. Bailenson has explored ways that online behavior spills over to the real world. People assume that, if anything, online activities emanate from offline lives. But Mr. Bailenson and his colleagues have shown the reverse. Their experiments demonstrate, for instance, that people who watch their avatars— cartoonlike versions of themselves— gain weight from overeating are more likely to adopt a weight-loss plan in real life."

"Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper"
Eric Alterman
31 March 2008

Cruel and Usual Punishment
One man with more courage than brains sacrifices himself on the altar of punditry, and, in so doing, fails to redeem us all
Gene Weingarten
Washington Post
Sunday, March 23, 2008

S P A C E W A R: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums
Stewart Brand
Rolling Stone
7 December 1972

In Mexico, on the Lam With Ken Kesey

Lawrence Downes
New York Times

'08 race as rhetoric

The New Republic

Cooked Books
Tyler Cowen

"Even if you are a Wikipedia fan who thinks the site is usually accurate, you can't help but feel that there's an implicit marker on all the content: 'Maybe this is correct.' That 'maybe' is what sticks in the craws of so many people. Teachers often insist that their students cannot cite Wikipedia. Journalists and academics are embarrassed to admit they use it, and most would not consider writing for it. But if your goal is to improve human understanding, isn't one of the world's top websites a better outlet than University of Nebraska Press?"

Harsh Realities About Virtual Ones
Michael Bugeja
"Rising costs of a college degree at our wireless colleges and universities have resulted in increasing public scrutiny, student debt and budget models based on marketing rather than pedagogical concepts. Academe’s insatiable investment in virtual worlds, social networks and other consumer applications is a benchmark of how far we will go and how much money we will spend in the name of engagement."

A Call for Slow Writing
Lindsay Waters (see also Enemies of Promise)
"There is no good reason why the essay should not replace the book, and a lot of good reasons why it should. I am tempted to say — in order to be maximally provocative — that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure. The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely. I ask you: How are you preparing for the future that could be yours and mine? We — I mean the world in general — don’t need a lot of bad writing. We need some great writing."

Borrowed Time: How do you build a public library in the age of Google?
Witold Rybczynski
A slide-show eassy about the architecture of libraries.

Web of Lies
Kevin Sites

"It can take two or 20 minutes to destroy someone on the Web, and it can take hundreds of hours to repair it."

Chris Wilson
"While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities, it's a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd."
An important site Chris Wilson leaves out. : reddit

http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/19/opensource
"As card catalogs once gave way to computers, it might be time for another paradigm shift at libraries," the article begins.

"An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant" By Andrea L. Foster
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i24/24a01101.htm
From the issue dated February 22, 2008
"At only 21, Aaron Swartz is attempting to turn the library world upside down. He is taking on the subscription-based WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database on the planet, by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update.

Many academic librarians are wary of Mr. Swartz's project because it will allow nonlibrarians, who may be prone to errors, to catalog books."

Marshall Herskovitz
An interesting critique of the Internet anchors Herskovitz's approach.

"Lessig decides against run for congress at internet speed"
How's this for "Digital Rhetoric"?

Juicycampus.com Backlash
Don'tdatehimgirl.com Lawsuit [The source is - gulp - Courttv.com, but it's helpful for an overview of the situation."]

Ned Rossiter

Wikileaks:
"Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis."

Lee Siegel on The Daily Show
"A cultural critic -- and former blogger -- looks at the Internet and finds nothing good."
A review of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.
Another review in the New York Sun.

Cell Phone solution to sidestep Laws of the Koran
"The CharmingBurka sends a self-defined picture of the wearing person to every mobile phone next to it. Laws of Koran are not broken." -- The implications for digital rhetoric and digital identity boggle the mind. We should discuss this.

Article from the NYTimes
I know that Harvard tends to be "overdetermined" in accounts of academic trends (I've argued from the Harvard influence in class) but I find this idea, and its accompanying arguments, fascinating. Lindsay Waters — http://www.hup.harvard.edu/authors/editors/lindsay.html— might be someone interesting to track as this debate unfolds. See: http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/catalog.html#sp04
Follow-up: the program was passed

ENGL 5314: On the Nature of Inquiry
An Approach to Inquiry: One Group's Wiki Home
Platonic Objects: a short satire

This is a video project produced by some of the students for their final project.

Scientists Ask Congress to Fund $50 Billion Science Thing
"Now, I'm no science major, but if I'm being told by a group of people that the protons, neutrons, and electrons need unifying, then I think we owe it to the American people to go in and unify them," Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) said. "After all, isn't a message of unity what we want to send to our children?"

NASA Goddard's MMO Game
"Suppose, for example, that scientific inqiury were situated within the context of digital spaces with the characteristics and potential outcomes and the strategies of self-expression, participation, and collaboration that we now associate with these spaces. What kind of rhetoric of science would we find within these spaces?" (323-24)

Discussion of a chatroom that only allows unique posts
"Speed encourages an oral and casual style, but it also encourages redundant and repetitive postings." (321)