I've offered to teach a class or seminar on the topic of "Building a cyberinfrastructure: A Hacker's Guide" (or something like that). Over the last six years I've spent at the Interactive University Project, I have learned a lot about a wide range of topics: XML, user-centric design, K-12 education, web services, weblogging, digital libraries, scholarly communication, among other things. I also have been able to teach others a great deal, though probably less than I could do with a more systematic approach, such as a class or seminar.
Now I have an opportunity I'm now pulling together a class or seminar. Because I have yet to work out the scope or format or the exact audience for the course, I want to work out my ideas here.
In my brainstorming about the course, I came up with the semi-facetious title, "Building a cyberinfrastructure: A Hacker's Guide". There has been a significant amount of attention paid to the term cyberinfrastructure recently, among members of both the science and engineering side of the house and the humanities and social science half. The work we have been doing at the Interactive University, particularly our partnership with the CDL, covers some aspects of cyberinfrastructure. I throw in the qualification "A Hacker's Guide" because I would like our seminar to take a very practical tack to the cyberinfrastucture questions. What if we had to build cyberinfrastructure today, with what we know, making the best out of what is here already? How might we hack together cyberinfrastructure (I use hacking in the positive way that ![[WWW]](/www/moin/htdocs/classic/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
hacks.oreilly.com -- O'Reilly Hacks Series has: "O'Reilly's Hacks Series reclaims the term "hacking" for the good guys--innovators who explore and experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools, and come up with fun things to try on their own."
A few general observations:
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The audience that comes immediately to mind is a group of my colleagues at the Interactive University, in addition to allied groups and a small group of other interested folks.
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I am leaning towards a seminar over a course, at least at the beginning. A seminar not only distributes the work but is also a clearer indication that the expertise is distributed too. While I clearly have some sense of the overall themes and a reasonable handle on some of many of the technical aspects, there are huge swaths of intellectual territory for which I have only questions, if that. Learning from others is a major goal for me in this seminar.
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There are many perspectives to have on this topic, and the view on cyberinfrastructure will differ depending on whether you the CIO of a major research university, a researcher, a manager of an information technology group, a scholar who just wants to use information technology but not build it, a programmer. Acknowledging the existence of these perspectives and working with them might be fruitful. Trying to deal with too many angles of thought might also be an unhelpful distraction.
I hope to begin the seminar in early February. If we follow a semester model and go to the end of May, that would be 16 weeks. That sounds way too long for a starter seminar. Maybe I'll try for 6 weeks, meeting once a week. I want to whet folks' appetite for more, not aggravate them with too much of what they don't find useful. Let me work with both a 6 and 16 week model to flesh out my thinking.
Seminal texts
We should definitely read and study some of the "seminal texts" of cyberinfrastructure. Besides the NSF report and all the Unsworth-led ACLS work, should we include Nat'l Academies Press, Preparing for the Revolution: (2002), page 3, in chapter Executive Summary, which has a quote:
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It is therefore important that university strategies include: the development of sufficient in-house expertise among faculty and staff to track technological trends and assess various courses of action; the opportunity for experimentation; and the ability to form alliances with other academic institutions as well as with for-profit and governmental organizations.
I must come back to sketch actual topics for the seminar. (Some things come immediately to mind: reading the seminal documents behind the cyberinfrastructure discourse, looking at disciplinary-based computational efforts, a study of desktop writing tools, scholarly publishing, intellectual property issues,....)
I'd definitely want folks to be mainting weblogs and wikis for the seminar to give folks a real sense of what it is like to create digital content of intellectual and social value (we hope) over some sustained period of time.
