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Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library Administrators. David will be talking about "developing faculty and teacher toolkits that gather and share digital content." I'm working with David to provide attendees a reading list of "key articles, web sites, or monographs" for participants to read.
First of all, I don't think that there is one piece of writing that nicely summarizes all that we are thinking about in terms of the gathering and sharing of digital content. Obviously, there the obligatory websites: Interactive University and Raymond Yee's work blog and wiki entries on Scholar's Box. If the attendees have not yet heard about blogs and wikis, we can suggest Educational Blogging (EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5) by Stephen Downes and Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not (EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5) by Brian Lamb. Weblogging presents very interesting possibilities for education. Chris Ashley’s article is an excellent introduction. Fall 2001: Weblogging: Another kind of website
Raymond Yee's article on the Second-Generation Web tries to draw together bits and pieces from all these elements that have informed our technical development: The sea change of the Web: What is the Second-Generation, Semantic Web?
Reading the current discussions on folksonomies and ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies can be instructive because, in many ways, it is about tensions between the institutional and the personal (themes in content development when so many have tools to develop digital content). A good entry point is Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment:
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There's a useful and engaging discussion unfolding about "folksonomies" -- emergent, user-shaped taxonomies of metadata like those in
Flickr and Delicious (Adam Mathes' thorough and detailed paper is here, Lou Rosenfeld offers measured dissent here, Clay Shirky fires back here).
Although Jon Udell's essay on internet-based collaboration in the sciences (Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration) is long and a bit dated, it is packed with insights, especially on the use of XML and the universal canvas in the context of the university.
The Network Really Is the Computer by Tim O'Reilly is an eloquent speech that helped us to understand the concept of the Web as a network of computational objects. Check out some of his lates writings: Read/Write Web: Tim O'Reilly Interview, Part 3: eBooks & Remix Culture:
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In Safari U, what we have is a framework where we have a database of 3000 books in XML. Here's an interface that lets you pick and choose what you want, re-assemble it, mix it with your own material into specific custom purposes. We're targeting right now at two markets. One is the academic and training market, where people want to put together custom training materials - that's been a request we've had for a long time. I think similarly we're seeing it in a corporate context, where a company says: I support these technologies and I want to put together a custom library. We're not really seeing it at the user level, which I think was your question.
That being said, one of the key ideas from the Creative Commons that I really embrace is the idea that all creativity is rooted in re-use. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration. The smartest thing that any publisher can do is to make sure that we allow our customers to surprise us with ways that they have remixed our ideas and our material with their own.
Lingua Franca - March 2001 | Feature: May the Course Be With You: May the Course Be With You Universities claim the right to sell classes on the internet. The faculty strikes back. by John Palattella (A good place to start in thinking about issues of intellectual property and the university is a wry and stimulating essay in Lingua Franca, which mentions prominently the University of California. )
Folks can learn more about learning objects and related standards by consulting Raymond Yee's annotated bibliography: Summer 2002: Understanding educational technology interoperability standards: An annotated resource list
Princeton historian Robert Darnton’s essay The New Age of the Book in The New York Review of Books provides one of the most inspirational images of what the Web can do for historical monographs.
BTW, since I am creating essentially a bibliographic/resource list, it would be cool to mark this list of resources up as a MODS collection -- but that must await another day.
