TL Infobits - January 2008
Issue 19
ISSN: 1931-3144
Technology and Higher Education's Future
2008 Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies
Technology and Emerging Issues in Academic Libraries
Bookmarking Tool for Scholars
Overview of Institutional Repositories
Recommended Reading
Infobits Subscribers -- Where Were We in 2007?
TECHNOLOGY AND HIGHER EDUCATION'S FUTURE
A new year has brought new publications that contemplate the future effects of technologies on education. Three of these documents are presented here.
In "How Technology Will Shape Our Future: Three Views of the Twenty-First Century" (ECAR Research Bulletin, Issue 2, 2008), Thomas L. Franke "explores three of the most compelling views of our longer-term future, the role of technology in those possible futures, and the impact these alternative futures might have on higher education. The alternatives range from a future of extreme constraint and possible collapse . . . to one of unprecedented abundance, where most of the current work of higher education will be automated. . . ."
The report is available online to members of ECAR subscribing
institutions at
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ecar_so/erb/ERB0802.pdf.
To find
out if your institution is a subscriber, go to
http://www.educause.edu/ECARSubscribingOrganizations/957.
ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) "provides timely research and analysis to help higher education leaders make better decisions about information technology. ECAR assembles leading scholars, practitioners, researchers, and analysts to focus on issues of critical importance to higher education, many of which carry increasingly complicated and consequential implications." For more information go to http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=4.
2008 HORIZON REPORT ON EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
The 2008 Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. Each year the report "describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years." Some key trends that this year's report calls attention to include:
Grassroots video: "What used to be difficult and expensive, and often required special servers and content distribution networks, now has become something anyone can do easily for almost nothing."
Collaboration webs: "The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, and free, and require no installation. Colleagues simply open their web browsers and they are able to edit group documents, hold online meetings, swap information and data, and collaborate in any number of ways without ever leaving their desks."
Mobile broadband: "New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content -- content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network."
Data mashups: "The availability of large amounts of data . . . is converging with the development of open programming interfaces for social networking, mapping, and other tools. This in turn is opening the doors to hundreds of data mashups that will transform the way we understand and represent information."
Collective intelligence: "In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence--evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging--and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained."
Social operating systems: "Social operating systems will support whole new categories of applications that weave through the implicit connections and clues we leave everywhere as we go about our lives, and use them to organize our work and our thinking around the people we know."
The complete report is available at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an "international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies." For more information, go to http://www.nmc.org/.
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) is a "strategic initiative of EDUCAUSE. While EDUCAUSE serves those interested in advancing higher education through technology, ELI specifically explores innovative technologies and practices that advance learning." For more information, go to http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?Section_ID=86.
TECHNOLOGY AND EMERGING ISSUES IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES
This month the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Research Committee has published its latest "Environmental Scan," a report identifying the "major assumptions shaping the practice of academic librarianship, as well as to identify emergent issues of concern to the profession." The committee compiled a list of ten assumptions for the future of academic libraries and librarians and outlined several "emergent issues" that are predicted to be of increasing importance.
Some of the assumptions listed include:
-- More emphasis will be placed on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives.
-- Students and faculty will expect to find a rich digital library presence.
-- Debates about intellectual property will become increasingly common in higher education.
-- Demands for technology-related services and technology-rich user environments will continue to grow and will require additional funding.
"Environmental Scan 2007" is available at http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/whitepapers/Environmental_Scan_2.pdf.
ACRL, a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academic library and information professionals to serve the information needs of the higher education community and to improve learning, teaching, and research. For more information, contact Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association, 50 East Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611-2795 USA; tel: 800-545-2433; fax: 312-280-2520; email: acrl@ala.org; Web: http://www.ala.org/acrl/.
BOOKMARKING TOOL FOR SCHOLARS
CiteULike is a free social bookmarking tool that lets you store, organize, and share the scholarly papers you are reading and find out who is reading the same papers. If a paper is from an academic or scientific publication that the tool recognizes, it will automatically extract citation information from the Web page and add it to your entry. Articles from other sources require that the user type in the citation details.
To read more about CiteULike, see "Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones" (Inside Higher Ed, January 31, 2008) at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/31/citeulike.
To try out the tool go to http://www.citeulike.org/.
OVERVIEW OF INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES
Charles W. Bailey, Jr., compiler of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (now in its 70th edition), has recently published "Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite," a work "designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic though liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites." The document covers definitions of institutional repositories, why institutions should have them, and the issues authors face when contributing to repositories.
"Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite" is available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/irtoutsuite.pdf. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.
You can access all of Bailey's publications on scholarly communication at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/.
Recommended Reading
"Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to kotlas@email.unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column.
"Thanks to YouTube, Professors Are Finding New Audiences"
By Jeffrey R. Young
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 9, 2008
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1159n.htm
"Forget Lonelygirl15, YouTube's 2006 online video phenom. Professors are the latest YouTube stars. The popularity of their appearances on YouTube and other video-sharing sites may end up opening up the classroom and making teaching--which once took place behind closed doors--a more public art."
INFOBITS SUBSCRIBERS -- WHERE WERE WE IN 2007?
Each January issue of Infobits includes an annual subscriber tally listing the countries represented by our subscribers. At the end of January 2007, there were 7,533 subscribers (an increase of 111 subscribers since last year's count). Here are some brief statistics about our current subscribers.
The majority of the subscribers we could identify by country are in the United States (3,566) and other English-speaking countries: Canada (447), Australia (273), and the United Kingdom (170).
Each of the following countries has between eleven and forty-five subscribers: Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden.
Each of the following countries has 10 or fewer subscribers: Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Korea, Macedonia, Mauritius, Micronesia, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia.
In addition to subscribers whom we can positively identify by a geographic location, the following sites don't have a geographic designation: 1,730 subscribers from commercial (.com) sites, 189 subscribers from .org sites, and 633 subscribers from .net sites.
Many thanks to all the subscribers for your support in 2007!
