In particular, the project aims to:

“Envision, identify, and promote integrated online environments for higher education that: simplify knowledge creation, storage, organisation, publishing, collaboration, outreach, and access, beyond the classroom, and across media and devices.”

The IKE project site is hosted on Google Sites. They are using a blog, del.icio.us tag, wiki and other ’social software’ to invite input from anyone who shows an interest — hey, it could be you!

Videos are now available on the Information Futures web site — follow the links below. Each presentation is 20-30 minutes long.

Blackboard’s Regional Manager, Tony Macguire, talked about the changing expectations and behaviors of our students, particularly younger people who are part of the Net Generation. Blackboard is a major component of our online learning management system, LMS+ (pronounced “Ell Em Ess Plus”).

Simon Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer for Sun Microsystems, and we were lucky that he happened to be visiting Australia at the right moment. As Sun is a major supplier of computer hardware, you might expect Simon to talk mainly about data storage and servers. No, indeedy — Simon talked about changes in society, in politics, in business practices, in how people interact with each other in everyday life. (For background about these ideas, try reading The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined.)

Richard Siegersma, Executive Chair of DA Books, spoke enthusiastically about the exciting possibilities of new technologies for accessing books, both in print and digitally. Imagine being able to download your entire reading list onto an ebook reader at the start of semester, including textbooks, articles and extracts. And if you want a printed copy of a book or reading pack, simply place an order at the campus bookshop and pick up your nicely-bound printed-on-demand book less than an hour later. These technologies aren’t quite fully developed yet — but they’re just around the corner…

Michelle Selinger is the Director of Education in Cisco’s Asia-Pacific division. Again, you might be surprised by the content of Michelle’s presentation. Cisco is known as an IT network specialist — cables, routers and so on — but they also take an interest in what their university clients are doing. Michelle explored questions about who owns knowledge, how it is shared and acquired, the nature of authority, learning through games and rich media environments, and the meaning of “academic rigor” in this new world.

Blackwell Ltd is a global supplier of books and other library materials. Area Sales Manager Carolyne Cohn’s presentation started with some observations about the challenges facing academic libraries: currency exchange rates, declining funding, competition for space on campus, different copyright laws in different countries, the changing expectations and preferences of academics and students — I’m sure this struck a chord with many of our own library staff! Publishers of monographs and other scholarly works are responding to these challenges in different ways, and Carolyne gave several examples of new ways to provide access to scholarly information.

Crispin Blackall, Telstra’s Director of Future Technology Solutions, gave an overview of the IT industry’s growth to date. Mobile computing — via your phone, ebook reader or other portable device — is predicted to be the major change in digital communications in the next few years. The future is fast, portable and flexible. (Oh, and don’t get too attached to that keyboard — in the next 10 years you will probably learn several other ways to interact with digital devices and information environments.)

Huge thanks to Kylie Nickels, Reuchlin Teo and James Beckford Saunders for organising the Vendors’ Day.

The New Media Literacies project at MIT takes what we might call an ‘embedded’ approach to teaching information literacy:

“How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in “age old” practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.”

At Harvard, the Good Play project:

“…seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world–especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation–and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.”

The two project teams met recently to share their experiences, and a summary was published on Henry Jenkins’ blog. Their blog post includes three examples of group exercises that help students work through concepts of responsibility, copyright and privacy.

The report also points to Spotlight, a group blog that publishes weekly articles about “what’s important” in the emerging field of digital media and learning.

The New Media Literacies project is building a ‘learning library’ and looking for partners, collaborators and contributors — see the NML web site for details.

Related posts on this Information Futures blog:

• Literacy, old and new
• Information management at a personal level
• Regardless of age, everyone googles

When you participate in such online communities, you give up some of your right to privacy and some aspects of control over the intellectual property you create in that environment. In return, the service provider makes money by selling advertising or other spin-off goods and services that are targeted to fit (their idea of) your particular interests and desires. Somebody’s making money from this deal, and it probably is not you.

So why do we cheerfully hand over our private information? Fister observes:

“Here’s the interesting paradox: The only way to increase the intellectual property value of your identity is to give it away. That’s the only way it can be shared, linked to and recognized by others. Trading a little personal information for a public platform, whether for personal expression or self-promotion (or both), seems a fair exchange.”

Fister draws a parallel with the Open Access movement, which seeks to make academic publications (journal articles, books etc) freely available online.

The “privately owned digital public sphere is a fertile if febrile commons where millions of people play out their identities and share ideas… Scholars and librarians champion the value of free and open exchange of ideas for the public good. It’s time to take those values beyond the academy. If we made an effort to help the public understand the tradeoffs we make to be part of the digital social sphere, maybe we’d all think more critically about how our public identities are formed and exploited – for what they are worth.”

Critiquing the study this week, Steven Johnson observes that the USA’s current crop of 9-year-olds are more proficient readers than were the equivalent age group in 1999. (thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link)

Johnson points to a bias for print-based literacy in the NEA report:

Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink? According to the NEA you’re not, because in almost every study it cites, screen-based reading is excluded from the data. This is a preposterous omission, because of course the single most dramatic change in media habits over the past decade is the huge spike in internet activity.

People who participate in the online world are both reading and writing, says Johnson: the only reason we don’t know about the literacy skills of ‘digital natives’ is that we haven’t yet measured them.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (available online for a fee, and republished with free access by The Australian), Matthew Kirschenbaum observes that the NEA report focuses on a single model of reading that is appropriate to understanding a 19th century novel but may not apply in other situations or to other texts.

The kind of reading we do online “values comparison and cross-checking as much as focus and immersion: lateral reading as much as reading for depth,” says Kirschenbaum.

Kirschenbaum suggests the NEA’s emphasis on ‘voluntary reading’ is misplaced: “How many of us who count ourselves as avid readers are able to maintain clear boundaries between work and leisure any more?” Reading is reading is reading.

The NEA report tends to treat ‘the computer’ as the venue for a single type of reading activity, says Kirschenbaum. He suggests that “we are not going to talk responsibly or well about what it means to read online until we stop conflating genre with value… There is a spectrum of writing online, just as there is a spectrum of reading, and more and more applications blur the line between the two.”

For higher education institutions, this new emphasis on ‘lateral’ literacy raises questions about the kinds of learning environments and skills-development services we offer to students and academic staff.

How will we help people to develop the information literacy skills they require to be adept at learning in a range of ways, including online and through virtual environments?

What technologies must we make available to students in our learning spaces? In our teaching spaces? How do we support a diverse student body who come to us with different skills and differing levels of access to emerging technologies?

How do we ensure that scholarly information is accessible to people with disabilities?

I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Notes

Steven Johnson is the author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: how popular culture is making us smarter.

Matthew G Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland at College Park.

This month, they passed the million mark. The commemorative web page provides information about the digitisation project:

• a PDF showing the steps involved in digitising a book
• presentation slides explaining the size and shape of the digitisation project
• photos of the library staff who are involved in the project
• a description of the millionth book, which is about 19th century astronomer Maria Mitchell
• links to the online catalogue and the project web site

The digitisation effort is part of a partnership between Google Book Search and several leading university libraries.

1. Size: Number of pages recovered from four search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
2. Visibility: Total number of unique inbound links external links, based on results from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
3. Rich files: Number of PDF, Postscript, Word and Powerpoint documents published, based on results from the four search engines.
4. Scholar: Number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.

Based on this ranking, Melbourne University is 6th in Australia and 128th in the world for the online profile of its research output.

Restricting the comparison to institutional repositories, our ePrints repository ranks 157th in the world. (what is an institutional repository?)

Webometrics is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

From the About Webometrics page:

The Web covers not only only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community…

We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Given our relatively low ranking, does Melbourne need to change its approach to making research output available online? How committed are we to making the outcomes of our research freely available?

What level of rigor, if any, do we wish to exert in verifying the quality of what is published on University servers?

What is our commitment to making the underlying research data accessible to support our research? Our teaching? Our knowledge transfer obligations? If the research data is of national or international significance, who will ensure its long-term preservation and access? How will this be funded?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these curly questions — just click the ‘comments’ link below and start typing!
(tip o’ the hat to Library Intelligencer for the Webometrics link, and to the Information Futures Commission project team for the list of questions)

In other words, we are all members of the ‘Google Generation’.

Missed the forums? No worries — you can ‘attend’ online instead. Videos of both the forums are now available on the Information Futures Commission’s main web site.

We started the forum series with Richard Katz, Vice-President of EDUCAUSE. Richard explored the disruptive effects of information and communication technologies on higher education — from how we communicate routinely with colleagues to questioning the fundamental notion of ‘the university.’

The second Information Futures Forum was presented by Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa. Michael is a leading advocate of providing open access to scholarly information, and an expert on copyright law. I could not attend Michael Geist’s lecture, Unlocking Access – the case for Open Access publishing, so I’m looking forward to hearing what he had to say.

Huge thanks to Jon Peacocke, Ian Shiel,  Ben Loveridge and the rest of the Digital Media Services team for their fabulous video recording and production work.

Anthropologist Michael Wesch made a splash in the online world last year when he released Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. In this short video, Wesch explores the different ways in which people are now interacting with digital information and technologies.

In an interview with John Battelle, Wesch observed that “…if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.”

To date, the first and revised versions of The Machine is Us/ing Us have been viewed just over 5 million times on YouTube.com.

Wesch followed this success later in 2007 with two further videos. In Information R/evolution, he explores “the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

In collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, Wesch’s third video — A Vision of Students Today — identifies some typical characteristics of today’s university students: “how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Finally, a slight change of direction. The Medieval Help Desk sketch, from a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, reminds us that even the most helpful scholarly technologies can be daunting and confusing when we first encounter them.