Wesch gave an hour-long illustrated talk at the US Library of Congress in June, an anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s packed with challenging ideas about identity, authenticity, social cohesion — and joy, lots of joy. Two examples of the joy: Blimvisible’s “Us“  and Gary Brolsma’s “New Numa” dance. (Wesch video found via Laurel Papworth’s silkcharm blog)

There’s yet more Wesch goodness from the University of Manitoba, which has streaming video of his lecture about using social media for teaching. If anybody could make Twitter, Google Apps or Facebook into a useful part of the learning process, you’d think it would be Wesch and his students. In fact, some social media work well and some don’t work at all (in an educational context).

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

In fact, the Information Futures Commission is interested in much more than text-based materials.

For example, let’s consider the image as a piece of scholarly information. In this post, I will describe two types of ’scholarly image’ — you can probably think of many more.

Image as illustration

Twenty years ago, a lecturer in literature might have used photographic slides, posters, prints or photocopies from a book — perhaps even a short section from a VHS video tape — to illustrate a lesson about the medieval Bayeux Tapestry. Our libraries, museums and archives still collect those types of materials, and our researchers and teachers still use them.

Today, though, the ease of digital access, manipulation and presentation is proving a winner in the classroom. A Melbourne Uni English Literary Studies lecturer, Stephanie Trigg, blogged recently about using digital sources in a lecture about the Bayeux Tapestry.

She described a process that’s familiar to thousands of academics in many different disciplines: search, find, evaluate, select, copy, manipulate, present and interpret. In Stephanie’s case, that process was entirely digital. I expect it was also faster and easier than it would have been 20 years ago — yet the quality of imagery and learning (for the students) in 2008 was probably equivalent to, or better than, in 1988.

Image as investigation

Another example of ‘image as information’ is in the burgeoning field of visualisation, the visual representation of a dataset.

As desktop computers have become more powerful in recent years, semi-automatic visualisation tools have also proliferated. Think, for example, of the Chart Wizard in Microsoft Excel — a basic visualisation tool that produces charts and graphs from a financial or statistical spreadsheet.

Real estate agents typically provide floor plans and 3D images on their web sites, allowing you to take a virtual tour of a property before you decide to inspect it in person. These are visualisations, as are the virtual models produced for by architects and landscape designers for their clients. Elevation drawings, floor plans and site maps convey design and construction details in a visual, graphical medium.

High-performance computing facilities have become incredibly powerful in recent years, due to advances in hardware technologies, bandwidth and programming methods. Pharmacology researchers can now create digital visual models of how novel drugs interact with certain types of molecule, pre-testing many different drug designs before they embark on traditional methods for drug development involving animal and human testing. Some universities teach specialist subjects in biomedical visualisation.

The University of California, Berkeley developed an open-source software platform, called BOINC, that runs distributed computing projects such as SETI@home and Einstein@home. These projects divide massive datasets into small chunks that can be downloaded, processed and returned to a central store automatically by your desktop computer — whilst you continue to work uninterrupted on other tasks. All these projects include an element of visualisation.

You may have heard of mashups — the practice of combining two or more data sets to produce new information, meaning or affordances. Again, these often include visualisation as an aid to understanding. Here are a few examples:

• John Snow’s cholera map, an early example of combining geographic information with medical records in order to understand a disease’s spread through 19th century London
• Google Maps, which combine GPS data, tagging, street maps, satellite photos, driving directions and other data sources (affordances galore!)
• the various projects produced in response to the Washington Post Remix initiative in 2006 — combining RSS feeds with data from Amazon.com, the US Congress Votes database and other sources; other US newspapers have produced mashups using geographic data, crime statistics and other newsfeeds
• flickrvision, which overlays Google Maps with geotagged photos from Flickr.com

At ReadWriteWeb.com, Sarah Perez offers an excellent annotated list of tools for visualisation — follow her links to see many inspiring examples of data turned into graphs, charts, images and animations.

So… why does the IFC care?

Most of the images I’ve described here can be, or become, scholarly information:

• when used for teaching
• or included in class notes or other ‘learning objects’
• and possibly created, modified or adapted by a student as part of a project;
• or used as input for research,
• created as part of a research activity
• and distributed to colleagues for comment;
• or published in a refereed journal article, textbook or monograph,
• analysed in an opinion piece for a newspaper or magazine;
• or acquired as part of an archive, library or museum collection
• and then digitised and published online…
• …and so on…

The scope of the Information Futures Commission goes beyond IT, and beyond libraries.

Questions for you

In the Consultation Paper we examined how changes in society, technology and scholarly practice are driving us towards new ways of understanding and managing our scholarly information.

• Did we identify all the major external changes that could influence our thinking about scholarly information and technologies? What did we miss?
• Have we made some assumptions that need to be challenged? Where did we stray?