TL INFOBITS January 2008 No. 19 ISSN: 1931-3144
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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/.
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BOOKMARKING TOOL FOR SCHOLARS
Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones
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/.
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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/.
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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 carolyn_kotlas@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."