To be honest, the week has been such a whirlwind, one thing I can say is that a brief excursion to the Boston Public Library on a beautiful April day was a nice diversion while we were in Boston. It was a thrill to walk through the hallowed halls of their reading room, and feel the intelligence of the quietly reading scholars radiating into the vast, open space.
Boston Public Library Reading Room, from http://www.boston.com
Along with creating a presentation for the PCA/ACA conference in Boston, I’ve been working on my wiki page on Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus in the past week. Now that a draft has been completed, and my PCA presentation on generating audiences online using pedagogical strategies is over, the only other thing I’ve been working on in class is my final project.
Last week, I took a free online course in JavaScript, which seemed helpful. We’ll see how far I get this week, now that the wiki page is basically done and I can devote a little more time to the generator.
Now that we’re really seeing the class wiki fill up on the course web page, I’m a little apprehensive that it might disappear. There is one other wiki that I have regularly found useful over the time in my program and that was from Kevin DePew’s Instructional Design and Pedagogy course. I am glad he built it off of the university webpage because another wiki that was built under the university umbrella for another teacher’s course as since disappeared.
That is one of the risks with creating scholarly references in a digital environment. Even now. All it takes is an ill-timed hacker to butt into a server or an account and everything could be blown away. Including this blog!
That is one thing I think of as I look at the journals we’ve been familiarizing ourselves with over the past few weeks. At the same time I’m thankful for being introduced to some of them, I am also leery of their permanence. That goes hand in hand with why some institutions do not regard new media scholarship (defined as scholarly argumentation that takes place in a digital format and availing itself of the affordances of being digital), as equal to traditional, linear, written scholarship. A lot can be lost in the twinkling of an eye. I think it’s a good idea to offer scholarship in multiple formats. A lot of work, but at least the knowledge will be less likely to be lost.
Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. New York: Penguin Books.