The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That’s not because we’re short of information about the network; on the contrary, we’re awash with the stuff. It’s just that we don’t know what it all means. We’re in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as “informed bewilderment”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know

A web project may help to shake up the academy and academic publishing. Paul Jump reports

Two history professors are hoping to shake up the academy and academic publishing with a project that in a single week has generated more than enough “crowd-sourced” content for a new book on academia.

Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, directors of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Virginia, launched a website, “Hacking the Academy”, on 21 May. They gave users seven days to submit articles, blogs, videos and comments on topics relating to the academy.

Professor Cohen said he and Professor Scheinfeldt planned to compile the best submissions in a book, to be published by the University of Michigan Press, for the benefit of members of the academy who are less comfortable with digital media.

But he admitted that the one-week submission deadline was intended to be provocative and express academics’ frustration with the “calcified” structures of the academy in the digital age, such as the “years and years” it could take presses to publish edited volumes.

Read full story in Times Higher Education.

An interesting experiment in using Twitter with a class of 50 history students. The best comment on the YouTube video: “Education isn’t a product/service like milk or car repair. What you are paying for is the opportunity to apprentice with someone who knows a lot more than you. What you get out of it depends upon what you put into it.”

“MySpace. Facebook. YouTube. Wikipedia. Twitter. Social networking sites are a global phenomenon boasting hundreds of millions of members. Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom is the first book written for a wide audience about the powerful trend that is reshaping your life: the Web 2.0 social networking revolution.

Refreshingly original, often unexpected and always insightful, Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta examine the powerful forces behind the social ‘e’-revolution, detailing often absurd and powerful reactions to it as well as making predictions about its long-term consequences.

The book argues that whilt the Web 2.0 revolution has reached a tipping point socially, especially among young members of ‘Generation V’ who feel completely at ease in the online world, it is facing powerful forces of resistance inside organisations – especially corporations and government bereaucracies. Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom makes the case that everyone involved in senior management must understand the dynamics of the Web 2.0 revolution before it’s too late – before it will be sweeping through their corridors and into their boardrooms.”

Buy on Amazon.

Video?
I’m suspecting, as women’s rights are still such a key issue, and this is such a seminal text, there’s plenty on YouTube, so let’s go random with the first entry, and see where it takes you from there!

• The site was to cover internet resources, a more general bibliography, duplicate the material available in a handout, and provide example exam answers for those who rarely decided to attend revision sessions!
• The site is quite basic (but fast downloading), and has not been updated since I last ran the course…. as a historian it’s great to see the full development of my web skills starting with this early design!
• I am debating absorbing the material into my ww2poster website, providing links to interesting information, and examples of how exam gobbets can be answered.