Clearly one of the challenges academia faces is to figure out a productive use of networks in terms of research practices. Usually I write more about the teaching aspects of the university and clearly there are many ways universities will employ networks. But I want to think specifically about the use of the web for research with a few goals in mind: to enhance collaboration between academics to publish and share research to share knowledge with a broader audience (students, governments, industries, non-profits, the general public, and so on) One might say that these have been answered, but the real challenge is that as the web continues to evolve and now converge with other networks, the practices we have established need to change as well. That is, from the inception of the web, one could find the appearance of academic journals: genuine, rigorously reviewed, academic scholarship available freely online. There were (and are) listservs that might facilitate collaboration. Similarly individual faculty and faculty organizations built websites where they offered information, policy statements, and so on (NCTE or MLA for example in English Studies). But how are we moving forward?

Conventional academic discourse lies with journals and conferences. For all the advantages of these modes, neither offers an ongoing, dynamic interchange. Listservs offer that, but, in my experience anyway, they don't really create a productive, collaborative space. Sometimes there are debates on listservs; sometimes there is sharing of information (e.g. does anyone know a good article about x"?). But there isn't a sustained building of knowledge there. I suppose there could be, but there isn't, probably b/c we all go off to write our individually authored articles and conference presentations. In any case, the listserv is too large a community for collaborative work. Yes, tens of thousands contribute to Wikipedia, but they don't all work on the same article, right? So I don't know what the magic number is, but let's say I was looking for a dozen scholars in who were interested in the same things I'm interested in: mobile networks virtual worlds audio/video production public, collaborative learning It's unlikely that we would all work on the same research project at once, but there would be a handful of project undertaken by individuals or small groups. There would be a public face to the group and a private project management site, like Basecamp. The public face would offer a steady stream of information as we shared what we were doing, what was going on in our teaching, what we were reading and writing. We'd be assembling streams of information from our blogs, twitters, flickr, YouTube, and so on--wherever we were post information. The result is a collection of information that is hopefully useful groundwork for more formal investigation and also a mechanism for fruitful collaboration between our classes.

Meanwhile, in a more private space we might be orchestrating collaborative classroom projects and sharing research, drafts, and other media: constructing our scholarly work. When it's complete, we publish it in traditional venues and republish it on our public site as well.

Level 4: Individual, Networked, Social Interaction with Content (Me to We with Museum) This is the level where web 2.0 sits. Individuals still do their interacting with the content singly, but their interactions are available for comment and connection by other users. And the architecture promotes these connections automatically. For example, on Netflix, when you rate a movie highly, you don’t just see how others have rated it; Netflix recommends other movies to you based on what like-minded viewers also rated highly. By networking the ratings, tags, or comments individuals place on content, individuals are linked to each other and form relationships around the content. A successful level 4 experience uses social interaction to enhance the individual experience; it gets better the more people use it. The social component is a natural extension of the individual actions. Which means, perhaps, users are ready for…

As always, comments are encouraged—and in this case, strongly desired as I work on refining this content for the article.

using web 2.0 to promote civic discourse in museums, I’m developing an argument about the “hierarchy of social participation.” I believe that, as with basic human needs, experience design in museums (and for other content platforms) can occur on many levels, and that it is hard to achieve the highest level without satisfying, or at least understanding, those that come before it. One of the impediments to discourse in museums is that fact that designers want to jump straight from individuals interacting with content to interacting with each other. It’s a tall order to get strangers to talk to each other, let alone have a meaningful discussion. And so, I offer the following hierarchy of social participation.

THe New sCHoLarsHiP aNd eMerGiNG forMs of PubLiCaTioN Time-to-adoption Horizon: four to five Years The time-honored activities of academic research and scholarly activity have benefited from the explosion of access to research materials and the ability to collaborate at a distance. At the same time, the processes of research, review, publication, and tenure are challenged by the same trends. The proliferation of audience- generated content combined with open-access content models is changing the way we think about scholarship and publication—and the way these activities are conducted

Increasingly, scholars are beginning to employ methods unavailable to their counterparts of several years ago, including prepublication releases of their work, distribution through nontraditional channels, dynamic visualization of data and results, and new ways to conduct peer reviews using online collaboration.

New forms of scholarship, including fresh models of publication and nontraditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common—blogs and video clips, for instance—but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Some scholars worry that blogging may cut into time that would otherwise be used for scholarly research or writing, for example, or that material in a podcast is not as well researched as material prepared for print publication. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research—a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work. Blogging scholars report that the forum for airing ideas and receiving comments from their colleagues helps them to hone their thinking and explore avenues they might otherwise have overlooked.

Another proposal, from Dave Beckett (2006), is to make more use of the social context within which tags are created by separating the tool that creates the tags from the tool with which they are used. He also proposes that wiki pages should be created for individual tags which users could then add to/edit so that the wiki page, in effect, becomes the tag. The on-going process of refinement for each separate tag would form a kind of consensus as to the meaning of that tag and would also record the processes (the semantic path) by which the end result is being reached. This would, to take just one simple example, allow direct links to other language versions of the same tag.