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you write something really important, sign over your rights to a for-profit publisher and then that publisher charges YOUR university (and potentially other subscribers; individual or organizational) a fee to carry that journal. In other words, you are giving your knowledge to a company so they can sell it back to your university

Hypertext is the (not so) new endnote/footnote.

Most print journals STILL cannot handle color graphics. With incredible advances in data visualization technology, there must be a move to publishing to the Web directly.

As a result of her use of various forms of social media, Ravitch has (amazingly) positioned herself as the leading voice of the counter-narrative to the dominant educational policy agenda.

motivated by sharing with others, a blog allows scholars to disseminate content and express opinions to larger audiences than more traditional outlets. Second, needing room for creativity and self-reflection, the blog is a tool for practicing writing and for keeping up-to-date and remembering; it is a space to house early articulations of one’s ideas. Finally, valuing connections, the participants used their blogs for interacting and creating relationships with others.

A recent post about charter schools on Dr. Baker's blog includes 25 comments which, together, comprise a great argument between Bruce, Stuart Buck and Kevin Welner. That conversation happened "in public," not at some exclusive conference or behind some paywall. How can you read that conversation and not recognize the value of blogs as spaces for scholarly communication?

there is a real need for content-area experts who can serve as curators.

One could certainly argue that content curation is not a new kind of authorship. Editing books or journals is about content curation and has traditionally "counted" as authorship for tenure and promotion purposes. However, at the risk of sounding repetitive, our tools for content creation are new.

Social bookmarking tools are also incredibly simple to use and ideal for curating content. Diigo and Delicious are the two most widely adopted free social bookmarking services. Users can "bookmark" sites, aggregate them using tags, and then share their collections publicly.

unlike content curation in a print medium, that collection is dynamic (I can add or delete at any time) and interactive (visitors can comment on any of the items in the collection and start a conversation of sorts). I believe this to be a truly modern and increasingly important form of scholarly activity. 

There are other forms of modern scholarly activity that are well-worth considering, including webinars and podcasting.

Gideon Burton, Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University, who writes: I don't want to be complicit in sustaining a knowledge economy that rewards its participants when they invest in burying and restricting knowledge. This is why Open Access is more than a new model for scholarly publishing, it is the only ethical move available to scholars who take their own work seriously enough to believe its value lies in how well it engages many publics and not just a few peers (para. 7).

All three require talented faculty members with scholarly training.  These things are (1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, (2) preserving the discoveries of the past, and (3) personally mentoring students in ways that allow them to participate in (1) and (2).  Doing these things well takes special training.  It is inherently expensive, because the processes involved are hard to automate or even systematize very much. 

Harvard and BYU-Idaho involve their students in teaching one another.  They also have general education courses, created in the last five years, that cut across academic disciplines and engage students in applying principles and theories to real-world problems.  These instructional approaches challenge students to frame inquiries, rather than merely respond to questions posed by their professors.

Harvard and other elite institutions are in a paradoxical position.  Their students and alumni are satisfied with their current offerings; in fact, they have a huge surplus of qualified applicants.

We’re likely to significant change in the next decade, the net effect of which will be more students served at a lower average cost.  However, the nature of the evolution will differ among institutions.  The elite schools will hybridize their courses not primarily to reduce cost or grow enrollments, but to better serve the rising generation of “digital natives” and to make the most of learning-enhancing computer-adaptive technology.  By contrast, schools without the benefit of high prestige and large endowments will hybridize and offer fully online courses mainly so that they can keep tuition affordable, admit more students, and use the incremental revenues to plug the hole left by rising operating costs and declining state support.  In all cases, students will benefit.

Most professors will need to spend the majority of their time teaching.  A school that generates the bulk of its revenues via tuition will be able to afford some time for faculty research.  However, that research will need to have relevance to the student learning experience, and it won’t be the driving factor in tenure decisions; teaching quality will be.  Tenure based primarily on publications isn’t a sustainable model for most institutions.