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A killer application of Twitter is conferences and conference reporting."

"What Twitter does is it humanizes our existence by keeping us in touch with people who we're interested in."

Mr. McLeod argues that professors have been too slow to adopt Twitter. Academic discussions online often take place on closed e-mail lists, he says, when they should be happening in public forums like Twitter, so that a diverse group of outsiders can join in. "I think academics are actually missing a lot by not being involved in more of these social tools," he told me. "There are a lot of academics who think, 'If it's not coming from some other academic it's not worth a damn,' and that's not right."

fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.

micromarkets

Flickr, YouTube

multiple demographics

Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.

Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.

Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity

a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.

Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.

Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"

Google

Google

if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.

Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.

It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.

Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.

ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.

In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers

As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."

That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.

user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance

They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.

In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.

the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.

cholarly publishers

They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.

Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.

Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.

The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:

Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.

Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.

I am one of Cole’s “experimental lab rats,” and I must say that Cole and his colleague changed the way that I view teaching and learning. That course disrupted my notions of participation, identity, and community, and the changes are for the better. The course was so intellectually stimulating that when the course ended, I experienced a tremendous loss. The loss was so great that I felt myself trying to create Twitter communities in my future classes because I missed that engagement. If you are curious about our course, visit my course blog. https://blogs.psu.edu/mt4/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=655&tag=CI597C&limit=20 From there, you can access other students’ blogs and see some of the other conversations that ensued. For those who are critiquing Cole for his “grand experiment,” I must say that those of us who were in the course take pride in being a part of such an innovative course that challenged our perspectives of teaching and learning. We truly became a community, and that community has continued to this day on Twitter. I have even started using Twitter when I teach my undergraduate courses! Thank you, Cole (and colleague), for making a difference in my life! If you still curious about the course, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE935OqkKE8 and hear more about it.

@Bill Sodeman, FERPA does not come into play in what we did here. Twitter was not a replacement for a course management system and we didn’t hand out grades or force anyone into the environment. Those who adopted found it worthwhile. Also, controlling access would have killed one of the other really important (and unintentional) things that happened here — people not enrolled in the course followed and contributed via Twitter live!

We introduced quite a variety of technologies as we explored themes of community, identity, and design — all while participating in some very rigorous readings and conversations. I wrote a few posts about it a while back. Twitter was the most surprising outcome on many levels. At the end of the day, it was the class that became the community. Twitter empowered that in a strange way — a way that has us thinking about how we do this again. The one thing I am thrilled to see is that this conversation is happening — again, not about Twitter per se, but about rethinking practice. Thanks to everyone who is contributing thoughts!

@Megan Fritz The most intriguing part for me was the there was no official “monitor” of our conversation. Instead, we new that Cole and his colleague were tuned in, but it didn’t matter. We were in charge of our conversation. We became the drivers of the conversation, which made it meaningful for us as we constructed our learning. The channels of communication changed from bi-directional (teacher-to-student) to multi-directional (teacher-student-student-teacher, etc.). I would be bothered by thinking that the professor thought that we were “off track” and needed someone to monitor us to keep the back channel on track. In our case, the back channel was very much on task and often sat in the driver’s seat. It gives a whole new meaning to student-directed instruction. While such openness can be scary and intimidating because the control is handed over to the students, the experience can be powerful because the teacher becomes a member of the community partaking in the negotiation of the steering of the conversation.

I’m a PR student at the University of Oregon and this term I’m taking a social media marketing class with Kelli Matthews. She allows us to tweet during lecture as long as we tag content with #j412. If anyone would like to sit in just do a twitter search for #j412. We meet Monday and Wednesdays noon to 1:30 (pacific time). Or, check out our class website: http://strategicsocialmedia.wordpress.com/

Purdue's podcasting project arose from a desire to let students study without being tethered to their computers, according to Michael Gay, the university's manager of broadcast networks and services for information technology. "We're trying to give people as many options as possible if they miss a course and need to catch up — or if they just want to review," he says.

Duke University

Drexel University

Purdue University

American University

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's School of Dentistry

"Everybody knows that when you say something in class, the first time, not everybody is paying attention," Mr. Jackson says. "But if you make your lecture available as a podcast, students can relisten to troublesome passages, and it's easy for them to slow things down."

St. Mary's College, in California

For a graduate-level course in quantitative analysis, Ms. Herkenhoff creates two different series of podcasts, each recontextualizing highlights from her lectures.

"When I talked about this with my colleagues, the first thing they all said was 'well, no one's going to go to class,'" says G. Marc Loudon, a professor of medicinal chemistry at Purdue who has posted lectures for students as both audio and video files. Mr. Loudon offers a fairly unsympathetic rejoinder to those concerns: "If a podcast can capture everything you do in class, you deserve to have nobody coming."

started penalizing students a grade point for every class session they missed.

"Those of you who didn't come to class, but are listening to the podcast, should know that one of the answers to the next test is on the screen," he said. "But I'm not going to tell you what it is."

But most students are savvy enough to realize that coursecasts aren't an alternative to class,

"a great way to complement the presentation slides many professors already offer online."

Richard Smith, a lecturer in instructional technology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, hosts a weekly podcast on scholarship and education. But he is not convinced that the technology can revitalize pedagogy — because, he says, there is little evidence that recorded lectures will hold students' interest.

"I don't think most professors, no matter how good they are in the classroom, can avoid being boring as hell when they're recorded."

Students reared on iPods and the Internet do not come to class expecting to sit through an hourlong lecture, he says. Instead, they want to gather information on their own terms and spend their class time in discussion, not rapt attention.

"The 'sage on the stage' is dying, if not dead already," Mr. Jackson says. "Faculty members are no longer privileged sources of knowledge, so our job should be to get people to think critically and independently about things."

Coursecasting, he says, can help that process along. In Mr. Jackson's own courses, he has put lectures online as podcasts and asked students to listen to them before they come to class, a technique he refers to as "distance learning with a twist." "Think about how much classroom time you would save if you didn't have to lecture anymore," Mr. Jackson says. "You free up all this interactive personal space between you and your students. It changes the classroom experience."

The "decentered classroom," as Mr. Jackson calls it, can be unsettling for students who are not eager to let the lecture-hall experience bleed into their free time.

Richard Edwards, an assistant professor of communication at St. Mary's College, is building a course around a series of 30-minute podcasts about film-noir classics that he and a colleague had made. Students will listen to the podcasts and then elaborate on Mr. Edwards's talking points in class. "Instead of having to run through all of our thoughts on Double Indemnity," Mr. Edwards says, "we can actually start our discussion in the 31st minute, in media res, without setting up the movie for everyone."

Mr. Edwards has made the podcasts that will anchor his film-noir course available to the public free through a license from Creative Commons, a group dedicated to making scholarly and artistic material widely available online. "I want people to download this stuff so they can feel free to engage with it," he says.

Michigan's dentistry school, for example, keeps its coursecasts locked behind a firewall so that only students can listen.

Administrators received enough complaints that they formed a faculty committee that is now examining BoilerCast's intellectual-property implications. "The fundamental question is who owns a faculty member's lectures," Mr. Loudon says. "If these classes have intellectual value beyond the classroom, who owns that?"