Next fall, some modern New Yorkers — students at City Tech, CUNY’s New York City College of Technology — will explore the Fulton Ferry Landing that Whitman described in the poem and record their investigations on a Web site. Meanwhile, thanks to open-source software, students at three other institutions — New York University, Rutgers University at Camden, and the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia — will be recording their own literary and geographical explorations of Whitman’s work on that same Web site. The project, “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman,” is the brainchild of a group of professors at all four schools led by Matthew K. Gold, an assistant professor of English at City Tech. It received a start-up grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. James Groom, an instructional-technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington, is the site’s architect.

Mr. Gold believes that Whitman would appreciate the openness of the endeavor. The poet was nothing if not open source:

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students. Except better. First of all, its content is moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes.

“The challenge of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”

I believe that not only are office slackers more productive than work-only employees, but that people who work from home are more productive than the office crowd -- and for many of the same reasons

2. It gets personal things off your mind.

3. It builds work relationships.

The human mind is a curiosity engine.

the entire campus is, and will continue to be, part of this exciting project

I propose we (you and me) get off our asses and put together an east coast higher ed blogger con that focuses not on a particular platform, but instead on the affordances of an open publishing platform. We’ll host here in State College or we can do it elsewhere — doesn’t matter to me. What do you think? A two day event that could (maybe) eventually rival Northern Voice … that may be shooting too high, but we need to set a bar somewhere.