Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College

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.”

Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth

"ambient awareness"

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

Part of my interest in this turn to Twitter comes from disappointment with most university press blogs, which often seem more like PR vehicles than genuine blogs with discussion, disagreement, expressions of real enthusiasm or curiosity or whatever. Reading very many of them at one sitting feels like attending a banquet where you are served salt-free soda crackers and caffeine-free Mountain Dew that's gone flat.By contrast, university-press publicists seem more inclined to experiment and to follow tangents with Twitter than they do on their own official websites. They link to material they have posted at the press’s blog, of course – but also to news and commentary that may be only obliquely related to the books in their catalog. It’s as if they escape from beneath the institutional superego long enough to get into the spirit of blogging, proper.

The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.

She then makes a point that bears stressing given how often university-press blogs tend to be coated in institutional gray: “I think that any kind of social networking needs to have a personality tied to it in order for it to be successful. Also, I think you really need to participate in the media in order for it to be successful. We ask people for questions and opinions, offer giveaways sometimes. My main goal is to try to get people talking -- either with me or with each other about our books and authors.... You can't just provide information or news feeds to reviews and articles about your books. Involving the Press in what is going, contributing to the various discussions, and asking (and answering) questions is really the way to grow your following.”

Bachelor's degree in political science, Dickinson College, 1977;

At an open "listening session" with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company's annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system's fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed to turn into a communal gripe session, with complaints ranging from the system's discussion forum application, to the improved -- but still lacking -- user support, to the training materials for faculty members. Participants' concerns were often greeted with nods of agreement and outright applause from their peers as they spoke of their frustrations with the system.

"We recognize there are still some shortcomings in our products," responded Michael Chasen, president and CEO of Blackboard.

new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet

Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."

"The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."

some institutions have decided to end their laptop programs for students because of the economic challenges facing those institutions.

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: