The scholarly community online by Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt

[Stephen] Greenblatt continued to say that last year Harvard passed a vote that faculty would be required if they wrote an article to allow access to a digital version for Harvard, so that all their scholarly work would be universally accessible digitally. "As a general principle, the idea that the work that we do should have value digitally and have universal access," is what Greenblatt says he had been calling for for years. In an article for the MLA, he said we must transform our understanding of what it means to appear on the web and how we can use that. We must make more broadly accessible our work. We must feel that work is significant; though the web must take into consideration the feeling of community that is subscription-based. You feel you are part of a community when you subscribe to a scholarly journal. But ultimately your work can reach a larger scholarly audience with the internet.

A great piece from the Future of the Book site.

Scholars & Libraries & Blogs & Trust

While the library community appreciates institutional networks, academics feel closer to their own disciplinary networks. In my interviews, faculty members told me that at the heart of their reaction are concerns about quality (which is an essential criterion for scholarly outputs) and potential copyright infringements. Several faculty members I talked with during my study expressed the need to stay closer to their special communities through networking and information sharing both for professional development and for building reputation. Also, many of them expressed their preference for posting articles on their own Web sites rather than institutional repositories.

The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

News Innovation

I've challenged the team to look at improving "conversations around news" - to use digital community-building tools to enhance people's connections to their local communities and to news and information about those communities. If the class is successful, the students will develop new ideas for building these community connections - and a new Web site or service that brings those ideas to life.

Here are the high-level goals for the class:

To understand the ways that journalism has historically helped enable civic engagement and provided a forum for conversations around news.

To understand the nature of people's interactions online and to apply that understanding to local communities and the role of media in a democracy.

To develop recommendations on how to approach news, online conversations and civic engagement.

To develop software prototypes for enhancing online conversations and engagement.

From the MediaShift Idea Lab