New technologies have allowed readers to make their book time "social time," with such apps as Social Books (recently renamed to RethinkBooks) and the various e-readers that sport social features. This is reminiscent of a time of marginalia, where books were thoroughly annotated with readers' thoughts before they were given as gifts.
The University of California is committing to expanding its repertoire of for-credit online education pilot program by 20 to 40 new courses, an effort that will both increase system tuition revenues and educational access.
Dan Cohen's "Syllabus Finder" allowed easy access to information for education research before its 2009 demise. George Mason's Center for History and New Media is now offering the 1 million syllabi Cohen had sported as a downloadable database to fill in the leftover gap.
Bill Gates has promised $20 million in grants for a batch of e-learning initiatives that emphasize a game-based approach to education.
New technologies are going to continue to reshape the learning and teaching environment in higher education; here are some resources that delve into the question of how best to navigate them.
As technology continues to evolve, even very recent innovations become outdated and cast aside. These orphans pose a threat to the art forms which they may contain, and raise questions about ongoing preservation and archiving.
Professor Mark Davies from Brigham Young University has taken Google Books a step further, using his new website as a massive data cruncher for the 155 billion word data bank Google freely offers to the public.
In response to a Twitter-bashing Sunday Magazine piece by NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, University of Maryland Professor Zeynep Tufekci argues that the Internet is not the site of dematerialized text, but an assortment of platforms bearing diverse communicative implications.
Stanford's innovative Spatial History Project represents a stunning example of digital humanities, providing a visual representation of history that is both intelligible and appealing to specialist and nonspecialist alike.
Scalar is a digital publishing platform that has the potential of bridging the gap between popular web media and scholarly work, though the latter goal creates some risk for the company.
