Blogs

Probably not the first or last, but an insight/researchy conclusion gleaned from the PIT Journal project: knowing how to conduct peer reviews does not come naturally or easily for readers. The first few days after closing the submission process a good deal of activity has gone toward strengthening the ability to review.

A message sent to participants, handouts, and a video all speak to the conclusion that the population of PIT participants and the process of developing the submissions benefit from support for developing reviews.

One of those obvious conclusions, surely, but of note nonetheless.

Publication decisions should be based not only on the quality of a submission but also on the quality of one's participation in the community of writers.

This is on one of my son's mix CDs left in the car. I like the way the folksy fiddle flow gives way to the drum and bass and then it all flows together. The video also tells a nice story.

 When watching The Searchers the other day I noticed something odd about one of the figures in the shot. Are those plastic sunglasses? Hmmm. Must be something to say about historical representation, revisioning, intertexuality. And it does look mighty bright.

We don't begin accepting submissions for two weeks, but the Web site is up and the wind is in our sails for the People, Ideas, and Things Journal. I'll be posting in various places over the next few months about the project no doubt. For now, it's nice to know that we have reached take-off velocity.

Idea for developing a design for the journal: identify a theme from among those in the drupal open source community--criteria tagged extendable, standard, sustainable, robust, etc. Recuit two or more people to adapt the design for the journal--image, layout, etc. Post your design. Get votes and feedback. Revise. Become site theme.

Related idea: try to get groups of people involved in every element of the journal's development, bring out their skills and creativity, a renaissance mode that spreads.

Action idea: get down the philosophy. There's the gift culture. Participant status. Education. Breakdown. Education: reading, writing, composing across texts, disciplines, social networks; gift culture: bring one, read one; participant status: if you read something leave a mark, gain recognition through reading and teaching.

Arching idea: learning how to teach something is the best learning.

Some credo ideas for the PIT Journal:

• If you bring a paper, read a paper
• If you read a paper, make a comment
• If you make a comment, read the paper (first)
• If you read a paper, leave your mark.

From the Chronicle: Colleges to Try 'Crowdsourcing' Their IT Help Desks.

Dewitt A. Latimer is among the most vocal proponents of the crowdsourced model of college technical support. He's chief technology officer at the University of Notre Dame, where the help desk is open only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. "But our students don't stop learning at 5 o'clock, and the faculty don't stop teaching at 5 o'clock," he told me recently. And, unlike Indiana, Notre Dame does not have an online database of advice, even for internal use.

 

A couple of years ago Mr. Latimer attended a college-technology conference and had one of those aha! moments. The keynote speaker was Barry Libert, a co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, who talked about how companies like Amazon.com were tapping into user recommendations to increase sales. "I was sitting there in the audience," Mr. Latimer said, "and I thought, This concept was very applicable to the higher-education space—it just needed somebody to recognize it and run with it."

I'm just about finished with the book Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. It offers a nice study of these kinds of social trends that  have recognized in the Web 2.0 realm for a while. Much of the discussion parallels points made by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.

Dennis Jerz posts on the trend of outsourcing university computing into the clould

CNN also has a piece by John D. Sutter in which he reports on his efforts to find his data in the cloud. The information on the energy footprint of data that we might wrongly assume floats off into the ether is a good reminder of the concrete conglomerations of things that are associated with our conceptions of knowledge.