Daniel Anderson, Writing Pusher

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.

 Much as I hate the idea of dressing up pets, I guess it's worth sharing this photo of the family dog ready for Halloween.

Gizmodo reports on a new book about the cross over artistry of Norman Rockwell. There are some great images depicting Rockwell's use of photographs as raw materials for his iconic paintings, like this one.

Via dayblend.

Personal Democracy Forum reports on the white house Web site switching to drupal Glad to know that the drupal movement is rolling right along. I think this is a big boost to the open source movement, especially to hybrid models featuring people linking their work activities to open source. The most obvious links are those economic ones between outfits like acquia and the open source community, but the links also seem to be along the lines of professional ethos and open source sharing.

via Liz Losh

A piece for all of those worried about Web surfing and brain rot. Not much surprising here to my mind, but still it's always good to have evidence to use when needed.

 A project that is about to take off: The People, Ideas, and Things Journal. Things are still amorphous but the key process will be developing an online journal in concert with writing activities in several classes but also public and open to a larger public. I need to get down some thoughts that I'll push under the tag of PIT outcomes or big picture aspirations from Dan for the project:

• Experiment with time. Think about connections between the writing and publication processes. What happens if something goes public once every three weeks instead of six months? What should go public? How/when should items move from authors to readers to editors to publics?
• Experiment with group dynamics. What f2f and social activities and connections play out? What about the sizes of groups, motivations, and processes?
• Connect with clasrooms. The project should be co-influential with practices for teaching and learning to write.
• Innovate with social networking tools. How do tools, people, and concerns of teaching and writing participate in a remediating circuit with one another?
• Theorize about technology and social concerns. What can we say about cultural networks, conceptions of knowledge or groups, time, space, flowzones?

These are at least some of the broad goals to start thinking about.