We welcome all comments! And are especially interested in finding out about innovative models existing now and that can be expanded in the future.

I agree completely. In the next iteration, libraries will play a greater role. One initiative in which HASTAC is involved is finding ways to have scholars, university presses, and libraries collaborate more. Right now, structurally, many university presses and libraries compete for resources, as if they were opposites rather than part of the whole process of knowledge production. Universities typically have different business models for libraries and presses—-but, without publishing (eletronic or paper isn’t the issue; the issues are refereeing and distribution), libraries have no role, nothing to archive and distribute. So in a next iteration we also want to think about innovative ways of putting together the different parts of the process of knowledge-production. The “Zip Car” system is one intriguing me now and I think there are economic models embedded in that that can be transported to universities. Another interest we have pursued in other forums and will also pursue here is interoperability, getting away from lock-box archives. This requires enormous work with IP issues as well as branding, turf, and other issues.

Thanks so much for your comment. It will jog us to turn our attention to this important addition for libraries, most surely, are mobilizing networks in a very precise and important way.

I believe this glitch is now fixed. Another important project sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book using this tool is a posting of the Iraq Study Group Report that allows the public to comment upon, correct, and translate that report into common language, away from political jargon and obfuscation. They were posted first, and I believe we were the second project to be posted on this site using this great new tool. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for pointing out the glitch.

Of course! We will clarify this. Thanks for pointing it out. What we meant to signal is that two students (or two hundred) working a few miles away or many thousand miles away can be working together. That propinquity is no longer the key to collaboration.

Obviously “mobilizing networks” are meant to signify the people who mobilize and networks and to lay the emphasis on the human as opposed to the classical definitions of “institutions” that lay emphasis on rules of order, protocols, histories, codes of conduct, and explicitly non-human regulatory factors that attempt to maintain the unchanging, static, fixed, and dominating aspects of “institution” as opposed to behavior of individuals within the institutions. We were being cantankerous by thinking of the energies within institutions that work around, through, against, and outside those rules as being the more interesting feature, given that institutions (we believe) are constantly changing and that the rule-function of organizations is often to delimit and contain if not control that change. As with all good comments, this one gives us more inspiration to be overt about the inspiration for our definition, the human factors–individual and collective–that, to us, are more important than the law/rule/exempla/tradition factors of institutions. Thanks again

Funny comment. Hilarious . . . maybe the long tail for Anderson is into academe, where he has made nary a ripple. Some cats, I guess, have multiple tails, some long, some short. But your point is well taken, about targeted audiences, rather than popularity. Although even “smash bestseller” is a fraction of the population, hitting some segments, missing others entirely. Thanks for the insight. Very helpful in pushing our thinking.

Special thanks to all who are adding url’s about new kinds of classes, new kinds of institutions that YOU are involved with. We intend in the final document to include an annotated hyperlink interactive bibliography, our “Hall of Fame,” for these kinds of courses. We’re also thinking of a “Hall of Shame” for kneejerk responses by institutions to the worst kind of media hype or commercialization which makes institutions even more resistant to change. Universities that expect their faculty members to put all their courseware (syllabi, reading lists, and so forth) on line but then refuse to stand by their faculty who wish to use commercial materials for educational “fair use” are way up on my list for the “Hall of Shame.” Some of our most media-savvy and hyper-commercialized research universities (no names yet, but there will be later) go on that list.

This is a very important question and one thing that we are thinking about is an appendix with the precise legal details of reforming HASTAC as a 501c3 which would have made it more like a “real” institution rather than a virtual one. What compiling such a document did was made evident the many, many ways and levels in which this “virtual institution” is supported by actual ones. Such things as health insurance for those on grants. The virtual institution could not exist without the support of extremely stable institutions, including grant agencies. The distinction we need to make is between “voluntary” and “cost free.” And what is gained and what is lost by an actual institutional identity and membership? Those are the issues that your good question helps to elucidate and we are grappling with on many different levels.

I really like this sequence of comments. Thank you very much for such a thoughtful conversation. The drop-out rate issue needs to be separated out carefully. I don’t think we have decided yet how much, for example, NCLB will be part of this project. (I am writing another where I think it will be quite central, but that is more about learning and cognition and not on institutional transformation.) Thanks very much.