Video: The Ivory Tower and the Open Web

Here’s the video of my plenary talk “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web,” given at the Coalition for Networked Information meeting in Washington in December, 2010. A general description of the talk:

The web is now over twenty years old, and there is no doubt that the academy has taken advantage of its tremendous potential for disseminating resources and scholarship. But a full accounting of the academic approach to the web shows that compared to the innovative vernacular forms that have flourished over the past two decades, we have been relatively meek in our use of the medium, often preferring to impose traditional ivory tower genres on the web rather than import the open web’s most successful models. For instance, we would rather digitize the journal we know than explore how blogs and social media might supplement or change our scholarly research and communication. What might happen if we reversed that flow and more wholeheartedly embraced the genres of the open web?

I hope the audience for this blog finds it worthy viewing. I enjoyed talking about burrito websites, Layer Tennis, aggregation and curation services, blog networks, Aaron Sorkin’s touchiness, scholarly uses of Twitter, and many other high- and low-brow topics all in one hour. (For some details in the images I put up on the screen, you might want to follow along with this PDF of the slides.) I’ll be expanding on the ideas in this talk in an upcoming book with the same title.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeNjiuw-6gQ&w=480&h=385]

Comments

[…] his most recent posting, “The Ivory Tower and Open Web”, historian and director of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) […]

Shai Ophir says:

totally agree. The people in the academy are reluctant of adopting new methods, because it is a threat on their position. This has been always the case.
I believe that having all history materials online, via Google and alike, can change not only the way we do research, but also our actual knowledge. So far a researcher could know a limitetd number of books and journals, usually from the close social/academic circle. The discussion was closed. Now we may find that 90% of the historical material was a dark matter, not being accessible at all, forgotten. The e-Curpus will bring to our eyes ALL materials, and will ebale a real high-level global macro-history.
But we’ll have to develop many more tools for achieving this. One very simple example can be found in my article published in The Information Society (TIS) Vol 26.2, under the title “A new Tupe of Historical Knowledge”.
Shai Ophir

Shai Ophir says:

[PLS IGNORE MY TYPOS ON THE PREVIOUS POST]
totally agree. The people in the academy are reluctant of adopting new methods, because it is a threat on their position. This has been always the case.
I believe that having all history materials online, via Google and alike, can change not only the way we do research, but also our actual knowledge. So far a researcher could know a limitetd number of books and journals, usually from the close social/academic circle. The discussion was closed. Now we may find that 90% of the historical material was a dark matter, not being accessible at all, forgotten. The e-Corpus will bring to our eyes ALL materials, and will enable a real high-level global macro-history.
But we’ll have to develop many more tools for achieving this.
One very simple example can be found in my article published in The Information Society (TIS) Vol 26.2, under the title “A new Type of Historical Knowledge”.
Shai Ophir

Shelley says:

Great title! Although my work appears on the web, as a community college professor I have to say that any suggestion of more web influence in the classroom makes me uneasy. My students, some poorly socialized, need more, not fewer, face-to-face human interactions. Just a thought….

Jacob says:

Hey Dan,

Have you heard about this conference at MIT in April: BiblioNews: Common purpose for journalists and librarians

http://journalismthatmatters.org/biblionews/

This is the information page for “Beyond Books: News, Literacy, Democracy and America’s Libraries” (shortlink: “BiblioNews”) a one-and-one-half-day convening April 6-7, 2011 at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., for journalists, librarians and citizens. From the links below and along the black bar at the top of the page you can reach our wiki pages, find out who’s coming, and follow other resources below. We are meeting immediately prior to the National Conference for Media Reform, next door in Boston on April 8-10.

Among our collaborators are(alpha order): Joe Bergantino (New England Center for Investigative Reporting), Jessica Durkin (New America Foundation fellow), Mike Fancher (RJI / Seattle Times-retired), Fabrice Florin (NewsTrust), Marsha Iverson (King County libraries), Library Leadership & Management Assn. (LLMA), Alan Inouye (director, Office of Info Tech Policy, ALA), Nancy Kranich (Rutgers Univ., chair ALA Center for Public Life), Lorrie LeJeune and Andrew Whitacre (MIT C4FCM), Leigh Montgomery (Christian Science Monitor librarian), Donna Nicely (Knight Commission/Nashville Public Library), Patrick Phillips (Vineyard Voice), Josh Stearns (FreePress.net), Colin Rhinesmith (Univ. of Illinois), Bill Densmore, (New England News Forum/Media Giraffe Project/Reynolds Journalism Institute).

[…] articles were in the back of my mind when, two days ago, I attended a talk by Dan Cohen on The Ivory Tower and the Open Web.  His talk had numerous tweetable moments, but I was particularly struck by his comparison of the […]

[…] the book, I was reminded of something Dan Cohen said in “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web,” a plenary talk at a meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information. Dan argued convincingly that an […]

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