Information wants to be free. -- old internet adage

1. Information wants to be free. -- old internet adage

2. A new generation of students, never having encountered higher education before, may not even recognize the dangers of a centrally planned educational economy or an intellectually homogeneous society. --Philip E. Agre The "Global Academic Village" and Intellectual Standardization http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/global.html

3. Reading off the screen is still vastly inferior to reading off of paper. Even I, who have these expensive screens and fancy myself as a pioneer of this Web Lifestyle, when it comes to something over about four or five pages, I print it out and I like to have it to carry around with me and annotate. And it's quite a hurdle for technology to achieve to match that level of usability. -- Bill Gates, Microsoft (as quoted in ROBERT DARNTON ,The New Age of the Book , NY Review of Books, March 18, 1999http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F

4. Some independent scholars rejoice in their independence. Barbara Tuchman, whose family was well-to-do, proved that superb history could be written outside the protective walls of academic institutions. But most independent or adjunct scholars have to scramble for a living, picking up odd jobs wherever they can find them, usually for inadequate pay, insufficient benefits, and no recognition. We may be producing the intellectual equivalent of the Okies and Arkies from the dust-bowl years—migrant academic workers with lap-top computers who live out of the back seats of their cars. --ROBERT DARNTON ,The New Age of the Book , NY Review of Books, March 18, 1999http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F

5. I am not advocating the sheer accumulation of data, or arguing for links to databanks—so-called hyperlinks. These can amount to little more than an elaborate form of footnoting. Instead of bloating the electronic book, I think it possible to structure it in layers arranged like a pyramid. The top layer could be a concise account of the subject, available perhaps in paperback. The next layer could contain expanded versions of different aspects of the argument, not arranged sequentially as in a narrative, but rather as self-contained units that feed into the topmost story. The third layer could be composed of documentation, possibly of different kinds, each set off by interpretative essays. A fourth layer might be theoretical or historiographical, with selections from previous scholarship and discussions of them. A fifth layer could be pedagogic, consisting of suggestions for classroom discussion and a model syllabus. And a sixth layer could contain readers' reports, exchanges between the author and the editor, and letters from readers, who could provide a growing corpus of commentary as the book made its way through different groups of readers. --ROBERT DARNTON ,The New Age of the Book , NY Review of Books, March 18, 1999http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F

6. Extravagant predictions of utopia or doom have accompanied most new communications technologies, and the same rhetoric of celebration and denunciation has enveloped the Internet. For Wired magazine publisher Louis Rossetto, the digital revolution promises "social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire." According to Iraq's official government newspaper, Al-Jumhuriya, the Internet spells "the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics.” Roy Rosenzweig ,Live Free Or Die? Death, Life, Survival, And Sobriety On The Information Superhighway, American Quarterly 51.1 (1999) 160-174

7. Within five years of Alexander Graham Bell's first display of his telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Scientific American promised that the new device would bring a greater "kinship of humanity" and "nothing less than a new organization of society." Others were less sanguine, worrying that telephones would spread germs through the wires, destroy local accents, and give authoritarian governments a listening box in the homes of their subjects. The Knights of Columbus fretted that phones might wreck home life, stop people from visiting friends, and create a nation of slugs who would not stir from their desks. Roy Rosenzweig ,Live Free Or Die? Death, Life, Survival, And Sobriety On The Information Superhighway, American Quarterly 51.1 (1999) 160-174

8. Computer-related work, like other forms of scholarship, teaching, and service, should be evaluated as an integral part of a faculty member's dossier, as specified in an institution's guidelines for reappointment, promotion, and tenure. Faculty members are responsible for making a case for the value of their projects, articulating the intellectual assumptions underlying their work, and documenting their time and effort. In particular, faculty members expecting recognition for computer-related work should ensure that their projects remain compatible with departmental needs, as well as with criteria for reappointment, tenure, and promotion. Periodic reviews provide an opportunity to assess the match between a faculty member's scholarly and pedagogical development and the department's needs and expectations. MLA, Guidelines for EvaluatingComputer-Related Work in the Modern Languages, 1993

9. What about libraries? They will also have to shrink and change their role. The transition to the new system is likely to be less painful for them than for publishers. There is much more inertia in the library system, with old collections of printed material that will need to be preserved and converted to digital formats. Eventually, though, we are even likely to need very few reference librarians. If the review journals evolve the way I project, they will provide directly to scholars all the services that libraries used to. With immediate electronic access to all the information in a field, with navigating tools, reviews, and other aids, a few dozen librarians and scholars at review journals might be able to substitute for a thousand reference librarians. -- Andrew M. Odlyzko ,Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/1994/scholarly.journals.html

10. The telephone did not radically alter American ways of life; rather Americans used it to more vigorously pursue their characteristic ways of life." -- Claude Fischer , America Calling, 1992

11. The future of the Internet and other new communication technologies--whether within the specific realm of education or in society at large--will be determined by how we act and organize as scholars and citizens. Roy Rosenzweig ,Live Free Or Die? Death, Life, Survival, And Sobriety On The Information Superhighway, American Quarterly 51.1 (1999) 160-174

12. In recent years changes in universities, especially in North America, show that we have entered a new era in higher education, one which is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation. Automation - the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material - is often justified as an inevitable part of the new "knowledge-based" society. It is assumed to improve learning and increase wider access. In practice, however, such automation is often coercive in nature - being forced upon professors as well as students - with commercial interests in mind. This paper argues that the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations and companies with "educational products" to sell on the other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend, towards the rather old era of mass-production, standardization and purely commercial interests. -- David F. Noble, "Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education," First Monday, 3 (5 Jan. 1998)

13. Consider the book. It has extraordinary staying power. Ever since the invention of the codex in the third or fourth century AD, it has proven to be a marvelous machine—great for packaging information, convenient to thumb through, comfortable to curl up with, superb for storage, and remarkably resistant to damage. It does not need to be upgraded or downloaded, accessed or booted, plugged into circuits or extracted from webs. Its design makes it a delight to the eye. Its shape makes it a pleasure to hold in the hand. And its handiness has made it the basic tool of learning for thousands of years, even before the library of Alexandria was founded early in the fourth century BC. ROBERT DARNTON ,The New Age of the Book , NY Review of Books, March 18, 1999http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19990318005F

14. Good Morning. The title of today's presentation is: "The Effect of Presentation Software on Rhetorical Thinking," or "Is Microsoft Powerpoint Taking Over Our Minds?" * I will begin by making a joke. * Then I will take you through each of my points in a linear fashion. * Then I will sum up again at the end. Unfortunately, because of the unique format of this particular presentation, we will not be able to entertain questions. LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN , NY Times April 17, 1999

15. The refereed journal literature needs to be freed from both paper and its associated production costs, but not from the process of peer review, whose "invisible hand" is what maintains its quality. Is there a way to continue providing this quality at no cost to the reader? STEVAN HARNAD, The Invisible Hand of Peer Review http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html

16. Most educational technology introduced over the past 50 years has supplemented and often enhanced—but not supplanted—traditional classroom instruction, thus adding to its cost, not reducing it. Information technology tends to be expensive and have a short half-life, straining education budgets, not relieving them. Whether online instruction will produce savings for students is unclear. Some institutions are actually charging more for online courses than for on-campus instruction. Students who enroll online, however, may face lower net costs because of savings in time and travel expense. College Board, Virtual Universities and Educational Opportunitieshttp://www.collegeboard.com/press/html9899/html/990407.html

17. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. Vannevar Bush As We May Think, Atlantic Magazine, July 1945

18. The higher education community is planning for a world in which information technology (IT) will be so pervasive that the very institution of higher education will change. Of course, IT probably can be used to improve higher education. But IT is exceedingly flexible, and we will face numerous choices about how best to apply it. Some of those choices are straightforward matters of efficiency, best left to technical experts. Other choices will require us to reflect carefully on the values that a university ought to express. If educators have learned anything from attempts to improve life using IT, it is that significant improvements are possible only when institutions are rethought. But in order to rethink institutions in a responsible way, we first need language to describe them. --Philip E. Agre The "Global Academic Village" and Intellectual Standardization http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/global.html

19. The ability to digitize still and moving images has broadened the scope of our work and enabled us to enter an intimate relationship with the images that are the source of our study. We can choose the stills we want and need, and, most importantly, we can show the moving images themselves. This, coupled with networked publication and the hypertext capabilities of the Web, makes possible new kinds of thinking about film, new textualities in which the work of the critic and the work of the film assume different kinds of relationships, new flexibilities of thought, expression, and publication. Robert Kolker ,Editor's Introduction: Special Issue on Film: Postmodern Culture Volume 8, Number 2, January 1998 Postmodern Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v008/8.2editors-intro.html

20. Until a couple of years ago, the most powerful technological innovation to affect teaching at Penn in my time here was the introduction of the "Dispennser," that wooden chalk-and-eraser rack that most of our classrooms now have. We no longer begin a term by hiding bits of chalk strategically in classrooms to have something to fall back on in an emergency. Like most great inventions, it was an empowering tool that expanded the reach and freedom of those who used it. Of course that chalk was a technological innovation in its own way, and for that matter the stick with which ancient teachers drew in the sand to illustrate geometry was technology. But above all, language itself is a gadget, an innovation designed to make it easier to manipulate things and move people in concerted action. There's nothing new about teaching with technology. --James. J. O'Donnell , Teaching with Technology, Penn PrintOut

21. What has changed now, and what marks the decisive turning, is the degree of interconnection between people that networked information brings. For the most part, there's no question of replacing the tried and true with the novel, but rather an explosion of opportunities for making links of one kind or another. --James. J. O'Donnell , Teaching with Technology, Penn PrintOut

22. BOOKS ARE FOREVER, SAYS AUTHOR: Fiction Pulitzer Prize winner E. Annie Proulx says that the information highway is "for bulletin boards on esoteric subjects, reference works, lists and news -- timely, utilitarian information, efficiently pulled through the wires. Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little screen. Ever." (New York Times 5/26/94 A13) -- as quoted by James J. O'Donnell James. The Pragmatics of the New:Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus, in Avatars of the Word