We've been hearing about the semantic web, a term created by Tim Berners-Lee. (Here, BTW, is the Wikipedia article on the semantic web.) It promises a lot. Tim Robinson, of Today's Campus, condenses a recent presentation he viewed by expert Tony Shaw, and then adds his own list of "killer uses" on campus. That list includes:

6. Research libraries already use this technology to connect disparate scientific databases. 

5. Students will be able to do class-related research faster and more comprehensively so they can spend more energy on data analysis and writing.

4. Matching technology will appear in new generation job boards to create intuitive profiles and match applicants and schools that are good fits for each other. 

3. Career Services will tailor internship and post-graduation employment placements based on curriculum and employer needs.

2. Fundraisers will make their time and effort more productive with better predictive alumni-related models.  

1. Safety officers will coordinate more effectively with community law enforcement, public health officials and environmental planners.

 Click on the title, The Semantic Web: Your Web's Smarter Younger Brother, to access the resource described above.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online"

We like this discussion of how reading on line is changing the way we read. We welcomed exposure in this article to ideas from thinkers who don't necessarily think this is bad. In fact, some argue, the "literary" stage of our culture may be ending and the period of post-literacy might become (and be good) the norm. Note that this includes an NPR audio interview.

Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an education researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we've traditionally understood it, "is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry — clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society." The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" world of the book and enter the Web's "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity" — a world in which "the greatest skill" involves "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux."

Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University, suggested in a 2008 blog post that we shouldn't waste our time mourning the death of deep reading — it was overrated all along. "No one reads War and Peace," he wrote, singling out Tolstoy's epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. "It's too long, and not so interesting." People have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it." The same goes for Proust's In Search of Lost Time and other novels that until recently were considered, in Shirky's cutting phrase, "Very Important in some vague way." Indeed, we've "been emptily praising" writers like Tolstoy and Proust "all these years." Our old literary habits "were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access." Now that the Net has granted us abundant "access," Shirky concluded, we can at last lay those tired habits aside.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution"

Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, authors, respectively, of the books - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age - are interviewed for Wired magazine. The conversation was "about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia." Free time you ask? Well, there are people who have some, especially those (like me) who watch no television. What Shirky and Pink talk about is how that time is now "put to use" instead of "used up." 

A thought-stimulating, brief interview:

Shirky: We’re still in the very early days. So far, it’s largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

Pink: Amazing. All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Shirky: And it represents a very different and very powerful type of motivation.

Pink: Exactly. Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it’s pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.