“I am not arguing that we shouldn’t be looking long and hard at exactly how online courses are “disrupting” education, with special attention devoted to who plans to profit from new delivery models and how taxpayers will inevitably get screwed. What I’m saying is we have to start from the position that the tidal wave is already here. Indignation, however righteous, is beside the point. The kids who are cutting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry. They will naturally migrate to the best stuff and be less and less willing to pay for crap. This will cause a lot of trauma for the educational establishment, but that’s not the problem of the next generation that wants to learn.”

“But I’d go a little further. Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?”

Full article available here.

Current debates on the subject of massive open online courses (MOOC)

“For all our good will, college in the U.S. has gotten worse for nearly everyone who relies on us. For some students—millions of them—the institutions in which they enroll are more reliable producers of debt than education. This has happened on our watch.

The competition from upstart organizations will make things worse for many of us. (I like the experiments we’ve got going at NYU, but I don’t fantasize that we’ll be unscathed.) After two decades of watching, though, I also know that that’s how these changes go. No industry has ever organized an orderly sharing of power with newcomers, no matter how interesting or valuable their ideas are, unless under mortal threat.

Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.”

Full article available here.

On Wednesday, November 28, “The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums” was hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and cosponsored by the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Art History and the Center for the Humanities.

“The digital humanities empower practitioners, museum staff and the public, with the tools and methods to re-ignite museums as civic centers of networked life.”

Neal Stimler is Associate Digital Asset Specialist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic scholarship that is informed by art history, cultural studies, digital technology, and sociology.

On Wednesday, November 28, “The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums” was hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative and cosponsored by the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Art History and the Center for the Humanities.

William Noel is the University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ director of the Special Collections Center and founding director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. He lead the greatly admired Archimedes Palimpsest project.

A recent article about Getty Voices and the Metropolitan Museum’s new multimedia site 82nd and Fifth published by New York based art and art history blog http://hyperallergic.com/

Kyle Chaya writes: “Museums are continuously pushing the envelope of how we experience the objects under their stewardship and access the work that they do. These features expose the side of the museum — the experts, the conservation work, the tireless scholarship — that were previously hidden from the public. Let’s hope there’s more of this transparency and more to appreciate in the future.”

ORBIS The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, “allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.”

Jasmine Pui writes, for History Today: “The first resource of its kind, ORBIS offers comprehensive graphic tools to portray the transport and communication infrastructure that underpinned the Roman Empire’s existence. […] An ORBIS visitor can traverse over 84,631 kilometres of road, including desert tracks, and 28,272 kilometres of rivers and canals, using 14 modes of road travel from camel caravan to military march and accurate, normative sailing times.”

lab.softwarestudies.com/p/research_14.html

The projects done at Software Studies Initiative are explorations in the growing field of digital humanities. The lab is developing theory and methods for the analysis of massive sets of images and video (cultural analytics).

The Digital Mellini a collaboration between the Getty Research Institute and the Department of Art History of the University of Málaga, Spain, takes an unpublished 17th-century manuscript—Pietro Mellini’s 1681 rhyming inventory of paintings and drawings from his family’s collection in Rome—as a point of departure.

The research team will publish the inventory online, building the manuscript into a more complex digital workspace that takes advantage of a wide range of technology tools and Web resources. The project will also explore Web 2.0 methods of social information gathering and sharing to create a new kind of living, collaborative publication that offers expanded opportunities for research and communication.

Read more on the project website, and a blog post by Susan Edwards on creating this complex on-line research platform.

mappinggothic.org/

www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1015