Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York. The Macmillan Company.

This book could be mined extensively for any topic. These are just a handful that are somewhat relevant to the paper I’m writing. I’ll probably revise this post later with more nuggets. 1916…

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.

De Kerckhove, D., & Dewdney, C. (1997). The skin of culture: Investigating the new electronic reality. London. Kogan Page.

With virtual realities upon us, we may find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between our “natural” selves and the electronic extensions. Page 177.

The environment has ceased to be a neutral container for our activities. It is made of information, it is becoming “intelligent” and, via the media, everything is coming out into the open. Page 179.

Whitaker, R. (1999). The end of privacy: How total surveillance is becoming a reality. New York. New Press.

…the principle of the panopticon could and should be extended to various bounded sites of human activity, from asylums to the eighteenth-century equivalent of welfare institutions, to workplaces, to schools. Page 33.

The gathering of social statistics permits an historically unprecedented degree of collective self-consciousness. Page 41.

The object is always to construct an understanding of the social world in order to change or control it. Page 47.

Downes, S. (2005). E-learning 2.0. eLearn Magazine. pp. 1-6

In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network.

Mott, J. (2010). Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network. EDUCAUSE Quarterly. 33 (1) pp. 1-9

It’s a really good article, framing some ideas around an Open Learning Network. Definitely worth a read. Much of it isn’t a good fit for what I’m looking for because it’s tied tightly to the OLN concept and examples.

While the LMS has become central to the business of colleges and universities, it has also become a symbol of the higher learning status quo. Many students, teachers, instructional technologists, and administrators consider the LMS too inflexible and are turning to the web for tools that support their everyday communication, productivity, and collaboration needs. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, microblogging tools, and other web-based applications are supplanting the teaching and learning tools previously found only inside the LMS.

Cambpell, G. (2009). New Horizons: A personal cyberinfrastructure. EDUCAUSE review. 44 (5) pp. 58-59.

The article is intended to be used as a manifesto for institutional change, rather than a research-based paper. Some of it is a bit hyped, but the foundation is sound.

In building that personal cyberinfrastructure, students not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments ranging from multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction, and social networking.

How’s this for a first kick at the cat? Huge gaps, but I’m trying to avoid writing a 200 page definition full of acronyms and words requiring further definition…

Personally, I’m not a fan of the word “cyberinfrastructure” as it seems to make people glaze over in its made-up-wordness. But, it appears to have some legs. Whatever. I guess the next best thing to having a word that doesn’t suck, is having a crappy word with a half decent definition…

Sommer, R. (1969). Personal Space: The behavioral basis of design. Prentice-Hall. Englewood Cliffs.

We are told that classrooms should have straight rows of chairs so that the children will face the teacher, prisoners should be kept in separate jail cells, college students should have roommates, and park benches should be heavy and indestructable so that vandals will not cart them away. With or without a conscious philosophy or explicit recognition of the fact, designers are shaping people as well as buildings. page vii.

McLoughlin, C. & Lee, M. (2007). Social software and participatory learning: Pedagogical choices with technology affordances in the Web 2.0 era. ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007

Somewhat breathless about the Web 2.0 hype.

Social software tools such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, media sharing applications and social bookmarking utilities are also pedagogical tools that stem from their affordances of sharing, communication and information discovery.

Attwell, G. (2007). Personal Learning Environments-the future of eLearning?. E-Learning Papers. vol. 2 (1)

The idea of a Personal Learning Environment recognises that learning is continuing and seeks to provide tools to support that learning. It also recognises the role of the individual in organising their own learning. Moreover, the pressures for a PLE are based on the idea that learning will take place in different contexts and situations and will not be provided by a single learning provider. Linked to this is an increasing recognition of the importance of informal learning.

Borgman, C. (2003). Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation. NSF Workshop on Post-Digital Libraries Initiative Directions (2003)

This is an article about the design of digital libraries to support innovation, but has some implications as it discusses monolithic vs. individual applications in an educational environment.

The digital libraries of today (and the near future) tend to be monolithic systems that serve large distributed communities. These are critical mass technologies that become more valuable as their repositories grow in size. Their strengths are also their weakness: by being large and general, they are not easily tailored to individual uses.

Klamma, R., Chatti, M., Duval, E., & Hummel, H. (2007). Social software for life-long learning. Educational Technology & Society (2007) vol. 10 (3) pp. 72-83

Abstract:
Life-long learning is a key issue for our knowledge society. With social software systems new heterogeneous kinds of technology enhanced informal learning are now available to the life-long learner. Learners outside of learning institutions now have access to powerful social communities of experts and peers who are together forging a new web 2.0. This paper reviews current work in pan-European initiatives that impact upon life-long learning via views of professional learning, learner competence and social networking. It seeks to provide an overview of some of the critical research questions for the interdisciplinary field of social software research.