As William S. Burroughs once famously said “Well, this is insane.”
I can’t believe how much information there is available on the Information Commons (Learning Commons, etc) idea. So many places have been ramping up on and studying this idea since it first burst on the scene in 2004 (ish — it’s actually a much older idea) that there is literally an overload of information.
I have started gathering some of the links and resources here but I’m really going to need a sub-folder called like “gems” or something in order to sort the wheat from the chaff. For example, Suzanne rightly pointed out The Media Lab at MIT who say things like:
The Media Lab is a place where the future is lived, not imagined… The Lab’s language of invention is the demo: working examples that blend sophisticated technologies, emerging business models, and human expression.
Wow, and they have been doing this since 1980. So, they have longevity, resources, the brightest minds, a clear vision and a building designed by I.M. Pei and we can’t compete with that. But what I’m hoping we can do is take some of these and other places’ great ideas and do them with the resources, time, and brilliance we do have.
As I work my way through this huge pile of documents I’ll try to pull together some thoughts and put them up here. Stay tuned!
The UWTLIT Weblog 