It is time to resume our public discussion (this is the content of a recent report Vika and I sent to NEH): now that the first phase of intensive encoding is completed, over the next few weeks we will concentrate our effort on designing the home page and, along with it, the second major component of the VHL, the Virtual Seminar Room. There will be a single “door” into the VHL, with links to its various components, including links to the Catasto/Tratte databases, which won’t be “integrated” into the VHL but will be part of the research and pedagogical activities made accessible through the VSR. The VSR will be the entry point for a number of collaborative activities based on our encoded texts (including the Decameron) and made possible by the capabilities of the VHL platform (annotation engine, etc.). The idea, as you know, is to combine traditional study and research activities (the reading and interpretation of texts), distance collaboration and the digital editing process, broadly conceived: participating scholars and students will be able to contribute annotations, participate in the process of semantic encoding etc., as well as interact and communicate with each other in this virtual space (we are planning to add a chat room). The VSR will thus provide a testing and training ground for those collaborative practices made possible by the digital platform. Feedback from scholars and students will also determine the evolution of the VHL, the additional tools, texts and functions that we will include in the future.

Of course, during this brainstorming phase, feedback from every member of the teams (Esposizioni, Pico and Villani) is vital: help Vika and I conceptualize the kind of activities that your specific scholarly community (literary scholars, historians, philologists and philosophers etc.) may find most useful and compelling; and help us envision how these activities could become part of graduate or ug. seminars and courses focused on, or including one or more of our texts.

Auspicious, that I only discovered Wikiversity today: voting that will determine whether the project will go ahead will end at midnight UTC!

The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).

More information is at the link above. The idea needs work, and much development and goodwill, but is promising. I would certainly be excited to participate.

Please take a moment to create* a (free) new account and vote if you’re even remotely interested in this; they need a two-thirds majority to launch the beta. At the time of this writing it’s 197 Yes to 83 No, which is encouraging but awfully close.

*The interface for creating a new account is a bit misleading. Just fill in the username and password (and email, if you want) fields, and click on “Create new account.”

Oh rapture! Article in Inside Higher Ed reports that “Blackboard, Inc., said it would acquire its top competitor, WebCT, Inc., for $180 million.” The merger is supposed to take place in the next few months; the new conglomerate will “continue to support both companies’ products for the foreseeable future, to keep disruption to current clients to a minimum, the two companies said.”

Forgive me if I am not thrilled, though if you were reading this blog last year you’ll hardly be surprised. One of the commenters on the above-linked post pointed out that Blackboard is much more flexible than WebCT, and from that perspective the merger may be a good thing; but neither company seems interested in actually disseminating knowledge, as does for example MIT’s Open CourseWare. It’s also telling that all of the dozen or so comments so far on the Inside Higher Ed article reflect a negative attitude toward the news. Some academics are worried about whether the merger signals a monopoly in the works; others are getting the word out about open-source alternatives.

Since many universities, Brown among them, seem enamored of the suboptimal options offered by WebCT, there’s seemingly nothing to be done on an institutional level. On a smaller scale, however, we can work toward better solutions. This requires humanist academics to either learn more about educational software and web design or employ people who are already good at it, or both. Since that learning curve is inevitable these days anyway (just try being full-time faculty and not knowing how to attach a document to an email), all that remains is to not give in to the apparent convenience of commercial course management software and think more broadly. Wouldn’t it be great if, in a few years, people still learned new things from the materials you created for a course you no longer teach?

Monday 17th, edited to add: A follow-up article in Inside Higher Ed asks, “In buying WebCT, did course-management giant vanquish competition, or is open source the real competition?”