I stumbled into a social network through a link on the LITA list. PRONETOS is:

a home to communities and scholars of every academic discipline: a global think-tank of the leaders in your field.

I’ve been trying to make sense of FaceBook. While I think I understand it,  I don’t get it. I haven’t found anything that would draw me to spend much time there.

Pronetos, on the other hand, is an interesting place, with disciplinary focused conversations. It’s worth a second look, and perhaps a third….

Baraniuk’s vision of an open source system for sharing digital texts is consistent with our vision for the History of Missiology web site though admittedly a few steps further down the road. We are trying to provide a body of texts that can support teaching, research, investigation, and conversation about the the beginnings of Christianity in the non western world, the founding of indigenous churches, and early theories of comparative religion. Mission thinkers produced some of the first ethnographic studies of people in primal societies, and histories of encounters between westerners and people from Asia, Africa, and the America. In a course setting, the site provides for the students and professor to engage in conversation through blogs, discussion forums, and chat. Baraniuk has taken the vision a step further to encourage a real mashup of the texts in a way that I find to be a really fascinating possibility.

Naturally, his vision has enormous implication for scholarly publishing…

Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students — all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.

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Bill Badke’s article in Online provides a helpful analysis of Wikipedia’s acceptance (or lack thereof) in academia…

But notice how very analog that is, just as much of academia remains analog and simply has not bought into the amazing power of the digital Information Age. For most academics, peer review and print publication are a mainstay. True, academia has made concessions to digital reference sources, electronic full text, and open access. But all of this is simply an electronic format for an analog world in which most of what is available as electronic full text has a counterpart print version. Even those peer-reviewed, open access, online-only journals are produced by the same principles as print production—submission to an editor, peer review, and publication in tidy volumes and issue numbers.

….

But isn’t that just the point? Wikipedia users appear to be abandoning a world of certainty for an intangible universe made up of half-blown ideas and blatant errors. The problem is, they have not abandoned anything. They have never been part of the analog generation. Wikipedia is their world, and it has met their needs wonderfully. To tell them to use only the print encyclopedias for reference information is to make them ask, “Why should I when Wikipedia is at my fingertips?” They don’t know the analog world very well, and what they see is a law of diminishing returns—too much effort for too little benefit.

I would add that it seems to be more than simply a difference between analog and digital culture. It seems to me that Wikipedia assumes a different epistimological model than does a print encyclopedia (and most of academia). Wikipedia assumes that knowledge can be gathered, developed, organized and made accessible through collaborative social networks that are not based on sources authorized by the traditional structures of expertise of academe.

In the Wall Street Journal (Feb 11), JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG has an article about an experiment by Random House to begin selling books one chapter at a time. This seems to follow the model that has become popular in the music industry.

Random House Publishing Group’s experiment appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” for $2.99 each.

The move comes at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content. Most recently, Amazon Inc. announced that it was buying audiobook seller Audible Inc. for about $280 million. Late last year, Amazon introduced its Kindle electronic-book reader, a device with built-in wireless Internet access that quickly sold out upon debut.

Publishers are convinced that as it becomes easier to download books, and screen technology improves, an ever-larger number of readers will opt to receive digital content.

 Patricia Cohen reports in the New York Times that Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty will consider an alternate to traditional scholarly publishing that could have wide implications for the open access movement.

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.