[Web4lib] Everyone Into The Pool / OneCulture:Art&ScienceTogetherAgainForTheFirstTime

[Gerry Mckiernan]

Colleagues/

Two major developments that I’ve just profiled on my Scholarship 2.0 blog that I hope will be of interest

 [ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/ ]

/Gerry

[1] Everyone Into The Pool

Chronicle of Higher Education / May 30, 2008

New-Media Scholars' Place in 'the Pool' Could Lead to Tenure

By ANDREA L. FOSTER

[snip] Re:Poste is one of 600 creative works — games, art, and more — by new-media students and faculty members, most of them on the [University of Maine ] Orono campus, described in the Pool, which also contains about 2,000 reviews of those works. Starting in June, the Pool will have a much wider reach, as people in general will be invited to add material to the site, rate others' projects, build on their ideas, and find collaborators for their own projects.

The Pool, as yet little known, could provide a new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs. Eventually it could play a role in their tenure and promotion as well. The numbers and influence of such scholars in academe are growing, and they are looking for new ways for their institutions to evaluate them. Books and journal articles alone are a flawed measure of their productivity, new-media professors say, because many of their accomplishments exist only as Web sites, interactive games, or multimedia presentations. The Pool, they suggest, can be one measure for judging their work.

"What we're trying to do is find alternative metrics," says Mr. Ippolito, who conceived of the Pool with Joline J. Blais, an associate professor of new media at Orono. "Sometimes it's not even the quality of what you do, it's how much influence it has."

[snip]

GMcK Quote: 
No college is yet using the site as a way to evaluate professors. But Gerard McKiernan, a science-and-technology librarian at Iowa State University, says the Pool, once open to the public, could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence.

"Five hundred heads ... [are] better than two in assessing the value of a work," says Mr. McKiernan, who runs the blog Scholarship 2.0, on alternative Web-based methods for scholarly publishing.

[ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/ ]

Much More, Links, Graphics and Access To The Full Text Available At

[ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/05/everyone-into-pool.html ]

OR

[ http://tinyurl.com/4gogyr ]

[2] OneCulture:Art&ScienceTogetherAgainForTheFirstTime 

New York Times / May 27, 2008 / SCIENCE / Basics

Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

By NATALIE ANGIER

[snip]

The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they’re already dead. 

It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned. Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.

Much More, Links, Graphics, Access To Full Text Available At

[http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/2008/05/onecultureart.html ]

OR

[ http://tinyurl.com/52hh87 ]

NOTE: I would most appreciate Any/All reactions to these developments.
Please Post As A Comment On The Respective Blog Entry ; Thanks!

Regards,

/Gerry 

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

There is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Victor Hugo
[ http://www.blogger.com/profile/09093368136660604490 ]

Iowa: Where the Tall Corn Flows and the (North)West Wind Blows 
[ http://alternativeenergyblogs.blogspot.com/ ]