DIY U

Update: Roger Schonfeld asked me to clarify: “We are a bit confusing – ITHAKA is the larger not-for-profit organization, of which Ithaka S+R, our strategic consulting and research service, is but one of several services.”

On Friday, with fresh snow on the ground, I trekked uptown to the Mellon Foundation for my first ever telepresence presentation. It felt very strange to be presenting my slides to an almost-empty room–the oddity of the technology meant that I had to look at a big image of myself, not of the audience, which was located in I think 5 or 6 different states.But it worked fairly well all things considered.

Anyway, the Q&A was much more interesting, I thought. Bryan Alexander gave a recap of the whole afternoon here.

Roger Schonfeld, of Ithaka, which is similarly dedicated to “ help[ing] the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways” , saw on Twitter that I was at Mellon and invited me to walk across the courtyard and say hi–this is on 62nd street in Manhattan. So we chatted a bit about Taylor Walsh’s new book, Unlocking the Gates, from Princeton University Press, which I gather Ithaka supported her to write. It’s a great detailed look at the spread of open courseware programs from the institutions’ point of view. I plan to look back at the book in more detail soon.

“Ithaka S+R focuses on the transformation of scholarship and teaching in an
online environment, with the goal of identifying the critical issues facing our
community and acting as a catalyst for change.
We pursue projects in programmatic areas that are critical to academic work:
Sustainability of Digital Resources, The Role of the Library, Practices & Attitudes
of Faculty Members and Students, Teaching & Learning with Technology, and
Scholarly Publishing.”