Daniel Sullivan, the president of St. Lawrence University, recently published an essay in the Educause Review entitled "Why IT Matters to Liberal Education" . In the face of the latest backlash against bulging IT budgets reinforced by books such as Nicholas Carr's "Does IT Matter?" , Sullivan's essay is useful because it articulates not only why IT does matter for higher education in general, but specifically looks at the connections that exist between the goals of liberal education and the instrumental value of various technology, services, and facilities that can help achieve those goals. My favorite quote from the essay has to be
"The role of technology in liberal learning is decidedly as complex as the university's mission" which at one level seems like a dodge, but at another level explains why the activity of explaining why IT matters requires more time and attention than many have to attend to. He goes on to document the particular challenge of doing IT on a small campus (lack of economies of scale), but suggests that even in the face of that challenge, it is a critical mistake to not understand the strong connections between IT and the evolving 21st. century liberal education.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local institutions and organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; to enhance learning and innovation; and to support professional development.  

In the Knowledge Society of the 21st Century, digital content will be created, managed, preserved and disseminated within an infrastructure that is seamless and virtually invisible to users. The future digital environment will include digital representations of accumulated historical knowledge as well as vast amounts of new content. Future generations of users will build on this existing information and preserved digital content to create new knowledge and forms of expression. Libraries, museums, and archives are vital components of the emerging cyberinfrastructure.  

Cultural heritage institutions are developing digital repositories to manage and preserve collections converted from analog formats as well as those that are digital-only. They are also leading efforts to develop tools, standards, and best practices to improve the management, discovery, presentation, and use of digital content. IMLS provides grant opportunities to libraries, museums, archives, and institutions of higher education for research, demonstrationl, and implementation projects to enhance library and museum services and for programs to educate the next generations of library and museum professionals. IMLS grant programs that support cyberinfrastructure include:

National Leadership Grants

• Research and Demonstration Projects
• Building Digital Resources
• Library and Museum Collaborations
• Collaborative Planning Grants

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Since 2003, HASTAC has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

In 2006-07, over eighty HASTAC centers worked together to produce courses, seminars, workshops and public events on the theme of "In|Formation." Topics in that theme were: InCommon, Interplay, InCommunity, Interaction, Injustice, Integration, Interface and Innovation. The project for 2007-08 is a series of ad hoc podcast Town Halls on any topic of social and political importance to new technologies. All podcasts will be advertised and archived on the HASTAC website. In addition, in 2007-08, HASTAC will host the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million competition sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning. To become part of HASTAC, simply register to the http://www.hastac.org/ website and contribute.

Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg are cofounders of HASTAC.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

We've all learned the hard way about the trouble with technology for technology's sake. But what about the fate of learning for learning's sake?  Boria Sax's recently published Learning the Love of Learning: Newman's Ideal Updated  looks squarely at the tradition of learning for learning's sake, and finds reason to not abandon this seemingly quaint ideological position. As part of Liberal Arts On-Line, a series from the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College that looks at various--and at times competing--issues and ideas surrounding what people mean when they say 'liberal education' or 'liberal learning,' Sax's essay provides a quick romp through 2,000 years of educational history, defending the oft-attacked irrelevance of arcane scholarly pursuit from both the pragmatists who want to see what it can do to improve the world beyond the Ivory Tower, and the deconstructionists, who see worrisome dragons within the idealist claims that knowledge is an end in itself. What I had hoped for (given Sax's authority in the world of on-line learning) was both a critique of how technology might be excacerbating the problems caused by disciplinary super-specialization, and also how it might help to re-build what he calls 'the village square' function in cyberspace.