1. Explore — it’s not just about knowing how to find experts, co-learners, but about exploration as invitation to serendipitous encounter.

2. Search – Use Diigo, delicious, listorious, to find pools of expertise in the fields that interest you.

3. Follow candidates through RSS, Twitter. Ask yourself over days, weeks, whether each candidate merits continued attention

4. Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates #pln

5. Feed the people you follow if you come across information that you suspect would interest them.

6. Engage the people you follow. Be polite, mindful of making demands on their attention. Put work into dialogue if they welcome it.

7. Inquire of the people you follow, of the people who follow you. But be careful. Ask engaging questions – answers shd be useful to others

8. Respond to inquiries made to you. Contribute to both diffuse reciprocity and quid pro quo

Last Spring and this Fall term John Fenn and I taught / are teaching Art and Society. The course is designed in such a way as to encourage creativity, invention, and the performance of democracy. Performance occurs in the classroom and online. Gardner Campbell’s lecture yesterday, “Digital Citizenship in a Networked World,” affirmed for me the importance of what those of us associated with Art and Society are doing.

Campbell talked about higher education as a “platform” for spreading ideas – ideas that are socialized and spread through networks. This network he likened to Sebastian Seung’s conception of the “connectome;” the neural connections in the brain. Digital citizens are those who know how to perform democratically within this network. It is the responsibility of educators to assist students in engaging in this performance. Campbell reminded us that the design of the internet is deliberate. You don’t have to have a license to be on the web and Campbell argues that like democracy, a free internet is a risk worth taking. It is a place where publication and collaboration can’t be divided. This he calls the “quantum entanglement.”

Campbell described the steps leading to digital citizenship as 1. information (knowledge) literacy, 2. digital fluency, 3. meta-medium thinking, 4. building a personal cyberinfrastructure, and 5. participating as a digital citizen. His efforts to assist students in moving through these steps is informed by his use of C-Panel, a server platform that students can adapt to their own purposes. It is through the use of strategies, such as C-Panel, that Campbell believes his students are able to participate in the types of liberatory practices first descirbed in the zine Computer Liberation/Dream Machines in 1974.

Campbell quoted Jaron Lanier on the use of technology in the classroom. “Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances.”

I am confident that those of us participating in Art and Society this term, and last spring, are among those tenacious oddballs building a virtual spaceships. As we ride this virtual spaceship, we should remember and celebrate Dewey’s assertion that the “free interaction of individual human beings with surrounding conditions…which develops and satisfies need and desire by increasing knowledge of things as they are…Need and desire-out of which grow purpose and direction of energy-go beyond what exists, and hence beyond knowledge, beyond science. They continually open the way into the unexpected and unexplored and unattained future.”

Questions being discsussed include:

Openness in research and publishing: How can new academics gain prominence in their field while still embracing openness? How can academics and scholars who are committed to openness negotiate this in their interactions with institutions that rely on scarcity and closed access?

Openness in professional and personal identities: To what extent is privacy at odds with openness? How can academics make decisions about how public to make their engagement with non-academic communities and networks? What is the value of or drawback to developing anonymous or pseudonymous identities, and do these conflict with the spirit of openness?

Openness in teaching and learning: How can we engage openly and transparently with our colleagues about what happens in the classroom? How would this affect our students?

Openness in policy: Is openness a threat to the university model? How can institutions embrace openness and still remain necessary?

Access the forum at: http://www.hastac.org/scholars.

“Sunflower Seeds” consists of one hundred million hand craftet sunflower seeds. Read Evan Osnos description of the project here. Initially visitors were encouraged to walk through the seeds. There are now reports that is no longer possible because of health hazards associated with the resulting dust.

While we were in Beijing in September the ChinaVine team had the opportunity to visit his studio / gallery / courtyard complex in the Dashanzi Arts District.

Can an algorithm edit a journal?

Can a library exist without books?

Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms?

Can a conference be held without a program?

Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

I am associated with two submissions to the project.

John Fenn and I submitted “Art and (Sustainable Society: Re-Mix: An Exercise in building a course using transmedia pedagogy.” This entry appears under “Educational Technology.”

Kristin Congdon, John Fenn, Tomas Valladares, and I submitted “Interrogating Interpretation.” This entry appears under “Scholarship and Scholarly Communication.”