The Social Life of Information
The Social Life of Information
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge
Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge
Designing a cooperative education program to support an IT strategic plan
CITC5 '04 Proceedings of the 5th conference on Information technology education
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
A collaborative and experiential learning model powered by real-world projects
SIGITE '08 Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age
Student-pull instead of instructor-push: in preparation for a student learning dashboard
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Today's networked computing and communications technologies have changed how information, knowledge, and culture are produced and exchanged. People around the world join online communities that are set up voluntarily and use their members' collaborative participation to solve problems, share interests, raise awareness, or simply establish social connections. Two online community examples with significant economic and cultural impact are the open source software movement and Wikipedia. The technological infrastructure of these peer production models uses current Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, social networking, semantic tagging, and RSS feeds. With no control exercised by property-based markets or managerial hierarchies, commons-based peer production systems contribute to and serve the public domain and public good. The body of cultural, educational, and scientific work of many online communities is made available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing. Higher education's receptiveness to these transformative trends deserves close examination. In the case of the Information Technology (IT) education community, in particular, we note that the curricular content, research questions, and professional skills the IT discipline encompasses have direct linkages with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. For that reason, IT academic programs should pioneer and lead efforts to cultivate peer production online communities. We state the case that free access and open engagement facilitated by technological infrastructures that support a peer production model benefit IT education. We advocate that these technologies be employed to strengthen IT educational programs, advance IT research, and revitalize the IT education community.