institutions

So I'm hanging in the Seattle airport thinking about my Educause experience this year and wondering about the future of Academic Technology, that strange hybrid entity emerging out of web design, data management, librarianship, CS, education and the work of various academic misfits--including myself. Instructional Computing has turned into a thing in it own right, with the more advanced course management systems attempting to model collaborative pedagogical principles and to incorporate the most widely adopted tools under the umbrella of university authentication and authorization schemes.

At the last MacArthur-sponsored forum on "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," we talked about historian Pat Seed's digital projects that began in 1991 (the official birthyear of the internet). Her most recent on early Arabic maps of Africa made me rethink the religious-basis for early intraAfrican slavery . . . and that made me think about the religious persecutions in Europe. A new paradigm always generates new paradigms. The Inquisition as "tribal warfare."