Participation Literacy

Thinking about the Web as a native environment for research will lead to more information within reach for the CI machines. Let us say, for example, that you prepare a PowerPoint presentation for a lecture series. You probably want your students to be able to download the presentation instead of splitting their attention by writing notes. Perhaps you do not want to “publish” your presentation for a wider audience. Perhaps you do not think your presentation is good enough to be published. This line of thinking belongs to the time before the Web. We have to move away from thinking about research texts as “paper sheets with thousands of well grounded and thoroughly researched thoughts”. Publishing is everything from making a bookmark in Delicious to commenting on a blog article to writing long articles. That insight is the heart of thinking about the Web as Platform.

Journals published only in paper format do not belong to this time. Academic knowledge in this time wants to be found and integrated. This time belongs to search engines, CI machines and researchers with an urge to participate. Google Book Search has shown that it is possible to gain a semi transparent view of commercial information (you can perform full text searches of books even though they are not accessible for reading in their complete form). A problem in the academic sphere is that the act of searching in itself is commercial and it is (partly) the companies hosting the information that perform the search. Their business model focuses on finding and getting the information as a package.