Jim Luke describes the development of a 'digital commons' connecting students with each other. The idea of the digital commons is to recapture what the "unbundling" of the online campus has lost: the social interactions, community formation and networking that takes place between students. The article is also interesting to me because it documents how these ideas - which have been around in our community for the last two decades or more - are being separated from their source. People like Cathy Davidson in The New Education and Randy Bass and Bret EynoniIn Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem are being cited as the authorities. It's a practice I've decided to call "grazing" - this is where academics don't develop any of the solutions they describe, they just follow the people who are actually doing the work and write books and take credit. I compiled Knowledge, Learning and Community back in 2001 to capture a lot of these ideas in their formative stages. and (much) more recently I've taken to calling the phenomenon 'The Yale Advantage'.
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