Here are some of my questions...feel free to add your own.

 

 

INFORMATION LITERACY, THE 'GOOGLE GENERATION' & DEMOGRAPHICS

 

Are the 'net native' generation becoming 'information rich' but 'question poor'?

 

Is it becoming harder or easier to undertake research in an online environment?

 

Does 'information overload' make it harder to evaluate information and make relevance judgements?

 

Does a familiarity with technology imply information literacy?

 

If 40% of our students are mature students, how do their needs differ from the 'Google Generation'?

 

Are we right to assume that new cohorts arriving at university are 'net natives' and ICT savvy?

 

Is there evidence to suggest that some students reject technology on pragmatic and philosophical grounds?

 

 

WORDS

 

If search requires keywords, how important is spelling and vocabularly to study and research?

 

Will user generated tags organize the Web in folksonomies?  Or will Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Semantic Web need to be realised before we have perfect findability?

 

Just how important is the right metadata to ensuring that your research is located and cited?

 

How important is it for students' understanding and learning that we are careful to define our terms?

 

 

READING

 

Is a new form of reading emerging online?  And does this have fundamental implications for teaching and learning?

 

Should we be teaching reading strategies at university? 

 

Should we be doing more to encourage a culture of reading among our students?

 

Is the way we read historically contingent?

 

Can technology enhance reading? ( for instance, by controlling speed, inserting haptic and synesthetic qualities)

 

As reading shifts online amongst teenage cohorts, should we follow? and begin to think about specifically online-reading skills?

 

 

WRITING,WEB 2.0, WIKIS & BLOGS

 

Will user-generated content fundamentally change journalism?  Will the mass media succumb to the 'media of the masses'?

 

Is 'crowdsourcing', 'the wisdom of crowds' and collaborative authoring just the long-tail of mediocrity, as Tara Brabazon argues?

 

Would getting students to post their essays to wikis (exposing them to the potential of public scrutiny and legal redress) be a good idea?

 

Would students' writing be better if there was no cut and paste function?

 

What does blogging do to our sense of narrative structure?

 

Will Twitter and the 24hr news agenda reduce all writing to the  haiku of the soundbite?

 

Can you publish an academic journal on a blog?  Will blogs take over as a form of rapid scholarly communication?

 

How is authority and quality estabished with Web 2.0 forms of publishing?

 

Would you allow a student to cite a Wikipedia article?

 

Will Open Notebook Science take off?  Will everyone be publishing their lab notes on Open Wet Ware? 

(See Waldrop, M. M., Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?, Scientific American, 9 Jan 2008)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0-great-new-tool-or-great-risk

http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page

 

 

ORAL COMMUNICATION

 

Does a lack of articulacy disadvantage students in the knowledge and service economy?

 

How can we develop good oral-communication skills at university?

 

Would YouTube be a good medium for developing presentation skills?

 

Is ubiquitous informal communication via mobile technology part of the problem or part of the solution?

 

 

DISCOURSE, DEBATE AND BEHAVIOUR

 

Have we lost something when debate moves from talking to typing?  For example http://www.economist.com/debate/

 

Is it acceptable to text message in class?

 

Can we use Web 2.0 technologies to encourage debate, collaborative learning, group working?

 

Can we orient and teach students about appropriate discourse and modes of behaviour in virtual worlds?

 

 

CRITICAL THINKING

 

How can students develop critical thinking if they have never had it explicitly defined for them?

 

Can we teach critical evaluation of web-based information?

 

How important is a student's own theory of knowledge (epistemology) to progression in critical thinking?

 

Should we reintroduce the medieval pre-curriculum of grammar, rhetoric and logic as a prerequisite for all study?

 

Has hypertextuality improved students' parallel processing (multi-tasking) but impared their sequential processing (reading, evaluating)?

 

 

E-BOOKS

 

Will e-books ever repalce the printed codex? 

 

Will the e-book reader and e-paper kill off bookshops and libraries?

 

Has anyone ever read an entire monograph online?

 

How can we better incorporate into our teaching and learning the wealth of free digitized book collections like Project Gutenberg and Google Books?

 

What effect does the search function in e-books have on the development of students' reading skills?  Does it, in some sense, decontextualize knowledge or is it just the latest manifestation of the index?

 

 

LIBRARIES

 

As more and more content is available online and research becomes disintermediated, what is the role of libraries and librarians?

 

As more and more unique digital objects are created around campus (retrospectively-digitized archival material, exhibitions, photographs, courseware, primary data, peer-reviewed journal articles) how are they to be managed, archived and retrieved?

 

Are archival, Open-Access and media metadata standards interoperable?  And does it matter if they are not?

 

What is the libraries role in teaching information literacy?

 

Should we be making searching for information easier (like Google)? Or be teaching students to critically evaluate their sources?  Or both?

 

 

OPEN-ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING

 

Will Open-Access publishing democratize access to information?

 

How important are pre-print servers and 'online early' schemes for rapid scholarly communication?

 

How can we use self-archived peer-reviewed research outputs on institutional and subject repositories to improve teaching and learning?

 

Can institutional repositories improve citation rankings for our research and promote our research more widely?

 

 

OPEN  PEER REVIEW

 

Is Scientific American's 'networked journalism' initiative a form of pre-publication peer-review, collaborative authorship via crowdsourcing, or a bit of both?

 

How important is pre- and post-publication peer review by research communities?  Do we need double-blind peer review prior to publication when the whole academic community can comment on the value and quality of articles at the press of a button?

 

Should peer-review be limited to defined experts, as with BioMedCentral's recommendation approach - for example, Faculty of 1000 Biology http://www.f1000biology.com/home

 

The physics, computation and maths pre-print server arxive.org has become an established place to publish, with peer-review undertaken by the whole research community.  Is this a model for rapid dissemination and quality control?  http://arxiv.org/

 

How useful is online voting and commenting on articles, as employed by chemistry.org/exchange or PLOS One's article rating scheme?

http://exchange.chemistry.org/cms/

 

http://www.plosone.org/home.action

 

 

GAMES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS

 

Play is an established mode of learning, so why isn't university more fun?

 

If so many online games involve the notion of questing, can we use them to inculcate the pedagogy of the question?

 

Why hasn't online-games technology made more inroads into our e-learning?

 

Can we use off-the-shelf virtual worlds to engage our students in problem-based learning, run simulations, model and build scenarios?

 

Can we use virtual worlds to teach communication and debate, consensus building, establish social contracts and modes of behaviour?

 

Is the act of creating an avatar a useful analogue to help students understand reflexive and metacognitive thinking?

 

 

SOCIAL NETWORKS

 

Is the moral panic around social-networking sites and their role in young peoples lives justified?

 

Will social networks be the main interface through which we access and exchange information in the near future?

 

What are the pros and cons of engaging with students in their own spaces?

 

Should students be free to critique their tutors on social networking sites?  When does free speech become cyber bullying?

 

Do students and staff need to be taught how to protect personal data on social networks?

 

Is there such a thing as private information if it is available online?  Are journalists justified in trawling Facebook to research stories?

 

Should multiple-online identities be protected by human rights legislation?

 

 

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ETHICS

 

Can we use Web 2.0 technologies to teach students about plagiarism, intellectual property and copyright?

 

Why do academics continue to sign away their copyright when they publish in academic journals?

 

Should we be more systematic in our use of Creative Commons Licences, Science Commons Licences and JISC Surf Licences when managing our digital intellectual assets?

http://creativecommons.org/

 

http://sciencecommons.org/

 

http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/

 

Should we be making all our courseware and lectures freely available on the internet like MIT OpenCourseware?

 

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

 

 

NEW CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF TIME AND SPACE

 

Communication and access to information has gone mobile.  How much should we embrace the idea that you can learn anywhere, anytime?

 

Is teaching performative?  What is the balance between informing and entertaining?  Is there any benefit to giving your lectures in pubs, clubs, MySpaceTV, YouTube?

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=34755004

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=13455128

 

Evidence suggests younger cohorts are better at working in multi-modal, multi-media environments?  Is this a good thing and what are the implications for teaching?  What implications does that have for the lecture, the classroom and the tutor?

 

Should we be recording all teaching so that students can reprise lectures via ipods?  Whose intellectual property is the recorded lecture?  What implications would it have for academic freedoms?