If:book has two recent posts on the role of pedagogy and our proposed scholarly network, MediaCommons.

Avi Santo wrote an extended post exploring the conceptual framework of pedagogy.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/mediacommons_2_renewed_publics.html

John McClymer of Assumption College wrote an interesting piece outling his use of the network in his teaching of American History.
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/teaching_in_a_collaborative_in.html

Scholarship had a deep relationship with teaching and outreach. Our hope is that MediaCommons will attempt to acknowledge and address all three. These two posts start to define the landspace for teaching and pedagogy in the networked age.

Hi,

I'm Ray Cha, from the Institute of the Future of the Book, and lurker on Kaironews. I'd like to share with you our latest project, which launched today, a networked book on video games by Ken Wark, author of the Hacker Manifesto and who is not a gamer. It has some great writing for gamers and non-gamers alike and a novel interface. Please check it out.

http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

A press release is found below.

Best,

-Ray.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is pleased to announce a major networked book experiment with McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard 2004). Wark has shared a draft of his next book, GAM3R 7H30RY (Gamer Theory), in an open web-based environment designed to gather feedback and spark discussion. GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 envisions a new kind of book that evolves over time and brings authors and readers into conversation.

http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

In GAM3R 7H30RY, Wark turns his attention to video games, the emergent cultural form of our times. He is interested in two main questions:

1. can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
2. can there be a critical theory of games?

Readers of GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 have two ways to respond to the book and to discuss these larger concerns. Inside the book itself, comment streams are situated directly alongside each individual paragraph, eschewing the usual top-down hierarchy of blog-based discussion and allowing readers to respond to the text on a fine-grained level. There is also a free-fire discussion forum where readers can start their own threads about the games dealt with in the book and the experience of game play in general. The gateway to this forum is a graphical topic pool in which conversations float along axes of time and quantity, giving a sense of the shape of the discussion. Both sections are designed to challenge current design conventions of online discourse, and to generate thoughtful exchange on the meaning of games, along with meta-questions about the future of books and the design of virtual spaces. Wark will actively participate in these discussions, and draw upon them in subsequent drafts of his book. The current version is published under a Creative Commons license.

GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1. is the latest in a series of "thinking out loud" experiments devised by the Institute to explore new forms of creative labor in the networked commons. The first, Without Gods: Toward a History of Disbelief, is a weblog by Mitchell Stephens of NYU devoted to his latest book project — a history of atheism eventually to be published by Carroll and Graf. Next is Rough Cut, a collaborative film-editing experiment coordinated by independent media producer Brian Drolet, centered around interviews with five Iraqi women. Following this will be another networked book collaboration with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing.

http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/

http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens