<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">have new sources of information and at least in principle and increasingly</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">in practice novel ways to exchange and to interact with information. But</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">our institutions of "higher" learning and the way we teach have remained</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">largely the same for years, one could say even centuries and across many</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">different national sites.</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">So it is increasingly crucial to ask, as Cathy Davidson and I did in The</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">Future of Learning, what happens to traditional educational institutions</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">when learning also takes place in the new ways now available,</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">participatorily, in genuinely transformative connected ways, peer-to-peer,</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">virtually and incessantly? In the book we investigate how traditional</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">learning institutions are challenged to become increasingly innovative,</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">flexible, robust, and collaborative as well as what this means for</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">reconceiving the very nature of the "institution" as a "mobilizing</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">network" and how it operates, what it affords us anew in terms of learning</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">engagements, practices, and possibilities.</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; "><br></div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">The questions raised about existing institutional structures of "higher"</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">learning link directly to the possibilities and challenges as a</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">consequence of DIY learning, at all levels. Learning is now being</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">challenged to be less hierarchical and authoritative or expert-driven.</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">More horizontal, shared, connected, participatory and peer-to-peer, the</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">conference DIY track will examine the variety of possibilities,</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">experiments, and practices now being unleashed to promote, assess, and</div><div style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: medium; ">certify these new learning modalities.</div></div><div><br></div><div><div><div><br></div><font face="Calibri,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial"><span style="font-size:12pt">David Theo Goldberg<br>
Director and Professor<br>
University of California<br>
Humanities Research Institute/<br>
Executive Director,<br>
MacArthur Digital Media and Learning<br>
Research Hub</span></font></div></div></body></html>