Bio

Matthew K. Gold is Assistant Professor at New York City College of Technology (English) and CUNY Graduate Center (Interactive Technology and Pedagogy). Recent and forthcoming work includes articles in The Journal of Modern Literature, On the Horizon, and Kairos, and a chapter in From A to : Keywords of Markup (Minnesota 2010). He is currently editing a collection of essays on recent debates in the Digital Humanities that will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in January 2012. His projects include “Looking for Whitman” (http://lookingforwhitman.org), a multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy sponsored by two NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, and a recently awarded $3.1 million Title V Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. He serves as Project Director of the CUNY Academic Commons (http://commons.gc.cuny.edu) and Co-Director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative.

Open Education: The University and The Commons

The Academic Commons. The WikiMedia Commons. The Smithsonian Commons. The Digital Humanities Commons. The CUNY Academic Commons. Recent years have seen a proliferation of “Commons” projects as many universities and academic organizations have striven to respond to the growing open education movement. Though the sites named above serve different functions for their communities, Commons projects typically provide platforms meant to foster collaboration, communication, and sharing in open online environments, thus contributing proprietary university resources towards the larger, shared goal of broad public dissemination of knowledge. And yet, as such Commons projects have begun to mature, they have provoked a variety of questions: to what extent can information be shared across these various Commons? What types of spaces do they make available, and how might those spaces suggest new models for academic collaboration and community? Finally, what responsibilities do universities have to the broader intellectual commons in an age of do-it-yourself education?