In her biography about her horticulturalist father, Jonathan Baldwin Turner, Mary Turner Carriel wrote the following of Turner's quest to fence prairies; words that may also serve as an allegory for present-day libraries: What he could have done to tempt the pioneer from his home in the East to settle upon the fertile lands in the West. The first…

Habitats, ecology and evolution are a few of the many metaphors commonly associated with the domain of biological ecosystems. Surprisingly, these and other similar biological metaphors are proving to be equally associated with a phenomenon known as digital ecosystems. Digital ecosystems make a direct connection between biological properties and…

The future of Web 2.0 is about content streams or streams of information. The metaphor implied by "streams" is powerful. The idea is that individuals are living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The goal today is to be attentively aligned--"in flow"--with these information streams, to be aware of information as it…

The Internet is an American invention, and though it has spread around the world, the bulk of the communication conducted through it is still in English. Even so, depending on what one is searching for, he/she can come across web pages, blogs, and other content in many other languages. To deal with this multilingualism, various free…

Metaphors that posit writing as linear, essayistic, and the province of a single author no longer fit the dynamic, newly spatialized practices of composition occurring on and via the Web. Using "folksonomy," or multi-user tagging, as an example of one of these practices, this article argues for a new metaphor for writing that encapsulates how…

This paper proposes Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2000) as a tool for identifying the various discourses that can be found in the provision of open educational resources. The argument will be built upon the concept of a "flat world", a powerful metaphor used by Friedman in his famous book "The World is Flat" (2005). The discussion will…

Cloud computing is the latest paradigm shift for the delivery of IT services. Where previous paradigms (centralized, decentralized, distributed) were based on fairly straightforward approaches to technology and its management, cloud computing is radical in comparison. The literature on cloud computing, however, suffers from many divergent…

There are particular theories and concepts that teachers of writing use to inform pedagogical practice--outcomes and understandings that teachers hope students will carry with them into their academic and professional lives, as well as their civic involvements. The field of composition has theorized the term "community" in relation to…