Today, the Scholastica blog mentioned two cases where there has been popular academic discussions pointing out specific technologies that would be helpful to the scholarly community:
- A post at Genome Unzipped where there's a picture of a reddit type application that allows a user to submit a paper and have it voted up or down based on its quality.
- A year old post at Area 51, where scholars are asking for a Q&A site.
Granted, that we're providing these types of features with Scholastica - and this post isn't intended to be self-aggrandizing - but why isn't the scholarly community making the tools that it's calling for in these types of posts?
There are definitely examples of the academic community providing access to new tools - Kathleen Fitzpatrick over at MediaCommons is a great example of this. But cases like this are rare.
Overall though, with so many types of minds on campuses across the country - ones in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences - why aren't we seeing as many tools as one would expect, popping up ad-naseum? Especially in that the concept of open source is a popular academic topic. But compare the amount of academic tools that are created by singular entities working together compared to that of the tech world (<= note that ~8700 people are watching that project and ~1400 people have made their own forks of it to work on).
Is the lack of new, modern tools a lack of communication across disciplines or something else?
