The Pool profiled in Chronicle of Higher Education

Andrea Foster writes in the 30 May 2008 issue:

Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media, is only in its infancy. But the program has already generated buzz on a social-networking Web site called the Pool....Re:Poste is one of 600 creative works — games, art, and more — by new-media students and faculty members, most of them on the Orono campus, described in the Pool, which also contains about 2,000 reviews of those works. Starting in June, the Pool will have a much wider reach, as people in general will be invited to add material to the site, rate others' projects, build on their ideas, and find collaborators for their own projects.

The Pool, as yet little known, could provide a new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs. Eventually it could play a role in their tenure and promotion as well.

The numbers and influence of such scholars in academe are growing, and they are looking for new ways for their institutions to evaluate them. Books and journal articles alone are a flawed measure of their productivity, new-media professors say, because many of their accomplishments exist only as Web sites, interactive games, or multimedia presentations. The Pool, they suggest, can be one measure for judging their work.

Most of the commentary in the article supports the idea that alternative recognition metrics can be useful for scholars of the Internet age. Gerard McKiernan of Iowa State says the Pool could be a good barometer of a scholar's influence:

"Five hundred heads is better than two in assessing the value of a work," says Mr. McKiernan, who runs the blog Scholarship 2.0, on alternative Web-based methods for scholarly publishing.

Richard Chait of the Harvard Graduate School of Education remains skeptical ("I don't know how you authenticate the value of Web-site hits or what people say on Web sites"). He seems to have missed the fact that all three innovations described in the article--The Pool, Re:Poste, and ThoughtMesh--are tools designed to inject trust into the wild and woolly world of online publishing.

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