Hi Dave, we had a discussion on EdTechTalk about the Middlebury College/Wikipedia issue. I wanted you to know that I have thought about and I’m still thinking about many of the points you made there and here. In particular, I’m revisting my memories of being a History student as an undergraduate. I don’t have more to share at this point, but you got me thinking.

Why paper? I’m not going to talk about why I love paper, or other people should, or some other Luddite rambling. In the study of history, there is no way and will be no way to avoid the ties to paper because no matter how many old texts Google scans and uploads to the Internet, the sheer volume of paper records from the start of writing on that medium until this point is huge. Historians looking back will be working with paper. An example of that would be this week’s revelation of missing letters from Otto Frank. Now, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be able to do their written work in other mediums. This post seems to be saying that the medium for your output (paper) shapes the message when you are creating. It may not shape it the same way, but I think the medium for your input — old paper records — can also shape how and what you see in the message. This will not be changing for historians at higher levels (where they use primary sources) anytime soon.

Thanks for sharing, listening, etc.