In 1998, the National Science Foundation initiated a effort known as Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI). It focused on knowledge networking; learning and intelligent systems, and new computational challenges. Our Distributed Knowledge project ("Can Knowledge Be Distributed? The Dynamics of Knowledge in Interdisciplinary Alliances") was part of the KDI initiative. We chose to study the Alliance, a consortium of 50+ universities, research insitutes, companies, etc. which promoted new ways of doing science in distributed teams. We found successes, but also problems with the distributed knowledge vision. An important insight was to see technology is an end, as well as a means for inquiry (pragmatic technology).

The essence of inquiry-based learning is the realization that learning is inseparable from life. When learning activities are divorced from ordinary experience, fragmented into short blocks of time, and framed within narrowly-defined disciplines, the learner is unlikely to engage, remember, or apply the knowledge supposedly conveyed. But there are institutional pressures and practical challenges that constrain learning in exactly those ways. How can we provide learning opportunities that are connected to the learner's needs and interests, relevant to life both within and beyond schoooling, challenging and engaging? How can we conceive disciplines in a way that enlarges learning rather than limits it? How can we make the best use of texts, multimedia, computers, field experiences, dialogues, and all the other media for learning? This presentation explores these questions, all within a larger framework that considers the relation of schooling to the larger society.

We present an overview of an inquiry approach to developing tools to support inquiry-based teaching and learning. Our approach sees inquiry as involving transformation of situations not simply learning concepts, engaging people in multiple forms of collaboration, and envisioning tools as both the means and products of inquiry. To illustrate these ideas we tell the story of the Inquiry Unit, a web-based means for people to describe processes of inquiry. Over the last eight years the Inquiry Units have evolved from a simple mechanism for teachers to share curriculum units with other teachers into a general mechanism for people in community centers, libraries, school, and other settings, to engage in collaborative inquiry. These changes have included mechanisms for co-authorship, comments, spin-offs, document sharing, and group and community support. Central to our discussion is how these features emerged through an open, participatory process of reflective inquiry.

How do we help learners as we all become immersed in a new information age? The answer may be neither to embrace the new information changes as unquestioned human advances nor to reject them as ephemeral and misguided. Instead, we need a way to engage critically with them—to understand the promises as well as the perils. Doing so would mean applying what Walter Kaufman (1977) calls “dialectical reading” to the evolving new media culture. This means that as we attempt to understand and engage with the changes before us, we neither embrace nor reject them, but rather enter into a kind of dialogue with them, asking what they mean and what they could be, and how our interactions with them can lead to useful reflection on who we are.

Keq questions include:

1. How have literacy practices changed over time and responded to new technologies? What is the future of literacy?
2. What media are emerging in our literacy practices? How do technological, linguistic, political, and economic forces shape literacy practices today?
3. How is meaning constructed in both personal and social terms?
4. How are ethical and policy issues shaped by the changes in literacy?
5. How can we understand and facilitate learning through new technologies?
6. What role do the new literacies play in creating and maintaining community?

Virtual libraries, interactive digital museum objects, scholarly databases accessed by mobile phone, blogs, Wikipedia, and more. We are in the midst of an epochal shift from print-bound places to digital environments, logics, and cultures in and through libr@ries. For six millennia, libraries have functioned as repositories of social memory and cultural capital, comprising key sites for language and literacy work. In a mutually-beneficial synergy, literati and librarian produced, preserved, and distributed valorized texts and knowledges, thereby playing key roles in the interconnected political economies of society and schooling. But access to information resources and services is now independent of time, place, face-to-face social interaction, and the micropolitics of institutional mediation. Bit by bit and brick by brick, online technologies and new media are literally and figuratively disassembling the institutional spaces, powers, practices, and privileges of libraries. Thie presentation explores a range of issues around the libr@ry as emblematic of rapid change taking place in public access to information, education, literacy, and intellectual property.