Calling it one of the “must-have” products for the fall, School Library Journal has just named Britannica Online School Edition one of the “10 Best Digital Resources” for 2009. Take it away, SLJ:

“Britannica Online School Edition has tipped the scales of online encyclopedias by including four different products within their Online School Edition. . . . With the addition of this latest product, Britannica has expanded their encyclopedic line to reach every user at every level, while still providing educators with Teacher Resources, additional learning materials, digital images, video clips, maps, and much more. It only takes a few minutes of online research (or maybe some interactive fun) within any of the Britannica modules to discover why this online encyclopedia has advanced to the head of the class.”

BOLSE is Encyclopaedia Britannica’s comprehensive, curriculum-aligned online service for pre-K through grade 12. Go here to read the entire review by Professor Shonda Brisco of Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, and to see the other products on the list. Schools and school districts interested in School Edition can call 800-621-3900 or go here for more information.

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Note: If you publish regularly on the Web, as a blogger, writer, webmaster, or what have you, you’re probably eligible for a free subscription to Britannica Online, which will make it easy for you to link to Britannica articles you want to share with your readers. We call it the Britannica’s WebShare program. Details here. Apply here.

Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. PCs, the Internet, whiteboards, presentation software, and other high-tech devices, once considered educational aides for the library, the media lab, and the home, are increasingly a central part of the classroom curriculum itself, with results that have yet to be fully understood.

The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It’s also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called “multitasking.” Many educators voice ambivalence about the power of educational technologies to distract students and fragment their attention.

Do the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between? Utopian and dystopian visions tend to collide whenever the topic comes up.

To explore the question intelligently we’ve asked several experts on educational technology to join us this week for a forum on the subject at the Britannica Blog.

Participants include (among others):

Tuesday

Michael Wesch / Post: “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)”

Dubbed “the explainer” by Wired magazine, Wesch is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University who studies the impacts of new media on human interaction. He has turned his attention in recent years to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed over six million times and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences. Wesch is a member of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s editorial board.

Mark Bauerlein / Post: “Turned On, Plugged In, Online, & Dumb: Student Failure Despite the Techno Revolution”

Professor of English, Emory University, and former research director for the National Endowment of the Arts. Author of the recently published The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.

Wednesday

Steve Hargadon / Post: “Moving Toward Web 2.0 in K-12 Education“

Director of the K12 Open Technologies Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and founder of the Classroom 2.0 social network. Hargadon blogs, speaks, and consults on educational technology, free and open-source software, Web 2.0, computer reuse, and computing for low-income people.

Dan Willingham / Post: “Why Web 2.0 Will Not be an Integral Part of K-12 Education”

Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine.

Thursday

David Cole / Post: “Why I Ban Laptops in My Classroom”

Professor of Law, Georgetown University, legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Former staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he litigated a number of major First Amendment cases.

Michael B. Horn / Post: “Technology Can Have a Positive Impact on Education: Deploy It Disruptively!”

Michael Horn is the Executive Director, Education and co-founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He recently coauthored Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill: June 2008) with Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson, president of The Citistates Group. The book uses the theories of disruptive innovation to diagnose the root causes of schools’ struggles and suggest a path forward to customize an education for every child in the way she learns.

Monday

Howard Rheingold / Post: “R.I.P.: Lectures, Notes, and Tests (Scrapping the Old Ways)”

Respondents and Commentators

John Seely Brown, “Chief of Confusion”: Writer and scholar on innovation in education and other fields, co-author of The Social Life of Information, The Only Sustainable Edge, and other books. Visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Formerly Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Karin Chenoweth, author of It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, is currently with The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization. Chenoweth previously wrote the Homeroom column for the Montgomery and Prince George’s Extras of The Washington Post, which gained a national readership for its focus on schools and education.

Kevin Hogan, Editorial Director, Technology and Learning magazine.

Kathy Ishizuka, Technology Editor, School Library Journal.

Joanne Jacobs, author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds. After 19 years as a San Jose Mercury News columnist and editorial writer, she left in 2001 to create one of the first education weblogs, at joannejacobs.com.

Tim O’Brien, Online Editor and Author with O’Reilly Media, covers technology, science, and politics for O’Reilly News. Tim supported pedagogical virtual reality efforts at the University of Virginia in the middle 1990s, and now supports the development of a globally distributed K-12 learning system.

Howard Rheingold, a well-know writer, speaker, and observer of all things digital, is, among many other credits, the author of countless books, including Smart Mobs. More about Howard here.

Joyce Kasman Valenza, Library Information Specialist, Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, Penn.; writer of School Library Journal’s Never Ending Search blog; and a former columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Valenza is prolific speaker and writer on issues relating to libraries, technology and education has won many professional awards.

As always you, the reader, are welcome, too.

Please come, read, and tell us what you think.

Britannica.com Week in Preview: September 8-14

With the end of two weeks of political theater that we call conventions in the United States, now we can finally focus on things that are important–such as the 25th birthday on Sunday of British diva Amy Winehouse. In song she refused to go, but in May she finally succumbed and said yes to Rehab. But rehab didn’t stop her from winning a Grammy–the show even set up a special satellite performance in London for her to accept the award, because she couldn’t obtain a visa to travel to the United States.

Among the other features on Britannica’s homepage this week are:

September 8: Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duhhhhhhh. Monday is the 83rd anniversary of the birth of the late Peter Sellers, who played the magnificently inept Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther and appeared in Dr. Strangelove (pictured below). Monday is also the 579th anniversary of Joan of Arc’s attempt to take Paris and the 504th anniversary of the unveiling of Michelangelo’s David in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.

September 9: George W. Bush’s favorite member of the axis of evil, North Korea, turns 60 on Tuesday. The proclamation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by the country’s Eternal President, Kim Il-sung, set the stage for the Korean War. Speaking of war, War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy was born 180 years ago Tuesday. And, now back to communists and founders; China will also be marking an anniversary–32 years since the death of Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China.

September 10: Who was the first American president? George Washington, you say? No. It was John–not John McCain (he’s not that old)–Smith. Maybe I am stretching the definitional bounds a bit, I know. But, still, it was 400 years ago Wednesday that John Smith became president of Jamestown Colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America. And, 20 years ago tennis star Steffi Graf completed the tennis Grand Slam by capturing the U.S. Open (she added Olympic gold three weeks later). And, happy birthday to golfer and Britannica contributor (our Masters Tournament article) Arnold Palmer, who turns 79 years young.

September 11: Thursday Americans remember the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Britannica looks back at the events of that tragic and world-changing day. Thursday also marks the 33rd anniversary of Pete Rose becoming Major League Baseball’s all-time hit leader when he broke Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 career hits. And, it’s happy birthday to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who turns 43, and the 123rd anniversary of the birth of English writer D.H. Lawrence.

September 12: Well, it wasn’t exactly to infinity and beyond, but it was to the Moon. It was 49 years ago Friday that the Soviet Union launched Luna 2, the second of a series of Soviet lunar probes and the first spacecraft to strike the Moon. Also, the Philippines was in a political tussle a year ago, when former president Joseph Estrada was convicted of plundering–only to be pardoned a month later. China and Houston will be celebrating basketball star Yao Ming’s 28th birthday; he may not have won gold in Beijing last month, but he has done much to popularize the sport in the country.

September 13: An aloof ruler who spent lavishly and exacerbated his country’s economic problems. Hmmm…who could that be? Depending on what country you’re from, you probably have a different answer, but it was on this day in 1598 that Philip III, who was such a ruler, was crowned king of Spain and Portugal. Saturday is also the 67th birthday of Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica and a Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped negotiate a Central American peace agreement and wrote an essay on the Lessons of the 20th Century for Britannica.

September 14: And, finally, wrapping up the week, everybody’s favorite (or not) cartel, OPEC, turns 48 this week; its birthday present was being spurned by Brazil, which opted last week not to join the multinational organization. As Americans debate abortion and other issues surrounding pregnancy in the upcoming presidential election, feminists (and others) celebrate the 129th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Sanger, who is credited with originating the term birth control. And, finally, the Mexican-American War was brought to an end 161 years ago Sunday as Mexico City fell to advancing American forces.

This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. I’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]

Today is 08-08-08, and according to news reports, the Chinese authorities were to take full advantage of the fortuitous numerical convergence and start the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games precisely at 8:08 Beijing time. Under the circumstances, it seems only fitting that we repost these observations by our own resident numbers maven, Professor Ian Stewart:

“The number 8 is generally considered to be an auspicious number by numerologists. The square of any odd number, less one, is always a multiple of 8 (for example, 9 - 1 = 8, 25 - 1 = 8 x 3, 49 - 1 = 8 x 6), a fact that can be proved mathematically. In Babylonian myth there were seven spheres plus an eighth realm, the fixed stars, where the gods lived. As a result, 8 is often associated with paradise. Muslims believe that there are seven hells but eight paradises, signifying God’s mercy. In Buddhism 8 is a lucky number, possibly because of the eight petals of the lotus, a plant associated with luck in India and a favourite Buddhist symbol.

“In China, just as the number 7 determines the life of a woman, 8 determines that of a man. A boy gets his milk teeth at eight months, loses them at eight years, reaches puberty at 2 x 8 = 16, and loses sexual virility at 8 x 8 = 64. The I Ching, which describes a system of divination using yarrow stalks, involves 64 = 8 x 8 configurations.”

Ian’s full blog post is here. Go here for his larger article on “number symbolism” in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

[Cross-posted from the Britannica Blog]

You can post these related widgets on your blog or Web site and give your readers the Britannica articles on each topic:

In his cover article in the July/August issue of the The Atlantic Monthly (”Is Google Making Us Stupid?“), Nicholas Carr raises what for some will be an alarming prospect: that we may soon face the end of reading, the end of thinking, and the end of culture as we have known them for hundreds of years, thanks to the Internet and the dramatic ways in which it is reshaping the way we learn, interact, and express ourselves.

He begins with a personal reflection:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Carr believes the problem stems from the years he has spent on the Internet. For a writer, researcher, and blogger like him, the Net has been a blessing, he admits, putting hitherto unprecedented volumes of information at his fingertips. But the blessing has also been a curse because of how the Internet does it. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” he says. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Here at Britannica, the article struck us as important, and not simply because Carr is a member of our editorial board. That his stark vision of the future is both noteworthy and, at the same time, that it may not be the final word on the subject prompted us to hold a forum on the Britannica Blog in which we invited comments from several other writers who think intelligently about these issues.  Contributors, in addition to Carr, include Clay Shirky, Sven Birkerts, Larry Sanger, Michael Gorman, Robert McHenry, and Matthew Battles. Come and see the forum at the Britannica Blog. 

Britannica.com Week in Preview: July 21-27  

Eh, what’s up this week at Britannica’s homepage, doc? Well, for one, Britannica remembers this week America’s favorite rabbit, Bugs Bunny. That wascally wabbit turns 68 on Sunday, July 27. Bugs continued to appear in films–usually along with his arch nemesis Elmer Fudd–into the 1990s, taking a starring role in Space Jam in 1996 with basketball legend Michael Jordan. Jordan starred for Chicago in the NBA, and that city this week honors Sweetness, running-back Walter Payton, who was born 54 years ago this week; Payton passed away in 1999 of a rare liver disease and is credited with awakening national interest in organ donation.

Other highlights of what’s on Britannica.com’s homepage this week:

• July 21: It tolls for thee. Keeping with the Chicago-area theme, Monday is the anniversary of Nobelist Ernest Hemingway’s birthday. In 1899 Hemingway was born in Cicero, Illinois–or is that Oak Park? Well, it was then Cicero, but now it’s Oak Park, and I don’t really want to get in the middle of this battle. Incidentally, Cicero was also home for a time for Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of everyone’s favorite jungle hero, Tarzan. Back to Hemingway; he wrote many classics of American literature, including The Old Man of the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms. As Britannica’s biography contends: “The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy.”

• July 22: Sick of your casual work environment and the flip-flops and shorts of your fellow co-workers ? (Confession: I take full advantage of Britannica’s casual environment and wear jeans to work every day.) Style is the name of the game on Tuesday, as Oscar de la Renta turns 66. He first gained attention for his gypsy- and Russian-inspired collections in the late 1960s and early ’70s, which suggested the cosmopolitan sophistication that would characterize his creative output over the following decades. He was still going strong into the 21st century, winning the CFDA Womanswear Designer of the Year Award in 2000. Tuesday also marks 31 years since Deng Xiaoping was restored to his government posts in China; with the world gearing up for the Olympic Games in Beijing on August 8, you can get background on all things Olympic and Chinese at Britannica.

• July 23: Wednesday is the fourth anniversary of the reopening of Mostar’s famous stone-arched bridge, which was destroyed in 1993 in fighting during the Bosnian civil war; in 2005 the bridge was listed among UNESCO’s World Heritage sites. The wounds of the war and the break-up of Yugoslavia still run deep; more than 300 newly identified victims of the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 were reburied this month, and Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia earlier this year continues to roil politics in the region and even relations between the European Union, Russia, and the United States.

• July 24: The Liberator, Simón Bolívar, turns 225 on Thursday. The South American revolutionary and statesmen helped break the continent free from Spanish rule. His legacy can still be seen in Latin America, particularly in the rule of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Chávez, who seemingly enjoys getting under U.S. President George W. Bush’s skin, launched what he called the Bolivarian Revolution shortly after becoming president in 1999, and he often uses Bolívar’s image as a backdrop for his speeches (for example, see here and here).

• July 25: From Latin American to South Asia, Friday marks Pratibha Patil’s first year in office as India’s first woman president. Her relatively unknown status and good relationship with Sonia Gandhi helped catapult her into the post. Friday also marks another first for a woman; 24 years ago on Friday Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya became the first woman to perform a spacewalk. If only Bugs could have debuted on July 25 rather than July 26, I could have tied together Space Jam and spacewalk. Rats!

• July 26: For those of you upset with Congress’s recent decision to expand the authority of U.S. agencies to wiretap, you’re probably not in the mood to celebrate Saturday’s anniversary. The G-men of the FBI are celebrating 100 years as the U.S. government’s principal investigative agency. Its more than 10,000 agents investigate cybercrimes, organized crime, terrorism, and other criminal activities.

July 27: Assuming there are riders left not disqualified for doping (as of this writing, three riders had tested positive and been disqualified), the Tour de France wraps up on Sunday as riders make their way into Paris for the final stage. The grueling race, first held in 1903, will have covered about 3,500 km in its 21 stages. If you’d rather remember a different French anniversary, there’s always the 240th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Corday, who 215 years ago this month killed revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. And, in the U.S., A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, turns 33 on Sunday; given the way the baseball star’s life has been going the last few weeks have been going–divorce proceedings, rumors of an alleged association with married singer Madonna, and criticism that he left the All-Star Game early before it was over last week–he probably can’t wait until August 4, when perhaps attention can be directed toward remembering the one-year anniversary of his 500th homer–a feat that made him the youngest to reach the mark in major league history.

This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. We’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.

[This post appeared originally at the Britannica Blog.]

The July 2008 issue of the The Smithsonian magazine features the article “John Muir’s Yosemite,” about the man widely recognized as the greatest champion of that precious U.S. national park. Muir was famous even in his own day, for when the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s tenth edition needed someone to write an article about the park, Muir was the obvious go-to guy. That article appears below.

Editor’s Introduction
John Muir knew Yosemite as perhaps no one before or since. He first came to the valley in 1868, and three years later he hosted a visit by no less a luminary than Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was still the preserve’s most ardent and eloquent defender 30 years later, when he wrote this piece for the Tenth Edition (1902-03). (In the latter year one of his disciples in the conservationist ethic, President Theodore Roosevelt, joined him for a Yosemite campout.) By the way, the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, mentioned in the last paragraph as being nearly the equal in beauty of Yosemite, is also mentioned in the current Britannica–as the Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir.

Yosemite
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tenth Edition

YOSEMITE,a famous valley on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada of California, about 150 miles east of San Francisco and 4000 feet above the sea. It is 7 miles long, half a mile to a mile wide, and nearly a mile deep, eroded out of hard massive granite by glacial action. Its precipitous walls present a great variety of forms and sculpture, determined by the grain or cleavage of the rock–domes, gables, towers, battlements, and majestic mountain cliffs, partially separated and individualized by recesses and side cañons. The bottom, a filled-up lake basin, is level and park-like, diversified with groves of oak and pine, clumps of flowering shrubs, and spacious ferny meadows and wild gardens through which the river Merced meanders in tranquil beauty; while the whole valley resounds with the booming of its unrivalled waterfalls. The most notable of the wall rocks are: El Capitan, 3300 feet high, a sheer, plain mass of granite, the end of one of the most enduring of the mountain ridges, which stands forward beyond the general line of the north wall in imposing grandeur; the Three Brothers, North Dome, Glacier Point, the Sentinel, Cathedral, Sentinel Dome and Cloud’s Rest, from 2800 to nearly 6000 feet high; and Half Dome, the noblest of all, which rises at the head of the valley from a broad, richly-sculptured base to the height of 4740 feet. These rocks are majestic glacial monuments, illustrating on a grand scale the action of ice in mountain sculpture. For here five large glaciers united to form the grand trunk glacier that eroded the valley and occupied it as its channel. Its moraines, though mostly obscured by vegetation and weathering, may still be traced; while on the snowy peaks at the headwaters of the Merced a considerable number of small glaciers, once tributary to the main Yosemite glacier, still exist. The Bridal Veil Fall, 900 feet high, is one of the most interesting features of the lower end of the valley. Towards the upper end the great Yosemite Fall pours its white floods from a height of 2600 feet, bathing the mighty cliffs with clouds of spray and making them tremble with its thunder-tones. The valley divides at the head into three branches, the Tenaya, Merced, and South Fork cañons. In the main (Merced) branch are the Vernal and Nevada Falls, 400 and 600 feet high, in the midst of most novel and sublime scenery. The Nevada is usually ranked next to the Yosemite among the five main falls of the valley. Its waters are chafed and dashed to foam in a rough channel before they arrive at the head of the fall, and are beaten yet finer by impinging on a sloping portion of the cliff about halfway down, thus making it the whitest of all the falls. The Vernal, about half a mile below the Nevada, famous for its afternoon rainbows, is staid and orderly, with scarce a hint of the passionate enthusiasm of its neighbour. Nevertheless it is a favourite with visitors, because it is better seen than any other. One may safely saunter along the edge of the river above it, and stand beside it at the top, as it calmly bends over the brow of the precipice. At flood time it is a nearly regular sheet about 80 feet wide, changing as it descends from green to purplish grey and white, and is dashed into clouds of irised foam on a rugged boulder talus that fills the gorge below. In the south branch, a mile from the head of the main valley, is the Illilouette Fall, 600 feet high, one of the most beautiful of the Yosemite choir. It is not nearly as grand a fall as the Yosemite, as symmetrical as the Vernal, or as airily graceful as the Bridal Veil; nor does it ever display as tremendous an outgush of snowy magnificence as the Nevada; but in fineness and beauty of colour and texture it surpasses them all.

Click here to read the entire article 

Here are three related widgets you can also grab and post on your Web site or blog.  Each one has articles from the current Encyclopaedia Britannica that will give your readers information on Yosemite, national parks, and conservation. 

Britannica.com Week in Preview: July 14-20

Britannica.com’s homepage contains daily and weekly features where we place the news in context, highlight contributors and new content, quiz our readers, and profile events and biographies of the day.

Today starts a series of weekly posts that I’ll make here at the Britannica Blog that gives our readers a preview of some of the highlights of what’s to come on the Britannica site.

• As the British Open prepares to, well, open in England, Britannica proudly features all week a brand-new article on the tournament by British golfer Colin Montgomerie. Tiger Woods, who edged out Montgomerie at the 2005 Open, is out with an injury.

• July 14: While the world’s golfers are preparing to storm the sands of the Royal Birkdale, across the Channel the French will be shouting “Vive le 14 juillet!” and celebrating Bastille Day, marking 219 years since a mob stormed the prison, signaling an end to the ancien régime.

• July 15: As oil prices surge, causing major U.S. airlines to cut jobs and beg consumers to call on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation to end market speculation, which they charge has caused the spike in oil prices, the Boeing Company marks its founding in 1916.

• July 16: Speaking of destruction, on July 16 the world marks the anniversary of the atomic age. It was on this day 63 years ago that the United States’s Manhattan Project had its first succesful test. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and bring the war in the Pacific to an end.

• July 17: If you need a little levity after reading about the atomic age, take a trip to the Magic Kingdom, which this week is celebrating its own anniversary. Fifty-three years ago the first guests entered Disneyland in Anaheim, California, realizing the fantastical dreams of showman Walt Disney. Mickey and Minnie are still going strong, with theme parks around the world, including in Orlando (U.S.), Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Paris.

• July 18: Speaking of birthdays, Nelson Mandela turns 90 this week. During his amazing life, he survived more than 27 years of imprisonment on Robben Island and helped end apartheid in South Africa without bloodshed. Celebrities and others feted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize winner last month in London. Even singer Amy Winehouse showed up–which was perhaps an event in itself.

• July 19: A year before Mickey and Minnie sauntered through Disneyland, the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was published. In the 2000s the tale was turned into a box-office smash, through the vision of director Peter Jackson and a cast including Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and, of course, Frodo….errr…Elijah Wood.

• July 20: From Middle Earth to the Earth’s Moon, it was 39 years ago this Sunday that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the earth’s satellite, while the author of this blog kicked his pregnant mother for the first time (well, at least so goes the legend in the family).

This and other information is available this week via Britannica’s homepage. Or, you can search the site to read other articles of interest. We’ll be back next week with another preview of Britannica’s weekly content.

[Note: This post appeared originally on the Britannica Blog.]

On Friday, July 11 at 9:38pm Michael DeBakey died in Houston, Texas, of natural causes (see hospital press release). He was not only a renowned surgeon and pioneer in surgical procedures for the treatment of defects and diseases of the cardiovascular system but also an educator and international medical statesman.

We at Britannica mourn the world’s loss and consider ourselves fortunate to count him among our many illustrious contributors. Articles currently published on the Britannica site attributed to him include aneurysm and a section on the treatment of the heart in our entry on cardiovascular disease.

Among his more than 1,600 professional and lay publications is the The New Living Heart (1997). He has received numerous awards, including the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society’s lifetime achievement award (2007), and only recently he was bestowed with the highest and most distinguished civilian award given by the U.S. Congress, the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor (2008).

The world of medicine will miss Dr. DeBakey.

And, we at Britannica mourn the loss of a member of our family of scholars.

For some of what is being said about his life on the Web, see:

• Simon Alford at the Times Online
• BBC News
• Todd Ackerman and Eric Berger for the Houston Chronicle
• Anna Boyd at eFlux Media

[Note: This post appeared originally on the Britannica Blog.]

Today we’re posting here and on the Britannica Blog a somewhat detailed overview of the new site that we will launch shortly. Instead of repeating those details here, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you how we see the future development of this site and how it fits into the current Internet publishing environment.

Much has been said lately about the collaborative nature of creating, documenting, and sharing knowledge. What is surprising about this discussion is that for some people this process seems possible only now because of the interactivity of the Internet. Others, including us at Britannica, take a different perspective, one that has historical roots. For us, the creation and documentation of knowledge has always been best achieved, and sometimes only achieved, through an intensely collaborative process.

At Britannica, for example, we’ve been working for 240 years at creating, documenting and sharing knowledge through a process in which thousands of expert contributors and dozens if not hundreds of editors work daily to produce factually correct, objective, well written, and up-to-date encyclopedia entries. Our readers have also played an important part in this process. For many years we have received and answered letters in which they have shared their points of view with us or suggested specific improvements. Recently, the volume of comments we get from readers has intensified through the direct feedback system on our site and by regular email.

So for us collaboration is not something new; it is not something we consider daring or experimental. It is something we’ve always done in creating Encyclopaedia Britannica. Obviously, we share with many the view that the Internet brings significant opportunities to make this collaborative process more inclusive, and that by doing so we will not only improve the quality of our content but also increase its reach and relevance. It should not be a surprise then that among the main objectives of our new site are to make it very easy for our contributors, other scholars, and regular readers to engage with our content by suggesting improvements to our editors; and to provide the editing tools they need to create and share their own content at the site.

The Consequences of Listening to Experts
But there are significant differences between our approach and what is popularly termed “Web 2.0.” First, and most important, we believe that the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one, and this has at least three consequences.

The first one is ownership. Here I am not referring to copyright ownership but to owning the responsibility that comes with having created or documented a set of ideas or a body of knowledge. That someone is, or should be, responsible for what he or she writes and shares with others is not a new idea. It has long been part of who and what we are as humans. At the new Britannica site, we will welcome and facilitate the increased participation of our contributors, scholars, and regular users, but we will continue to accept all responsibility of what we write under our name. We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable “wisdom of the crowds.”

The second consequence of our collaborative-but-not-democratic approach is that we recognize the voices and powers of experts. The plan for the new site goes to great lengths to increase the relationships we have with thousands of our current contributors as well as with new experts recommended or identified by the user community. We are calling this larger group our new “community of scholars.” To this special group we will provide a set of editing tools, promotional and community features, and incentive plans for them to engage with Britannica content as well as a place at the site for them to publish directly and under their own names for other Britannica users. This content created by the community of scholars will be controlled by each individual creator, and they will be responsible for deciding what feedback they accept or reject from those reading their work.

Finally, the third consequence of this approach is objectivity, and it requires experts. Certainly, objectivity is difficult to attain, but we’re committed to it. We believe that to provide lively and intelligent coverage of complex subjects requires experts and knowledgeable editors who can make astute judgments that cut through the cacophony of competing and often confusing viewpoints on a topic. In contrast to our approach, democratic systems settle for something bland and less informative, what is sometimes termed a “neutral point of view.”

Desire to Share and Participate is Strong
We also know that there are many Britannica users who, although they may not be experts in a given field, are interested in spreading knowledge and information and sharing their contributions to that effort with others. The new site will make it easy for our users to do so by making the Britannica content available for them to quote, modify, save under their name, and share it with others at the site. So regular users not only will be able to submit their suggestions to the editors of Britannica, but also create their own content or modify Britannica’s coverage under their own names and share the results with others in a special section of the site. We believe that by allowing our users the flexibility of using existing Britannica content, properly quoting or modifying it, and by doing so under their names, we will not only facilitate their ability to learn more about that topic, but also inspire in them the responsibility that comes with having created a new treatment under their name.

As we launch this important new project at Britannica, we realize that not everything will run smoothly. This new approach in publishing and engaging communities has required us to rethink almost all of our internal procedures and to invest significantly in editorial and technology resources. We apologize beforehand for any temporary malfunction that our users may experience as the new features and tools are launched in the coming weeks and months. But most important, I would like to take this opportunity to invite you to participate, to help us with your ideas about how to fulfill our mission to improve the understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we live.

Please look at the new site now in beta testing, read about the plans we have for the weeks and months ahead, and let us know what you think. And stay with us and join us as we gradually introduce the new features.