cheeks5965 writes "We've argued before over compressed air vehicles, a.k.a. air cars. Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts. The NYTimes' Green Inc. blog reports that the reality is less rosy. New research from UC Berkeley and ICF International puts a period at the end of the discussion, showing that compressed air is a very poor fuel, storing less than 1% of the energy in gasoline; air cars won't get you far, with a range of just 29 miles in typical city driving; and despite appearing green the vehicles are worse for the environment, with twice the carbon footprint as gasoline vehicles, from producing the electricity used to compress the air. Given these barriers, manufacturer claims should definitely be taken with a grain of salt."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, was officially released last month. In a comprehensive review, Ars takes you under the surface for an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes.

The wiki crops up in many companies' internal discussions about process improvements and efficient collaboration, but it is often shot down because so few people have exposure to good models of what a really successful business wiki can do. Ars is here to help with a practical introduction based on real-world examples.

Barence writes "Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology, but are the authors of sci-fi stories finally running out of steam? PC Pro has traced the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash, but suggests that writers have run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrow's products. 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,' PC Pro claims. Author Charles Stross tells the magazine that he began writing a sci-fi novel in 2005 and 'made some predictions, thinking that in ten years they'd either be laughable or they'd have come true. The weird bit? Most of them came true already, by 2009.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "One of the driving forces behind the ESRB toughening its ratings is closing its doors on December 31st, 2009. The National Institute on Media and the Family was funded by Fairview Health Services, and simply could no longer justify the yearly $750,000 price tag given today's economic climate. NIMF's reign of nagging has been pretty consistent since 1996, and was often indirectly featured on Slashdot. Don't worry, president and founder Dr. David Walsh promises to keep writing and giving speeches ... and imploring us all to think of the children."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What would a week in Apple be if it didn't involve some developer drama, Google, and Psystar? That's all included in this week's top Apple news, as well as a few major software tidbits and rumors about Apple building more first-party iPhone games. Read on:

Respected developers begin fleeing from App Store platform: Continued issues with the App Store approval process are prompting developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers pumping out over 100,000 iPhone apps, will migration away from iPhone development result in less quality software for the platform? Worse yet, will users even care?

News Flash: Apple already working on Mac OS X 10.7: Believe it or not, Apple has already begun work on the successor to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Well, actually, you should believe it—Apple has probably been working on it since 10.6 was announced.

Hugh Pickens writes "The World Health Organization says that there were 'early signs of a peak' in swine flu activity in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the US. The American College Health Association, which surveys more than 250 colleges with more than three million students, said new flu cases had dropped 27 percent in the week ending on November 13th from the week before, the first drop since school resumed in the fall. Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of vaccination and respiratory disease at the CDC, chose her words carefully. 'We are in better shape today than we were a couple of weeks ago,' she says. 'I wish I knew if we had hit the peak. Even if a peak has occurred, half the people who are going to get sick haven't gotten sick yet.' Privately, federal health officials say they fear that if they concede the flu has peaked, Americans will become complacent and lose interest in getting vaccinated, increasing the chances of another wave. However, Dr. Lone Simonsen, a former CDC epidemiologist, says she expects a third wave in December or January, possibly beginning in the South again. Based on death rates in New York City and in Scandinavia, Simonsen argues that both 1918 and 1957 had mild spring waves followed by two stronger waves, one in fall and one in midwinter, adding that in the pandemic of 1889, the bulk of the deaths occurred in the third wave. 'If people think it's going away, they can think again.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mr2001 writes "Consumerist reports that Apple is refusing to work on computers that have been used in smoking households. 'The Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, [the warranty has been voided] and they refuse to work on the machine "due to health risks of second hand smoke,"' wrote one customer. Another said, 'When I asked for an explanation, she said [the owner of the iMac is] a smoker and it's contaminated with cigarette smoke, which they consider a bio-hazard! I checked my Applecare warranty and it says nothing about not honoring warranties if the owner is a smoker.' Apple claims that honoring the warranty would be an OSHA violation. (Remember when they claimed enabling 802.11n for free would be a Sarbanes-Oxley violation?)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First the 10.6.2 update to Snow Leopard wasn't compatible with Intel Atom processors. Then it was. Then it wasn't again when it was finally released to the masses. Fortunately for the netbook-loving Mac OS X fans out there, the OSx86 scene is only too happy to offer a patched version of mach_kernel to enable booting 10.6.2 on netbooks once more.

The kernel is the deep-down part of Mac OS X that generally handles direct communication between the OS and hardware. Speculation swirled that Apple was actively trying to keep Mac OS X from being installed on inexpensive Atom-based netbooks. However, chances are it was more likely a result of optimizations that didn't take into account Atom processors, since Apple doesn't use them in any shipping products.

Let's look back at the week that was in Microsoft news. Here were the top stories:

Inside "MinWin": the Windows 7 kernel slims down: Back in 2003, Microsoft assembled a team of engineers to rethink the lowest levels of Windows, so that the OS could be more easily slimmed down and secured to run in servers and embedded applications. That project, called "MinWin," has now started to bear fruit. Ars takes a look inside MinWin.

Windows 7 tool violates GPL; Microsoft will open source it: After pulling the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from its servers over reports that it might violate the GNU General Public License (GPL), Microsoft has decided to go open source with the tool.

societyofrobots writes "Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has proposed taxing college and professional students for the privilege of receiving an education in the city. The proposed tax will charge students in the city at a rate of 1% of their yearly tuition — which, at Carnegie Mellon, would mean roughly a $400 tax (PDF) on most students. As the tax proposal hit local media outlets this week, the mayor repeatedly emphasized the burden that college students have placed on city services, and the need for students to pay their 'fair share.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tburton writes "The US House of Representatives yesterday released the Conflict Minerals Trade Act (HR 4128) to try and end the international trade of tungsten, tantalum and col-tan, the mining of which is accused of fueling violent rape and murder in eastern Congo. Since the very same minerals power the most popular consumer electronics from HP, Verizon, Nokia, RIM and Intel, the Information Technology Industry Council has quickly signed a statement of support. Advocacy groups are hopeful these commitments prove to be meaningful as consumers begin to question the end result of the supply chains powering their favorite gadget."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

boggis writes "Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft's Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government (like certain others). The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "Cyber attacks on the US Department of Defense — many of them coming from China — have jumped sharply in 2009, a US congressional committee has reported. Citing data provided by the US Strategic Command, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said that there were 43,785 malicious cyber incidents targeting Defense systems in the first half of the year. That's a big jump. In all of 2008, there were 54,640 such incidents. If cyber attacks maintain this pace, the yearly increase will be around 60 percent. The full report (PDF) is available online."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bourdain writes with news out of the University of Arkansas, where researchers are looking for ways to combat counterfeit RFID tags. Passive tags typically wait for a reader to transmit a signal of the appropriate strength and frequency before sending their own transmission. The scientists found that the amount of power required to trigger this varies quite a bit from one tag to the next, especially when many different frequencies are sampled. This and other physical characteristics give the tag its own "fingerprint" that is independent of the signal information stored in its memory, which the researchers say will facilitate the detection of cloned tags.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most current academic thinking dismisses the idea that genres are stable and essential categories, that we can determine what genre a work belongs to once and for all, and that doing so tells us all we need to know about the example in question. Instead, this new scholarship talks about what genres do rather than what genres are and describes the processes by which works get classified and reclassified over time.

When these categories are deployed as a system for regulating the production and distribution of culture, The publishing industry is misusing genre theory. As music critic Simon Frith notes, "genre maps change according to who they're for... A committed music fan will soon find, for example, that she's interested in sounds that fit into several categories at once and that different shops therefore shelve the same record under different labels.... It's as if a silent conversation is going on between the consumer, who knows roughly what she wants, and the shopkeeper, who is laboriously working out the pattern of shifting demands. What's certain is that I, like most other consumers, would feel quite lost to go to the store one day and find the labels gone – just a floor of CDS, arranged alphabetically."

So, for Frith, genre categories have some temporary use value in helping consumers find the music they want to hear. But those categories are also subject to recall and modification without notice and are often deployed in idiosyncratic ways, reflecting the personalities of the owners of different record shops or even the whims of the clerks who shelve particular titles. If you print the genres on the book jacket, you automatically limit their shelf life by restricting your ability to shuffle the pieces to reflect changing tastes and perceptions. The result will be as much bad business as bad art.

Of course, on the consumption side, we all adopt very idiosyncratic systems for shelving our books anyway: that's the pleasure of reading someone else's bookshelves as a map of their mind, displaying what things interest them and the perceived relationships between the parts.

You might think that this "shelving" metaphor for thinking about the cultural work of genres would break down quickly in a world where fewer and fewer books are purchased in brick-and-mortar bookshops and more and more of them are being bought online, where listings can be easily reconfigured, where the same book can be listed in an infinite number of categories.

Paradoxically, though, genres have had a tighter hold on our imagination in recent years as the range of cultural choice has broadened and audiences have fragmented. Film historian Rick Altman tells us that far from imposing rigid boundaries between genres, the old studio system depended on the idea that the same film could appeal to multiple audience segments at a time when pretty much everyone in the country went to the movies once or twice a week. Hollywood films rarely fit into some narrowly composed category: the same film had to appeal to men as well as women, the young as well as the old, by signaling different entertainment elements ("Comedy. Romance. Action. Exotic Locales. Singing. Dancing....")

Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers. These more rigid and precise subgenres are the product of a more general tendency towards what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls "specification." Subcultures break down into smaller subcultures, niches become smaller niches in an eternal dance between our desire to differentiate ourselves from and affiliate ourselves with others who share our tastes. There are more different categories of books, records, and films than ever before; all that diversity produces an anxiety that is being met by more aggressive policing of boundaries. Using more sophisticated tools, media consumers are trying to find the "perfect choice," rather than taking for granted that a work designed for a general audience is going to contain some things we like and some things we don't.

And where the market doesn't impose such specifications, we add them ourselves. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that the best fan fiction is "unpublishable" in the sense that it operates across the genre categories, aesthetic norms, and ideological constraints that shape commercial publishing. Fans self-publish in order to step outside those filters. Yet, the fan community also imposes its own categories, which help readers find the "right story" through author's notes that tell us, for example, which "ships" (relationships between specified pairs of characters) are being explored, offer a rough sense of their sexual explicitness or emotional tone, warn us about vexing themes, and so forth. And if you read the letters of comment, there's enormous anger directed at any writer who asks a reader to read a story that doesn't deliver what was promised and, even worse, gives them something they didn't ask for.

All of this focus on using genres to classify and shelve works assumes that we know where one genre ends and another begins and that genre works stay where we put them. Genres may be optical illusions, which come and go like mirages, depending on the ways we look at the texts in question.

In one formulation, genre classifications offer reading hypothesis: we start a book with the assumption that it will follow a certain path; we read it "as" a mystery or as a romance or as a fantasy, and as we do so, we look for those elements that match our expectations: depending on our starting point, we may notice some things or ignore them, make certain predictions or avoid them, value or reject certain elements, form or dismiss certain interpretations. Start from a different hypothesis and you will have a different experience.

Some critics are rereading familiar texts through alternative logics: so, for example, queer cultural critic Alex Doty has made the case for The Wizard of Oz as a power struggle between butch and femme lesbians, Jason Mittell has read the HBO series The Wire as a video game, and Linda Williams reads pornography in relation to Hollywood musicals. Might we see such essays as interstitial criticism?

For some readers, there is a certain pleasure in playing a game where all the parts match our templates (much as a sparrow feels more like a bird than an ostrich does). For other readers, there may be a pleasure in the unanticipated or the indeterminate. Let's hear it for the duck-billed platypus!

Tzvetan Todorov has talked about the "fantastic" as playing with this uncertainty about classification. For instance, most ghost stories create a special pleasure from our uncertainty about whether we are supposed to believe there really are ghosts or whether we are to come up with a natural, logical, real-world explanation for the events. The pleasure, he says, is in toggling between multiple interpretations, not knowing what kind of story we are reading: there was a ghost; the narrator was crazy; or in the Scooby-Doo version, it was all a scheme by the guy who runs the old amusement park.

Even when we kinda knew where the ghost story was going, the process of hiding and unveiling can be as much darn fun as a good old fashion striptease. What if we were to imagine the interstitial as another kind of indeterminacy, one that flits between genres in the same way that the fantastic flickers between levels of reality. Maybe this is what Heinz Insu Fenkel is getting at when he writes, "Interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader's world larger, more interesting, more meaningful, and perhaps even more comprehensible. The reader, who has been seeing black-and-white, suddenly begins not only to see color, but to learn how to see other colors."

Just as there are systems of cultural production where audiences express confusion if a work straddles genres, there are others where artists thrive upon and audiences anticipate mixing and matching genre elements. Take for example the so-called "masala films" that come out of the Bollywood film industry in India and are popular across Asia, Africa, and increasingly the west. The same film might move between historical and contemporary settings, might mix comedy and melodrama, might follow an intense (and disturbing) action sequence with a musical number, might mix the most sudsy romance with social uplift and political reform, and might acknowledge both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The descriptor "masala" refers to a mixture of spices used in Indian cooking. Just as one would be disappointed if an Indian dish only contained one spice, the Bollywood spectator would be disappointed if a Hindi film contained only one genre.

We are seeing greater cultural churn as more and more works move across national borders, get picked up by new artists and audiences, get combined in new ways, paving the way for nouvelle culture in the same way that the global availability of spices and ingredients has led many of our best chiefs to experiment with radical departures from and reinventions of traditional cuisines. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has contrasted a classic understanding of cultures as so many exhibits in an ethnographic museum with a more contemporary notion of cultures as garage sales, where people push, pull, and paw over other people's used stuff before taking it home, trying it on for size, and altering it to suit their needs.

Many young American consumers are using the web in search of Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Latin American telenovelas, or Bollywood films, anything that takes them outside the parochialism of their own culture. The result really does defy any classification: look at something like Tears of the Black Tiger which starts as a classic Thai novel, throws in a little opera, adds a much more intense color palette, and tells the man's story as a western and the woman's story as a '50s style melodrama to suggest that the two protagonists are living in different worlds.

Globalization is simply one of a number of forces which are breaking down the tyranny of genre classifications and paving the way for experimentation within popular storytelling. In his book Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson makes the argument that the most popular forms of entertainment today are popular because they make demands on our attention and cognition. For example, a television show like Lost, one of the top ratings successes of the past decade, demonstrates a level of complexity that would have been unimaginable on American television a few decades ago; with its large scale ensemble casts of characters, its flashes forwards and backwards in time, its complex sets of puzzles and enigmas, its moral ambiguities and shifting alliances, but also its uncertain and unpredictable relationship to existing television genres.

If we knew what the operative genre model was, we might figure out what's really happening on the island, but without such a clear mapping, we remain pleasurably lost. Such dramas thrive in part because they support robust internet communities where readers gather online to compare notes, debate interpretations, trace references, and otherwise have fun talking with each other. Its interstitial qualities are essential to Lost's success, even as they account for why other viewers got frustrated and gave up on the series convinced that it was never going to add up to anything anyway.

Lost illustrates another tendency in contemporary popular culture towards what I call transmedia storytelling. Lost is not simply a story or even a television series; Lost is a world that can support many different characters and many different stories that unfold across multiple media platforms. As these stories move across media platforms, Lost also often moves across genres: not unlike early novels, which might be constituted through mock letters, journals, and diaries, these new stories may mock e-mail correspondence, interviews, documents, websites, news magazine stories, advertisements, computer games, puzzles, cyphers, and a range of other materials which help make its world feel more real to the reader. These transmedia works will add a whole new meaning to the concept of interstitial arts.

So, to borrow from Charles Dickens (who borrowed from everyone else in his own time), this is the best of times and the worst of times for the interstitial arts. In such a world, the interstitial thrives and it withers. It finds receptive audiences and harsh critics. It gratifies and grates. It inspires and confuses. Above all, it gives us something to talk about. It opens us up to a world where nothing is what it seems and where little belongs, at least in the narrow sense of the term. We're going Out There!

What happens next is in your hands. Read. Enjoy. Debate. Tell your friends. But also create. Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform. Just leave your cookie cutters and jelly molds at home. We can figure out what shelf this belongs on later.

 

Bibliography

Ellen Kushner, "The Interstitial Arts Foundation: An Introduction," in Nebula Awards® Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann (ROC/PenguinPutnam, March 2005), http://www.interstitialarts.org/essays/kushner_iaf_an_introduction.php

Delia Sherman, "An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/intro_toIA.html

Susan Stinson, "Cracks," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionStinson.html

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas, 1982).

Heinz Insu Fenkl, "The Interstitial DMZ," http://www.interstitialarts.org/why/the_interstitial_dmz_1.html

Barth Anderson, "The Prickly, Tricky, Ornery Multiverse of Interstitial Art," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionAnderson.html

Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Rick Altman, Film/Genre (British Film Institute, 1999).

Grant McCracken, Plenitude 2.0: Culture by Commotion (Periph: Fluide, 1998).

Catherine Tossenberger, Potterotics: Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the Internet, Dissertation, University of Florida, 2007.

Alex Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000).

Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic," in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (MIT Press, 2009).

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (University of California Press, 1999).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cornell University Press, 1975).

Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Reworking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press, 1993).

Charles Vess, "Interstitial Visual Arts: An Impossible Marriage of Materials," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/marriage_of_materials.html

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You (Riverhead, 2006).

Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1988).

John Caughie, Theories of Authorship: A Reader (Routledge, 1981).

Peter J. Rabinowitz, "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy," Critical Inquiry, March 1985.

Most current academic thinking dismisses the idea that genres are stable and essential categories, that we can determine what genre a work belongs to once and for all, and that doing so tells us all we need to know about... Henry Jenkins http://www.henryjenkins.org/

itwbennett writes "Some very generous Alpha OS geeks have snagged the Chrome OS source code and compiled a version to share with the rest of us, writes blogger Peter Smith. 'The build comes in the form of a virtual machine, which means you'll need VMWare or VirtualBox running, and of course the image of Chrome OS itself. The folks at gdgt are distributing the latter, and they've set up a page with all the links you'll need. You'll need to create a gdgt account if you don't have one yet. The Chrome OS image is only a bit over 300 megs, so it's a fast download. If you need a little more handholding, TechCrunch has a step-by-step guide to getting Chrome OS installed and running using VirtualBox, and a Chrome OS torrent they link to.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest volume in Springer’s CSCL book series is: Stahl, G. (2009) "Studying Virtual Math Teams", Springer, 626 pages.

It is a comprehensive, integrated report on a major CSCL research effort, including chapters by 29 authors from the project team and 10 collaborating centers.

It includes sections on project philosophy, pedagogy and technology; interaction analysis; methodology; software design; interaction representations; and theory.

This is a follow-up to Stahl, G. (2006) "Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge", MIT Press, 510 pages—carrying out the kinds of development, interventions, analysis and theory building proposed there.

You can download the book’s table of contents from http://GerryStahl.net/vmt/book/svmttoc.pdf or a flyer with order form from http://GerryStahl.net/vmt/book/svmtflyer.pdf.

The book is available in hardback and ebook (including as individual chapters) from Springer Press (http://www.springer.com/education/learning+%26+instruction/book/978-1-4419-0227-6) with a 25% discount for ISLS members, or order from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Studying-Virtual-Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning/dp/1441902279) to save shipping and tax.

The latest volume in Springer’s CSCL book series is: Stahl, G. (2009) "Studying Virtual Math Teams", Springer, 626 pages.

It is a comprehensive, integrated report on a major CSCL research effort, including chapters by 29 authors from the project team and 10 collaborating centers.

It includes sections on project philosophy, pedagogy and technology; interaction analysis; methodology; software design; interaction representations; and theory.

This is a follow-up to Stahl, G. (2006) "Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge", MIT Press, 510 pages—carrying out the kinds of development, interventions, analysis and theory building proposed there.

You can download the book’s table of contents from http://GerryStahl.net/vmt/book/svmttoc.pdf or a flyer with order form from http://GerryStahl.net/vmt/book/svmtflyer.pdf.

The book is available in hardback and ebook (including as individual chapters) from Springer Press (http://www.springer.com/education/learning+%26+instruction/book/978-1-4419-0227-6) with a 25% discount for ISLS members, or order from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Studying-Virtual-Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning/dp/1441902279) to save shipping and tax.

As it enters its fifth year of publication, ijCSCL has learned that it has been selected for coverage in Thomson Reuters products and services (formerly ISI). Beginning with V. 3 (1) 2008, ijCSCL will be indexed and abstracted in the Web of Science under the following categories:
• Social Sciences Citation Index®/Social Scisearch®
• Journal Citation Reports/ Social Sciences Edition
• Current Contents®/Social and Behavioral Sciences
Since the journal was accepted starting with 2008 the first Impact Factor will be calculated for 2010, which will be published in June 2011.

This is the most prestigious form of indexing for academic journals. Universities and other institutions in many countries consider journals indexed by ISI to be top-rank publications in matters of tenure and promotion. It is rare for new journals to be accepted for indexing so quickly. ijCSCL has been considered the logical place to publish major contributions to the field of CSCL ever since it was founded by the CSCL community in 2006. However, now, the decision by ISI should mean that scholars working in the broader field will—even more than in the past—consider ijCSCL to be a premier publication venue.

ISI’s announcement is not only a tribute to the Editorial Board and many other reviewers who have worked hard to guide authors to meet high standards of academic publication. It is also due to the authors who took the risk to publish in a new journal and the readers who have subscribed through ISLS and supported the journal.

More than anything else, the journal’s increased stature is a clear and direct reflection of the maturing of the field of CSCL. The history of the field can be traced to a workshop in Maratea, Italy, in 1989. The establishment of a regular biannual CSCL conference in 1995 defined a persistent research community. With the 2001 conference in Maastricht and the 2005 conference in Taipei, as well as the founding of ISLS as a supporting institution, the community became self-consciously international and permanent. The Springer CSCL book series and the Springer ijCSCL journal provide crucial publication outlets specifically founded for this field.