The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, a MacArthur Foundation Report, is an important read for academic librarians. For the most part, the university learning experience has changed little in hundreds of years, with lecture still the predominant format and grading individualistically focused. With the advent of collaborative online tools and the resulting changes in student learning styles, the learning experience has to become more collaboratively focused. The report itself (and an upcoming full-length book) was developed though face-to-face and virtual contributions from a wide variety of scholars, including a few academic librarians.
One of the principles for the future of learning is a de-centered pedagogy. So often we shun sources like Wikipedia, but recognizing them is likely in our students' best interest:
To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of
a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are
willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without
remuneration: by definition, this is education. To miss how
much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the
foundations of learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self destructive.
Interesting! Take a look at the entire report