I know the word "prosumer" has been around for a while, but I just learned about it yesterday while working on an NSF grant with my colleague Nancy Ares and our new partners at RIT. We're were invited to submit a full proposal for our Virtual Community Zone project and have been working like crazy to get it finished. Jon Schull, one of the professors we are working with, used the word to capture the kind of innovative technologies we are working on and it fit so nicely with the Web 2.0 practices Michele and Colin and others have been writing about. It's always exciting to learn new things, even if they are only new to me.
Reading the literature out of my field has also been exciting. I can get so focused on literacy practices and the local Rochester context that I forget how amazing scholarship across disciplines can be. It's funny because I complain a lot that we don't read across fields enough but ended up doing it myself, even though I thought I did. Education literature can get pretty narrow. Carol Lee made this same point at AERA a few weeks ago in the Wallace lecture. She was certainly right. Who knew all this inspiring immersive technology work was going on?