Today's networked computing and communications technologies have changed how information, knowledge, and culture are produced and exchanged. People around the world join online communities that are set up voluntarily and use their members' collaborative participation to solve problems, share interests, raise awareness, or simply establish social connections. Two online community examples with significant economic and cultural impact are the open source software movement and Wikipedia. The technological infrastructure of these peer production models uses current Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, social networking, semantic tagging, and RSS feeds. With no control exercised by property-based markets or managerial hierarchies, commons-based peer production systems contribute to and serve the public domain and public good. The body of cultural, educational, and scientific work of many online communities is made available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.
Higher education's receptiveness to these transformative trends deserves close examination. In the case of the Information Technology (IT) education community, in particular, we note that the curricular content, research questions, and professional skills the IT discipline encompasses have direct linkages with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. For that reason, IT academic programs should pioneer and lead efforts to cultivate peer production online communities. We state the case that free access and open engagement facilitated by technological infrastructures that support a peer production model benefit IT education. We advocate that these technologies be employed to strengthen IT educational programs, advance IT research, and revitalize the IT education community.
