The world of content authoring tools (as it pertains to the world of higher education specifically) is in such tremendous flux. It is hard to distill what I know into a short essay about that topic, primarily because I don't know how all it fits together. I have only intimations of important but hidden connections.

The Scholar's Box represents one of our major attempts to synthesize our thinking about content authoring in that the Scholar's Box stands at the interstices of digital libraries, educational technology, desktop authoring tools, and social software.

Let me list a number of themes and ideas to consider:

• blogs and wikis are really promising platforms for content development

• the second-generation XML web is an important background

• "the network is the computer"

• reuse and bricolage

• pursuit of machine-actionable semantic web

• the mass creation of content and metadata is bringing into question the value of institutionally created and sanctioned formal taxonomies.

• intellectual property right issues still need to be addressed rationally

If I were in David's shoes, I'd do a bit of introduction on all these themes and then point them to the list of references I assembled so that my audience can then go off to learn more on their own.