I think an interesting topic that combines both our class topics of cultures of science/knowledge production and cultures of technology/virtual worlds is how have virtual communities affected the ways scientists produce knowledge. Considering that academics were among the first users of the internet, this is not a particularly new thing. I think if we look around we will find that cultures of knowledge production have increasingly moved online. Many subjects have rich and active online communities devoted to them. Many scientists comment about their own research, related research, and intersections of science, technology, policy, education, society, and culture in real time on personal blogs. We find things like wikis and databases for all sorts of data such as genomic and cosmological data (also indicative of technology changes that allow us to produce and computationally analyze exponentially increasing amounts of data). Sites like arxiv have in some ways altered norms of publication. In an increasingly inter-disciplinary world, virtual technologies as a tool seems to be greatly facilitating collaborative efforts.
And we have even crowdsourced gamers to solve protein-folding problems. Foldit is a protein-folding puzzle game that has crowdsourced the power of human intuition and problem solving to solve actual research problems in protein-folding.
In 2011, players of Foldit helped to decipher the crystal structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) retroviral protease, an AIDS-causing monkey virus. While the puzzle was available to play for a period of three weeks, players produced an accurate 3D model of the enzyme in just ten days. The problem of how to configure the structure of the enzyme had stumped scientists for 15 years.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit
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