ON EDIT: It appears I misunderstood the nature of the institute when I wrote this post. See the comments below. Sorry for the confusion.

Dr. Robin Anne Reid announced on her blog last month:

We have been informally informed (the official letter will go to our Institution) that our proposal for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a Summer Institute on Tolkien for 2009 has been approved!

You can read the entire announcement here.

15 Tolkien scholars and 25 secondary teachers will be involved in this ambitious project, the first of its kind (at least one of this scope and scale). You can watch their community here, although there is nothing to see right now.

The Internet has long been proposed as a new medium for education but we have struggled to find a way to utilize the resources available. The chief obstacle seems to be the distribution of resources. That is, too few people have the ability to deliver the content and not enough people have the ability to retrieve the content.

In a world of broadband communications, one might ask, how can distribution of resources be a problem? It turns out that there is a problem of scale and a problem of equity or balance.

The scale problem centers around the ability to disseminate information at real-time speeds. There simply are not enough online resources to provide that much (credible) education -- at least, not about J.R.R. Tolkien. It takes much longer to prepare an online lesson than it does to present it. So it will take a long time for our society to build up a sufficient reserve of online resources to meet high volume demand for knowledge.

And there is indeed a high volume of demand for knowledge where Tolkien is concerned. When the Peter Jackson movies were still in production, and had not yet been released, many otherwise obscure Web sites frothed with information-starved Tolkien fans, grasping at every little piece of news any site could scarf up, forge, or speculate about.

It was a heady time when a page that now receives 100 visitors a day would be viewed by 1,000-2,000 people a day. If you included pictures or video, you could literally watch your server crash. I stayed up until 6:00 AM in the morning with 100 other Tolkien fans to watch Peter Jackson's Internet preview in the late Spring of 2001. I wrote the first online review of the less-than-two-minute video that took me 4 hours to download and I was quoted in newspapers and magazines around the world.

So the problem of scale is still with us. There simply is not enough credibly informative information available online to satisfy people's desire to know.

The problem of equity (or balance) is more about where the resources to access online knowledge reside. At home I use a very old computer still running Windows Server 2000. It contains a Pentium III CPU with about 250 Megabytes of RAM. At work I use the latest Dell laptop with an Intel Duo Core 2 processor and, I think, 4 Gigabytes of RAM. I'm using Windows Vista and running the latest browsers.

If I make a few sacrifices I can buy myself a similar computer for home, but the problem is that I'm satisfied with the access I have both at work and at home. Being able to take the work laptop home helps, but the truth is that I'm tired of buying computers that are considered obsolete in less than 2 years.

There are still many people even here in the U.S. who are not running Windows Vista on laptops with 4 Gigs of RAM. It's too expensive to buy everyone that kind of equipment. Add to that the disparities between broadband services (DSL versus Cable versus shared T1 lines, etc.) and you'll quickly come to the realization that we cannot all tolerate the same requirements for participating in the online medium.

The people most likely to have the latest and greatest computer equipment and access (at home) are the hard core gamers. The rest of us will limp along with what we have for as long as we have because computers are not yet disposable resources. Well, powerful computers are not yet that cheap.

So sixteen years after the World Wide Web became a reality we're seeing our first esoteric online institute: and it's Tolkien-related rather than, say, devoted to the study of humingbird feather patterns. That is, it took a popular topic with a long, rich history of online involvement to produce something of this scale.

There have been online schools and institutes, Webinars, forum-based schools, and other educational projects for years. But when you bring 40 educators together to teach Tolkien and related topics online, I think that deserves some notice.

It can only get better from here.