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College, Reinvented: The Finalists Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Is the death of newspapers the end of good citizenship? MOOCs and the Future of the University Survival of the Fittest in the New Music Industry The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever How Dead Is the Book Business? Beyond Literacy and Beyond ‘Beyond Literacy’ Conservatives and the Higher Ed 'Bubble' Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, or What's Really Up With Automated Essay Scoring Our Napster is Udacity: Quality Doesn’t Beat Access University of the future: A thousand year old industry on the…
Yes, I've fallen behind a bit on my MOOC due to conferences and other general insanity, but after doing the last week this week I vow to catch up a bit retroactively and do weeks 3, 4 & 5. My weeks 1 and 2 posts are here and here. Distributed Research: new models of inquiry (Nov 12- 18) Introduction - Week Six Distributed research, or more generally, open science, reflect the next logical progression of the internet’s influence on higher education. Early 2000’s saw the development of open content. Since 2008, teaching in open online courses has gained prominence. Distributed research labs…
It seems that Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario really likes me. Two years ago, the Library kindly invited me to speak during their Open Access Week festivities. And this year the Physics Department has also very kindly invited me to be part of their Seminar Series, also to talk about Getting Your Science Online, this time during OA Week mostly by happy coincidence. It's tomorrow, Tuesday October 23, 2012 in room H313 at 12:30. Here's the abstract I've provided: Physicist and Reinventing Discovery author Michael Nielsen has said that due to the World Wide Web, “[t]he process of…
I'm at the Access Conference in Montreal this week starting today, so I'm a bit behind on the readings for the Current/Future State of Higher Education MOOC I'm participating in. I'm hoping a nice long relaxing train ride will give me the opportunity to catch up. Anyways, Week 1 was a great introduction to the issues facing higher ed and here in Week 2 Week 2: Net Pedagogies: New models for teaching and learningReadings and Resources Blended Learning Models The Blended Learning Toolkit: Improving Student Performance and Retention, Educause Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 4, December 15, 2011. A…
Well, I've done it. I've signed up for a MOOC. MOOC, of course, being Massively Open Online Courses, are all the rage in higher-ed-more-disruptingly-than-thou circles, what with their potential is greatly expand the reach of higher education beyond a campus-bound constituency. But not without criticism, of course. Coursera is a popular example of a company that's offering MOOCs but there are a bunch of them out there now. Having read so much about them over the last year or so, I thought I'd give one a try. And as a bonus, this one is about the changes happening in the higher education…
The most recent controversy to whip up the library and science blogospheres revolves around SUNY Potsdam cancelling their American Chemical Society journal package because the subscription packages on offer sucked up too high a percentage of their total budget. SUNY Potsdam Library Director Jenica Rogers wrote about the decision on her blog, garnering quite a bit of attention, including a feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature included some rather rude and derailing comments from a representative of the ACS, who later threw some gasoline on the PR fire on a chemistry…
Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations? There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope. I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…
Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…
About a month ago The Scientist published an interesting set of interviews with a set of scientists, publishers and LIS faculty on the future of scholarly publishing. They called it Whither Science Publishing? with the subtitle "As we stand on the brink of a new scientific age, how researchers should best communicate their findings and innovations is hotly debated in the publishing trenches." It's a pretty good set of questions and answers, provocative and thought provoking, with a few good shots especially from the scientist side of things. Unfortunately, I think it lacks a bit in terms of…
Imagine a scenario where suddenly over night all toll access publishing suddenly converts to Open Access. You go to bed and your average academic library spends millions of dollars on serials. You wake up, and the subscription bill is zero. Now, that doesn't mean that suddenly scholarly publishing doesn't cost anything to support. It just means that the money to support that publishing is coming from somewhere other than library budgets. I would generally assume that an entirely open access publishing ecosystem would be significantly less expensive overall than the current mixed publishing…
My colleagues and I are taking our Creative Commons/Panton Principles presentation on the road to another library conference this winter. As a result, I'm still compiling more references on the topic so I thought I share what I've found recently with all of you. Of course, suggestions for more resources are always welcome in the comments. NLM APIs (library as data incubator) Harvard Releases Big Data for Books What does one do with millions of MARC records? Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset Now Available via EBSCO Discovery Service™ from EBSCO Publishing Harvard Publicly Releases…
This is the third and hopefully final summary post on the controversy at the University of Virginia surrounding the forced resignation of President Teresa Sullivan. The previous two are here and here. Trouble With Transparency A Much Higher Education: UVA has its president back. But the fight to save our universities has only just begun. Being the innovation shield After Leadership Crisis Fueled by Distance-Ed Debate, UVa Will Put Free Classes Online Going Public the UVa Way U-Va. parent: Online learning is an oxymoron University of Virginia’s peaceful revolution grew strength online Most…
This one is a little less on the strictly amusing side and a little more on the useful and thoughtful side for a Friday Fun post, but sometimes it's worth mixing things up a bit. I've mostly not read these books myself but I am in the middle of the Christensen/Eyring book right now. And they all look very useful and interesting, if only as a springboard for disagreement and debate. A little bit of end-of-summer reading is always a good thing! Without further ado, from OnlineUniversities.com, the 10 Best Books on the Future of Higher Ed. Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money…
I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys. This interview with Mike Morgan is from April 24, 2007. ===================================== It's time for another in my occasional series of scitech publishing/…
The title of this post might be a bit misleading. I don't really think it's much of a question. Of course it's ok to get paid to promote open access. My university pays me to be a librarian. I have faculty status. I can decide what I think are the most important issues in my field. I can advocate for solutions to those issues. I have decided that one of the most important issues in my field of science librarianship is the broken scholarly communications system. I have come to the conclusion that a system of open access to the scholarly literature is much fairer and probably ultimately much…
Today is #OAMonday. It marks the launch of a petition on the Whitehouse web site to "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research." Here is the text of the petition: We petition the obama administration to: Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would…
A fantastic quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you. The source of which seems to be…
Harvard Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing: Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained "No, we can't" A proposal for the library of the future Harvard: we have a problem Harvard Library: subscriptions too costly, faculty should go open access Could Harvard Library's "untenable situation" regarding journal costs help move scholars toward open access? Saying Costly Subscriptions 'Cannot Be Sustained,' Harvard Library Committee Urges Open Access Harvard's library can't afford journal subscriptions Harvard Library to faculty: we're going broke unless you go open…
As I mentioned last week, on Tuesday, April 17 I was part of a workshop on Creative Commons our Scholarly Communications Committee put on for York library staff. My section was on open data and the Panton Principles. While not directly related to Creative Commons, we thought talking a bit about an application area for licensing in general and a specific case where CC is applied would be interesting for staff. We figured it would be the least engaging part of the workshop so I agreed to go last and use any time that was left. Rather unexpectedly, the idea of data licensing and in particular…
As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well. The Panton Principles Why does Dryad use CC0? #sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data Information mining from Springer full-text: I ask for freedom Textmining Update: Max Haussler's Questions to publishers: They have a duty to reply The…