PlanetWinK » Scholarly

Scholarly (68 unread)

Hayrick's Blog Explorations

Read free journal content in the Education Reading Room of Springer

Posted: March 18th, 2011, 2:24pm EDT by rickdude

Read free journal content in the Education Reading Room of Springer. SpringerLink offers free access to a small subset of its education journals, changing the selection every 2 months. The present selection includes Instructional Science, Volume 36, Numbers 5-6 of which are a special issue on constructivist learning environments. Worth checking out if you don’t already have free access through a large university’s library.
APA 6th edition

Posted: March 18th, 2011, 2:23pm EDT by rickdude

I bought a copy of the APA Style Guide, 6th edition soon after it came out. According to this petition, it is riddled with errors, and everyone should get a corrected copy free of charge.

This makes sense if the book does indeed have so many errors. However, the petition doesn’t mention what the errors are; nor does it link to a blog post or similar where the errors are detailed.

Update: Here is an errata PDF produced by the APA. And here is the APA Style Blog, which I never knew existed. An Inside Higher Ed article has more details on the situation.
Cambridge Journals

Posted: March 18th, 2011, 2:20pm EDT by rickdude

MORE ON THE EFFECTS OF EXPLICIT INFORMATION IN INSTRUCTED SLA
Nicholas Henry,Hillah Culman and Bill VanPatten (2009).
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Volume 31, Issue 04, December 2009 pp 559-575
[journals.cambridge.org]
On the difficulties of hacking the academy

Posted: May 22nd, 2010, 5:48pm EDT by rickdude

Jason Baird Jackson has a nice essay (1) on how to “get out of the business”. The business to which he refers is that of “freely giv[ing] my labor to large multinational corporations whose interests align with their shareholders but that are antagonistic to my own”, by submitting articles to journals published by large for-profit concerns such as Reed Elsevier, or doing similar things like editing a book, acting as a peer-reviewer, and so on. He points out that we each have the choice not to submit our work to these publishers and to turn down invitations to editorial positions and the like.

I share Jason’s view that such choices by a fairly large number of academics have already changed the academic publishing landscape and stand to change it further moving forward. However, the vast majority of academics continue to use the “traditional” venues for scholarly communication, and appear to be tacitly resistant to the suggestions, and it seems to me that a truly radical change looks unlikely at the present time. And to be honest I suppose I would have to include myself within “the vast majority of academics”. Jason’s suggestions are just that: suggestions to individuals, who will make their own decisions about whether to follow them. I’d like to explore some of the reasons why most of us choose not to, and also some ways in which that situation might change.

The overriding reason is a fairly obvious one: Though our long-term interests may well be served by “getting out of the business”, tenure or promotion may well depend on getting published in the most prestigious venues, and on serving as editors or peer-reviewers for them. If and when a radical shift does take place, not-for-profit venues may well become the most prestigious venues, but, until that happens, most individuals are better served by taking the traditional route, submitting to a publication that in all likelihood is earning profits for Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, or similar—a fact that of course makes such a shift, still less a shift to “born digital scholarly forms” less likely.

However, I think there are a few reasons for optimism and list them below.

1. NOTHING TO LOSE. The first possibility for change lies in faculty who are already at the top of their game, with tenure and full professorships. Once failure to publish in whatever venues are most prestigious ceases to have financial implications, the possibility of professors making the same choices as Jason increases. And as renowned scholars’ work is seen in alternative venues, those venues may start taking on an air of greater respectability, starting a snowball effect. Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons why this doesn’t seem to happen as often as we might like.

An individual senior scholar retiring from “the business” usually just means that someone up-and-coming gets the opportunity to take her place. Academia is full of people whose chief weakness (and charm) is that they don’t really calculate the value of time; we’re willing to spend countless hours on tasks that we think will further our career, or contribute to our own prestige, or simply lead to progress in our field, or even that just seem cool or interesting. Further, the senior scholar, who we are saying has nothing tangible to lose, still has a lot of intangibles at stake. What if people start saying that she is “past it”, assuming that the bright young thing editing the best journal is there simply because he’s better.

The large profits of companies like Reed Elsevier also mean that, if they feel they really need a specific scholar to edit their journal, they can afford to make an exception to their policy and pay the scholar whatever is necessary—which is likely to be nothing like what the work is worth in any commercial sense.

The whole situation is exacerbated by the prevailing ideology that business is good and institutions that don’t operate on mainly commercial lines are naive or misguided and need to import business practices—highly ironic when you consider that the subject of Jason’s essay was unpaid labor. At least until recently, most universities would rather pay vast sums of money to a company like Blackboard to provide a virtual learning environment to students than to pay a much smaller sum to a smaller company to administer and service the installation of an open source system such as Moodle. A pedagogical innovation introduced at no cost or funded from an individual professor’s research budget may receive no credit at institutional level, yet a similar innovation with inflated cost accompanied by external funding wins lots of brownie points. This again is ironic when you consider that many of these external grants have very little long-term benefit to the institution as a whole, generally having to be used for the specific project for which they were won, and thus having a mainly derivative value (showing that you are able to attract external funding).

2. NOTHING TO GAIN. The second possibility for change I would like to mention is the fact that it can be very difficult to get published in the most prestigious journals. The large for-profit publishers may well offer other relevant titles (depending on your field), but if you miss out on the big ones, you may as well go for something not for-profit. I think Japan also offers a version of the nothing-to-gain scenario, as many full-time academic positions still have quasi-tenure, and promotions still depend to a large extent on age, while the salaries of full professors are only marginally higher than those of assistant professors; thus, a scholar spending his time and energy on things that are valued officially may end up gaining very little over the scholar doing things he considers truly valuable to the academy as a whole. Another factor that I guess belongs in the “Nothing to Gain” category is the “hidden costs of publishing in a closed way“: beyond the long turnaround time is the fact that many people are unable to read prestigious journals because of the prohibitive cost.

3. THE ALLURE OF COOL. Another possibility for change lies in one of the very qualities that make academics easy to exploit: the attraction to things that are perceived as interesting or cool. As initiatives like Firefox and Wikipedia continue to enjoy success, and as we hear of more open access journals and similar ventures in our own or other fields, the climate may pass a threshold where the coolness of publishing in alternative venues outweighs the tangible benefits of sticking with the traditional ways. Perhaps even those of us with a lot to lose may just decide without detailed calculation of costs and benefits that open access or non-profit is where it’s at.

As I review these reasons for optimism before posting, they all look a little tenuous, but I think it’s a flurry of little things that causes big changes to take effect. I’d like to close with a concrete suggestion for those exploring alternative publishing venues: Get someone to proofread your articles!

Why is this important? To be honest, it may not be for many people, but the big publishers like to justify their use of free academic labor by pointing to the other costs of publishing, such as printing and proofreading and so on. When scholarship takes place on blogs or other alternative venues, publishers can point to a lack of “quality”, most clearly manifested in superficial problems such as spelling mistakes or grammatical errors such as garden path sentences, mismatched singulars and plurals, and so on. By taking greater care, we can start to create the impression that scholars do care about rigor, not just in the quality of the ideas expressed, but in the precision with which we express them, and that we don’t need the big publishing companies to do the work for us. The companies’ position is further weakened when we notice that quality control is becoming an outmoded concept in large sections of the publishing industry, including some academic journals published by the major companies.

The author of this essay is Richard S. Lavin

(1) Jason Baird Jackson, Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps (With Updates). October 12, 2009. http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2009/10/12/getting-yourself-out-of-the-business-in-five-easy-steps/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Commonwealth of Learning – Education for a Digital World

Posted: September 3rd, 2009, 6:28pm EDT by rickdude
I neglected to mention this when it came out, but here’s a link to Education for a Digital World, the book from Commonwealth of Learning that I was involved with, coauthoring 3 chapters and acting as a contributing editor.
- Commonwealth of Learning – Education for a Digital World
  
  tags: educational, technology, edutech, education
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. And here is my (still very short) list of edutech-related books.
DSpace

Posted: July 19th, 2009, 3:42pm EDT by rickdude

I’ve just been checking out the DSpace introductory video. It looks like a great way to make an institution’s research searchable at low cost. It’s popular worldwide, with many sites in Japan, including Kyushu University and Nagasaki University. For open access content, note that the DSpace foundation recommends that it should also be listed in the ROAR registry.

I notice that I wrote about Open Access repositories before.

Ma.gnolia: Bookmarks in WinK Core in Magnolia

YackPack in Education (screencast)

Posted: November 11th, 2008, 8:55am EST by rickla

Camtasia video on using YackPack in class

Saved By: WinK Core in Magnolia | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: chat, groups, voice, audio
YackPack - Simply Connected

Posted: November 11th, 2008, 8:54am EST by rickla

looks like a nice option for chat in class

Saved By: WinK Core in Magnolia | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: chat, groups, voice
Working online - LabSpace - OpenLearn - The Open University

Posted: November 10th, 2008, 11:02am EST by rickla

SLN Working Online

Saved By: WinK Core in Magnolia | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: online courses, online writing
Social Media Classroom

Posted: November 10th, 2008, 2:14pm EST by rickla

Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” We invite you to build on what we’ve started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own. (See this for an explanation of who “we” are).

Saved By: WinK Core in Magnolia | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: socialsoftware, CMS, CMC, edutech
ETC-Press Launches at Carnegie Mellon University Publishing Works Under Creative Commons Licenses

Posted: August 7th, 2008, 8:57pm EDT by rickla

ETC-Press Launches at Carnegie Mellon University Publishing Works Under Creative Commons Licenses

Saved By: WinK Core in Magnolia | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: publishing, publishers
Institutional Repositories and Research Management Systems

Posted: August 7th, 2008, 8:53pm EDT by rickla

Institutional Repositories and Research Management Systems

Saved By: WinK Core in Magnolia | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: research, repositories

Hayrick's Blog Explorations

Open Access Repositories

Posted: August 7th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by rickdude

Stephen Downes links to a list of Australian Open Access repositories and asks for a similar thing for Canada, which leads to a comment pointing to a list of such repositories from all over the world. I’m sure there must be some very useful stuff hidden away in some of the repositories listed.
Wordle of WinK blogs, 2008 1st semester (July 30, 2008)

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 9:44pm EDT by rickdude

I tried out the Wordle service today, having come across a recommendation in the Edublogger. It gives a graphic display of the most frequently occurring words in any feed or chunk of text. I fed it our WinK student blogs mega-feed.I suspect that it might only be handling recent posts, as words like summer, swim, and beach figure quite prominently. That’s an argument for doing this on a monthly basis.
Plagiarism and appropriation of genres

Posted: July 30th, 2008, 8:42pm EDT by rickdude

I recently obtained Dialogue with Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning, edited by Hall, Vitanova, and Marchenkova. One of the chapters*, written by Karen Braxley, has some interesting things to say about appropriation of genres, and its relationship to plagiarism. The students whose experiences and views form the main subject of the study generally felt that the literature review was the most difficult part of a research paper to write, and one stated that she felt the expectations of the genre caused her to feel as if she were “stealing” others’ ideas:

“Put all the quotes together but not quote, just put in my own words. I feel like I’m creating something I’m not supposed to. I feel like I’m stealing. You know, people say, you have to use your own words, but I have to use someone else’s academic writing pattern anyway, so it’s not really my own words—I’m just copying people anyway.” (p.26)

*Mastering Academic English: International Graduate Students’ Use of Dialogue and Speech Genres to Meet the Writing Demands of Graduate School, pp. 11-32