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Print: The Chronicle: 6/15/2007: The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority - 0 views

chronicle.com/...printable.cgi
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 07 - Cached
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 07
       
      Higher ed slow to respond.
  • Web 2.0 is all about responding to abundance, which is a shift of profound significance.
  • Chefs simply couldn't exist in a world of universal scarcity
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • a time when scholarship, and how we make it available, will be affected by information abundance just as powerfully as food preparation has been.
  • Scholarly communication before the Internet required the intermediation of publishers. The costliness of publishing became an invisible constraint that drove nearly all of our decisions. It became the scholar's job to be a selector and interpreter of difficult-to-find primary and secondary sources; it was the scholarly publisher's job to identify the best scholars with the best perspective and the best access to scarce resources.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 07
       
      Comments?
  • Online scholarly publishing in Web 1.0 mimicked those fundamental conceptions. The presumption was that information scarcity still ruled. Most content was closed to nonsubscribers; exceedingly high subscription costs for specialty journals were retained; libraries continued to be the primary market; and the "authoritative" version was untouched by comments from the uninitiated. Authority was measured in the same way it was in the scarcity world of paper: by number of citations to or quotations from a book or article, the quality of journals in which an article was published, the institutional affiliation of the author, etc.
  • Google
  • Google
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 07
       
      Where critical analysis comes in
  • The challenge for all those sites pertains to abundance:
  • Such systems have not been framed to confer authority, but as they devise means to deal with predators, scum, and weirdos wanting to be a "friend," they are likely to expand into "trust," or "value," or "vouching for my friend" metrics — something close to authority — in the coming years.
  • ecently some more "authoritative" editors have been given authority to override whining ax grinders.
  • In many respects Boing Boing is an old-school edited resource. It doesn't incorporate feedback or comments, but rather is a publication constructed by five editor-writers
  • As the online environment matures, most social spaces in many disciplines will have their own "boingboings."
  • They differ from current models mostly by their feasible computability in a digital environment where all elements can be weighted and measured, and where digital interconnections provide computable context.
  • In the very near future, if we're talking about a universe of hundreds of billions of documents, there will routinely be thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of documents that are very similar to any new document published on the Web. If you are writing a scholarly article about the trope of smallpox in Shakespearean drama, how do you ensure you'll be read? By competing in computability. Encourage your friends and colleagues to link to your online document. Encourage online back-and-forth with interested readers. Encourage free access to much or all of your scholarly work. Record and digitally archive all your scholarly activities. Recognize others' works via links, quotes, and other online tips of the hat. Take advantage of institutional repositories, as well as open-access publishers. The list could go on.
  • the new authority metrics, instead of relying on scholarly publishers to establish the importance of material for them.
  • They need to play a role in deciding not just what material will be made available online, but also how the public will be allowed to interact with the material. That requires a whole new mind-set.
  • cholarly publishers
  • Many of the values of scholarship are not well served yet by the Web: contemplation, abstract synthesis, construction of argument.
  • Traditional models of authority will probably hold sway in the scholarly arena for 10 to 15 years, while we work out the ways in which scholarly engagement and significance can be measured in new kinds of participatory spaces.
  • if scholarly output is locked away behind fire walls, or on hard drives, or in print only, it risks becoming invisible to the automated Web crawlers, indexers, and authority-interpreters that are being developed. Scholarly invisibility is rarely the path to scholarly authority.
  • Web 1.0,
  • garbed new business and publishing models in 20th-century clothes.
  • fundamental presumption is one of endless information abundance.
  • Flickr, YouTube
  • micromarkets
  • multiple demographics
  • Abundance leads to immediate context and fact checking, which changes the "authority market" substantially. The ability to participate in most online experiencesvia comments, votes, or ratingsis now presumed, and when it's not available, it's missed.
  • Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, by Page A, for Page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important,'"
  • It has its limits, but it also both confers and confirms authority because people tend to point to authoritative sources to bolster their own work.
  • That kind of democratization of authority is nearly unique to wikis that are group edited, since not observation, but active participation in improvement, is the authority metric.
  • user-generated authority, many of which are based on algorithmic analysis of participatory engagement. The emphasis in such models is often not on finding scarce value, but on weeding abundance
  • Authority 3.0 will probably include (the list is long, which itself is a sign of how sophisticated our new authority makers will have to be): Prestige of the publisher (if any). Prestige of peer prereviewers (if any). Prestige of commenters and other participants. Percentage of a document quoted in other documents. Raw links to the document. Valued links, in which the values of the linker and all his or her other links are also considered. Obvious attention: discussions in blogspace, comments in posts, reclarification, and continued discussion. Nature of the language in comments: positive, negative, interconnective, expanded, clarified, reinterpreted. Quality of the context: What else is on the site that holds the document, and what's its authority status? Percentage of phrases that are valued by a disciplinary community. Quality of author's institutional affiliation(s). Significance of author's other work. Amount of author's participation in other valued projects, as commenter, editor, etc. Reference network: the significance rating of all the texts the author has touched, viewed, read. Length of time a document has existed. Inclusion of a document in lists of "best of," in syllabi, indexes, and other human-selected distillations. Types of tags assigned to it, the terms used, the authority of the taggers, the authority of the tagging system.
  • Most technophile thinkers out there believe that Web 3.0 will be driven by artificial intelligences — automated computer-assisted systems that can make reasonable decisions on their own, to preselect, precluster, and prepare material based on established metrics, while also attending very closely to the user's individual actions, desires, and historic interests, and adapting to them.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 23 Sep 07
     
    When the system of scholarly communications was dependent on the physical movement of information goods, we did business in an era of information scarcity. As we become dependent on the digital movement of information goods, we find ourselves entering an era of information abundance. In the process, we are witnessing a radical shift in how we establish authority, significance, and even scholarly validity. That has major implications for, in particular, the humanities and social sciences.
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2010 Horizon Report » One Year or Less: Open Content - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...open-content HorizonReport opencontent
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The movement toward open content reflects a growing shift in the way academics in many parts of the world are conceptualizing education to a view that is more about the process of learning than the information conveyed in their courses. Information is everywhere; the challenge is to make effective use of it.
  • As customizable educational content is made increasingly available for free over the Internet, students are learning not only the material, but also skills related to finding, evaluating, interpreting, and repurposing the resources they are studying in partnership with their teachers.
  • collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content,
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • the notion of open content is to take advantage of the Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective knowledge and wisdom, and to design learning experiences that maximize the use of it.
  • The role of open content producers has evolved as well, away from the idea of authoritative repositories of content and towards the broader notion of content being both free and ubiquitous.
  • schools like Tufts University (and many others) now consider making their course materials available to the public a social responsibility.
  • Many believe that reward structures that support the sharing of work in progress, ongoing research, highly collaborative projects, and a broad view of what constitutes scholarly publication are key challenges that institutions need to solve.
  • learning to find useful resources within a given discipline, assess the quality of content available, and repurpose them in support of a learning or research objective are in and of themselves valuable skills for any emerging scholar, and many adherents of open content list that aspect among the reasons they support the use of shareable materials.
  • Open content shifts the learning equation in a number of interesting ways; the most important is that its use promotes a set of skills that are critical in maintaining currency in any discipline — the ability to find, evaluate, and put new information to use.
  • Communities of practice and learning communities have formed around open content in a great many disciplines, and provide practitioners and independent learners alike an avenue for continuing education.
  • Art History. Smarthistory, an open educational resource dedicated to the study of art, seeks to replace traditional art history textbooks with an interactive, well-organized website. Search by time period, style, or artist (http://smarthistory.org).
  • American Literature before 1860 http://enh241.wetpaint.com Students in this course, held at Mesa Community College, contribute to the open course material as part of their research. MCC also features a number of lectures on YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/user/mesacc#p/p).
  • Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/ The Open Learning Initiative offers instructor-led and self-paced courses; any instructor may teach with the materials, regardless of affiliation. In addition, the courses include student assessment and intelligent tutoring capability.
  • Connexions http://cnx.org Connexions offers small modules of information and encourages users to piece together these chunks to meet their individual needs.
  • eScholarship: University of California http://escholarship.org/about_escholarship.html eScholarship provides peer review and publishing for scholarly articles, books, and papers, using an open content model. The service also includes tools for dissemination and research.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes lectures and materials from most of its undergraduate and graduate courses online, where they are freely available for self-study.
  • Open.Michigan’s dScribe Project https://open.umich.edu/projects/oer.php The University of Michigan’s Open.Michigan initiative houses several open content projects. One, dScribe, is a student-centered approach to creating open content. Students work with faculty to select and vet resources, easing the staffing and cost burden of content creation while involving the students in developing materials for themselves and their peers.
  • Center for Social Media Publishes New Code of Best Practices in OCW http://criticalcommons.org/blog/content/center-for-social-media-publishes-new-code-of-best-practices-in-ocw (Critical Commons, 25 October 2009.) The advocacy group Critical Commons seeks to promote the use of media in open educational resources. Their Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare is a guide for content developers who want to include fair-use material in their offerings.
  • Flat World Knowledge: A Disruptive Business Model http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003790/flat-world-knowledge-a-disruptive-business-model/ (David Weir, BNET, 20 August 2009.) Flat World Knowledge is enjoying rapid growth, from 1,000 students in the spring of 2009 to 40,000 in the fall semester using their materials. The company’s business model pays a higher royalty percentage to textbook authors and charges students a great deal less than traditional publishers.
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Wikipedia Pushes for Users to Add Videos - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...22035 wikipedia video
shared by Chenwen Hong on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • For some institutions, the biggest roadblock to posting video to Web sites is the worry that the videos can be taken by other people, Mr. Moskowitz said. Because information posted on Wikipedia is free and unlicensed, someone can use a posted video for a profit-making venture. Mr. Moskowitz said the best strategy for protecting your videos is to keep the HD version of a video for your own use and post the standard-definition version to Wikipedia. Institutions could brand videos as well, although other users could crop out the institutional seal or post a new video in its place.
  • For some institutions, the biggest roadblock to posting video to Web sites is the worry that the videos can be taken by other people, Mr. Moskowitz said. Because information posted on Wikipedia is free and unlicensed, someone can use a posted video for a profit-making venture. Mr. Moskowitz said the best strategy for protecting your videos is to keep the HD version of a video for your own use and post the standard-definition version to Wikipedia. Institutions could brand videos as well, although other users could crop out the institutional seal or post a new video in its place.
  • Chenwen Hong on 25 Mar 10
     
    "For some institutions, the biggest roadblock to posting video to Web sites is the worry that the videos can be taken by other people, Mr. Moskowitz said. Because information posted on Wikipedia is free and unlicensed, someone can use a posted video for a profit-making venture. Mr. Moskowitz said the best strategy for protecting your videos is to keep the HD version of a video for your own use and post the standard-definition version to Wikipedia. Institutions could brand videos as well, although other users could crop out the institutional seal or post a new video in its place."
  • Chenwen Hong on 25 Mar 10
     
    Can Creative Commons be a good alternative to these troubling issues?
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Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions | Education | Change.org - 0 views

education.change.org/...stions_and_the_right_questions irasocol technology questions
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 May 10 - Cached
  • we have to create engagement which works educationally for more than 25% of students, precisely because we have to work against the dominant culture - "math is hard," "history is stupid," "languages are un-necessary." And we need to do that using the efficiencies of contemporary technologies.
  • So tech, in my view, increases factual knowledge. It also allows a constant check of that knowledge. Math facts may stay fairly stable, but not the nations of Europe. Biological knowledge, chemical knowledge, changes constantly. We obviously need both, but a memorizer is not a person with a trustable education. A "finder" may be.
  • the best thing we will have done for our children (and future generations) is to have fully engaged them in empowered learning, building relationships and thinking creatively - and right now technology is one of the tools that facilitates that kind of education, so we need to use it! http://www.iwasthinking.ca/2008/10/09/its-not-about-the-technology/
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  • i.e. I remember it only until I've finished the test) transforms to internalized (and useful) memorization only when the information is RELEVANT to my life! That's why kids can remember Pokemon points and Blues Clues songs yet struggle with their times tables or history dates! Yes, we need to agree on what content is foundational - AND we need to learn to teach it to (or learn it with) our children in ways that are meaningful to THEM, not just to us!
  • I used to teach in an urban alternative school where many of my students were gang members.  These students were not successful in school though they did get an education.  I am sorry to say that the majority of their education did not come from school teachers nor was it an education sanctioned by the school district.  I also through the years have been involved in many online communities of interest.  Learning occurs there all the time.  Not all members of these communities were successful in school but within these communities were successful in becoming educated about certain things.  There is high quality education occurring in many places that we don't consider school:  boy and girl scouts, workplaces, church youth groups, 4H, Little League, gangs, internet chat rooms, YouTube, blogs, libraries, family interaction, etc.  In fact, the most relevant learnin for most people happens in one of hese other places of education and not in schools. 
  • If the goal for schools is to become the most relevant and useful place for education we need to harness the rhetorical draw of the gang, the personal significance of the family, the intrinsic nature of clubs and organizations like the Scouts and 4H, the relevance and applicability of the work place, and the openness of social media.  The only way to do this is to personalize the learning experience for each student.  This means that content will be as different from person to person as is the approach to teaching that content.
  • Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.
  • Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.
  • Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency." But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.
  • We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.
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After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds - Technology - T... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...64137 virtual worlds secondlife
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • It turns out that virtual worlds are at their best when they look nothing like a traditional campus. Professors are finding that they can stage medical simulations, guide students through the inside of cell structures, or pre­sent other imaginative teaching exercises that cannot be done in a physical classroom.
  • OpenSimulator, and it is essentially a free knockoff of Second Life
  • The most ambitious attempt to build an education-friendly virtual world is a project called Open Cobalt,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • led by researchers at Duke University
  • Any college with a spare server and some staff time can use the OpenSimulator software and play God to a virtual world.
  • The main request is the ability to limit access to students in a course, which the group can do.
  • To counter these new options, Linden Lab is testing a product that would let colleges install a world on their own servers and limit access to students and professors. Case Western is among those trying it out for its virtual campus.
  • Maybe 3-D online environments are just one of those technologies that sound cool but never fully materialize, like personal jetpacks. Trying to make the World Wide Web look like the real world misses the new kinds of things the Internet can do.
  • "We don't ­really understand what we can do and what we can't do with this tool for education yet, so it's more exploratory now," said Peter J. Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University who studies virtual worlds. "We know there's something here, but we don't know what yet."
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Feb 10
     
    It turns out that virtual worlds are at their best when they look nothing like a traditional campus. Professors are finding that they can stage medical simulations, guide students through the inside of cell structures, or pre sent other imaginative teaching exercises that cannot be done in a physical classroom.
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A Fairy Tale? « Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice - 0 views

larrycuban.wordpress.com/...a-fairy-tale education reform pre-wwII cuban
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 May 10 - Cached
  • what they had learned in school did not prepare them to face the problems of life, think clearly, be creative, or fulfill their civic duties.
  • So to give high schools the freedom to try new ways of schooling in a democracy, a small band of reformers convinced the best universities to waive their admission requirements and accept graduates from high schools that designed new programs.
  • Between 1933-1941, thirty high schools in the country and over 300 universities and colleges joined the experiment sponsored by the Progressive Education Association.
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  • Called “The Eight Year Study,” each high school decided for itself what curricula, schedules, and class sizes would be. There were no college admission requirements or must-take tests. Old lesson plans were scrapped. One school sent classes into the West Virginia coal region to study unions. Science, history, art, and math were often combined in projects that students and teachers planned together.
  • A few principals blocked the experiment. Some school faculties divided into warring factions.
  • While there was much variation among the schools, there were also common elements. Many of the large public high schools (of the 30, fifteen were private) created small schools within the larger one. Principals increased the authority of teachers to design and steer the program; teachers crossed departmental boundaries and created a core curriculum (math/science and English/social studies), set aside three hours a day for teams to work with groups of students, and planned weekly units with students.
  • evaluators established 1,475 pairs of college students, each consisting of a graduate from an experimental school and one graduate of another high school matched as closely as possible as to age, sex, race, social class, and academic performance. They then compared their performance in college.
  • Evaluators found that graduates of the thirty schools earned a slightly higher grade average and more academic honors than those who attended regular high school. Furthermore, the “guinea pigs,” as they were called, were more precise in their thinking, displayed more ingenuity in meeting new situations, and demonstrated an active interest in national and world issues than their matched counterpart.
  • results showed over 70 years ago was that there was no one single best way of schooling teenagers.
  • Later generations of reformers seldom inquired or cared about this large-scale, non-federally funded experiment that showed convincingly that schools, given the freedom to experiment, could produce graduates that not only did well academically in college but, far more important, displayed an active interest in civic affairs, were resourceful in handling new situations, and could think clearly.
  • 1. When engaged teachers, administrators, and students are given the freedom to experiment and the help to do it, they will come through. 2. There is no one best way of schooling youth. 3. Students can graduate high school who are academically engaged, involved in their communities, and thoughtful problem-solvers. 4. Standards of excellence that work in schools are those that are set and done locally by adults and students—not imposed from the top-down.
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ALA | Top 25 | Best Websites for Teaching and Learning - 0 views

www.ala.org/...bestwebsitestop25.cfm 25 websites ala best
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 13 Jul 10
     
    LearnCentral among these
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Google Moderator - 0 views

www.google.com/moderator google moderator
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Aug 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 03 Aug 10
     
    Helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size.
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Online version: Open Data, Democracy and Public Sector Reform : Tim's Blog - 0 views

www.timdavies.org.uk/...cracy-and-public-sector-reform dissertation comments dynamic openaccess actfl10
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 26 Aug 10
     
    Over the weeks since I handed in my MSc Dissertation I've been trying to work out how best to share the final version. Each time I've started to edit it for release I've found more areas where I want to develop the argument further, or where I recognise that points I thought were conclusions are in fact the start of new questions. After trying out a few options, I settled on the fantastic Digress.it platform to put a copy of the report online - giving each paragraph it's own URL and space for comments and trackbacks. Hopefully this can help turn a static dissertation into something more dynamic as a tool for helping take forward thinking about the impacts of open government data. All comments, feedback, reflections and thinking aloud on the document welcome.
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SpeEdChange: What a good IEP looks like... - 0 views

speedchange.blogspot.com/...what-good-iep-looks-like.html iep student support irasocol student2.0
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Does your IEP include the student's assessment of their own strengths, needs, issues, desires? If it does not, it can not possibly be a "good IEP." The IEP is not a tool for the school's convenience. It is a plan designed to help the student become the best, most successful, most independent human that student can possibly be. And if does not begin with the student speaking for him or herself, it will fail to do that.
  • The "Individualized Education Program [Plan]," is the central "paperwork" component of American "Special Education" - and, in other forms, not uncommon in other nations. Unfortunately, it is typically (almost always) a deficit-model statement, listing all that is "wrong" with the student
  • The very idea of 'behind'-ness is what's under attack here, A. When you standardize what it means to be an educated child, you create a line in the sand that defines some kids as 'ahead' and some kids as 'behind.' As anyone with a learning disability knows, these sorts of lines are increasingly arbitrary the more you examine them. They shut you out for all manner of reason. They create a situation where those who are 'ahead' get a free bonus happy career, and those who are 'behind' get either the short stick or the sanctimony. Or both.
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  • So let me make this the number one idea behind a "good IEP": Start by describing all the things the student is good at.
  • The WATI Student Information Guides (all free downloads) ask you about student abilities in each "area" - the essential first step. But a good IEP goes beyond that. What are the student's interests? What is the best time of the day for the student? What drives this student to succeed? At what? Without this kind of listing, your IEP will fail because you will not be able to leverage student strengths to overcome the things which cause them trouble. The IEP Guidelines start with, "The child's present levels of academic and functional performance." That should be a major bit of writing, not a list of test scores.
  • What opportunities are available to non-disabled students - clubs, sports, arts, music, physical education, socializing? You cannot claim "least restrictive environment" if you deny students the right to participate in these things because they are spending mandatory "extra time" on tasks or in resource rooms, or even, doing homework.
  • If your IEP does not give the student a computer or mobile device to type with or dictate to, and thus the student can not write alongside their peers, they are "not participating" and I want you to write an explanation of that. If that student's IEP does not give them a computer or mobile device which reads to them and thus they must read a different book, or have fewer choices, or go to a separate room, they are "not participating" and I want you to write an explanation of that. If that student's IEP does not give them an appropriately sophisticated AAC device which allows them to communicate in "real time," they are "not participating" and I want you to write an explanation of that. If that student's IEP does not include technologies and strategies to be in the band or on a team or a member of a club or the ability to sit with friends during lunch, they are "not participating" and I want you to write an explanation of that.
  • And remember, "technology" is everything. The chair, the desk, the lighting, and the school itself. And technological solutions can not be restricted by other "educational" policies - such as a "cellphone ban" or a prohibition against iPods or mp3 players.
  • Students need to learn to use their solutions every day, and they need to use those solutions to demonstrate their capabilities.
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