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Barbara Lindsey

Dissertation Couros FINAL 06 WebVersion - 0 views

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dissertation Couros OpenSource education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 11 Apr 09
     
    PhD Dissertation - Examining the Open Movement: Possibilities and Implications for Education web2.0 dissertation opensource socialnetworks Education-Teaching
Barbara Lindsey

Academic Evolution: Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Mid... - 0 views

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OpenAccess opencontent higher ed research

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Witness, for example, the article from last week's Chronicle of Higher Education in which editors of humanities journals complained that the journal issue is now a kind of threatened species because the article is becoming a more primary unit (either compiled in collected print volumes or placed independently online). This sort of balkanizing apparently erodes the relationship among articles whose coherence is physiclly obvious within the binding of a printed issue; it sacrifices the disciplinary organization of knowledge that editors work hard to provide in their careful assembly of related works. Those are some interesting arguments, though they ignore the ways the semantic web and social filters can organize knowledge in more flexible ways than any given issue of a given journal.
  • Despite going electronic, the contemporary academic journal remains largely unmediated in the ways that popular communication now is by default. A few more pictures, perhaps, but the genres of academic publication resist all the ways in which knowledge today is now rapidly interconnected. Hyperlinks are superior to traditional scholarly citations, but even links that are cited in scholarly publications get fossilized as footnotes rather than being living links. And worst of all, academic publishing remains quarantined behind commercial barriers. In a world in which there are now four billion near-instantaneous delivery devices (mobile phones), professors are content to have their best thinking enter a distribution stream that guarantees their work will be limited to as few as several hundred potential users. At some point it will be impossible to refer to such limited distribution as publication at all. Access is everything.
  • Modern popular knowledge has been socialized through commenting and recommendation systems that academic knowledge has kept itself immune from behind its ivory curtain. And there is strong motivation for it to resist current communications. If academic publishing stays within its established genres and persists in the gateway model of peer review, it can continue to pretend to fixed and certain authority, as though knowledge is a commodity (as indeed, it is within the academic reward system).
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  • ost of the Open Access movement is taking place in terms of accommodating Scholarship 1.0. Almost all the discussion regarding Open Access takes as a given the persistence of the traditional genres of academic knowledge (especially the journal article, but also the monograph, the dissertation, the thesis, etc.), and the persistence of the single-instance, gateway model of peer review. (It is still rare to hear OA advocates speak about born-digital scholarship, teaching media, or student-generated work--all of which should be captured and maintained in such repositories, as I've argued elsewhere).
  • Journal articles are going to be versioned one day just as Wikipedia pages, collaboratively created and mediated with sound and image as never before. Tagging and linking will be as critical, as required to substantiate knowledge, as peer review and documentation conventions are now. Scholarly social networks are emerging whose value will outstrip the greatest collections of fossilized knowledge.
  • An Institutional Repository will hopefully contain all the intellectual output of a given university or discipline, permanently and openly connecting this data to all other open knowledge portals worldwide. But if such a repository is imagined simply as a collection of digitized texts--print monographs or PDF versions of articles that look and act like print, disconnected from the various media and socializing conventions of the digital knowledge paradigm--then these nerve centers for the future risk becoming monuments to the past. Enough college campuses are already going to serve that memorial function as location becomes less critical to knowledge-generating activities. Our precious databases upon which to build a bright future should not be just the "middleware" to the Second Middle Ages--what we may one day term those print-bound centuries preceding the Digital Renaissance we now enter.
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