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Barbara Lindsey

Academic Evolution: Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid - 0 views

www.academicevolution.com/...intellectual-apartheid.html

publishing2.0 academy higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid
  • I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.
  • lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.
  • I believe it is fair to label as “apartheid” any artificial social construct that privileges an elite minority to the detriment of a majority. The artificial construct doing that in the world of knowledge is the toll-access system of traditional scholarly communication.
  • Despite all the digitizing and online publishing now extant, despite the proliferation of websites and web users, despite the largely up-to-date technological infrastructure within academia, it is still the case that most of the world’s most important knowledge remains out of reach of most of the world. Keep that simple fact central in your mind as I revisit the mission statements of universities and academic presses that purport to promote scholarship for the general benefit of humankind.
  • “The mission of a university press,” said Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University in 1880, “is to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission ‘to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.'" Universities and academic publishers are ostensibly dedicated to the very opposite of keeping people and knowledge apart. And yet, they do.
  • You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?
  • Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists.
  • Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the “influence” of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; “impact factor” relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.
  • one of the great secrets of academic publishing
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think about this statement? Who knows (and perpetuates) this secret, in your opinion?
  • academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      Do you agree with this statement? If so, what does this mean for you and your academic future?
  • A university’s reward system requires its faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals serve the purpose of authenticating knowledge, but at the same time they also wall in that knowledge by making it available only to those willing to pay for it.
  • There is an assumption that if something is “published” (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available.
  • It may be “circulating” among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion).
  • Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.
  • scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals. And it's a shame that broader, open, multi-disciplinary review is considered inferior to one-time assessment by two or three experts. Can we really be sure that conventional peer-reviewed knowledge is as reliable as it pretends to be when its adherents resist transparency and the checks and balances of exposing this knowledge more broadly?
  • I call upon you to join me in a full divestment from intellectual apartheid.
  • Here's how each academic stakeholder can fight Intellectual Apartheid: Scholars: Publish your work in Open Access journals or arrange open access for publications in conventional journals. Use Creative Commons licensing (rather than signing away copyright) in order to preserve access to your own work Deposit your publications in institutional or disciplinary archives to ensure permanent open access and the broadest exposure to search engines. Refuse to peer-review manuscripts or serve in editorial capacities for any journal that does not accommodate open access. Cancel subscriptions to toll-access scholarship Wean yourself from using any research materials that an everyday person from a developing country wouldn't have full access to via the Internet
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09
       
      What do you think?
  • In training students, patrons, and faculty, teach them more about how and why to use open access resources rather than how to use expensive proprietary databases and services. Work with administrators to educate faculty about the benefits of open access publishing and rights management.
  • Administrators Create a university-wide mandate (as Harvard has done), requiring faculty to retain copyright of their scholarship and to license the non-exclusive depositing of that scholarship in the institutional archive. Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure). Require chairs and deans to educate faculty on evolving academic publishing models and to ready their conversion to using and publishing open access scholarship.
Barbara Lindsey

Top News - Jr. colleges outpace 4-year schools in tech use - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...top-news

higher ed technology integration

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Overall, U.S. colleges and universities are only half way to realizing the 21st-century campus, a new survey suggests
  • In a recent survey on technology integration in higher education, community colleges actually scored slightly higher than four-year institutions.
  • U.S. colleges and universities are only half way to fulfilling their potential for 21st-century teaching and learning, according to CDW-G's "21st-Century Campus" report. Only a third of professors said technology is fully integrated into the higher-educational experience, and although 63 percent of students said they use technology to prepare for their classes, just 24 percent said they use it during class.
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  • College faculty and IT staff agreed that a lack of technology know-how among professors is the biggest barrier to technology integration on campus. Although 85 percent of faculty members said their institutions provide some kind of technology training, 44 percent nevertheless said their biggest challenge is knowing how to use technology in their teaching.
  • But community colleges also lag in certain areas, the index suggests--including using social-networking tools to enhance faculty-student interaction and giving students access to their computer networks off campus.
Barbara Lindsey

The Alexandrine Dilemma | the human network - 0 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=101

libraries britannica mark pesce

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08 - Cached
  • People were invited to come by and sample the high-quality factual information on offer – and were encouraged to leave their own offerings. The high-quality facts encouraged visitors; some visitors would leave their own contributions, high-quality facts which would encourage more visitors, and so, in a “virtuous cycle”, Wikipedia grew as large as, then far larger than Encyclopedia Britannica.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      How does the actual quality and perception of quality of wikipedia affect its acceptance by academia?
  • It wasn’t the server crash that doomed Britannica; when the business minds at Britannica tried to crash through into profitability, that’s when they crashed into the paywall they themselves established.
  • Just a few weeks ago, the European Union launched a new website, Europeana. Europeana is a repository, a collection of cultural heritage of Europe, made freely available to everyone in the world via the Web. From Descartes to Darwin to Debussy, Europeana hopes to become the online cultural showcase of European thought.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 26 Dec 08
       
      But it appears that they and the sites they link to will not allow for unfettered use of their content. Current, restrictive copyright laws are in place, it seems.
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  • there is an almost insatiable interest in factual information made available online
  • rbitrarily restricting access to factual information simply directs the flow around the institution restricting access. Britannica could be earning over a hundred million dollars a year from advertising revenue – that’s what it is projected that Wikipedia could earn, just from banner advertisements, if it ever accepted advertising. But Britannica chose to lock itself away from its audience.
  • under no circumstances do you take yourself off the network.
  • t seems as though many of our institutions are mired in older ways of thinking, where selfishness and protecting the collection are seen as a cardinal virtues. There’s a new logic operating: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.
  • In a landmark settlement of a long-running copyright dispute with book publishers in the United States, Google agreed to pay a license fee to those publishers for their copyrights – even for books out of print. In return, the publishers are allowing Google to index, search and display all of the books they hold under copyright.
  • Each of these texts is indexed and searchable – just as with the books under copyright, but, in this case, the full text is available through Google’s book reader tool. For works under copyright but out-of-print, Google is now acting as the sales agent, translating document searches into book sales for the publishers, who may now see huge “long tail” revenues generated from their catalogues.
  • Since Google is available from every computer connected to the Internet (given that it is available on most mobile handsets, it’s available to nearly every one of the four billion mobile subscribers on the planet), this new library – at least seven million volumes – has become available everywhere. The library has become coextensive with the Internet.
  • When CD-ROM was introduced, twenty years ago, it was hailed as the “new papyrus,” capable of storing vast amounts of information in a richly hyperlinked format. As the limits of CD-ROM became apparent, the Web became the repository of the hopes of all the archivists and bibliophiles who dreamed of a new Library of Alexandria, a universal library with every text in every tongue freely available to all.
  • We have now gotten as close to that ideal as copyright law will allow;
  • For libraries, Google has established subscription-based fees for access to books covered by copyright.
  • Within another few years, every book within arm’s length of Google (and Google has many, many arms) will be scanned, indexed and accessible through books.google.com. This library can be brought to bear everywhere anyone sits down before a networked screen. This librar
  • The library has been obsolesced because it has become universal; the stacks have gone virtual, sitting behind every screen. Because the idea of the library has become so successful, so universal, it no longer means anything at all. We are all within the library.
  • The central task of the librarian – if I can be so bold as to state something categorically – is to bring order to chaos. The librarian takes a raw pile of information and makes it useful.
  • At its most visible, the book cataloging systems used in all libraries represents the librarian’s best efforts to keep an overwhelming amount of information well-managed and well-ordered.
  • Google seems to have abandoned – or ignored – library science in its own book project. I can’t tell you why this is, I can only tell you that it looks very foolish and naïve.
  • because the library is universal, library science now needs to be a universal skill set, more broadly taught than at any time previous to this. We have become a data-centric culture, and are presently drowning in data. It’s difficult enough for us to keep our collections of music and movies well organized; how can we propose to deal with collections that are a hundred thousand times larger?
Barbara Lindsey

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

twitter Mumbai tweeting

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Dec 08 - Cached
  • One tweet from "Dupree" appeared to be coming from inside one of the hotels: "Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor." A group of Mumbai-based bloggers turned their Metroblog into a news wire service, while the blog MumbaiHelp offered to help users get through to their family and friends in the city, or to get information about them, and has had a number of successes. Flickr also proved a useful source of haunting images chronicling the aftermath of the attacks. Journalist Vinukumar Ranganathan's stream of photos were published by CNN and other major broadcasters. iReport.com: Are you there? Share your photos, videos and stories A Google Map showing the key locations and buildings with links to news stories and eyewitness accounts, and CNN's iReporters flooded the site with their videos and images of the terror attacks.
  • However, as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies. For example, a rumor that the Indian government was asking tweeters to stop live updates to avoid compromising its security efforts was published and republished on the site.
  • As blogger Tim Mallon put it, "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.
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  • What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted. A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media. Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information
  • Barbara Lindsey on 03 Dec 08
     
    Neha Viswanathan, a former regional editor for Southeast Asia and a volunteer at Global Voices, told CNN, "Even before I actually heard of it on the news I saw stuff about this on Twitter.
Barbara Lindsey

Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating - 0 views

digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/ial-Bookmarking-and-Annotating

diigo del.icio.us social bookmarking Ferriter actfl09

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence
  • While these early interactions are simplistic processes that by themselves aren't enough to drive meaningful change in teaching and learning, they are essential because they provide team members with low risk opportunities to interact with one another around the topics, materials and instructional practices that should form the foundation of classroom learning experiences.
  • A tagging language is nothing more than a set of categories that all members of a group agree to use when bookmarking websites for shared projects.
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  • In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.
  • Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."
  • Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.
  • Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums
  • Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"
  • With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.
Barbara Lindsey

AFP: State Department revamps website in Web 2.0 push - 0 views

www.google.com/...M5gOLdg63Ods8tZujzJZ6X0L-7jUrA

dipnote web2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 18 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Public diplomacy is changing so rapidly because of digital media," she said. "You need the tools to communicate constantly in an increasingly interconnected world with 24/7 news feeds, constantly updated blogs, and of course, viral video."
  • "This redesigned website and the redesigned blog, DipNote, both aim to employ the practices of 21st Century statecraft; to educate, listen, learn and engage," Dowd said.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 18 Dec 09
     
    Many institutions of of higher ed would do well to consider this approach...
Barbara Lindsey

FuturistSpeaker.com - The personal blog of Futurist Thomas Frey » Blog Archi... - 0 views

www.futuristspeaker.com/...the-future-of-education

education future Learning2.0

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Architects refer to schools as a “place,” and over the years place-makers have attempted to create the ultimate classroom – a place where learning can be optimized and students can excel.
  • Using classrooms as the primary “touch point” for learning creates many problems. The person or education system that controls the classroom also controls the time when learning can take place, the students who will participate, the lighting, the sounds, the media used, the tools, the pace, the subject matter, and in many cases, the results.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
       
      Can you provide a counterargument?
  • This transition began with the introduction of comment sections at the end of online news posts. People began to voice their thoughts on whether or not a piece of news was accurate, timely, or in any way news-worthy. Many commenters added additional information.
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  • New forms of education are not achieved by putting an umbrella over our existing education systems and networking them with hopes that they will get better. And they’re not achieved by simply recording the lectures for later broadcast.
  • he notion that education can take place only in a classroom is similar to the notion that purchasing a product can only take place when you see it on a store shelf. Removing the classroom constraints to learning is similar to removing the shelf space constraints to the marketplace.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
       
      Do you think this analogy works?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Jan 10
     
    Architects refer to schools as a "place," and over the years place-makers have attempted to create the ultimate classroom - a place where learning can be optimized and students can excel.
Barbara Lindsey

Zotero - The Next-Generation Research Tool - 0 views

www.zotero.org

2.0 academic citations research free online notetaking roml5395 extension bibliography citation

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 04 Dec 09
     
    Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work - in the web browser
Barbara Lindsey

Classroom 2.0 LIVE-Resources for 12-12-09-Cell Phones as Classroom Learning T... - 0 views

gl.am/BXUpW

cellphones Kolb learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Dec 09
     
    Resources for Liz Kolb's Classroom 2.0 Live presentation on December 12, 2009.
Barbara Lindsey

Career U. - Making College 'Relevant' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...03careerism-t.html

highered curriculum relevance

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Dr. Coleman says she had an “aha” moment five years ago, when the director of admissions was describing the incoming class and noted that 10 percent — some 600 students — had started a business in high school.
  • “We believe that we do our best for students when we give them tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you anymore,” Dr. Coleman says.
  • There’s evidence, though, that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”
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  • Companies are demanding more of employees. They really want them to have a broad set of skills.”
  • But the major isn’t nearly as important as the toolbox of skills you come out with and the experiences you have.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 02 Jan 10
     
    Changing course offerings and foci in American unis over the past decade or more.
Barbara Lindsey

Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into Language & Culture Courses - bit... - 0 views

j.mp/8Xiuxa

bit.ly j.mp urlshortener stats

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Dec 09
     
    j.mp and bit.ly let you see who, where and how often your public URLs are shared.
Barbara Lindsey

Students as 'Free Agent Learners' : April 2009 : THE Journal - 0 views

www.thejournal.com/...24308_1

pewresearch digital divide survey

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 02 May 09 - No Cached
  • Among the findings: There's a trend toward students using technology to take hold of their own educational destinies and act as "free agent learners."
  • The survey this year polled more than 281,000 students, 29,000 teachers, 21,000 parents, and 3,100 administrators and involved 4,379 schools from 868 districts in all 50 states.
  • students see significant obstacles to using technology in schools. They reported that school networks block sites that they need to access, that teachers specifically limit their use of technology, and that there are "too many rules," preventing students from using their own devices, accessing their communications tools, and even limiting their use of the technologies that the school provides.
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  • students and teachers were asked which technologies they would include in the "ultimate school." More than twice as many students as teachers chose online classes; more than twice as many students as teachers chose gaming; nearly three times as many students chose Internet access; and three times as many students chose mobile devices.
Barbara Lindsey

Web 2.0 Teaching Tools: Twitter Tweets for Higher Education - 0 views

web20teach.blogspot.com/...eets-for-higher-education.html

twitter higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Apr 09
     
    Twitter for Academia
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