Group items tagged

"In this post, I will argue that cutting journals out of scientific publishing to a large extent would be unconditionally a good thing, and that the only thing keeping this from happening is the absence of a "killer app"."

Shades of the Shirky Symposium Keynote? At first glance this might seem frightening to the layman, but think about it: knowledgeable, trained doctors using an additional but social source to find information that augments peer reviewed journals.

I wonder how much time doctors have to devote to research in peer reviewed journals. Maybe they get to read JAMA. When Andrew needs to look up something medical, he often starts with Wikipedia or PubMed and then digs deeper from there.

" 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind. About half (53%) get news on their tablet every day,"

Lessons for the TLT website?

I hope that lifelong access becomes the new norm. I keep hearing publishing companies talking about online textbooks with access that would be limited to a set period (a semester or six months). That's fine if you're taking a single course that you don't really care about - but I don't want students to feel that way about their learning. Courses build upon each other. Good reference materials should serve a purpose for years, not months.

I returned many of mine, but kept the foundation books that I'd need for other courses - calculus, mechanics, chemistry, etc... Many of them were used for more than one course (e.g. Math 140 and 141). I'd hate to have to buy the same book twice and then not have it afterward for other courses.

I think that's typically what these students do in the focus group, but it was all about 'having the option' to keep the book at the end of the course. Might be some sort of perception of options thing going on here. The other popular comment was "I look at computer screens all day, I definitely don't want to look at a computer screen to read fine print another 1-2 hours a day". A couple students really bashed their profs about the quality of PDFs they are putting online, meaning that profs are STILL photocopying PDFs from journals, that cut words from a column and are angled funny in the PDF. Claimed these were unreadable online and they had to print them out to 'guess' at some of the words and fill them in by hand.

I know, I know, online research methods, but darn it if this doesn't just get me all excited.

story about clicker use that vicki williams found. I'd be less inclined to think it was that big a deal (it's only one study, not a meta-analysis, etc), but it's being published in Science is huge in terms of visibility.