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"Cracking Open the Scientific Process Timothy Fadek for The New York Times A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members. By THOMAS LIN Published: January 16, 2012 Recommend Twitter Linkedin comments (145) E-Mail Print Single Page Reprints Share The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others. Science Times Podcast Subscribe This week: Opening science and doing it yourself, plus the malaria medicine of Chairman Mao. Podcast: Science Times Related Wordplay Blog: Open Science, Numberplay style! (January 16, 2012) When Breakthroughs Begin at Home (January 17, 2012) RSS Feed RSS Get Science News From The New York Times » Enlarge This Image Timothy Fadek for The New York Times LIKE, FOLLOW, COLLABORATE A staff meeting at ResearchGate. The networking site, modeled after Silicon Valley startups, houses 350,000 papers. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (145) » For centuries, this is how science has operated - through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only "if you're stuck with

"Crowdsourced Book-Review Project Puts Critiques Online March 20, 2012, 6:18 pm By Nick DeSantis The traditional academic-publishing industry moves slowly, and scholarly book reviews can take a long time to get printed. So one group of students is trying to speed up the review process and make it more interactive by putting a crowdsourced book review online for anyone to critique. The reviewers are members of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory's scholars program, which is made up of undergraduates and graduate students. Their book of choice is Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White's Race After the Internet, a collection of essays published last October. Hastac scholars wrote reviews of the book's 14 chapters, and their contributions have been published on the Web for readers to evaluate and add their own takes. The project went live last week. "These are not just reviews existing on their own in a print journal," said Fiona Barnett, a doctoral candidate at Duke University who directs Hastac's scholars program. "They're active at the moment, with other students and other academics responding to them instantly." Ms. Barnett said the group split the review into chapters because each reviewer has different specialties and may not be an expert on the entire collection. Also, for many graduate students who have jobs and dissertations to worry about, "writing an entire book review is actually pretty daunting," she added. Some of the reviews are personal engagements with the text, and others are grounded in theory, Ms. Barnett said. It's not unprecedented for scholars to outsource reviews of their work to the masses-a University of California at Santa Cruz professor once put his book on an academic blog for commenters to critique while he published it through MIT Press. But this review is different, because Hastac's scholars organized the review, rather than Race After the Internet's editors. And unlike

As I talk at colleges and universities across the country about the blogging initiatives I've led at the University of Mary Washington, Baylor University, and now at Virginia Tech, my audiences consistently ask about several issues. FERPA is one. Grading is another. But the fundamental questions have to do with the nature and value of the activity itself.

"The Measuring Stick Finale: A Hawk and a Skeptic Walk Into a Bar … December 21, 2010, 12:38 pm By David Glenn As promised, this blog will expire with the calendar year (cue violins). In this last post, I've tried to distill some fundamental arguments about assessment and accountability in higher education. I've borrowed liberally from comments that readers have left here and elsewhere on The Chronicle's site. Many thanks to all of you for reading and arguing. Of course there are more than two sides to these debates. In that respect, what follows is pathetically reductive. But I've tried not to put my thumb on the scale on behalf of either of these characters. I've tried to convey the strongest cases on each side of an admittedly-crudely-drawn line. (If I've failed to do that, you should of course call me out in the comments.) The scene: Friday, 7:45 p.m. A bar on the outskirts of a moderately selective public university. The décor and the jukebox appeal to disillusioned 36-year-old faculty members and a few graduate students. The fraternities leave this place alone. Accountability Skeptic: Did you see that memo from the dean today? He's hired some consultant to teach us how to "design learning outcomes" for our students. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money. And I don't think the dean even believes in this stuff himself. I think he's just trying to keep the accreditors off his back. Accountability Hawk: Don't be so cynical. Tuition and fees here have gone up by more than 50 percent since 2000. Students are taking on miserable levels of debt to be in our classrooms. They deserve to have faculty members who are focused on their learning-and that means that we need some kind of common understandings in our departments about the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be picking up. Skeptic: Listen. I do focus on my students. I assess their learning every week. It's called grading. I get the feeling that the dea

"Ranking the Rankings August 23, 2010, 9:01 am By Richard Kahlenberg If it's back to school, it must be time for the publication of college rankings. In recent days, U.S. News & World Report released its much-discussed rankings of U.S. colleges and universities, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University declared its ranking of world universities. As my Innovations Blog colleague Richard Vedder noted recently, Forbes has its own rankings to compete with U.S. News, and Vedder (who helped Forbes come up with its methodology) argues that Forbes's is better-that is, ranks higher. My good friend Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at U.S. News, discusses the proliferation of rankings in his fascinating new book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World. Wildavsky devotes a lengthy chapter to global rankings and compares and contrasts the two main international rankings-the Shanghai rankings, which look primarily at science research (counting factors such as the number of alumni and faculty who have Nobel Prizes and citations in science journals) with those of the Times Higher Education Supplement, which heavily weights academic peer evaluations. Despite their fundamental differences, Wildavsky notes, in 2008, the top 10 in the two lists had seven overlapping institutions. My own favorite in the rankings game is The Washington Monthly, which today released the 2010 rankings of "What Can Colleges Do for the Country." While other guides "help students and parents decide how to spend their tuition dollars wisely," the Monthly says its goal is "to tell citizens and policy makers which colleges [are] spending their tax dollars wisely." The Monthly ranks colleges and universities based on whether they promote social mobility; research, and service. As I've noted elsewhere, one of the intriguing findings of the Monthly's social mobility ranking is that public universities systems where affirmative action by race has bee

"For-Profit Colleges on the Brink, Part 2 January 7, 2011, 11:27 am By Peter Wood For several years prior to 2010, it was boom times for for-profit colleges and universities. Their enrollments soared, their profitability went through the roof, and investors rushed to get in on a good thing. The market capitalization of the for-profit sector of higher education shot up to dizzying heights. Much of the growth was due to the efficient way in which for-profit colleges and universities signed up students for federally guaranteed student loans. As a whole, the sector didn't much concern itself with the academic preparation of its prospective students. Federal loan eligibility was the key to admission. Beginning in 2009, the Obama administration's Department of Education began to float ideas for increased regulation of the for-profits, but in spring 2010, it seemed to decide enough was enough and began an all-out regulatory assault on the pro-profit sector that continues to this day. The assault spilled over to Congress as well. On December 8, for example, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Tom Harkin (D) issued a scathing report, Benefiting Whom? For-Profit Education Companies and the Growth of Military Education Benefits, that portrayed the for-profit sector as ruthlessly exploiting federal programs intended to help veterans. The report, based on an undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office, turned out to be error-ridden with virtually all of the errors prejudicial to the for-profits, but that hasn't slowed the effort to rein them in. When the regulatory assault began, analysts predicted big drops in enrollment; stock prices plummeted; and some foresaw an industry that would be driven to the wall. In my last blog I summarized what happened. How much or how little should the travails of the for-profit sector of higher education matter to those of us concerned with the general future of American scholarsh

"The Measuring Stick Finale: a Hawk and a Skeptic Walk Into a Bar … December 21, 2010, 12:38 pm By David Glenn As promised, this blog will expire with the calendar year (cue violins). In this last post, I've tried to distill some fundamental arguments about assessment and accountability in higher education. I've borrowed liberally from comments that readers have left here and elsewhere on The Chronicle's site. Many thanks to all of you for reading and arguing. Of course there are more than two sides to these debates. In that respect, what follows is pathetically reductive. But I've tried not to put my thumb on the scale on behalf of either of these characters. I've tried to convey the strongest cases on each side of an admittedly-crudely-drawn line. (If I've failed to do that, you should of course call me out in the comments.) The scene: Friday, 7:45 p.m. A bar on the outskirts of a moderately selective public university. The décor and the jukebox appeal to disillusioned 36-year-old faculty members and a few graduate students. The fraternities leave this place alone. Accountability Skeptic: Did you see that memo from the dean today? He's hired some consultant to teach us how to "design learning outcomes" for our students. I can't imagine a bigger waste of time and money. And I don't think the dean even believes in this stuff himself. I think he's just trying to keep the accreditors off his back. Accountability Hawk: Don't be so cynical. Tuition and fees here have gone up by more than 50 percent since 2000. Students are taking on miserable levels of debt to be in our classrooms. They deserve to have faculty members who are focused on their learning-and that means that we need some kind of common understandings in our departments about the knowledge and skills students are supposed to be picking up."

"Gates Wikipedia University? June 10, 2011, 12:42 pm By Richard Vedder I received an e-mail from James Loynd recently, commenting favorably on an appearance I made on PBS's News Hour. Mr. Loynd asked, "What if the best professors in every department were to video tape their lectures? A student could them work his/her way towards a degree off campus. Even chat-room discussions with grad students could assist the students. Testing could be…not necessarily on campus, maybe even at your local YMCA." Of course, this is not the first time the idea has been suggested, but the question arises: Why are we not moving aggressively to do something like this? More specifically, why doesn't someone-say, the Gates Foundation-hire 100 or so stellar professors in 20 disciplines to offer perhaps 150 to 200 absolutely superb courses online, with testing administered by an outside agency (say, the ACT, SAT, or Underwriter's Laboratories)? Even paying each professor $100,000 per course and allowing for 100 percent overhead, this would cost $30- to $40-million. There would be some expenses for administration and a need to redo lectures every few years, but the whole thing is within the financial capacity of several foundations in the private sector. The upshot would be that a student taking about 32 of the courses would have the equivalent of a B.A. degree, and it could be offered to the student free (with modest per-student private or government subsidies) or at very modest cost. If someone proposed to do this, of course, there would be all sorts of objections. Some would argue you need more disciplines included, more courses, etc. And who would accredit the institution issuing the degree? Most such objections are trivial or bogus-for example, a college student does not have to be offered detailed study in every discipline in order to acquire a body of knowledge over roughly a four-year period that is the equivalent of a decent-quality bachelor's degree. Some fu

"Professors Consider Classroom Uses for Google Plus July 8, 2011, 5:43 pm By Jeff Young Google Plus LogoGoogle Plus, the social-networking platform, is so new that most Internet users are not yet able to see it-an invitation is required while the service is in its test phase. But some professors who have tried it say they already see possible uses for teaching and research if the service catches on. The new Google service, announced last week, is similar in many ways to Facebook. It provides a way to share updates, photos, and recommendations with friends and colleagues. One key difference is that Google Plus makes it easier to share information with isolated subgroups of contacts, rather than sending all updates to every online "friend." Facebook's default approach-sharing with everyone in your personal network-has created a dilemma for professors whose students want to be their online friends. Often the students inadvertently share their party pictures and other private material with their instructors on Facebook, giving some faculty members the feeling that they have crossed too far into students' personal space. Professors have also accidentally shared comments with students that they meant only for fellow instructors. Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research. "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," says Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a "circle" and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab a

"January 8, 2012 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 'Badges' Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas 1 Photo illustration by Bob McGrath for The Chronicle Enlarge Image By Jeffrey R. Young The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain-intentionally so-to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom. At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a "Great Listener" badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of "Master of Algebra" or other "Challenge Patches." Traditional colleges and universities are considering badges and other alternative credentials as well. In December the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching the free lecture materials the university has long posted as part of its OpenCourseWare project. MIT also has an arrangement with a company called OpenStudy, which runs online study groups, to give online badges to students who give consistently useful answers in discussion forums set up around the university's free course materials. But the b

"Alan Jacobs - Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at ayjay.tumblr.com. The Great Unbundling of the University By Alan Jacobs Jan 23 2012, 2:14 PM ET 14 The bundle of knowledge and certification that have long-defined higher education is coming apart, but what happens now? Felix Salmon tells the story of how Sebastian Thrum was so overwhelmed by the success of his online Introduction at Artificial Intelligence course -- 160,000 students enrolled! -- that he decided to quit teaching at Stanford and start his own online university, where he'll begin by teaching the people who sign up how to build a search engine. Well, how cool is this? There are about a thousand things I could say about this development, but let's boil it down to the essentials. For a long time now, universities have flourished by offering a bundled package of knowledge and credentialing. People attended university in order to learn stuff that they couldn't learn elsewhere -- because the experts weren't elsewhere -- and to be certified by those experts as having actually learned said stuff. The bundle has been a culturally powerful one. But now: unbundling. Clearly, many universities have come, or are coming, to the conclusion that their primary product is the credentialing, and that they can give knowledge away either as a public service or as brand consolidation (choose your interpretation according to your level of cynicism). Those 160,000 students may have learned a great deal about artificial intelligence, and the successful ones received a "statement of accomplishment ... sent via e-mail and signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig." But in announcing the course the instructors were careful to note that the "statement of accomplishment ... will not be issued by Stanford University." The big question for universities going forward is this: Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge? If a great many people learn

"With Curriculum, the Medium is the Message By Joshua Kim May 4, 2010 9:45 pm Three predictions about how changes in the curricular mediums will alter the learning process. Prediction 1: Curricular content will be consumed in shorter chunks, across more diffuse times, and in multiple places. Prediction 2: The amount of time any given individual (student) spends consuming curricular content will decrease. Prediction 3: The total amount of curricular content consumed will increase, as prior "non-students" and "student non-consumers" evolve into curricular consumers. All of these predictions of course follow Marshall McLuhan's statement that "the medium is the message," and were inspired by Monday's NYTimes story "Audiences, and Hollywood, Flock to Smartphones.""

"August 17, 2010, 06:00 PM ET Elite Institutions and Low-Income Students: A Story of Dismal Failure By Diane Auer Jones The hypocrisy in higher education is sometimes just astounding. I read Richard Kahlenberg's blog yesterday about the admirable efforts on the part of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to increase graduation rates among low income students who attend these institutions. In fact, Mr. Kahlenberg goes as far as to suggest that other universities should learn some valuable lessons from these institutions. Give me a break. Of course I applaud efforts to help those less fortunate succeed, but the idea that we should celebrate two highly selective, well-funded, elite universities that require even MORE funding to develop special programs to serve such a small, hand-picked population of students who, in the end, enjoy only slightly improved outcomes (at best), seems a bit outrageous to me. Instead, I would suggest that the stories of Wash U and UNC provide additional evidence to support what some of us have known for quite some time (and that academic researchers have concluded over and over again), which is that educating low income students requires a lot more than talented faculty and a rigorous curriculum - it requires a great deal of additional money at a time when there is precious little of that to go around."

"Apparently, there's a company that employs people in India with graduate degrees to grade papers for American professors. For twelve bucks a paper, they'll give not just a letter grade, but comments. The idea is to free up faculty to focus on instruction (or, more accurately, research), rather than grading. It also saves the university money, since outsourcing the grading allows you to run classes at much larger sizes. From the comments to the article, you'd think that this had never been done before. You'd think that professors have always done their own grading, and that the grading was a form of deep examination of each student's soul, resulting in unparalleled insight and bonding. Um, no. And I have the scantron invoice to prove it."

""Old" Habits Meet a "New" Normal By Kristin Conklin January 16, 2011 11:07 pm EST Despite a slight rise in state revenues, the 2011 budget cycle is likely to be the most difficult yet of the states' ongoing fiscal crisis. That's because budget shortfalls are epic - $60 billion in budget shortfalls this year and another $50 billion in 2012. Whereas most state revenues will rebound to peak levels by 2013, revenue recovery is not likely in nine states until 2014. The National Association of State Budget Officers' A New Funding Paradigm for Higher Education says that while a slight rise in revenues will "mitigate the funding squeeze, the environment for state higher education support might be permanently and unalterably different from the past." What an understatement. Average annual spending growth is projected to be a weak 3 to 4 percent for the next 10-20 years. How governors navigate these "new normal" budget conditions will have a profound impact on the nation's economic future. An economic recovery cannot be achieved through cuts alone. Shrinking state budgets must be refocused to grow the economy. Higher education will be front and center in any growth strategy. According to estimates from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, if the U.S. could muster the capacity to better match skills with today's jobs, unemployment would be at 6.5 percent instead of 9.6 percent. That represents millions of good-paying jobs that lead to economic growth."

"Average College Debt Rose to $24,000 in 2009 By TAMAR LEWIN Published: October 21, 2010 College seniors who graduated in 2009 had an average of $24,000 in student loan debt, up 6 percent from 2008, according to an annual report from the Project on Student Debt. Related Comment Post a Comment in The Choice Blog The increase is similar to those of the past four years, the report said, despite the recession, probably because members of the class of 2009 took out most of their debt before the economic downturn began. "This consistent growth in debt over the last few years really adds up," said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, the research and advocacy group that operates the debt project. "It's important to remember that the experts all agree that if you're going to borrow, you should take out federal loans first, because federal student loans come with far more repayment options and borrower protections than other types of loans." "

"A Curricular Innovation, Examined (Part 3) December 16, 2010 'It Should Be Fine' Perhaps all of the back-and-forth about StraighterLine - the news stories, the blog posts, the assorted incidents of backlash, the endless tug-of-war over who awards credit for what - might be boiled down to two essential questions: Are StraighterLine's courses truly more or less equivalent to the courses that many college students are already taking? And, more broadly, at what point does any educational experience - specifically, in StraighterLine's case, an introductory-level general education class - become worthy of college credit? The former question addresses the level on which Burck Smith would like for his brainchild to be evaluated; the latter is an issue that he actively seeks to avoid. In a long series of emails over the course of several weeks, as well as one 90-minute telephone interview, Smith repeatedly and expressly urged me to "make sure to compare our courses to other colleges' general education courses with whatever evaluation standards they use rather than what they say they do or wish they did." "…[E]veryone else is doing the same thing," Smith said, "but they're allowed to be accredited and approved and sort of part of the club." If one accepts Smith's terms of debate, it is difficult to argue with him. Surely accredited institutions offer plenty of courses that are not of the utmost quality. And colleges and universities do turn a profit on many large, introductory-level courses - particularly courses that are taught by low-paid temporary instructors, or broadcast online to vast numbers of students - and that profit is used, as Carey's Washington Monthly article puts it, "to pay for libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else." How colleges pay their classical Chinese poetry experts is not Smith's concern; on the contrary, he views himself as something of a consumers' adv

"Peer Review by Twitter As social media tools are increasingly used to respond to scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, many researchers are frustrated, according to an article in Nature. "Papers are increasingly being taken apart in blogs, on Twitter and on other social media within hours rather than years, and in public, rather than at small conferences or in private conversation," the article says. It goes on to quote many others who say that speedy response (even if of varying reliability) is actually a huge improvement over a system of waiting a long time for criticism of published articles."

"June 12, 2011 In Follow-Up, 'Academically Adrift' Students Show Worrisome Levels of Debt and Joblessness, Author Says By Scott Carlson Some people have been talking about a bubble in higher education. Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, doesn't quite buy it. But he did tell a room of college administrators here that higher education was going through a sea change: Once upon a time, if you took the financial risk of getting a college degree, no matter your major, you would do extremely well in life, compared to someone with only a high-school degree. Times have changed, he said. "It's not that college degrees aren't worthwhile," but the returns are diminished, he said. "After 2008, "you can't be so sure that the college credential, waving that paper in the air, is enough to give you the job that is going to pay enough that it didn't matter how many loans you took out." Mr. Arum appeared here at the Summer Seminar, a conference put on by the Lawlor Group and Hardwick-Day, two higher-education consulting firms based in the Twin Cities, to discuss the book he wrote with Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011). By now, most academics are familiar with the book and its provocative thesis: Students, the authors contend, spend a great deal of time socializing and relatively less time studying effectively. As a result, they don't seem to be learning as much as we might like to think they are, despite the high grades many have. "They might not hand out A's on college campuses like they're candy," he said, "but we hand out B's like they are candy. You've got to really work today to get something below a B." The book represents the work the researchers did in tracking through their first two years of college 2,300 students who entered 24 representative four-year institutions in the fall of 2005. "By the time the book came out, we had data not just on the first tw