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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

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.

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

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.

Over time, this collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of our enterprises and the attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise. It makes sense, therefore to call these kinds of communities communities of practice. (Wenger 1998: 45)

The characteristics of communities of practice According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other groups and communities: The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a club of friends or a network of connections between people. 'It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people' (op. cit.). The community. 'In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other' (op. cit.). The practice. 'Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction' (op. cit.).

The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community.

The interactions involved, and the ability to undertake larger or more complex activities and projects though cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate relationship and trust

Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation.

It not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning involves participation in a community of practice. And that participation 'refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities' (Wenger 1999: 4).

Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery. The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be less key to the community than others.

Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts significantly on the process.

What is more, and in contrast with learning as internalization, ‘learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 49). The focus is on the ways in which learning is ‘an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations’ (ibid.: 50). In other words, this is a relational view of the person and learning (see the discussion of selfhood).

'the purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation'. This orientation has the definite advantage of drawing attention to the need to understand knowledge and learning in context. However, situated learning depends on two claims: It makes no sense to talk of knowledge that is decontextualized, abstract or general. New knowledge and learning are properly conceived as being located in communities of practice (Tennant 1997: 77).

There is a risk, as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger acknowledge, of romanticizing communities of practice.

'In their eagerness to debunk testing, formal education and formal accreditation, they do not analyse how their omission [of a range of questions and issues] affects power relations, access, public knowledge and public accountability' (Tennant 1997: 79).

Perhaps the most helpful of these explorations is that of Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues (2001). They examine the work of an innovative school in Salt Lake City and how teachers, students and parents were able to work together to develop an approach to schooling based around the principle that learning 'occurs through interested participation with other learners'.

Learning is in the relationships between people. As McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17) puts it: Learning traditionally gets measured as on the assumption that it is a possession of individuals that can be found inside their heads… [Here] learning is in the relationships between people. Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is not learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.

One of the implications for schools, as Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues suggest is that they must prioritize 'instruction that builds on children's interests in a collaborative way'. Such schools need also to be places where 'learning activities are planned by children as well as adults, and where parents and teachers not only foster children's learning but also learn from their own involvement with children' (2001: 3). Their example in this area have particular force as they are derived from actual school practice.

Connecticut Education Association argues that the pervasiveness of small mobile phones that can record videos easily uploaded to the Internet is reason to update the law to specifically limit their use.

"What we're trying to do is address the problem head-on," Mark Waxenberg, the CEA's government relations director, said this week.

A Norwalk High School math teacher was suspended with pay in 2006 after a cellphone video posted on the Internet showed him calling a student a homophobic slur.

courts in the country have generally limited teachers' privacy rights in the classroom

No teachers spoke when the bill was aired at a public hearing Monday. And the lone piece of written testimony comes from Ray Rossomando, a CEA employee, who said that "surreptitious video-recordings of teachers has been an increasing concern" and cited the example of a Naugatuck Valley teacher who was recorded while instructing class this year. The clip was posted on YouTube.

People have to take the course to see the dance, he tells them.

So the clip is "a little upsetting," Smoker said, "because I do teach mostly seniors, and they know what the policy is. To do a sneaky video like this was out of line."

Still, Smoker was worried that the video would be taken out of context, and he called it a "rude awakening." He contacted the student, who has since graduated, to ask that it be taken down.

Global Voices, though headquartered at Harvard Law School, is a co-operative effort of contributors from every continent and dozens of countries.

1) Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world 2) Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves 3) Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution

So, to answer your question, the reason you notice the strange mix of reactions to wikis is due to the quite varied ways in which wikis can be employed in educational settings. At the far end of the risk continuum they might be used in place of expert knowledge. More safely, they can simply accumulate knowledge and information resources for a class. As my colleagues and I found in our first semester teaching with wikis, when interesting online resources are found, students will often say, “put it in the wiki” so it can be forever shared. And that is not a bad way to start to use them. Instructors can dip their toes into the wonderful world of wikis and remain in shallow waters testing them out before they get in too deep. Later, they might try Wikibooks or perhaps creating and editing Wikipedia pages.

We will see a lengthening of higher education during the coming decades of about 1 year for each 10. By the end of this century, it will be quite common to attend college until one is 30. Today only a small percent do. Open education will provide continued access to learning resources before, during, or after graduation. In turn, there will be less self-doubt about whether one can succeed. The increased knowledge needs of every citizen of this planet should calm the fears of those who predict fewer educators or institutions of higher learning will be needed. Just the opposite!

The type of instructors needed in higher education will dramatically vary from today. Many will remain in traditional instructor roles. Some will be course and program developers. Others will be online facilitators. Still others will be learning guides who help students make sense of their options. What is more interesting to me is the coming rise of the super e-mentor or e-coach. Such individuals will have a discipline expertise (e.g., theater, journalism, public health, finance, etc.) as well as human development or counseling skills. Third, they will understand the learning opportunities of the Web. They will know how to guide students in their online learning quests. Some will be needed daily, some monthly, and others perhaps just annually or biannually. They will be our learning gurus, in this, what I label, “the learning century.”Global and international education will be the buzz words of the coming decade. They already are. Student peers will increasingly be those from other institutions and regions of the world. One’s cohort groups will include many people that you will never physically meet. This will make affiliations with just one institution more difficult. More people will claim to be alums and be loyal to your institution but not to the same depth or degree as before.

Students will have more opportunities to create their own degree tracks and programs. There are no longer limits in terms of the time, place, and sequence of courses. The degrees offered will only be limited by one’s imagination. With the range of courses today, self-service learning will be the norm. It already is widely accepted in corporate training circles.