I have finally caved to peer pressure and set up a Twitter account, from which you can now receive blog updates if you prefer that to RSS or bookmarking. You can find my account here or by clicking the Subscribe to Twitter link on the right side of the Thoughts of a Neo-Academic homepage.
For the uninitiated, Twitter is a form of micro-blogging, which is essentially the same as blogging, except that your posts are limited to 160 characters. All Neo-Academic posts will be cross-listed there, as well as anything I run across during the day that seems interesting to a neo-academic audience.
The last week was pretty busy in terms of instructional technology news, so I thought I’d highlight some of the most interesting stories.
Virtual Reality Training Environments: The Kentucky Community & Technical College System has implemented an interactive virtual reality system, which I previously considered to be pretty far in the future considering cost. ODU has its own Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (which creates the recursive acronym CAVE), but my understanding was that these were too expensive to justify for use in the classroom. Apparently not, considering this one is a part of the curriculum in certain programs at schools in this system.
Social Networking in Elementary and High Schools: Kids want to use social networking in their curricula, and half of schools in one survey prohibit it at school, according to this report. The interesting part, however, is that these students are often talking about schoolwork on these social networks. So why not take advantage of it? I am excited about this considering one of my current research areas is the use of social networks to form automated mentoring support systems in organizations. And if you’re curious just what that means, you’ll have to come listen to me talk about it in Vancouver this October.
A School Built Around Video Gaming: In New York, a public elementary school has been created based around playing video games. It’s a little more involved than The Oregon Trail. Just remember, today’s students are tomorrow’s employees. Isn’t it imperative to design work to engage these people maximally, making the most of the technologies that they grew up with?
College Applicants Friending Admissions Officers: Social networking in the news again as college hopefuls try to add admissions officers and other key college personnel to their social networking friend lists. Over 70% of admissions officers in a recent survey indicate that it’s happened to them at least once.
The Collapse of Brick-and-Mortar Higher Education: An article in Business Week predicts the death of most brick-and-mortar higher education establishments in favor of credible, convenient online education. I agree that this is probable to occur in the distant future – but it will probably be quite distant.
Video Games and Gamers Are Becoming Researchers: While not precisely training news, this report on the use of video gaming to help investigate how Alzeheimer’s and other brain diseases function is still pretty awesome.
Publishing in academic journals is the dominant method by which research results are communicated amongst academics, and one would imagine that an institution priding itself on sharing such with the world would immediately embrace the freedom of expression that came with moving the entire enterprise online. But that hasn’t happened.
The problem lies in the traditional publishing pipeline that has supported academia for at least a century. In case you weren’t aware, this is the basic process:
- Academics are paid by their host institutions to produce and write up research
- Those write-ups are submitted to specific journals from specific publishing houses (such as Elsevier or Wiley) where the academic thinks the paper might appropriately appear
- Other, more experienced academics are paid by their own host institutions to review and critique those papers as reviewers and/or editors
- Once the paper has been accepted (a fairly complicated, multi-step process by itself), the editor academic communicates the paper’s acceptance (and in what issue it should appear and where) to the journal’s editor (the first person in this pipeline employed by the journal company)
- The publisher’s editing staff edits the piece for grammar and typos, formats it to an attractive page format, and sends a proof to the original writer
- After approval, the publisher’s editing staff prints the journals to paper and sends them to subscribers (most often libraries or similar organizations)
So as you can see, the journal company itself gets free content and really only serves as an intermediary. Contrast this with book publishing, where the author will receive royalties as long as the book is sold new. No royalties change hands for academic research in journals.
And few academics argue that this should change. Research is meant to be shared with all, and the recognition we receive (and by extension, career advancement) is the only desired personal outcome for many. Because of this, at some point, someone asked: why are publishing houses making money off of academic work? Academics produce research for no tangible profit, and then the publishers sell that research to others.
The solution now suggested? Open-access, online journals. If journals are online and free, research is available to everyone, and we’re not needlessly funding publishers. But here are the problems:
- If journals are online and free, it is true that publishers don’t turn a profit, but they also don’t have the cash flow to employ staff (such as copy editors).
- If online journals are an acceptable medium, what’s to prevent any random schmuck from publishing “research” and claiming it has been peer-reviewed?
In the quest to find a way to address these two concerns comes the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, an agreement made by Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and UC-Berkeley. This compact flips the subscription model in that these universities have agreed to pay the online journal purveyors for each article published to encourage online journals to exist as a legitimate alternative to traditional publishing.
Will it work? Research will indeed be open access under such a system, and that’s probably a good thing, but I can see many ways for such a system to be abused without tight controls. And of course, with tight controls, the compact’s purpose is undermined anyway. What is to prevent any random person from starting an online “journal” and having his friends submit “articles” and splitting the cash? It relies entirely on the integrity of every academic; if even one academic would abuse the system, there would be no way to assume any level of quality for any online journal. And based on some recent evidence, maybe that’s not the best idea.