By Stephen Downes
April 14, 2003
Scholarly Associations and the Economic
Viability of Open Access Publishing
A nice
analysis of the economics of open access publication for
academic societies. As the author notes, the bulk of income
for these societies is derived from journal subscriptions,
so at first glance they would take a significant hit were
fees to be waived. But for many societies (probably the
majority), the cost of publishing the journal exceeds
subscription revenues, and so the publication is in general
a drain on revenue from mebers' fees. Associations would
come out ahead were they to abandon the print publication
and move, as so many have already, to a free online
publication. "With print there was reason to make readers
and libraries pay for elaborately published volumes,
prepared in specialized print shops, well-bound on good
paper, meant to stand as a permanent scholarly record of
scientific and intellectual achievement. The Internet
changes what it means to go public." By John Willinsky,
Journal of Digital Information, April, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Three Objections to Learning
Objects
This survey paper attempts to identify
some of the major causes of discord in the learning object
community. There is certainly plenty to choose from, but
the author boils it down to three major issues. the first,
familiar to anyone with access to a dictionary, is the
problem of defining what a 'learning' object is supposed to
be; this problem is only compounded by the fact that the
definitions offered are almost completely meaningless to
the people who are supposed to use them. A second, and
deeper problem, centers around the idea that learning
objects, in order to realize their potential, ought to be
pedagogically neutral, but, as the author asserts,
"specifications and applications that are truly
pedagogically neutral cannot also be pedagogically
relevant." The best (and most controversial) is saved for
last: "Learning objects and e-learning standardization bear
the imprint of the ideology and culture of the American
military-industrial complex--of ways of thinking that are
related either marginally or antithetically to the
interests and values of education generally and public
education in particular." In case you had any doubt about
this assertion, the author hammers the point home with
damning diagram depicting learning content begin shoved by
a set of gears into the compliant brain of a "warfighter."
We haven't had this discussion yet. But maybe it's time we
started: just how badly is the military investment in the
United States distorting talk about learning objects? Anmd
what damage will this do to education in general? By Norm
Friesen, Athabasca University, April 13, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
EdNA Developer's Kit
Along with
the EdNA HTML services kit, the really good bit here is the
EdNA Online XML APIs documentation, linked from this site
as an MS Word document. Included in the kit are
addresses to the major EdNA RSS news feeds (the main one
has been added to my Edu_RSS online learning headlines
aggregator). But there's a lot more, including means to
search EdNA's resource library and to harvest OAI-compliant
EdNA metadata. My major criticism, though, is that most of
the useful stuff - such as metadata harvesting - is
restricted access only, which really defeats the purpose.
EdNA has some top-notch people working for it, but the
project itself seems to have been subverted by the 'content
hoarding' faction. Too bad; they could be leading the world
otherwise. By Various Authors, EdNA, April, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
MetaMap
If you are like me, you do
not have a reliable Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) viewer
available - yes, I know that Adobe makes a plug-in, but it
has never worked for me, either for Internet
Explorer on Windows (which it hangs) or Galeon / Mozilla on
Linux (which it crashes). So anyhow, in that light, I refer
to you but work of email only something that looks like it
will be useful one day: "The MetaMap is a pedagogical tool
in the form of a subway map, the goal of which is to help
people understand metadata standards, sets, and initiatives
related to information studies... The MetaMap exists to
help gather in one place information about these metadata
initiatives, to try to show relationships among them, and
to connect them with the various players involved in their
creation and use." By James M Turner, EBSI - Université de
Montréal, April, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Ich Bin Ein Illiterati: An Interview with
Mihai Nadin
I'm thinking today that it's not so
hard to see the future, not so hard to see where we ought
to be. Yet another thinker crosses my path today saying
pretty much the same thing as is advocated in these pages:
that we need to understand how technology is creating a
post-literate world, how we need to be able to choose our
own futures, how the educational institution needs to be
dramatically reformed, how we ought as a society to form
the objective of making a basic education abvailable to
everyone for free. All this and more is in this interview
with Mihai Nadin, the author of Civilization
of Illiteracies. This future is out there, it is within our
grasp, but it's almost as though it has been, like Nadin's
book, marginalized, forced out of print. We need to abandon
our pragmatism if we are to go forward, abandon it not in
the sense that we no longer need to get things done, but
abandon it in the sense of adherence to the traditional
determinates of value. By Thom Gillespie, Technos.Net,
Summer, 2002
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Spyware — It's Lurking On Your
Machine
This article is a good description of
the problem posed by spyware, that is, software designed to
hide on your computer and to report information about your
web viewing habits back to an advertising agency. Spyware
may also try to reset your home page or to pop up ads on
your screen. A good list of anti-spyware products (with
links) is provided. By Cade Metz, PC Magazine, April 22,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Google Washes Whiter
The
Register's Andrew Orlowski continues on his tirade against
Google and against weblogs as it appears that the search
engine has washed the term 'Googlewash.' As one critic
pointed out over the weekend, though, the fact that the
Register simply titles its pages 'The Register' might have
an impact on its low rankings in Google. By Andrew
Orlowski, The Register, April 10, 2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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