Stephen Downes

Interesting report (37 page PDF) from PLOS on the future of open academic publishing. There's a good summary on Scholarly Kitchen if you don't want to read the whole thing. The main finding is that "open science creates value when reuse is practical at scale," however, "these benefits depend on the infrastructure, standards, metadata, incentives, and coordination needed." Related is the idea that academic credit for participating in the various elements of the scientific research stack (and not just the publication, as is currently the case). The report defines this stack as "a publishing model that connects articles and preprints with associated research outputs - data, code, methods, and materials - into a structured, open, machine-readable record." The report also addresses the role of publishers, business model reform, and regional pathways.

Referencing an article by Abi Awomosu, Maha Bali argues that AI is not 'just a tool'. "At best, Generative AI is like a swiss knife, but you can't control which item within the swiss knife comes at you at any point in time, even with 'careful prompting'. It also has hidden elements you don't know, and you also can't control whether it gets used on you, even if you choose not to use it yourself." OK, fair enough. Not just a tool. But what, then? Maybe it's more like a 'medium-institution' where "it becomes the place where social, economic, and epistemic life happens. It sets norms. It creates gatekeeping. It arbitrates who gets to speak. It builds the archives that constitute collective memory." I think that's overstating it. Here is maybe a better analogy: working with AI is like working with an animal. It can greatly extend your capacities, but it can be capricious and act like it has a mind of its own.

This article makes the case for the prediction we read in the title, but it has more value as a takedown of the publishing industry in general. "The text, notably, is not all that relevant. Publishing is all about leverage and social status... As a leftist (i.e., someone who truly understands sociology and economics) you will be inadmissible into most institutions no matter how much you excel." There's a lot more (and I've cherrypicked the bits that apply to me) but the main message here is that "traditional publishing is not only aware of its impending cultural obsolescence, but actively planning it."

This interesting post discusses the concept of 'presence' and breaks it down into five elements: attention, connection, self-knowledge, reflection and curiosity and creativity (I don't know why the last two are joined as one item, but they are). But really, for Alexandra Mihai, presence boils down to this: "Being truly present means engaging all of our senses (and) a recognition that the classroom is a shared human space. Presence means truly seeing and hearing one another, paying attention when someone speaks, responding thoughtfully, sensing the emotional atmosphere of the room, and developing awareness of the group dynamic." Which takes us back to a fairly traditional educationalist's stance. But I have to wonder - is the classroom the best place to foster anything like 'presence' as described here? I have personally found it to be the worst environment to focus on anything, let alone all the stuff described here.

This report (46 page PDF) has two major sections: trends, which can be summarized as AI, Trump, and environment; and "signals of change", which are not trends, and includes "emerging practice", which again, are not trends. The Signals of Change section can be summarized as: AI, Trump ( recast as 'improving ROI) and environment (aka 'water'), with one notable exception, a section on 'the changing landscape of education systems', which postulates two-hour school days, inverted and flexible pedagogy, and athletics as a risk (obviously this report is very U.S.-focused). The 'emerging practices' section is the most forward looking, with sections (sometimes with examples) on administration (ie., admin+AI), learning pathways (with AI and VR), and community engagement (with AI). I get the emphasis on these three themes; they are dominating the discussion. But I wish they had looked maybe just a little beyond that limited horizon.

Sometimes people make it clear what they don't know by professing what they think needs to change. Such is the case with this Wall Street Journal opinion article which attacks the concept of peer review. Now we should be clear, peer review definitely needs reform, but not for the reasons the article proposes. The authors write, "The result is an ideologically biased literature that's presented as an expert consensus... objections to progressive orthodoxy are relegated to social-media threads, blog posts and newspaper opinion sections." This of course is complete nonsense. There is far more variety of opinion in academic journals than is ever found in the pages of this and other newspapers. And it's important that the editors' desire to squelch all dissenting opinion be resisted. Anyhow. They come out with a novel concept: "a first-of-its-kind article type called 'Peer Review.'" It's a good idea - but actual readers of academic journals know it's not exactly new. My own article was just published with two adjoining 'peer review' articles. It's a format I've seen often.