Normal Science and Abnormal Publishing
Dan Cohen, Weblog, June 23, 2012.

Eventually publishing in our field will turn to this model as well. "“There’s been a capitulation on the question of importance.” Exactly. Two years ago I wrote about how “scholars have uses for archives that archivists cannot anticipate,” and these new science journals flip that equation from the past into the future: aside from rare and obvious discoveries (the 1%), we can’t tell what will be important in the future, so let’s publish as much as possible (the 99%) and let the community of scholars rather than editors figure that out for themselves."

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Rhizoactivity: Toward a Post-Modern Theory of Lifelong Learning
Dae Joong Kang, Issuu, June 22, 2012.

I enjoyed this article, in spite of myself. Giorgio Bertini summarizes it as follows: "The author proposes a new concept, rhizoactivity, to navigate multiplicity of learning in a postmodern world. Anticipated benefits of employing rhizoactivity in understanding learning are discussed in terms of postmodern and lifelong learning conditions." I would quote at length from the actual article, but it's posted in a user-hostile Flash format. But the author, Dae Joong Kang, says rhizoactivity involves a series of decision-making that includes emotion, spirituality, intuition and bodily feeling as well as rationality. I think there's a point in there, but it's surrounded with a lot of unconvincing metaphors and argumentation. Exploration (which is hintend at with a rough rhizome as map analogy) is not a series of decisions, it is a series of inferences (at least, that's what my experience has been).

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