Funding science: When bureaucrats get out of control
Daniel Lemire, September 2, 2013

I remember once meeting with some directors at Industry Canada to recommend among other things a common format for the submission of data to government and other entities. The format I was recommending was a version of RSS, which individuals could create in their own way and maintain on their own website, and which could be accessed by any government or private agency contemplating funding, support, hiring or whatever. I also recommended a similar mechanism be employed for businesses and organizations interacting with the government. What we should absolutely not do, I argued, would be to create a submission-form based processed, because it would be cumbersome, very difficult to design efficiently, and limited in use to whomever received the form data.

Needless to say, my advice was not followed, and today I am reading about a forms-based submission process researchers in Canada must follow in order to qualify for grants and support. The form process (it is much more than a single form; it appears to hundreds of forms) can be accessed here. The protest site, currently a petition form Canadian academics, can be viewed here. Daniel Lemire explains, "it is a monster requiring between 2 days to 2 weeks of work depending on how senior you are." I'm not sure that I would ever finish the process of completing the form. The data collectors need to do better than this.

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Initial Reflections on The Hyperlinked Library MOOC and the Badges I Have Acquired
Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus, September 2, 2013

Brian Kelly's post strikes at the nib of the debate (to my mind) concerning badges. On the one hand, he writes, "I have to admit that I found this rather cheesy; I felt the system was patronizing me." This after receiving badges for joining a group, accepting a friend request, and updating an avatgar. Really basic stuff. But then, he notes, "in a recent post Michael Stephens suggested that 'Happiness is unlocking a badge!' and one fellow student responded: 'I’ve always been an intrinsically motivated kinda person, but this having little nuggets to ’win’ is stepping it up a notch!'." So, which perspective prevails? You can't say "both".

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Dark Patterns: inside the interfaces designed to trick you
Harry Brignull, The Verge, September 2, 2013

I do a lot of work on the web and I'm familiar with a lot of the sneaky tactics described in this article (and they are a big part of the reason why I am so dogmatic about thinks like openness and licensing, and so sceptical about (the oxymoronic) concept of corporate ethics). What these patterns have in common is that they are ways of tricking you into giving information, agreeing to spam, paying money, or accepting open-ended contracts. Even so, the Experts Exchange scan offered a twist I hadn't found before - the answer is there, you have to scroll down past the image saying the answer is available only to subscribers. Next time (because IO this this a lot) I'll scroll down. Another nice find from Doug Belshaw (working for Mozilla looks good on him).

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Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments
Phil Nicols, The Atlantic, September 2, 2013

I read somewhre last week or so about a classroom where it's OK to bring in a graphing calculator, but not OK to use the very same function on an iPad. The difference, of course, is the availability of internet on the latter device. But there was also commentary about the cost of the expensive calculator versus the inexpensive app. So is this rule the result of a marketing rpogram? Well I wouldn't have thought so, but then here is this article in the Atlantic touting the benefits of the calculator over the app. Phil Nicols writes, "I've now begun to see Texas Instruments graphing calculators as unique among educational technologies in that they enable learning that is couched in discovery more than formal teaching." Actually, any device that allows you to program, and not just consume, enables discovery learning (as I learned using a TI-99 in the 1980s). But many programming applications for iPad are available, including Hopscotch. So I wonder whether this article is just bad reporting or good marketing for TI.

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Taught by Finland
Tim Walker, Taught by Finland, September 2, 2013

Doug Belshaw linked to this blog by an American teacher from Boston teaching in Finland for the first time. The content is really interesting, but the writing style is abrasive, consisting entirely of short one (or maybe two) sentence paragraphs. It's a style of writing I've seen more and more from American edubloggers (you know who you are). The one-sentence paragraph is a type of emphasis, and these blogs read like everything is emphasized. Why now just write in all-caps and be done with it? Perhaps after a year of learning from Finnish students Tim Walker will write in clear well-structured paragraphs. In the meantime, if you can slog through the writing, I recommend the blog for the content.

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A troubling result from publishing open access articles with CC-BY
September 1, 2013

I've written about this quite a bit in the past, so I won't belabout the point, but it is worth linking to this post to show that the things I say will happen with CC-by licensing (as opposed to CC by-NC-SA) actually happen. In particular, we read about UBC professor Rosie Redfield, who recently blogged about the issue, and in particular, posted the results of a survey she did of researchers. People who support CC-by say "oh well, the article is always available for free somewhere." Well, not necessarily, and as Christina Hendricks points out, they might actually be legally required to lobby against the provision of free versions online.

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LinkedIn launches LinkedIn for Education
August 30, 2013

GigaOm reports: "LinkedIn has launched a new aspect of its service, this one centered on education. The central idea is to create University Pages for colleges and universities, intended to attract prospective students, existing students, alumni, and employers and getting them all to network through LinkedIn." See also Jimmy Daly.

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