Quality and openness
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, October 15, 2013

I've seen this is a few places now: "John Bohannon of Harvard University wrote a deliberately flawed biology article using a fictitious name and non-existent institution and submitted it to over 300 open access publications. It was accepted by about half of them." Every once in a while someone does this, and not only to open access publications. Who can forget SCIgen, which in 2005 managed to get a number of gibberish papers accepted in scientific jornals and conferences? Last year, the similar MathGen application got a paper accepted in a mathematics journal. There's also the Alan Sokal hoax in which a physics professor published patent nonsense in a prominent social theory journal. And then there is the Voynich manuscript, unearthed in 1912. Or the deeply flawed paper that Michael Eisen didn't submit as a hoax to Science. So the lesson here is not that open access journals are flawed - it is that peer review is flawed. But we knew that already.

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Announcing e-Literate TV
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, October 15, 2013

Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein "announce a new initiative we’re calling e-Literate TV, in collaboration with a company called In the Telling. Using some of the lessons that we’re learning from the MOOC community about differential engagement, our goal is create multiple entry points into a conversation about the issues." From my few forays into video I can say that it takes a lot of time and is difficult to get right. So I wish them the best. I assume they'll learn not to shoot in front of backlit windows in episode 2.

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Ghost – Bringing Blogging Back
Clarence Fisher, Remote Access, October 15, 2013

"Today," writes Clarence Fisher, "brings us Ghost." Actually, 'today' was October 14, the launch date, but close enough. "Ghost is an open source alternative to WordPress which focuses simply on blogging. As their introductory video says, WordPress has grown into a piece of software with huge capabilities, blogging being only one of them. Ghost, on the other hand, promises to simply be blogging software that is simple and easy to use." There is some interesting work behind the scenes with Ghost - from the Kickstarter project launch to the installers to the Rackspace implementation. "Right now to use Ghost you'll have to download it and install it yourself - but in the coming weeks we'll be rolling out our hosted service."

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Workplace Learning: Adding, Embedding & Extracting
Charles Jennings, 70-20-10 Forum, October 15, 2013

Good summary by Charles Jennings of the three major elements of workplace learning: adding, embedding and extracting. As Jennimngs says, "When faced with the opportunities to help with workplace learning, many HR, talent development, and learning professionals react by simply adding learning to the workflow." But while this has its place, the more important activirties are the other two. First, "embedding learning in work offers a wider range of opportunities for on-going development as part of the workflow," he writes. But the most powerful is extraction (this is what I do when I create this newsletter). "Learning is not only embedded in the workflow, but new learning is continually extracted from experiences and exchanges with colleagues, customers and the entire value chain."

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