Afterhours

Where does learning occur?

An interesting article in Change Magazine: In Defense of Lecturing, by Mary Burgan. Lecturing is difficult to defend nowadays, in the face of modern educational theories that decry “the sage on the stage” in favour of “the guide on the side”. I’ve written about this before – as the author of this article points out:

Save university presses?

The Chronicle: 10/3/2003: Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing

The bottom line is that scholarly publishing isn't financially feasible as a business model --never was, never was intended to be, and should not be. If scholarship paid, we wouldn't need university presses.

Without a subsidy of one kind or another, scholarly publishing cannot exist. Right now, universities are responsible for finding a way to support scholarly publishing -- but most universities are in perilous financial situations, too. That is the crisis. The most basic aspect of scholarship -- the foundation of our profession -- is at risk under the current model of who pays to publish the books and articles we write.

There follow ten suggestions for fixing what doesn't work - mostly along the lines of how to extract subsidies and other support from various segments of the academic community, including students: "6. Stamp out course packs!". What's missing: a critical analysis of the value of university presses in the first place - we have just the author's statement of belief: "The mainstay of academic publishing is the university press."

I'm neither particularly pro or con university presses, but this article smacks too much of "the existence of what's important to me is threatened, so I'm trying to shore it up" rather than providing any real justification for doing so.

The author (Cathy N. Davidson) will discuss this issue online on Oct. 2, for anyone interested.

Addendum: Five minutes after I posted this, I read several other posts on the same story, all more erudite than mine, of course. (See, e.g., OLDaily.) The bonus (via OLDaily) is a reference to a new blog on academia that looks well worth reading: Invisible Adjunct.

From the margins of academe: Occasional thoughts on higher education, campus politics, the use and abuse of adjunct faculty, the academic "job market," and various other absurdities. By an invisible adjunct assistant professor of history.

Prototyping as research

Stephen Downes comments aptly on an article by Etienne Joly entitled Various ideas about scientific publishing. Joly's abstract begins:

For the benefit of the scientific community, completely open access to all primary scientific papers is clearly the only way to go. But to ensure of the quality of the papers published, it is hard to conceive that scientific publishing could be carried out by others than money-earning professionals. The only viable solution is therefore for the publishing charges to be levied on the authors. ...

He then appears to be looking for a way to justify these costs, and settles on an elaborate peer review system with differential pay for referees, graded ratings and so on. Stephen's comment:

... the authors cling to a mode of publication where articles are screened and refereed. That's still too slow. Why would we wait for formal approval before publishing a paper online? Put it up first, and if it receives enough critical acclaim, then clean it up with an edit and place it into a 'journal of record'.

Exactly - I'd even elaborate. The ability to self-publish online makes possible a new paradigm of academic research I wrote about a while back: prototyping. Instead of submitting 'final' polished results for public scrutiny, researchers distribute incomplete work online and revise it based on open feedback from their peers or indeed, from anyone they can interest. This is much more useful to the researcher - in edujargon, it's formative assessment rather than summative assessment.

Protyping is widely used outside academia as a way of developing innovative products without getting mired in endless specs and evaluations (see, e.g. the book Serious Play by Michael Schrage). It's also the way I'm trying to learn how to design online interactive mathematics.