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Yearly Archives: 2013

How luxury journals are damaging science, writes Nobel Prize winning scientist

Friday, December 13th, 2013 | Richard White | No Comments

2013 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine Randy Schekman has published an article in the Guardian outlining how he thinks journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science. He writes that he has committed his lab to avoiding these luxury journals and advocates for Open Access journals instead, calling on university committees and funding agencies not to judge papers by where they are published, since it should be the quality of the science, not the journal’s brand, that matters most.

He begins:

I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives. The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

Read the full article by the Guardian.

Coursera “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education” MOOC (6 weeks, starting 27 Jan. 2014)

Thursday, November 28th, 2013 | MARK MCGUIRE | 3 Comments

Future Next Exit (Photo by backofthenapkin CC-BY-SA)

I just signed up for a (free) Coursera MOOC called “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education” (#FutureEd).This isn’t a “normal” Coursera MOOC. The instructor, Cathy N. Davidson (Duke University) is teaching a place-based course (ISIS 640: History and Future of Higher Education) in parallel with the MOOC, and she’s inviting others to form groups (or workshops or courses) to participate in the MOOC as place-based satellite nodes.

This looks like an interesting experiment, and it draws on the experience of DOCC13, the first Distributed Open Collaborative Course, which still running (check out the FemTechNet Whitepaper). Hybrid models that mix online and place-based teaching may be more sustainable (and more pedagogically sound) than the massive MOOCs on their own (or a single, place-based course in isolation).

It would be great if a group of us from the University of Otago could do this MOOC together. We could form a discussion group around it and meet once a week (those who are able to meet). Although Coursera suggests it might take 2-4 hours per week, here is no fixed amount of time that you have to devote to this MOOC (or any of these free MOOCs — people tend to dip in when it suits them). Although we can blog, tweet and interact with the course on our own, we might get more out of the experience if we met face-to-face and discussed the relevance of the videos and readings to our specific context. We all understand the value of group work, right?

So, what do you think? If you are interested, sign up for the MOOC (it comes with a no obligation, money back guarantee). If you want to join the MOOC Group (that would be a MOOCG, but I’m sure we could come up with a better acronym), leave a comment below, or contact me directly (email: mark.mcguire@otago.ac.nz Twitter: @mark_mcguire). If not us, who? If not now, when?

Related Links

The Coursera course
History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education (27 Jan, 6 weeks)

History and Future of Higher Education
This describes the strategy for a global movement to rethink higher education.

History and Future of Higher Education (ISIS 640) (Prof Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University)
This is the online syllabus place-based course she will be teaching at Duke.

Designing Higher Education From Scratch (Google Doc)
Posted by Cathy N. Davidson November 23, 2013
Her place-based students will do this a project. MOOC participants are also encouraged to work with this template.

What If We Could Build Higher Education From Scratch? What Would It Look Like? (blog post by Cathy N. Davidson)

How To Take On the MOOCs—And the Rest of Higher Ed Too (blog post by Cathy N. Davidson, 21 Nov 2013)

Storyboarding the Future of Higher Education. (blog post by Cathy N. Davidson, 15 May 2013)

Technology, Learning and Culture

This is a HASTAC group for “The History and Future of Higher Education,” the multi-institutional collaborative project (that includes the Coursera MOOC), that was initiated by the HASTAC alliance. We will list the Otago group on this site.

Course Readings

The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. By Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg (Free download)

Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (by Cathy N. Davidson) [Paperback on Amazon]

Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies: A Guide to New Theories, Methods, and Practices for Open Peer Teaching and Learning
 Written and Edited by The 21st Century Collective (Online text)

Duke Surprise
An Innovative Course on Methods and Practice of Social Science and Literature,
Co-Taught by Dan Ariely and Cathy N. Davidson
Re-Mixed by #DukeSurprise Students as a Self-Paced Open Course (SPOC)

Hacking a Media Textbook (in a Weekend)

Tuesday, November 12th, 2013 | Richard White | No Comments

Taking inspiration from a story about Finnish mathematicians who (successfully) attempted to write an open mathematics textbook in a weekend, this weekend (16-17 Nov) a group of intrepid Otago staff are leading collaborators from a group of institutions across Australia and New Zealand in writing a Media textbook in a weekend. Partly funded by Creative Commons, the project teams will work together in a purposely constrained timeframe to create a peer-reviewed text for use at their own institutions — and of course, being openly-licensed, for re-use by others.

Senior Lecturer in Otago’s Media, Film and Communication Department Erika Pearson says that in part the project aims to fill a gap: most introductory-level media texts are expensive for students and tend to be US-centric, rather than focused on our own cultural paradigm. The process itself will be a new experience for those involved, with teams across Australasia communicating via video link-up to keep tabs on each others’ progress — a bit like the V 48 Hours Film Competition but with teams collaborating to produce a textbook at the end of the weekend. In addition to producing a book that will be made available through institutional repositories, the process itself will be documented so that those involved can repeat and build on the process in future years and for others to learn from.

Read more about the project on its own blog or check out the Creative Commons post about it and similar initiatives around the world.

No doubt Erika and her team will welcome offerings of food and drink to keep them going over the course of the weekend!

Open Access MegaJournals, Open Research Data, OA in Oz

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013 | Richard White | No Comments

Kiwi Open Access Logo

Kiwi Open Access Logo (University of Auckland, Libraries and Learning Services, CC BY)

It’s Open Access Week. Everywhere. To celebrate, Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ is hosting a series of blog posts that focus on key issues in the rapidly developing OA environment, each of which make very interesting reading for NZ researchers:

Openly licensing your teaching materials (OSCoP, 14 October at 1pm)

Wednesday, October 9th, 2013 | Richard White | No Comments

In the next Open Scholarship Open Scholarship Community of Practice, Fieke Neuman from Anatomy will be joining us to discuss the plan to share Anatomy-specific teaching resources with other institutions over the Web using Creative Commons. Please come along and join in the discussion and bring a colleague/friend!

Otago Open Scholarship Community of Practice
October 14, 1pm
Central Library Conference Room 3
Audio-conference: dial (1) 083044, enter PIN 136363 then press #

#ReclaimOpen Learning Symposium

Thursday, September 26th, 2013 | MARK MCGUIRE | No Comments

"Open" by Jessica Duensing (CC-BY-SA)

Free streaming of the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium begins at 5:00PM on Saturday 26 Sept. Pacific time (that’s 12:00 noon on Friday 27 Sept. in New Zealand) at UC Irvine, with a conversation with John Seely Brown and Amin Saberi, moderated by Anya Kamenetz. The event (and stream) continues the next day (Sat. 5:00AM-12:00PM NZ time) with Howard Rheingold and the winners of the Reclaim Open Learning Innovation Challenge, who are

transforming higher education toward connected and creative learning, open in content and access, participatory, and building on a growing range of experiments and innovations in networked learning.

These are innovative project worth hearing about from dedicated, creative people who are worth following. Speakers include Jim Groom, Martha Buris and Alan Levine, from the University of Mary Washington (USA). They are behind ds106, an online community as much as a course, that focuses on Digital Storytelling and online identity. Jonathan Worth, Matt Johnston, Shaun Hides and Jonathan Shaw (from Coventry University, UK) won for #Phonar (Photography and Narrative), which they teach to a place-based class linked via blogs, websites and social media to the world. Susanna Ferrell and Jade Ulrich (Scripps College, United States) have put together a DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course), “DOCC 2013: Dialogues on Feminism and Technology“, which looks very promising. I am less familiar with the other winning projects, but I’m sure they are all worthy of our time and attention.

These initiatives challenge the dominant MOOC narrative, which has been captured by large (mostly private, for-profit) internet startups and elite universities, and they demonstrate how we can all innovate now, where we are, in our current institutions of higher education. Check out the winners’ websites and follow the symposium on Twitter (#ReclaimOpen, @DMLResearchHub). I assume the talks will be archived after the streaming of the presentations, so check the symposium website following the event.

Glue jar: “give books to the world”

Link

Reply

Gluejar is an innovative approach to digital publishing that uses Crowdfunding to “unglue” in-copyright books for distribution under a creative commons license.

This is a model that ensures that creators are still financially rewarded for their efforts, while releasing a free, legal digital edition of their book that can be read and shared worldwide.

In Beta at:
https://unglue.it/

For more information, go to:
http://www.gluejar.com/

Open Access, Academic Publishing, Creative Commons.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 | Bill Anderson | No Comments

Following on from the meeting about MOOCs, the Open Scholarship group has got another Opening to exploit!

Matt McGregor from Creative Commons (NZ) will be at the University on August 12 and we’ve invited him along to join in a discussion about…

Open Access, Academic Publishing and Creative Commons.

Our invitation to Matt signalled that it would be good if he would speak for a short time to begin, but the focus of the session was to be on discussion amongst participants about open access, academic publishing, creative commons and international developments in the area. Howard Amos, University Librarian, will be chairing the session.

Some resources you might find useful to get you started:

http://librelloph.com/ojs/index.php/politicsandgovernance/article/view/PaG.1.2.102

http://www.sparc.arl.org/

Come along and join in the discussion.

August 12, 1pm

Central Library Conference Room 3.

2013 NZ Report into the Declaration on Open and Transparent Government

Friday, June 21st, 2013 | MARK MCGUIRE | 2 Comments

From “An Opal Dream Cave” by Jem Yoshioka CC-BY-SA (reusing Katherine Mansfield’s poem)

As the Press Release says, “Open data benefits public and economy“. The “2013 report on adoption of the Declaration on Open and Transparent Government” was released by the Honourable Chris Tremain on June 17. It documents how well government agencies in New Zealand are adapting the declaration, which encourages the release of high value public data for reuse. Twenty six (84%) of government departments now include the Declaration in their core business plan or intend to do so next year (up from 72% in 2012). The Cabinet approved the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework on 5 July 2010 to provide guidelines for agencies to follow when releasing material under a licence that enables it to be reused by others. Since that time, progress has been very good. A directory of publicly-available, non-personal New Zealand government held datasets can be found at data.govt.nz. A list of open data case studies shows the wide variety of ways in which others have made good use of data that the government has made available. These include the Wellington Interactive Map Viewer, the Tongariro Pocket Ranger and CamperMate smart phone applications, and many other innovative products and services that effectively and productively reuse data that has been collected by the New Zealand government and released under an open licence. The New Zealand Creative Commons Website also has an excellent set of case studies that describe how Creative Commons licences have been applied to a wide range of government material. One good role model is the The Ministry for Culture and Heritage, which has published a wealth of public resources online using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence. As Matthew Oliver, the manager of the Ministry’s Web team says:

The more we could get our content used, the more we justify our work. By making our content available for reuse, we show that our content is important, that there is a need.

It is worth keeping this quote in mind as we engage in the important work that we do in higher education.

 

 

Open Scholarship Community of Practice – Inaugural meeting Monday, 10 June

Friday, June 7th, 2013 | Richard White | No Comments

As previously  blogged, the Open Scholarship Community of Practice will have its first meeting on Monday 10 June. There will be audio-conference for those who can’t make it in person (see details below). The first session will focus on MOOCs – developments, challenges, opportunities.

OSCoP is a forum for anyone with an interest in openness in higher education to share experiences and ask questions about open research, open publishing, open data, open courses, open educational resources – basically put open in front of it and you can come and talk with others about it. Meetings will be every two months.

  • 10 June, 1 – 2pm, University of Otago Central Library Conference Room 3
  • Our topic will be MOOCs, developments, challenges, opportunities
  • Audio-conference: call 083044; enter PIN 136363 then press # (dial 1 before 083044 if calling from an internal line).