Open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals. On one hand, I’m excited to announce that my article “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence” has been published in Convergence 14(1) (special issue edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). On the other hand, I’m deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it.
It is not because you aren’t interested (although many of you might not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you’ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That’s super depressing. I agreed to publish my piece at Sage for complicated reasons, but… For those outside of the academy, here’s a simplistic account of academic publishing. Alec Couros's profile. Open Thinking Wiki. Framework. Clubhouse-chapter. Sign In. Libraries for a post-literate society I. First off let me just say that I've impressed the hell out myself with the title of this post. But I just can't think of another way to describe some thoughts I've been trying to organize for a while.
Something less ostentatious will present itself eventually, I'm sure. - Doug “... the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” Steven Jobs Next time you are returning to your seat from an airplane's bathroom, do a quick scan over the shoulders of seated passengers. What are they doing? If your observations are similar to mine, well over 50% of air travelers are listening to portable music devices, playing games on handhelds, working on presentation or spreadsheet files on laptops, or watching video on small players.
Any number of recent studies are concluding that reading is declining.1 Not just any reading, but reading of novels and longer works of nonfiction. Postliteracy is impacting books themselves. 1. 2. 3. I can’t teach at Stanford again” Open online courses really mess things up. The force educators/funders/learners to question the value point of traditional education. Over the past four years, many different open online courses have been offered – some through formal universities (U of Manitoba – Stephen Downes and I, BYU – David Wiley, U of Regina – Alec Couros, Stanford – Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, U of Illinois -Ray Schroeder). I have a long running question that influences my vision of education: If we were to design education today, without the legacy baggage of the existing system, what would it look like?
I don’t have a clear answer, but I think it would look similar to open online courses: distributed, leveraging network effects, participative, peer/social pedagogy, large scale sensemaking, artifact creation and sharing, knowledge growth and domain expansion, etc. There is substance to massive open online courses (MOOCs) that goes well beyond the current buzz and hype.
Open Thinking Wiki. Writing Prompts (Collaborative Document) In the style of previous collaborations (here and here), we’ve collaboratively written a great list of writing prompts related to technology & media in teaching & learning. These were intended for the teacher candidates I teach, but I see tremendous value for anyone who is writing or thinking about the use of technology in education. Thanks again everyone for showing me that this form of collaboration really does work and for contributing great ideas to the document. I now have a great, growing resource for my students when they tell me ‘I have nothing to write about’. See the collaborative document here. Open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals. Public Knowledge Project. DOAJ -- Directory of Open Access Journals.