Nov
2019
Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/sending-jobs-overseas/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_Institute
Caldwell’s book review of
Baldwin, Richard E. The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. not at SCSU library, available through ILL (https://mplus.mnpals.net/vufind/Record/008770850/Hold?item_id=MSU50008770850000010&id=008770850&hashKey=cff0a018a46178d4d3208ac449d86c4e#tabnav)
Globalization’s cheerleaders, from Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, made arguments from classical economics: by buying manufactured products from people overseas who made them cheaper than we did, the United States could get rich concentrating on product design, marketing, and other lucrative services. That turned out to be a mostly inaccurate description of how globalism would work in the developed world, as mainstream politicians everywhere are now discovering.
Certain skeptics, including polymath author Edward Luttwak and Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, put forward a better account. In his 1998 book Turbo-Capitalism, Luttwak gave what is still the most succinct and accurate reading of the new system’s economic consequences. “It enriches industrializing poor countries, impoverishes the semi-affluent majority in rich countries, and greatly adds to the incomes of the top 1 percent on both sides who are managing the arbitrage.”
In The Great Convergence, Richard Baldwin, an economist at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, gives us an idea why, over the past generation, globalization’s benefits have been so hard to explain and its damage so hard to diagnose.
We have had “globalization,” in the sense of far-flung trade, for centuries now.
ut around 1990, the cost of sharing information at a distance fell dramatically. Workers on complex projects no longer had to cluster in the same factory, mill town, or even country. Other factors entered in. Tariffs fell. The rise of “Global English” as a common language of business reduced the cost of moving information (albeit at an exorbitant cost in culture). “Containerization” (the use of standard-sized shipping containers across road, rail, and sea transport) made packing and shipping predictable and helped break the world’s powerful longshoremen’s unions. Active “pro-business” political reforms did the rest.
Far-flung “global value chains” replaced assembly lines. Corporations came to do some of the work of governments, because in the free-trade climate imposed by the U.S., they could play governments off against one another. Globalization is not about nations anymore. It is not about products. And the most recent elections showed that it has not been about people for a long time. No, it is about tasks.
his means a windfall for what used to be called the Third World. More than 600 million people have been pulled out of dire poverty. They can get richer by building parts of things.
The competition that globalization has created for manufacturing has driven the value-added in manufacturing down close to what we would think of as zilch. The lucrative work is in the design and the P.R.—the brainy, high-paying stuff that we still get to do.
But only a tiny fraction of people in any society is equipped to do lucrative brainwork. In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy.
One of these platitudes is that all nations gain from trade. Baldwin singles out Harvard professor and former George W. Bush Administration economic adviser Gregory Mankiw, who urged passage of the Obama Administration mega-trade deals TPP and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the grounds that America should “work in those industries in which we have an advantage compared with other nations, and we should import from abroad those goods that can be produced more cheaply there.”
That was a solid argument 200 years ago, when the British economist David Ricardo developed modern doctrines of trade. In practical terms, it is not always solid today. What has changed is the new mobility of knowledge. But knowledge is a special commodity. It can be reused. Several people can use it at the same time. It causes people to cluster in groups, and tends to grow where those groups have already clustered.
When surgeries involved opening the patient up like a lobster or a peapod, the doctor had to be in physical contact with a patient. New arthroscopic processes require the surgeon to guide cutting and cauterizing tools by computer. That computer did not have to be in the same room. And if it did not, why did it have to be in the same country? In 2001, a doctor in New York performed surgery on a patient in Strasbourg. In a similar way, the foreman on the American factory floor could now coordinate production processes in Mexico. Each step of the production process could now be isolated, and then offshored. This process, Baldwin writes, “broke up Team America by eroding American labor’s quasi-monopoly on using American firms’ know-how.”
To explain why the idea that all nations win from trade isn’t true any longer, Baldwin returns to his teamwork metaphor. In the old Ricardian world that most policymakers still inhabit, the international economy could be thought of as a professional sports league. Trading goods and services resembled trading players from one team to another. Neither team would carry out the deal unless it believed it to be in its own interests. Nowadays, trade is more like an arrangement by which the manager of the better team is allowed to coach the lousier one in his spare time.
Vietnam, which does low-level assembly of wire harnesses for Honda. This does not mean Vietnam has industrialized, but nations like it no longer have to.
In the work of Thomas Friedman and other boosters you find value chains described as kaleidoscopic, complex, operating in a dozen different countries. Those are rare. There is less to “global value chains” than meets the eye. Most of them, Baldwin shows, are actually regional value chains. As noted, they exist on the periphery of the United States, Europe, or Japan. In this, offshoring resembles the elaborate international transactions that Florentine bankers under the Medicis engaged in for the sole purpose of avoiding church strictures on moneylending.
One way of describing outsourcing is as a verdict on the pay structure that had arisen in the West by the 1970s: on trade unions, prevailing-wage laws, defined-benefit pension plans, long vacations, and, more generally, the power workers had accumulated against their bosses.
In 1993, during the first month of his presidency, Bill Clinton outlined some of the promise of a world in which “the average 18-year-old today will change jobs seven times in a lifetime.” How could anyone ever have believed in, tolerated, or even wished for such a thing? A person cannot productively invest the resources of his only life if he’s going to be told every five years that everything he once thought solid has melted into ait.
The more so since globalization undermines democracy, in the ways we have noted. Global value chains are extraordinarily delicate. They are vulnerable to shocks. Terrorists have discovered this. In order to work, free-trade systems must be frictionless and immune to interruption, forever. This means a program of intellectual property protection, zero tariffs, and cross-border traffic in everything, including migrants. This can be assured only in a system that is veto-proof and non-consultative—in short, undemocratic.
Sheltered from democracy, the economy of the free trade system becomes more and more a private space.
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Caldwell’s book review of
Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. SCSU Library: https://mplus.mnpals.net/vufind/Record/007359076 Call Number: JC11 .F85 2011
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/twilight-of-democracy/
Fukuyama’s first volume opened with China’s mandarin bureaucracy rather than the democracy of ancient Athens, shifting the methods of political science away from specifically Western intellectual genealogies and towards anthropology. Nepotism and favor-swapping are man’s basic political motivations, as Fukuyama sees it. Disciplining those impulses leads to effective government, but “repatrimonialization”—the capture of government by private interests—threatens whenever vigilance is relaxed. Fukuyama’s new volume, which describes political order since the French Revolution, extends his thinking on repatrimonialization, from the undermining of meritocratic bureaucracy in Han China through the sale of offices under France’s Henri IV to the looting of foreign aid in post-colonial Zaire. Fukuyama is convinced that the United States is on a similar path of institutional decay.
Political philosophy asks which government is best for man. Political science asks which government is best for government. Political decline, Fukuyama insists, is not the same thing as civilizational collapse.
Fukuyama is not the first to remark that wars can spur government efficiency—even if front-line soldiers are the last to benefit from it.
Relative to the smooth-running systems of northwestern Europe, American bureaucracy has been a dud, riddled with corruption from the start and resistant to reform. Patronage—favors for individual cronies and supporters—has thrived.
Clientelism is an ambiguous phenomenon: it is bread and circuses, it is race politics, it is doing favors for special classes of people. Clientelism is both more democratic and more systemically corrupting than the occasional nepotistic appointment.
why modern mass liberal democracy has developed on clientelistic lines in the U.S. and meritocratic ones in Europe. In Europe, democracy, when it came, had to adapt itself to longstanding pre-democratic institutions, and to governing elites that insisted on established codes and habits. Where strong states precede democracy (as in Germany), bureaucracies are efficient and uncorrupt. Where democracy precedes strong states (as in the United States but also Greece and Italy), government can be viewed by the public as a piñata.
Fukuyama contrasts the painstaking Japanese development of Taiwan a century ago with the mess that the U.S. Congress, “eager to impose American models of government on a society they only dimly understood,” was then making of the Philippines. It is not surprising that Fukuyama was one of the most eloquent conservative critics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq from the very beginning.
What distinguishes once-colonized Vietnam and China and uncolonized Japan and Korea from these Third World basket cases is that the East Asian lands “all possess competent, high-capacity states,” in contrast to sub-Saharan Africa, which “did not possess strong state-level institutions.”
Fukuyama does not think ethnic homogeneity is a prerequisite for successful politics
the United States “suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems.” It has kept the peace in a stagnant economy only by dragooning women into the workplace and showering the working and middle classes with credit.
public-sector unions have colluded with the Democratic Party to make government employment more rewarding for those who do it and less responsive to the public at large. In this sense, government is too big. But he also believes that cutting taxes on the rich in hopes of spurring economic growth has been a fool’s errand, and that the beneficiaries of deregulation, financial and otherwise, have grown to the point where they have escaped bureaucratic control altogether. In this sense, government is not big enough.
Washington, as Fukuyama sees it, is a patchwork of impotence and omnipotence—effective where it insists on its prerogatives, ineffective where it has been bought out. The unpredictable results of democratic oversight have led Americans to seek guidance in exactly the wrong place: the courts, which have both exceeded and misinterpreted their constitutional responsibilities. the almost daily insistence of courts that they are liberating people by removing discretion from them gives American society a Soviet cast.
“Effective modern states,” he writes, “are built around technical expertise, competence, and autonomy.”
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Williams, J. (2017, May). The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension. NYT
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/the-dumb-politics-of-elite-condescension.html
the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb call the “hidden injuries of class.” These are dramatized by a recent employment study, in which the sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example.
Politically, the biggest “hidden injury” is the hollowing out of the middle class in advanced industrialized countries. For two generations after World War II, working-class whites in the United States enjoyed a middle-class standard of living, only to lose it in recent decades.
The college-for-all experiment did not work. Two-thirds of Americans are not college graduates. We need to continue to make college more accessible, but we also need to improve the economic prospects of Americans without college degrees.
the United States has a well-documented dearth of workers qualified for middle-skill jobs that pay $40,000 or more a year and require some postsecondary education but not a college degree. A 2014 report by Accenture, Burning Glass Technologies and Harvard Business School found that a lack of adequate middle-skills talent affects the productivity of “47 percent of manufacturing companies, 35 percent of health care and social assistance companies, and 21 percent of retail companies.”
Skillful, a partnership among the Markle Foundation, LinkedIn and Colorado, is one initiative pointing the way. Skillful helps provide marketable skills for job seekers without college degrees and connects them with employers in need of middle-skilled workers in information technology, advanced manufacturing and health care. For more information, see my other IMS blog entries, such as: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/01/11/credly-badges-on-canvas/
The reputations of Asian universities, and Chinese universities in particular, are on the rise. China’s World Class 2.0 project, announced in August 2015, aims to strengthen the research performance of China’s nine top-ranked universities, with the goal of having six of those institutions ranked within the world’s top 15 universities by 2030.
After two decades in which China has been largely an exporter of students to Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, it is now increasingly attracting international students to study at its universities. And what is true of China is true of other countries too. Global flows of students are an increasing feature of the world’s higher education systems.
You can see the recruitment of international students as an exercise in soft power, in global engagement , in global citizenship, a great exercise in language learning , the practical application of a challenge thrown down by the great American social anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
Certainly, my friends who lead universities in Australia, Canada and New Zealand are delighted when they read politicians’ rhetoric about making it harder for international students to come to the UK.(my note, this is a Guardian article, but applies perfectly with Bush Junior politics and with the rhetoric of Trump)
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more on globalization in this IMS blog:
Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don’t take steps to stop it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
YUVAL NOAH HARARI OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE
Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology in any detail, but they can sense that the future is passing them by. In 1938 the common man’s condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an “ordinary man,” rather than, say, a Jew or a woman).
n 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills.
Israel is a leader in the field of surveillance technology, and has created in the occupied West Bank a working prototype for a total-surveillance regime. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook, or travel from one city to another, they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones, or spy software. Algorithms analyze the gathered data, helping the Israeli security forces pinpoint and neutralize what they consider to be potential threats.
The conflict between democracy and dictatorship is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. AI may swing the advantage toward the latter.
As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our physical abilities, such as navigating space.
So what should we do?
For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated.
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more on SCSU student philosophy club in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=philosophy+student+club
Chun, L. (2017). Discipline and power: knowledge of China in political science. Critical Asian Studies, 49(4), 501-522. doi:10.1080/14672715.2017.1362321
Lin Chun or ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chun_Lin18
p. 501 – is political science “softer” than the other soft social sciences?
thus… political science “may never live up to its lofty ambition of scientific explanation and prediction. Indeed, like other social sciences, it can be no more than a ‘ science in formation’ permanently seeking to surmount obstacles to objectivity.”
p. 502 disciplinary parochialism
the fetishes of pure observation, raw experience, unambiguous rationality, and one-way causality were formative influences in the genesis of the social sciences. the ‘unfortunate positivism” of such impulses, along with the illusion of a value-free science, converged to produce a behavioral revolution in the interwar period Behaviorism was then followed through an epistemological twist, by boldly optimistic leaps to an “end of ideology” and ultimately to a claimed “end of history” itself.
p. 503
early positivism was openly underpinned by an European condescension toward Asians’ “ignorance and prejudice.” Behind similar depictions lay a comprehensive Eurocentric social and political philosophy.
this is illustrated its view of China through the grand narrative of modernization.
p. 504
Robert McNamara famously reiterated that if World War I was a chemist’s war and Word War II a physicist’s, Vietnam “might well have to be considered the social scientists’ war.”
Although China nominally remains a communist state, it has doubtlessly changed color without a color revolution.
p. 505
In the fixed disciplinary eye, “China” is to specific to produce anything generalizable beyond descriptive and self-containing narratives. The area studies approach, in contrast to disciplinary approaches, is all about cultural, historical, and ethnographic specificities.
If first-hand information contradicts theoretical conclusions, redress is sought only at the former end (my note – ha ha ha, such an elegant but scathing criticism of [Western] academia).
The catch [is] that Chinese otherness is in essence not a matter of cultural difference (hence limitations of criticizing Eurocentrism and Orientalism) and does not merely reproduce itself by inertia.
Given a long omitted self-critical rethinking of the discipline’s parochial base, calling for cross-fertilizing alone would be fruitless or even lead only to a one-way colonization of seemingly particularistic histories by an illusive universal science.
p. 506
political culture, once a key concept of political science’s hope for unified theorization, has turned out to be no answer
Long after its heyday, modernization theory – now with its new face of globalization – remains a primary signifier and legitimating benchmark. To those, who use it to gauge developments since 1945, private property and liberal democracy are permanent, unquestioned norms that are to be globally homogenized.
Moreover, since modernity is assumed to be a liberal capitalists condition, the revolutionary nationalism of an oppressed people remaking itself into a new historical subject noncompliant with capitalism cannot be modernizational.
p. 507
Political scientists and historical sociologists… saw the communist in power as formidable modernizers, but distinguished the Maoist model from the Stalinist in economic management and campaign politics.
Their analyses showed how organic connections between top-down mobilization and bottom-up participation cultivated in an active citizenry and high intensity politics. My note: I disagree here with the author, since such statement can be arbitrary from a historical point of view; indeed, for a short period of time, such “organic connection” can produce positive results, but once calcitrated (as it is in China for the past 6-7 decades), it turns stagnant.
p. 510
the state’s altered support base is essentially a matter of class power, involving both adaptive cultivation of new economic elites and iron-fist approaches to protest and dissent. By the same weight of historical logic, the party’s internal decay, loss of its founding ideological vision and commitment, and collusion with capital will do more than any outside force ever could do to destroy the regime.
That the Party stays in power is not primarily because the country’s economy continues to grow, but is more attributable to a residual social reliance on its credentials and organizational capacities accumulated in earlier revolutionary and socialist struggles. This historical promise has so far worked to the extent that cracks within the leadership are more or less held in check, resentment against local wrongs are insulated from central intentions, and social policies in one way or another respond to common outcries, consultative deliberations, and pressure groups.
p. 511
The word “madness” has indeed been freely employed to describe nations and societies judged inept at modern reason, as found in contemporary academic publications on epi- sodes of the PRC history.
My note: I agree with this – the deconstructionalists: (Jaques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov) linguistically prove the inability of Western cultures to understand and explain other cultures. In this case, Lin Chun is right; just because western political scientist cannot comprehend foreign complex societal problems and/or juxtaposing them to their own “schemes,” prompts the same western researchers to announce them as “mad.”
p. 513aa
This is the best and worst of times for the globalization of knowledge. In one scenario, an eventual completion of the political science parameters can now seal both knowledge, sophisticatedly canalized, and ideology, universally uncontested – even if the two are never separable in the foundation of political science. In another scenario, causes and effects no longer rule out atypical polities, but the differences are presented as culturally incompatible. In either case, the trick remains to let anormalies make the norms validate preexist- ing disciplinary sanctions.
p. 514
Overcoming outmoded rigidities will nurture a robust scholarship committed to universally resonant theories.
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more on China in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china
https://www.conferences-scientific.cz/inpage/conference-vienna-iacgetl-2017/
Conference Program Dates
Friday – Saturday, November 24 – 25, 2017
Venue Hotel – Fourside Hotel City Center Vienna
Grieshofgasse 11, A – 1120 Wien / Vienna, AUSTRIA
About the Conference
International Academic Conference in Vienna 2017 is an important international gathering of scholars, educators and PhD students. IAC-GETL 2017 in Vienna will take place in conference facilities located in Vienna, the touristic, business and historic center of Austria.
Conference language: English language
Conferences organized by the Czech Institute of Academic Education z.s. and Czech Technical University in Prague.
Conference Topics – Education, Teaching, Learning and E-learning
Education, Teaching and Learning
Distance Education, Higher Education, Effective Teaching Pedagogies, Learning Styles and Learning Outcomes, Emerging Technologies, Educational Management, Engineering and Sciences Research, Competitive Skills, Continuing Education, Transferring Disciplines, Imaginative Education, Language Education, Geographical Education, Health Education, Home Education, Science Education, Secondary Education, Second life Educators, Social Studies Education, Special Education, Learning / Teaching Methodologies and Assessment, Assessment Software Tools, Global Issues In Education and Research, Education, Research and Globalization, Barriers to Learning (ethnicity, age, psychosocial factors, …), Women and Minorities in Science and Technology, Indigenous and Diversity Issues, Intellectual Property Rights and Plagiarism, Pedagogy, Teacher Education, Cross-disciplinary areas of Education, Educational Psychology, Education practice trends and issues, Indigenous Education, Academic Research Projects, Research on Technology in Education, Research Centres, Links between Education and Research, Erasmus and Exchange experiences in universities, Students and Teaching staff Exchange programmes
E-learning
Educational Technology, Educational Games and Software, ICT Education, E-Learning, Internet technologies, Accessibility to Disabled Users, Animation, 3D, and Web 3D Applications, Mobile Applications and Learning (M-learning), Virtual Learning Environments, Videos for Learning and Educational Multimedia, Web 2.0, Social Networking and Blogs, Wireless Applications, New Trends And Experiences, Other Areas of Education
Tomlin, P. (2009). A Matter of Discipline: Open Access, the Humanities, and Art History. Canadian Journal Of Higher Education, 39(3), 49-69.
Recent events suggest that open access has gained new momentum in the humanities, but the slow and uneven development of open-access initiatives in humanist fields continues to hinder the consolidation of efforts across the university. Although various studies have traced the general origins of the humanities’ reticence to embrace open access, few have actually considered the scholarly practices and disciplinary priorities that shape a discipline’s adoption of its principles. This article examines the emergence, potential and actualized, of open access in art history. Part case study, part conceptual mapping, the discussion is framed within the context of three interlocking dynamics: the present state of academic publishing in art history; the dominance of the journal and self-archiving repository within open-access models of scholarly production; and the unique roles played by copyright and permissions in art historical scholarship. It is hoped that tracing the discipline-specific configuration of research provides a first step toward both investigating the identity that open access might assume within the humanities, from discipline to discipline, and explaining how and why it might allow scholars to better serve themselves and their audiences.
Solomon, D. J., & Björk, B. (2012). A study of open access journals using article processing charges. Journal Of The American Society For Information Science & Technology, 63(8), 1485-1495. doi:10.1002/asi.22673
Article processing charges ( APCs) are a central mechanism for funding open access (OA) scholarly publishing. We studied the APCs charged and article volumes of journals that were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as charging APCs. These included 1,370 journals that published 100,697 articles in 2010. The average APC was $906 U.S. dollars (USD) calculated over journals and $904 USD calculated over articles. The price range varied between $8 and $3,900 USD, with the lowest prices charged by journals published in developing countries and the highest by journals with high-impact factors from major international publishers. Journals in biomedicine represent 59% of the sample and 58% of the total article volume. They also had the highest APCs of any discipline. Professionally published journals, both for profit and nonprofit, had substantially higher APCs than journals published by societies, universities, or scholars/researchers. These price estimates are lower than some previous studies of OA publishing and much lower than is generally charged by subscription publishers making individual articles OA in what are termed hybrid journals.
Beaubien, S., & Eckard, M. (2014). Addressing Faculty Publishing Concerns with Open Access Journal Quality Indicators. Journal Of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication, 2(2), 1-11. doi:10.7710/2162-3309.1133
BACKGROUND The scholarly publishing paradigm is evolving to embrace innovative open access publication models. While this environment fosters the creation of high-quality, peer-reviewed open access publications, it also provides opportunities for journals or publishers to engage in unprofessional or unethical practices. LITERATURE REVIEW Faculty take into account a number of factors in deciding where to publish, including whether or not a journal engages in ethical publishing practices. Librarians and scholars have attempted to address this issue in a number of ways, such as generating lists of ethical/unethical publishers and general guides. DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT In response to growing faculty concern in this area, the Grand Valley State University Libraries developed and evaluated a set of Open Access Journal Quality Indicators that support faculty in their effort to identify the characteristics of ethical and unethical open access publications. NEXT STEPS Liaison librarians have already begun using the Indicators as a catalyst in sparking conversation around open access publishing and scholarship. Going forward, the Libraries will continue to evaluate and gather feedback on the Indicators, taking into account emerging trends and practices.
Husain, S., & Nazim, M. (2013). Analysis of Open Access Scholarly Journals in Media & Communication. DESIDOC Journal Of Library & Information Technology, 33(5), 405-411.
he paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative and explains the concept of open access publishing. It also highlight various facets related to the open access scholarly publishing in the field of Media & Communication on the basis of data collected from the most authoritative online directory of open access journals, i.e., Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The DOAJ covers 8492 open access journals of which 106 journals are listed under the subject heading ‘Media & Communication’. Most of the open access journals in Media & Communication were started during late 1990s and are being published from 34 different countries on 6 continents in 13 different languages. More than 80 % open access journals are being published by the not-for-profit sector such as academic institutions and universities.
Reed, K. (2014). Awareness of Open Access Issues Differs among Faculty at Institutions of Different Sizes. Evidence Based Library & Information Practice, 9(4), 76-77.
Objective — This study surveyed faculty awareness of open access (OA) issues and the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Wisconsin. The authors hoped to use findings to inform future IR marketing strategies to faculty. Design — Survey. Setting — University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, a small, regional public university (approximately 10,000 students). Subjects — 105 faculty members. Methods — The authors contacted 397 faculty members inviting them to participate in an 11 question online survey. Due to anonymity issues on a small campus, respondents were not asked about rank and discipline, and were asked to not provide identifying information. A definition of OA was not provided by the authors, as survey participants were queried about their own definition. Main Results — Approximately 30% of the faculty were aware of OA issues. Of all the definitions of OA given by survey respondents, “none … came close” to the definition favoured by the authors (p. 145). More than 30% of the faculty were unable to define OA at a level deemed basic by the authors. A total of 51 (48.57%) of the survey respondents indicated that there are OA journals in their disciplines. Another 6 (5.71%) of the faculty members claimed that there are no OA journals in their disciplines, although most provided a definition of OA and several considered OA publishing to be “very important.” The remaining 48 participants (46%) were unsure if there are OA journals in their disciplines. Of these survey respondents, 38 answered that they have not published in an OA journal, 10 were unsure, and 21 believed that their field benefits or would benefit from OA journals. Survey respondents cited quality of the journal, prestige, and peer review as extremely important in selecting a journal in which to publish. Conclusion — The authors conclude that the level of awareness related to OA issues must be raised before IRs can flourish. They ponder how university and college administrators regard OA publishing, and the influence this has on the tenure and promotion process
KELTY, C. (2014). BEYOND COPYRIGHT AND TECHNOLOGY: What Open Access Can Tell Us about Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University Today. Cultural Anthropology (Society For Cultural Anthropology), 29(2), 203-215. doi:10.14506/ca29.2.02
In this interview, we discuss what open access can teach us about the state of the university, as well as practices in scholarly publishing. In particular the focus is on issues of labor and precarity, the question of how open access enables or blocks other innovations in scholarship, the way open access might be changing practices of scholarship, and the role of technology and automation in the creation, evaluation, and circulation of scholarly work
Armbruster, C. (2008). Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy. Open Access and Trade Publishing: From Contradiction to Compatibility with Non-Exclusive Copyright Licensing. Policy Futures In Education, 6(4), 439-452.
Open source, open content and open access are set to fundamentally alter the conditions of knowledge production and distribution. Open source, open content and open access are also the most tangible result of the shift towards e-science and digital networking. Yet, widespread misperceptions exist about the impact of this shift on knowledge distribution and scientific publishing. It is argued, on the one hand, that for the academy there principally is no digital dilemma surrounding copyright and there is no contradiction between open science and the knowledge-based economy if profits are made from non-exclusive rights. On the other hand, pressure for the “digital doubling” of research articles in open access repositories (the “green road”) is misguided and the current model of open access publishing (the “gold road”) has not much future outside biomedicine. Commercial publishers must understand that business models based on the transfer of copyright have not much future either. Digital technology and its economics favour the severance of distribution from certification. What is required of universities and governments, scholars and publishers, is to clear the way for digital innovations in knowledge distribution and scholarly publishing by enabling the emergence of a competitive market that is based on non-exclusive rights. This requires no change in the law but merely an end to the praxis of copyright transfer and exclusive licensing. The best way forward for research organisations, universities and scientists is the adoption of standard copyright licences that reserve some rights, namely Attribution and No Derivative Works, but otherwise will allow for the unlimited reproduction, dissemination and re-use of the research article, commercial uses included.
Kuth, M. (2012). ‘Deswegen wird kein Buch weniger verkauft!’ Hybride Publikation von MALIS Praxisprojekten an der Fachhochschule Köln. (German). Bibliothek Forschung Und Praxis, 36(1), 103-109.
The article reports on a library and information science project at the Fachhochschule Köln (University of Applied Sciences, Cologne), Germany, to produce a hybrid, print and online research publication, “MALIS Praxisprojekte 2011,” which is available at http://www.b-i-t-online.de/daten/bitinnovativ.php#band35. It discusses the publishing process from writing to distribution and the implications of combining open access and for-fee publishing models for value chains in the publishing industry.
Riedel, S. (2012). Distanz zu Wissenschaftlern und Studenten verringern. (German). Bub: Forum Bibliothek Und Information, 64(7/8), 491-492.
A report from the International Bielefeld Conference on April 24-26, 2012 in Bielefeld, Germany is presented. Presentations discussed include the role of information storage and retrieval in libraries, Open Access publishing and content licenses, and the increased automation of the Bielefeld University library.
Ramirez, M., Dalton, J. j., McMillan, G. g., Read, M., & Seamans, N.. (2013). Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities? Findings from a 2011 Survey of Academic Publishers. College & Research Libraries, 74(4), 368-380.
n increasing number of higher education institutions worldwide are requiring submission of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by graduate students and are subsequently providing open access to these works in online repositories. Faculty advisors and graduate students are concerned that such unfettered access to their work could diminish future publishing opportunities. This study investigated social sciences, arts, and humanities journal editors’ and university press directors’ attitudes toward ETDs. The findings indicate that manuscripts that are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 82.8 percent of journal editors and 53.7 percent of university press directors polled.
Schuurman, N. (2013). Editorial /Éditorial. Canadian Geographer, 57(2), 117-118. doi:10.1111/cag.12027
The author reflects on the use of the Open Access (OA) publishing for publications. She states that in OA publishing, an un-blinded peer review format is used wherein the authors’ names are known to the reviewer. She mentions that the countries such as Great Britain and Canada passed legislations which mandates the use of OA journals in university publications and health research. She also relates the impact of the changes in publishing to the print versions of journals.
Bazeley, J. W., Waller, J., & Resnis, E. (2014). Engaging Faculty in Scholarly Communication Change: A Learning Community Approach. Journal Of Librarianship & Scholarly Communication, 2(3), 1-13. doi:10.7710/2162-3309.1129
As the landscape of scholarly communication and open access continues to shift, it remains important for academic librarians to continue educating campus stakeholders about these issues, as well as to create faculty advocates on campus. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Three librarians at Miami University created a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Scholarly Communication to accomplish this. The FLC, composed of faculty, graduate students, staff, and librarians, met throughout the academic year to read and discuss topics such as open access, journal economics, predatory publishing, alternative metrics (altmetrics), open data, open peer review, etc. NEXT STEPS The members of the FLC provided positive evaluations about the community and the topics about which they learned, leading the co-facilitators to run the FLC for a second year. The library’s Scholarly Communication Committee is creating and implementing a scholarly communication website utilizing the structure and content identified by the 2012-2013 FLC
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, (2010). Freier Zugang zu Forschungsergebnissen. Bub: Forum Bibliothek Und Information, 62(1), 7.
The article reports that the research society Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has expanded their support of open access publishing so that universities can now request that the DFG finance publication of their scientific works in open access journals.
Ottina, D. (2013). From Sustainable Publishing To Resilient Communications. Triplec (Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation): Open Access Journal For A Global Sustainable Information Society, 11(2), 604-613.
In their opening reflection on Open Access (OA) in this special section, Fuchs and Sandoval (2013) argue the current policy debate on Open Access publishing is limited by a for-profit bias which blinds it to much of the most innovative activity in Open Access. They further argue for a refocusing of the policy debate within a public service, commons based perspective of academic knowledge production. I pick up these themes by looking at another key term, sustainable publishing, in an effort to contextualize the policy debate on OA within the broader context of the privatization of the university. From this perspective, the policy debate reveals an essential tension between top-down and bottomup cultures in legitimizing knowledge. This is a tension that has profound implications for scholarly practices mediated through digital networked communications. Explicitly acknowledging this fundamental tension gives additional insight into formulating strategies for maintaining an academic culture of free and open inquiry. I suggest that the frame of resilient communications expresses the dynamic nature of scholarly communications better than that of sustainable publishing, and that empowering scholars through practice-based OA initiatives is essential in broadening grass roots support for equitable Open Access amongst scholars
Stevens, L. M. (2013). From the Editor: Getting What You Pay For? Open Access and the Future of Humanities Publishing. Tulsa Studies In Women’s Literature, 32(1), 7-21.
The article discusses the potential impact of the open access publishing movement on humanities scholarship and publishing. It is suggested that although the free circulation of knowledge is a positive goal, scholars and activists must be careful not to undermine the value of the scholarly and editorial labor which makes quality humanities publications possible. The author also suggests that authors who post their articles for open access or on university commons should pay journals a fee.
Thatcher, S. (2009). From the University Presses–Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication. Against the Grain, 21(5), 78-81.
The article presents a speech by the author, delivered on September 23, 2009 as part of the Andrew Neilly Lecture Series at the University of Rochester, in which he discussed open access publishing in terms of university presses and scholarly communication. He presented an overview of the history of such issues, and a forecast of likely future developments.
Dunham, G., & Walters, C. (2014). From University Press to the University’s Press: Building a One-Stop Campus Resource for Scholarly Publishing. Against The Grain, 26(6), 28-30.
The article examines the Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP) at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, Indiana. Topics discussed include the role played in the OSP by Indiana University Press (IU Press), the role played by IUScholarWorks (IUSW), which is an open access publishing initiative administered by IU Libraries, and the location of the university’s publishing activities, which is the Herman B. Wells Library at IU.
Abadal, E. (2013). Gold or green: the debate on Open Access policies. International Microbiology, 16(3), 199-203. doi:10.2436/20.1501.01.194
The movement for open access to science seeks to achieve unrestricted and free access to academic publications on the Internet. To this end, two mechanisms have been established: the gold road, in which scientific journals are openly accessible, and the green road, in which publications are self-archived in repositories. The publication of the Finch Report in 2012, advocating exclusively the adoption of the gold road, generated a debate as to whether either of the two options should be prioritized. The recommendations of the Finch Report stirred controversy among academicians specialized in open access issues, who felt that the role played by repositories was not adequately considered and because the green road places the burden of publishing costs basically on authors. The Finch Report’s conclusions are compatible with the characteristics of science communication in the UK and they could surely also be applied to the (few) countries with a powerful publishing industry and substantial research funding. In Spain, both the current national legislation and the existing rules at universities largely advocate the green road. This is directly related to the structure of scientific communication in Spain, where many journals have little commercial significance, the system of charging a fee to authors has not been adopted, and there is a good repository infrastructure. As for open access policies, the performance of the scientific communication system in each country should be carefully analyzed to determine the most suitable open access strategy.
Bargheer, M., & Schmidt, B. (2008). Göttingen University Press: Publishing services in an Open Access environment. Information Services & Use, 28(2), 133-139.
The article presents a round table discussion that focuses on publishing services in an open access environment that are offered by Göttingen University Press. Begun as an additional service for the Göttingen State and University Library repository, it offers a publication consulting service on behalf of the university. It covers diverse topics such as sciences, life sciences, and humanities.
Jubb, M. (2011). Heading for the Open Road: Costs and Benefits of Transitions in Scholarly Communications. Liber Quarterly: The Journal Of European Research Libraries, 21(1), 102-124.
This paper reports on a study — overseen by representatives of the publishing, library and research funder communities in the UK — investigating the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different but realistic scenarios for moving towards that end over the next five years, including gold and green open access, moves towards national licensing, publisherled delayed open access, and transactional models. It then compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The scenarios, the comparisons between them, and the modelling on which they are based, amount to a benefit-cost analysis to help in appraising policy options over the next five years. Our conclusion is that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to gold open access, while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed circa £2,000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence.
Tickell, A. (2013). Implementing Open Access in the United Kingdom. Information Services & Use, 33(1), 19-26. doi:10.3233/ISU-130688
Since July 2012, the UK has been undergoing an organized transition to open access. As of 01 April 2013, revised open access policies are coming into effect. Open access implementation requires new infrastructures for funding publishing. Universities as institutions increasingly will be central to managing article-processing charges, monitoring compliance and organizing deposit. This article reviews the implementation praxis between July 2012 and April 2013, including ongoing controversy and review, which has mainly focussed on embargo length
Hawkins, K. K. (2014). How We Pay for Publishing. Against The Grain, 26(6), 35-36.
The article examines the financial aspects of scholarly publishing. Topics discussed include the impact of these financial aspects on academic libraries and university presses, the concept of open access publishing and the financial considerations related to it, and the use of article processing charges (APC) in open access publishing.
Butler, D. (2013). Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing. Nature, 495(7442), 433-435. doi:10.1038/495433a
The article focuses on the investigation of Jeffrey Beall, academic librarian and university researcher at the University of Colorado in Denver regarding the practices of open-access publishing. It says that Beall who became a watchdog for open-access publishers criticizes them on his blog Scholarly Open Access. Beall adds that he was not prepared for the exponential growth of the occurrence of questionable publishers. The insights of publishers on the approach of Beall are also discussed.
Richard, J., Koufogiannakis, D., & Ryan, P. (2009). Librarians and Libraries Supporting Open Access Publishing. Canadian Journal Of Higher Education, 39(3), 33-48
An introduction is presented to the articles within the issue on the theme of open access publishing in Great Britain during the early 2010s, including topics on the economic aspects of and the British government’s policy on open access publishing and its impact on university libraries.
The article presents information on a joint publishing project “Digitalculturebooks” between the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of Michigan University Library in Michigan. The aim of the project was to publish books about new media in a printed version and an open access (OA) online version. It is mentioned that the project not only intended to publish innovative and accessible work about the social, cultural, and political impact of new and to collect data about the variation in reading habits and preferences across different scholarly reading communities, but also to explore the opportunities and the obstacles involved in a press working in a partnership with a technologically abled library unit with a business model.
Scientific Publishing: the Dilemma of Research Funding Organisations. (2009). European Review, 17(1), 23-31.
Present changes in scientific publishing, especially those summarised by the term ?Open Access? (OA), may ultimately lead to the complete replacement of a reader-paid to an author, or funding-paid, publication system. This transformation would shift the financial burden for scientific publishing from the Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), particularly from scientific libraries, universities, etc, to the Research Funding Organisations (RFOs). The transition phase is difficult; it leads to double funding of OA publications (by subscriptions and author-sponsored OA) and may thus increase the overall costs of scientific publishing. This may explain why ? with a few exceptions ? RFOs have not been at the forefront of the OA paradigm in the past. In 2008, the General Assembly of EUROHORCs, the European organisation of the heads of research councils, agreed to recommend to its member organisations at least a minimal standard of Open Access based on the Berlin Declaration of 2003 (green way of OA). In the long run, the publishing system needs some fundamental changes to reduce the present costs and to keep up its potential. In order to design a new system, all players have to cooperate and be ready to throw overboard some old traditions, lovable as they may be.
Kennan, M. A. (2010). The economic implications of alternative publishing models: views from a non-economist. Prometheus, 28(1), 85-89. doi:10.1080/08109021003676391
In this article the author discusses economic aspects of alternative economic models for scholarly publishing with reference to a report by J. Houghton and C. Oppenheim. The author present information on the economic models discussed in Houghton and Oppenheim report to the Great Britain’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). He discusses the open access (OA) publishing and suggests that mandates should be made by universities for OA.
A Q&A with Ali Jafari
We need now to have a totally new type of learning environment, both conceptually and technically, and it will also need to be different from a business perspective.
You might think of CN (Course Networking) as a complete social learning suite combined with comprehensive learning management tools, along with associated elements like ePortfolio, data mining, globalization and collaboration tools, and much more.
Every student on the CN has a “social portfolio”, which will be there for the student to access, life long. This social portfolio is different from a “typical” ePortfolio in several ways, but importantly, it can be created dynamically — for example, a teacher might check a box indicating that each student in the top ten percent of her class will receive a badge. Beyond that checkbox, everything happens automatically, without a need for the student to locate and upload the badge for display, and no need for the teacher to monitor or be further involved with the awarding of badges. As a student I can manage my social portfolio, and determine who will see or not see certain elements of it.
we are building and maintaining really one big network — instead of necessarily supporting many, many independent institutional client implementations.
A former SCSU faculty asked me to help her with literature regarding online learning; she is applying to teach complete online somewhere in the South.
Hey Plamen, Do you have any reading suggestions regarding teaching online? I am applying for a job at ?????? and the program is completely online. I want to be current with the literature if I happen to get an interview.
Hey ???,
It is a simple question, with ever growing complex answer. 2013 was announced as the “MOOC” year and that term literally killed the tag “online education.” Most of the literature on online teaching now is subdued one way or another under MOOC.
However, there are still authors, who are widely cited as “foundational.” E.g.: Susan Ko, Paloff and Pratt
Ko, S., & Rossen, S. (2010). Teaching Online: A Practical Guide. Taylor & Francis.
Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2010). Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community. John Wiley & Sons.
Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2009). Assessing the Online Learner: Resources and Strategies for Faculty. John Wiley & Sons.
Moore, M. G., & Kearsley, G. (2005). Distance education: A systems view (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic541040.files/Moore%20Theoretical%20Basis%20for%20Distance%20Education.pdf
Moore, M. G. (2013). Handbook of Distance Education. Routledge.
There is a long list of articles, which I am collecting through the years. You can peruse them and choose any further readings, if you want…
Adolphus, M. (2009). USING THE WEB TO teach information literacy. Online, 33(4), 20-25.
Andersen, M. H. (2011). The world is my school: Welcome to the era of personalized learning. Futurist, 45(1), 12-17.
Borja, R. R. (2004). New player in online school market pursues profits. Education Week, 24(15), 8-8.
Brooks-Kirkland, A. (2006). Podcasting for learning. School Libraries in Canada (17108535), 25(4), 44-48.
Ćukušić, M., Alfirević, N., Granić, A., & Garača, Ž. (2010). e-learning process management and the e-learning performance: Results of a european empirical study. Computers & Education, 55(2), 554-565.
Ćukušić, M., Alfirević, N., Granić, A., & Garača, Ž. (2010). e-learning process management and the e-learning performance: Results of a european empirical study. Computers & Education, 55(2), 554-565.
Ćukušić, M., Alfirević, N., Granić, A., & Garača, Ž. (2010). e-learning process management and the e-learning performance: Results of a european empirical study. Computers & Education, 55(2), 554-565.
de Freitas, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2010). Editorial: Crossing boundaries: Learning and teaching in virtual worlds. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(1), 3-9.
Department of education report: Its importance, one year later. (cover story).(2010). Distance Education Report, 15(12), 1-7.
Falloon, G. (2010). Using avatars and virtual environments in learning: What do they have to offer? British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(1), 108-122.
Hrastinski, S., Keller, C., & Carlsson, S. A. (2010). Design exemplars for synchronous e-learning: A design theory approach. Computers & Education, 55(2), 652-662.
Karagiorgi, Y., & Symeou, L. (2005). Translating constructivism into instructional design: Potential and limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 17-27.
Keengwe, J., Schnellert, G., & Miltenoff, P. (2011). Technology and globalization in higher education., 2535-2538.
Ketelhut, D. J., Nelson, B. C., Clarke, J., & Dede, C. (2010). A multi-user virtual environment for building and assessing higher order inquiry skills in science. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(1), 56-68.
Kim, P., Ng, C. K., & Lim, G. (2010). When cloud computing meets with semantic web: A new design for e-portfolio systems in the social media era. British Journal of Educational Technology,41(6), 1018-1028.
Kolowich, S. (2009). MIT tops world ranking of university web sites. Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(24), A15-A15.
Leach, J. (2008). Do new information and communications technologies have a role to play in the achievement of education for all? British Educational Research Journal, 34(6), 783-805.
Levine, A., Levine, A., & Dean, D. R. (2012). Generation on a tightrope : A portrait of today’s college student. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Mangu-Ward, K. (2010). Teachers unions vs. online education. Reason, 42(4), 44-50.
Nistor, N., & Neubauer, K. (2010). From participation to dropout: Quantitative participation patterns in online university courses. Computers & Education, 55(2), 663-672.
Ramig, R. (2009). Social media in the classroom. Multimedia & internet@schools, 16(6), 8-10.
Ramig, R. (2009). Social media in the classroom. Multimedia & internet@schools, 16(6), 8-10.
Schiller, K. (2009). Augmented reality comes to market. (cover story). Information Today, 26(11), 1-46.
Šumak, B., Heričko, M., & Pušnik, M. (2011). A meta-analysis of e-learning technology acceptance: The role of user types and e-learning technology types. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(6), 2067-2077.
Tallent-Runnels, M., Thomas, J. A., Lan, W. Y., Cooper, S., Ahern, T. C., Shaw, S. M., et al. (2006). Teaching courses online: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 93-135.
Tallent-Runnels, M., Thomas, J. A., Lan, W. Y., Cooper, S., Ahern, T. C., Shaw, S. M., et al. (2006). Teaching courses online: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 93-135.
Tallent-Runnels, M., Thomas, J. A., Lan, W. Y., Cooper, S., Ahern, T. C., Shaw, S. M., et al. (2006). Teaching courses online: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 76(1), 93-135.
Wang, H., & Shao, M. (2008). Desire2Learn for quality matters., 1335-1339.