An opportunity to join over 10,000 academics (so far) protesting against publisher exploitation of a lucky advantage that puts them in a position of abusable power. This particular petition is aimed at Elsevier, whose abuses are worse than most.

Address of the bookmark: http://thecostofknowledge.com/index.php

Another decent article about the absurdity of the academic publishing model.

What surprises me is that the billionaire publishers of stuff we provide for free, review for free, edit for free and then sign away copyright (which is sometimes not even ours to give) so that we can buy back our publicly funded work at ludicrous prices, do not seem to have any defense worth making. You’d think they try harder, given they can afford to buy the best marketers and spinners in the business. Maybe the argument is impossible to make.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/academic-publishing-monopoly-challenged

Brilliant comments on browsing vs search:

“Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations.”

Address of the bookmark: http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/99526/melody-records-amazon-flaneur

The spread of memes in Twitter may have nothing much, if anything, to do with the meme itself. The results in this paper suggest that the dynamics of the network inevitably lead to emergent patterns of meme distribution. Pretty much anything can go viral and, more significantly, it can be completely random. In real life, this seems counter intuitive, inasmuch as there must be some relevance to the content: if one tweeted a random assortment of words, or a bland statement like ‘I like popcorn’ it is hard to believe that it would go viral as rapidly as, say, the announcement of a major natural disaster or the impeachment of a president. However, it could (and does) happen, with no further explanation needed apart from ‘it is random’. That’s quite interesting.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120329/srep00335/full/srep00335.html

A nicely succinct explanation of why all learning style theories are wrong and some good thoughts on both the damage they cause and the reasons so many people believe in them. There are many much more compelling and rigorous critiques than this one, but this is an elegant summary of the central issues. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back Issues/September-October 2010/the-myth-of-learning-full.html

Canada currently tops the list as the best place to be if you are seeking an academic career, at least in terms of salary. Good to hear, especially in these times of economic uncertainty, hiring freezes, dropping salaries (in real terms) and unseemly government interventions in research funding.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/22/new-study-analyzes-how-faculty-pay-compares-worldwide#ixzz1pr0IyRqT

Brilliant student post-human essay looking, ostensively, at rhizomatic learning and Connectivism but that is, in reality, a self referential deconstruction of academic essays and connected knowledge in which every singleword is hyperlinked. Delightful. The links  are very interestingly selected.

Address of the bookmark: http://deferralanddifference.atwebpages.com/

Useful list of TEL and distance/open learning journals from the good folk at OUNL

Handy for those researching e-learning who are seeking good places to publish their work, or simply for finding things that are worth reading in the field. 

Address of the bookmark: http://celstec.org/content/advanced-learning-technologies-journal-list

This story has been building for a while. Incredible that there might be universities and colleges with so little respect for their own students.   It is lucky that this is bad for Facebook business otherwise, in the absence of US laws that prevent such abuse, there might be nothing standing in the way of such behaviour except for common decency.

Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2012/03/23/facebook-responds-employers-passwords/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

The answer to this question seems to be a guarded ‘yes’. The issue seems to be that we remember things in books not just because of content but because of context – where it was on the page, where it was in the book. In fact, i can sometimes recall things like page blemishes and discoloration too. This is something that has bugged me about most e-readers for some time and it seems very easily soluble and, in fact, easy to potentially improve upon. Most e-readers do allow you to view a bar showing your location relative to the thing you are reading, though this is not as easy to accurately recall as a location in a physical book and in most readers is not shown by default. So the first obvious step is to make that more prominent (some have that feature already). When it comes to pages, you are mostly on your own, as where a particular bit of text appears on a screen may not only change from one reading to the next, but also during the course of reading a page. I quite often switch orientation of my iPad, for instance, which usually entails a fair bit of cognitive re-orientation too, as I try to find the place I was reading again. It is worse for fixed-page formats like PDF because they tend to involve a fair bit of scrolling and zooming.

So, beyond the typical location indicator bar, what could we do? Here are a few ideas, that could be combined to provide a richer indication of context than simple location in a book:

• Show a distinctive abstract pattern next to the text, probably based on a hash of nearby sentences or paragraphs. This would make it easier to find when scrolling through.
• Very subtly modify every single word using a similar hashing algorithm that takes into account the surrounding text. Thus, every sentence would be uniquely rendered, making it much easier to recall particular passages. This is pretty much what we get from handwritten text, with the benefit of consistent legibility.
• Use subtle watermarks that are linked to each paragraph, again uniquely rendered using a hashing algorithm.
• Show small iconic representations (rendered to show the pattern of paragraphs)  of the paper-pages of the original, and their relationship to the current page we are looking at on the e-reader.

With a bit of thought, variations on these kinds of approach might at least help to restore a sense of context. 

Address of the bookmark: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/14/do-e-books-impair-memory/?iid=hl-main-feature&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews