justice

We’ve written a few times about the ongoing fight over whether or not federally funded research should be somewhat accessible to the public. This kicked off a few years back when the NIH, which funds a tremendous amount of research, required that any research that was funded by them had to be published in PubMed, its free and open database of such research one year after it was published in a journal. Scientific journals, as you probably know, are basically a huge scam. Unlike most publications, the journals don’t pay the people who provide all the material in those journals. Instead, the researchers pay the journals to publish their research. Not only that, but in exchange for paying the journal, the researchers also have to hand over their copyright on the research. This gets really ridiculous at times, as professors I’ve spoken with have needed to totally redo their own experiments because some journal “owned” their research, and they couldn’t reuse any of the data.

On top of that, these journals don’t pay people to do peer review. Other researchers in the field are expected to do the peer review for free. Oh, and then did we mention that these journals charge ridiculous sums (thousands upon thousands of dollars) for subscriptions, which many university libraries feel compelled to pay? And that much of the research is paid for by your tax dollars anyway?

via The Intellectually Dishonest Claims Of Those Fighting Against Open Access To Federally Funded Research | Techdirt.

The Wall Street Journal just reported that the Federal Communications Commission is holding “closed-door meetings” with industry to broker a deal on Net Neutrality — the rule that lets users determine their own Internet experience.

Given that the corporations at the table all profit from gaining control over information, the outcome won’t be pretty.

The meetings include a small group of industry lobbyists representing the likes of AT&T, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and Google. They reportedly met for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning and will convene another meeting today. The goal according to insiders is to “reach consensus” on rules of the road for the Internet.

This is what a failed democracy looks like: After years of avid public support for Net Neutrality – involving millions of people from across the political spectrum – the federal regulator quietly huddles with industry lobbyists to eliminate basic protections and serve Wall Street’s bottom line.

via Timothy Karr: The Fate of the Internet — Decided in a Back Room.

I had an absolutely brilliant time at TEDxNYED over the weekend, reconnecting with old friends like Larry Lessig, George Siemens, Neeru Khosla, and Dan Cohen, and making new friends like Michael Wesch, Gina Bianchini, Amy Bruckman, Chris Lehmann, and Dan Meyer. The videos of our talks will be online in a few weeks.

In the mean time, I’m posting the final version of the notes I wrote before creating slides for the talk. This is the fifth or sixth version of the notes, and due to time constraints not even all of this version got in – but much of it did. My words on stage didn’t mirror these rough notes directly, but the notes capture the spirit of the talk. You can view the slides for the talk on Slideshare.

Open Education and the Future

What is meant by “openness” in education?

Let’s begin by defining terms.

For over a decade, openness in education has been an adjective describing educational artifacts.

Open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks all mean teaching materials that are shared with everyone, for free, with permission to engage in the 4R activities.

The 4Rs are reuse, redistribute, revise, remix.

Open access to research means that articles describing the results of research are shared with everyone for free, generally with permission to engage in the first 2R activities (but sometimes all 4).

While the nouns being modified (content, resources, courseware, textbooks, and research articles) differ from each other, the activities that we associate with operationalizing openness is the same – acts of generosity, sharing, and giving.

Openness is about overcoming your inner two-year-old who constantly screams, “Mine!”

via My TEDxNYED Talk « iterating toward openness.

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

via Leading Scholar’s U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up Debate – NYTimes.com.

Right now, universities around the world are embracing level one — course content exchange — of the Global Network for Higher Learning. But they need to move further in the next four levels.

As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate “books” — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.

via Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.

Abstract: In the midst of the global recession, how have national governments viewed the role of higher education in their evolving strategies for economic recovery? Demand for higher education generally goes up during economic downturns. Which nations have proactively protected funding for their universities and colleges to help maintain access, to help retrain workers, and to mitigate unemployment rates? And which nations have simply made large funding cuts for higher education in light of the severe downturn in tax revenues? This essay provides a moment-in-time review of the fate of higher education among a number of OECD nations and other countries, with a particular focus on the United States, and on California – the largest state in terms of population and in the size of its economy. Preliminary indicators show that most nations are not resorting to uncoordinated and reactionary cutting of funding, and reductions in access in many regions, such as we see in the US. Their political leaders see higher education as a key to both short-term economic recovery and long-term competitiveness. Further, although this is speculative, it appears that many nations are using the economic downturn to actually accelerate reform policies, some intended to promote efficiencies, but most focused on improving the quality of their university sector and promoting innovation in their economies. One might postulate that the decisions made today and in reaction to the “Great Recession” by nations will likely accelerate global shifts in the race to develop human capital, with the US probably losing ground.

via CSHE – HIGHER EDUCATION BUDGETS AND THE GLOBAL RECESSION: Tracking Varied National Responses and Their Consequences.

In mid-December, two calls for a national day of action to defend education were issued, building on a state-wide call for action to defend public education issued in California. On December 14th, the California Coordinating Committee released a National Call for a March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education. Two days later, on December 16th, an ad-hoc body comprised of students, workers, and other activists from many states, including California, released a call of their own for a March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education. This body consisted of students who participated in the New School occupations, students and workers from across the country, student activists from ongoing campaigns in North Carolina, Chicago, Milwaukee, and various other locations.

The website you are reading is hosted by the ad hoc committee that produced the December 16th call. We do not see the two calls as being in competition or opposition with one another in any way. The dual calls were produced not out of any political, strategic or tactical disagreement, but because the two groups were not in contact with one another when they were drafting the calls. We encourage all students, teachers, workers and parents to forward the text of both calls to their friends, peers and allies, and to organize actions in their schools and communities to defend education for all. The text of both calls is reprinted below, along with a list of endorsers for the December 16th call. A form that can be used to submit endorsements for the December 16th call is located at the bottom of the page.

via Defend Education Take a Stand March 4th: National March 4th Calls for Action and Endorsements.

Howard Rheingold, writer, educator, and thinker, is renowned for tracking not just what is going on now in the digital world, but where the digital world will be going next. His books, such as Tools for Thought 1985, Virtual Reality 1991, The Virtual Community 1994 and Smart Mobs in 2002, usher in the next adventure in computer-human interaction.

In 2008 he was one of the winners of the Digital Media and Learning competition sponsored by HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation, an award he used to fund and design the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory, a free service that integrates social media tools like wikis, chat rooms, social bookmarking, video conferencing, and forums into a coherent solution for both students and educators. He currently teaches Digital Journalism at Stanford University and Virtual Community and Social Media at University of California-Berkeley.

Laurie Rowell: How has greater access to information changed the character of scholarship and what implications does that have going forward?

Howard Reingold: I think you have to parse greater access to information in a couple of ways. First of all, information used to be authoritative; that is, you obtained information that was authorized. A book in a library was something that was edited and published and accepted by the library by official gatekeepers, and you could pretty much accept the validity of that knowledge.

The change that the Internet has brought is that anybody is able to publish anything, so there has been an explosion of information that's available. The person whose library is inadequate but who has an Internet connection has seen a radical expansion of the information that's available to them. And that information is interconnected; there is information about information. There are search engines, metadata, and links that you don't find from isolated pieces of information in traditional libraries.

At the same time, the authority of that information is no longer unquestionable. It's up to the consumer of the information, not the publisher of the information to test the authenticity of that information. So that's a radical change—in what information is available, the way the information available is structured and how it's connected to other information, and the degree to which it is available to people outside of your university library and your traditional means of accessing information. Equally importantly, the reliability, the accuracy of the information, can no longer be assumed and must be tested.

via eLearn: Feature Article – An Interview with Howard Rheingold.

Mark Tushnet

This morning’s Washington Post has a story on proposed legal challenges to the individual mandate in the pending health care legislation. (In brief, conservatives are arguing that Congress lacks the power to require people to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, under either the commerce clause and the power to tax and spend for the general welfare.) The story observes that liberal-leaning constitutional scholars think that, as Erwin Chemerinsky puts it, “There are many close constitutional questions. But this is not among them,” or, as Jack Balkin says, “All of these arguments don’t work, but they’re interesting to debate.”

I’m afraid that these reactions demonstrate that liberal-leaning constitutional law types haven’t absorbed the lessons of critical legal studies — or, indeed, the lesson Justice William Brennan taught his law clerks by holding up one hand with his fingers splayed: “With five votes you can do anything.” The CLS lesson was — and is — that where the stakes are high enough and the political energy is available (to lawyers and judges), at any time the body of legal materials contains enough stuff to support a professionally respectable argument for any legal proposition. So too with the constitutional arguments against the individual mandate.

I lack both the interest and the energy to work out the arguments in detail, but I’ve thought enough about the constitutional issues to be able to sketch out an argument, compatible with existing law, that the individual mandate (a) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, (b) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare, and (c) is (in its penalty aspect) a direct tax prohibited by the Constitution. I myself don’t find these arguments particularly strong, but that — on the CLS view — doesn’t mean anything about what constitutional law on this matter “really” is. If, as Holmes said and as CLS reiterated, what the law “is” is what the courts will do in fact, the thing to do is to figure out which side of the argument can count to five first.

Or, put another way, remember Bush v. Gore?

via Balkinization.

Move Your Money.

A five month CBS News Investigation has found a staggering number of rape kits — a collection of swabs and clothing that provide DNA evidence — have never been sent to crime labs for testing.

via Rape Kits Data, By the Numbers – CBS News.

YouTube – dove evolution.

On September 12, 2001, Human Rights Watch issued a statement condemning the 9/11 attacks, calling on the Bush administration to “uphold the principles that came under attack yesterday, respecting innocent life and international law.” Eight years later, we repost our original statement, because it still stands for the principles we believe should have been, but were not, followed in responding to those brutal events.

Human Rights Watch Response to Attacks on the U.S.Civilian

Life Must Be Respected

September 12, 2001

We profoundly condemn yesterday’s cruel attacks in the United States and express our condolences to the victims and their loved ones. This was an assault not merely on one nation or one people, but on principles of respect for civilian life cherished by all people.

Last night, President Bush said that the United States “will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them.” Yet distinctions must be made: between the guilty and the innocent; between the perpetrators and the civilians who may surround them; between those who commit atrocities and those who may simply share their religious beliefs, ethnicity or national origin. People committed to justice and law and human rights must never descend to the level of the perpetrators of such acts. That is the most important distinction of all.

There are people and governments in the world who believe that in the struggle against terrorism, ends always justify means. But that is also the logic of terrorism. Whatever the response to this outrage, it must not validate that logic. Rather, it must uphold the principles that came under attack yesterday, respecting innocent life and international law. That is the way to deny the perpetrators of this crime their ultimate victory.

via Remembering 9/11 | Human Rights Watch.