justice

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

“It was unbelievable,” said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

via Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s – NYTimes.com.

The need for affordable and flexible education rings truer today than ever before. According to the College Board’s 2009 Trends in College Pricing report, the cost of higher education is rising: Tuition for in-state residents at public four-year institutions was about $7,020 for the 2009-2010 academic year, bringing the total cost for one academic year to more than $19,000 when books and living expenses are included. This means a four-year degree at a public university costs nearly $80,000, and according to the same report, a private four-year degree costs twice that — $160,000.

And governors will continue cutting higher education budgets, which will hike tuition costs, said John Thomasian, director of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. The lack of affordability combined with the complexity of student financial aid threatens higher education’s accessibility, said David Breneman, the Newton and Rita Meyers professor in economics of education at the University of Virginia. “To find out what the actual price of college is going to be is not trivial in this country,” he said. “The kids who are coached know how to run the financial aid system if they are eligible, while the kids from less sophisticated families — I think a number of us worry that they sort of get lost at the starting gate.”

As university budgets shrink, governors are searching for ways to make the remaining education money more effective, Thomasian said. “One of those ways to make it effective is for higher education to start using a lot more online learning.”

via Saving Public Universities.

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.

Everybody agrees that scientific research is indispensable to the nation’s health, prosperity, and security. In the many discussions of the value of research, however, one rarely hears any mention of how much publication of the results is best. Indeed, for all the regrets one hears in these hard times of research suffering from financing problems, we shouldn’t forget the fact that the last few decades have seen astounding growth in the sheer output of research findings and conclusions. Just consider the raw increase in the number of journals. Using Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of “refereed academic/scholarly” publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main cause: the growth in the number of researchers.

Many people regard this upsurge as a sign of health. They emphasize the remarkable discoveries and breakthroughs of scientific research over the years; they note that in the Times Higher Education’s ranking of research universities around the world, campuses in the United States fill six of the top 10 spots. More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise.

If only that were true.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

via We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

College students know the online resource of which they dare not speak: Wikipedia, the voluminous internet encyclopedia demonized by many in higher education—and a resource that two University of Denver instructors use as a centerpiece of their curriculum.

Denver journalism students are writing Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move to the web en masse.

Journalism instructors Lynn Schofield Clark and Christof Demont-Heinrich said students are told to check their sourcing carefully, just as they would for an assignment at a local newspaper.

“There’s a sense of anxiety about it, because professors have a pretty negative attitude toward Wikipedia,” said Demont-Heinrich, who first assigned the Wikipedia writing to students in his introductory course taught during the university’s recent winter semester.

“Students are leery about mentioning Wikipedia, because they might be subjected to criticism. … But I tell them it’s an online source of knowledge that just has some information that might be questionable, but that doesn’t mean you have to dismiss all of [its content].”

via Journalism students turn to Wikipedia to publish stories | eCampus News.

While the White House claims that the president secured a major education reform victory Tuesday by signing into law policy that limits the role of private lenders and increases the funds for Pell Grants, critics contend that it is just an incremental approach. In particular, some education advocates are concerned that skyrocketing tuition costs at higher-education institutions will make any bump in Pell Grants effectively moot.

Asked about these critiques, top aides to the president acknowledged the need for supplemental reforms; though with the jump in grants, they argue, community colleges would be effectively free for many students. But both Education Secretary Arne Duncan and top domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes emphasized in a joint interview with Huffington Post that the ultimate remedy for lowering tuition is to simply make the education system more open and competitive.

“You’re correct, some universities are running up tuition increases far above the rate of inflation,” Duncan said. “But you see other universities doing some really creative things. You see some universities going to three-year programs, basically taking out of their expenses. You see other universities going to no-frills campuses.”

“And so students and parents are very, very smart,” he added. “They're sophisticated. They're going to vote with their feet, they're going to go where they can get a great education but getting the good value along with that. And folks that don't contain cost, I think, frankly are going to lose market share, lose competitive advantage.”

via Duncan On Rising Tuition Costs: Students Will ‘Vote With Their Feet’.

The average law school increased its faculty size by 40 percent over the past 10 years, according to a study by The National Jurist to be released in late March.

This increase in staffing accounts for 48 percent of the tuition increase from 1998 to 2008, the study shows. Tuition increased by 74 percent at private schools and a 102 percent at public institutions from 1998 to 2008.

The increase in staffing does not take into account the increase in support staff, which most law school administrators acknowledge has also increased. But no reliable data is available for that.

Law school observers say the dramatic increases are related to two things — an increased need for specialization and the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools.

“Law schools tend to believe that their faculty reputation is driven by scholarship and they are very interested in U.S. News,” said William Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University Mauer School of Law. “Lowering your faculty-to-student ratio improves your [U.S. News] ranking and increases time for scholarship.”

Henderson said the typical teaching load has dropped from five courses a few generations ago to three courses today.

“Professors are spending less time in the classroom,” he said. “Now whether that is a smart use of a social resource is another question. It is very expensive to pay for faculty research.”

via Law school faculties 40% larger than 10 years ago | the National Jurist.

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.

Online courses have been around for nearly two decades, but enrollment has soared in recent years as more universities increase their offerings. More than 4.6 million college students (about one in four) were taking at least one online course in 2008, a 17 percent increase over 2007.

Institutions like Rutgers University and the University of California system are looking at expanding online courses as a way to keep down tuition costs or increase revenues. Recently, Rutgers said it would triple online revenues from $20.5 million to $60 million in five years.

Who benefits most from online courses — students or colleges? Are online classes as educationally effective as in-classroom instruction? Should more post-secondary education take place online?

via College Degrees Without Going to Class – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.

Fort Worth — Individual community colleges can’t match the marketing budgets of for-profit institutions that plaster their regions with advertisements. So they’re exploring ways to fight back by going national, pooling their efforts to promote online programs in a new marketing collaboration that was announced Sunday at a distance-education conference here.

The discussions, led by the American Association of Community Colleges, represent a fresh spin on an older strength-in-numbers distance-learning vision called the International Community College, which failed to get off the ground after four years of planning.

The distance-education landscape has changed drastically since that telecourse project. Both for-profits and an increasingly aggressive group of traditional four-year colleges now often recruit by purchasing “leads” on potential students that are parcelled out by online portals – a game community colleges have generally not joined.

via Community Colleges Explore National Collaboration to Fight For-Profit Marketing Machine – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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.