Teaching with Technology@Tufts

Today's post is part 1 of a series on Openness that I plan to do over the next few weeks.

Open Access and the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing

In honor of Open Access Week I thought it fitting to launch a series on openness with a post on the Open Access movement and it's increasing relevance to universities such as Tufts.

For readers who may be new to the subject, the open access movement got its start in December 2001 at a conference hosted by the Open Society Institute of Budapest, where scholars assembled to express support for open access to scientific and scholarly journal literature. The simplest definition of OA, arising out of this conference, holds that open access literature is literature that is scholarly in nature, digital, available online, free of charge and free or most copyright and licensing restrictions.

The primary driver behind the open access movement has been changes in the scholarly publishing industry, which have resulted in skyrocketing prices and the inability of libraries to keep up with subscriptions to scholarly journals. Over the past several years, journal prices have risen 320% while library budgets have increased by a fraction of that amount. Tufts University currently spends $4 million on journal subscriptions. The skyrocketing costs of academic journals limits the ability of university libraries to keep up their subscriptions and in turn greatly reduces dissemination of scholarly research. By removing price and permission barriers that often limit access to scholarly publications, open access publishing offers the potential to mitigate this crisis in scholarly communication and to ensure wider dissemination of academic research and knowledge at greatly reduced costs to scholars and institutions. Equally as important, it allows authors to retain more of their intellectual property.

There are many things that academics and institutions can do to increase the impact of their research and help mitigate the crisis in scholarly publishing. Chief among these is to Manage your intellectual property by negotiating with publishers. Most journals require authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement upon publication, which cedes copyright to the publisher. Increasingly however, publishers are allowing authors to retain portions of their copyright through the use of an author addendum or amendment to publication agreement. Signing an amendment to publication enables an author to retain more rights over the use of their publication and to upload a copy of their work to an institutional repository that's open. Another way of promoting open access is to use alternative methods of publishing such as self-archiving in open access repositories or publishing in open access journals, an increasing number of which are peer-reviewed and considered high-impact. Finally, support sustainable scholarly communication by wielding influence with your publishers, becoming a proponent in your department for open access, and support legislation to make publicly funded research free.

For more information on Open Access at Tufts, see the Scholarly Communication Team website.

One of the most exciting and potentially disruptive developments in the realm of teaching with technology is the growth of social media. Loosely defined, social media are inexpensive and accessible tools that enable users to create and publish content on the web. Use of social media represent a shift in how people discover, read and share information and content. Scholars such as Clay Shirkey have pointed to the democratizing effect of social media tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, etc.

We're all for democracy, but what effect are social media tools having upon teaching and learning? One of the most profound changes facilitated by social media is a shift in how and where information originates. By enabling anyone to publish content, social media tools supplant traditional channels and gatekeepers of knowledge, including instructors. Knowledge is no longer created and controlled by a select few and distributed through disconnected channels; rather it is open, connected and participatory. De Jaegher and Di Paulo (2007) have termed this trend "participatory sense making."

A related change brought about by social media tools is the ability to connect many people simultaneously, transforming one-to-many monologues such as lecture into many-to-many dialogues more typically found in group work and project collaboration. As Brown and Duguid have noted, (2000) information becomes knowledge through situating it within the context of our social connections. Knowledge, it may therefore be argued lives in the connections we forge with and among content creators.

A third change brought about by social media is a potential shift in the role of students. No longer relegated to being merely consumers of content in the classroom, students are becoming actively engaged in creating their own content and sharing it with others, beyond the traditional confines of the classroom. Such a shift holds the potential to do many things, the most intriguing of which to me is to move students up Bloom's Taxonomy of learning, ensuring potential engagement with theories and content at more advanced levels.

So, what should we make of emerging social media technologies and their potentially disruptive impact upon traditional classrooms? Given the assumption that understanding is determined by variables such as: the depth and diversity of connections, the frequency of exposure, the ability to integrate with existing concepts/ideas, and a combination of both strong and weak ties, we can simply ignore these technologies, or we can harness their potential to bring about new and deeper types of learning through the primacy and immediacy of networked connections.

Learn More about Social Media Tools and Resources at Tufts

*Blogs
*Wikis
*Podcasts
*Video/YouTube

In catching up with what is new in MERLOT, I read that the online Free Assessment Summary Tool (FAST) had received their Classics Award.

FAST is an anonymous online survey tool that automatically summarizes students' impressions of a course and/or teacher and supplies the data directly to the instructor. It is completely web based, password protected, anonymous, and instantaneously updated.

According to their mission statement, the FAST initiative will "provide professional, technical and academic advice to faculty who wish to become more informed about the teaching and learning process through the application of faculty-administered, anonymous online student feedback."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: FAST - Assessing Teaching Tool" »

The Immersive Education Initiative has certainly been in the news recently. This "international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies" is working to support online education using 3-D virtual platforms. In December, Harvard sponsored an Immersive Education Event and on January 22, at the Boston Digital Media Summit, the Immersive Education Initiative announced the creation of the "Education Grid and corresponding Platform Ecosystem" which will provide educators with "a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of virtual world learning environments, interactive learning games, and simulations."

The first three platforms in the ecosystem are Second Life, Sun Microsystems Laboratory's Project Wonderland, and Croquet. According to a Media Grid announcement:

"These platforms will be enhanced to utilize the server-side Education Grid that will deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled."

Since 2004, Boston College students have been using a version of the Immersive Education platform to take courses. You can read more about how the Immersive Education platform was used with students in The Wired Campus article 'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds Made for Learning.

The platform includes:

"interactive 3D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality, voice chat (Voice over IP/VoIP), Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with collaborative online course environments and classrooms."

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Immersive Education " »

Last fall I wrote about Zotero, a free Firefox extension that enables faculty to collect, manage, and cite their research from George Mason University. In December Zotero was in the news again with their partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive to create a shared online database for scholars to upload their notes, photographs, digital scans of research documents, and other data from their hard drives.

This opening up of private research materials before publication may be counter to the usual university research culture of waiting until publication for research to be shared but the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $514,000 to the Center for History and New Media at George Mason to support the effort, and gave more than $700,000 more to the Internet Archive for the project according to an article in The Wired Campus.

The Zotero-IA alliance will create a “Zotero Commons” into which scholarly materials can be added simply via the Zotero client, according to Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center.

Continue reading "Friday's Pick: Sharing Pre-Publication Research" »