David Silver on his blog reports on a four day trip to an organic farm he took with his students. At the end, there’s a tagcloud from the various posts that emerged. Snow, food, nature, and octagon all loom large. As does, rather mysteriously, Francis :)

There are pictures and links to the students’ posts. Fun to read.

Two completely fascinating presentations on technology and education, from very different points of view.

Dylan William brilliantly advances, step by step, toward concluding that technology has a quite particular role to play in education:

What I’m going to argue is that the role of technology in improving learning is primarily in what I call third generation pedagogies. Where we have automated aggregation technologies, which actually take the responses of different students and do some smart things with those things. And give the teacher advice about what are the sensible next steps. The really brilliant teachers are doing this already. But most teachers can’t do it. And so the challenge of third generation pedagogy is to have the contingencies of teaching—that what you do when you know that the teaching didn’t work quite the way you intended—that is supported by technology.

Google’s Peter Norvig, among other things, adds to the mix the value of having students learning in teams so they can teach one another.

(Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the pointers.)

[Tags: education teaching dlan_william peter_norvig ]

Public Library of Science has started yet another open access journal. This one, appropriately enough, is the PLoS Journal of Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS is a peer-reviewed journal that limits what it publishes to what it considers to be the best and most important articles. According to A Blog around the Clock, written by the online community manager at PLoSOne, the inaugural issue is fully international, and the site is now using TOPAZ software that enables comments, annotations, ratings and trackbacks. It will also take an interdisciplinary approach because, as WHO’s director general Margaret Chan writes in a guest commentary:

Although these diseases have been overshadowed by better-known conditions, especially the “big three”–HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis–evidence collected in the past few years has revealed some astonishing facts about the NTDs. They are among the most common infections of the poor–an estimated 1.1 billion of the world’s 2.7 billion people living on less than US$2 per day are infected with one or more NTDs. When we combine the global disease burden of the most prevalent NTDs, the disability they cause rivals that of any of the big three. Moreover, the NTDs exert an equally important adverse impact on child development and education, worker productivity, and ultimately economic development. Chronic hookworm infection in childhood dramatically reduces future wage-earning capacity, and lymphatic filariasis erodes a significant component of India’s gross national product. The NTDs may also exacerbate and promote susceptibility to HIV/AIDS and malaria.

PLoS is trying to be a high-quality, recognized journal, and there’s value in that. It therefore limits what it publishes to what pases peer review and is deemed important. PLoS One, on the other hand, publishes anything that passes its peer review process even if the topic is relatively minor. I wonder: Do all articles that pass PLoS’ peer review but that don’t make it into PLoS get sent over to an appropriate PLoS One journal, if there is one, and if the authors agree?

Anyway, neglected tropical diseases is a perfect topic for an open access journal. But, then, I sort of think everything is.

[Tags: science plos ntd tropical_disease medicine open_access a2k ]

If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries ]

According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It’d be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.

Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.

I’m actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I’ve just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?

Obviously, I’m also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.

But what pleasant questions to contemplate! [Tags: open_access harvard publishing copyright a2k]

Patrick Leary had a terrific article in Journal of Victorian Culture in 2005 that Alexander Macgillivray just pointed out to me. It’s called “Googling the Victorians,” and the premise is: “Fortuitous electronic connections, and the information that circulates through them, are emerging as hallmarks of humanities scholarship in the digital age. ” He’s got some great examples — tracking down the meaning of an 1858 cartoon’s “Remember the grotto!” caption — to make the point that “What is most striking, and often quite useful, about this sort of fishing expedition is how often the sources in which one finds a ‘hit’ are utterly unexpected.” Here’s another:

…when searching for additional instances, beyond those I had found in print sources, in which the Saturday Review had
been referred to by its critics’ nickname, the Saturday Reviler. Google instantly
located the phrase in the following: a biographical account of Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, as a favourite epithet of his associates; the short-lived 1872 periodical,
The Ladies; an 1864 book about the contemporary stage magicians the Brothers
Davenport; an appendix, by Richard Burton, to his 1885 edition of Arabian Nights;
and a magazine account of a conversation with Frank Harris about his tenure as
editor in the 1890s.

Leahy goes on:

Such experiences reinforce the
conviction that the very randomness with which much online material has been
placed there, and the undiscriminating quality of the search procedure itself,
gives it an advantage denied to more focused research. It has been often and
rather piously proclaimed (by myself, among others) that googling around the
internet cannot possibly substitute for good old-fashioned library research, and
this is certainly true. But we are perhaps reaching a point in our relationship to
the online world at which it is important to recognize that the reverse is equally
true. No amount of time spent in the library stacks would have suggested to me
that any of those sources would be an especially good place to look for instances
of that particular phrase, and if it had, the likelihood of actually discovering
the phrase in a printed edition of any of them would have been virtually nil.

This is an excellent argument for reversing the current momentum of copyright law. Our culture benefits from having as much of this stuff searchable and available as possible. Since 19th century stuff is generally out of copyright, the Victorian scholars are in good shape, as Leahy notes. But why should our ability to research, learn and understand suddenly come to a galloping halt towards the beginning of the 20th century?

I don’t want to miss another of Leahy’s points: “…the vast reach of online
searching is connecting people, not merely with information, but with one
another, often in the most unexpected and fruitful ways.” [Tags: copyright scholarship google everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Ellen Hoffman takes my Google talk as a starting point, and wonders what’s happening with education:

Many practitioners and scholars have commented on how little impact educational technology has on schools. But if … authority is shifting, the basis for formal education founded on disciplinary expertise and traditional knowledge definitions is likely to be impacted in ways that we haven’t even begun to explore.  … When students have more knowledge and capability to explore it at their fingertips than the entire school holds, and they have the ability to contribute rather than just consume, what is the role of the teacher? This is an impact far greater than determining if technology enhances achievement or has value in classrooms. Is it possible that educational technology should be thinking of itself as a revolutionary discipline?

That’s exactly the question, although the answer of course isn’t obvious or settled. Right now, the teaching cycle tends to go from textbook to classwork to test…that is, from solitary to social to solitary. But the Web is enabling us to learn socially and even to know socially. With the growing importance of reputation (in counterbalance to credentials), even the reward and measurement system is becoming social. The Web is disrupting the old rhythm. And it’s not clear that the traditional rhythm is teaching our children how to dance in the new world. (Block that metaphor!)

Brian Turner of the International Schools Tech blog apparently hasn’t read the book, but he has seen the movie (well, the Google videocast) and has listened to the podcasts. He thinks that I’m starting to put my “finger on” the meaning of Web 2.0 for education…

Here it is an iPod compatible download. (Try renaming it to .mp4 if your player thinks it can’t play it.)

Weblogg-ed writes about the book from the point of view of an educator, disappointed that there isn’t more in the book on that topic. There’s a useful discussion in the comments…