The idea here is that rather than understanding courses like these as MOOCs in terms of massive, broadcasting learning experiences, they become localized, fractal relationships that form a loose, yet dynamic, community born out of the web

Now I’m not sure how a course you don’t have to take and can leave at any time could be called a “tyranny” but I’ll deal with the question raised in this post head on: “Are we are attempting to impose our values (of openness, sharing, online learning as the future of education, etc) without a critical examination of what that means for practice and for individuals who are part of social organizations?” And the short answer is: no. For two reasons. First, nobody’s imposing anything here; if you want to go back to your structured formal education, where you pay a substantial fee, there are thousands of institutions who would be happy to help you. Second, the openness (and the rest of it) is the result of a critical examination. As I have argued with respect to the principles of successful networks, if you want your social organizations to be effective at all, you need to embrace things like autonomy, openness, interatcivity and diversity. We select these principles, not because we’re arbitrary, but because the best evidence tells us they work.

The web needs a higher signal to noise ratio, and it can only get that if well-informed and thoughtful people write in depth about whatever they want.

Ecological Psychology for design Young (2004) defines learning as the education of intention and attention, reinterpreting motivation as an on-going momentary personal assessment of the match between the adopted goals for this occasion and the affordances of the environment. Learners are self-directed by personal goals and intentions Learning improves with practice Learning improves with feedback The process of inducing students to adopt new goals is an essential element of instructional design from the ecological psychology perspective.

And in my estimation, that’s what human knowledge is generally about: not creating a mirror of a real world but creating real enough knowledge objects. Enough for what? I suppose those purposes can change.

What constructing ought to denote, but perhaps never will (hence Levi and Latour’s calls for a new term), is that the knowledge we produce is another object in the world, made from other objects in the world (including us). As one object among many, the knowledge we produce does not capture/represent in some pure way other objects in the world. It isn’t “true” in that sense. As academics we already accept this across the campus. However it also isn’t “untrue” or operating in a separate, noncommunicating realm from other objects. It isn’t purely discursive or purely social.

Zipf’s Law (Zipf 1935, 1965). This law states that if a word is nth in frequency in a given language it is likely to occupy the same ranking in any single text in that language. So, the most frequent words in the language are likely to be the most frequent words in any text in that language, and their order of frequency will also be roughly the same. Zipf also showed that there is a correlation between the length of a word and its frequency. Short words occur often.

La dinámica de la evaluación investigadora (de la que depende la provisión de puestos de trabajo en las instituciones) nos ha llevado a extremos perversos e indignantes. Revistas que pagan cantidades obscenas por ser incluidas en los famosos índices, investigadores que pagan por revisar un paper para la revista en cuestión, otros que pagan por publicar en dicha revista, jóvenes –y no tan jóvenes- que aún haciendo investigación de gran relevancia e interés, no tienen el más mínimo interés en hacerla pública y notoria, sólo en incluirla en el índice de una JCR aunque muera de soledad en alguna web en el mejor de los casos y para ello haya que pedir un préstamo. Investigadores que no tenemos la necesidad de que se conozca lo que hacemos, y para los que el impacto en la realidad ha sido sustituido en importancia por el impacto en los índices (que insisto, no es lo mismo).

major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised. It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. Moreover, some providers bundle many journals as one subscription, with major, high-use journals bundled in with journals consulted far less frequently. Since the Library now must change its subscriptions and since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views: 1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F). 2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F). 3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F). 4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues (F). 5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations (F). 6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options (F). 7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals (L). 8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system, (L). 9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public (L).