Ideas to meet the challenges facing academic publishers today, including research, academic and medical publishing. Here I’ve added all the ideas I’ve previously blogged about.
I have been approached by Allen & Unwin, Book Publishers, to use some less traditional ways to connect with readers – and using a newly published book seems a good place to start. This is an experiment, an ongoing project over the next 3 months open to change and trialling things depending on your feedback. Will using Social Media make any difference at all? I like the Publisher, Elizabeth Weiss, I like the book and am happy to be involved.
The Clean Industrial Revolution: growing Australian prosperity in a greenhouse age published 3 weeks ago, written by Ben McNeil known for his work on climate change and energy policy in Australia (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, The Australian and The Canberra Times, radio and television appearances). 
Ben also recently joined Twitter, started a blog and is doing a book signing at UNSW bookshop on Wednesday where I hope to interview him.
To see how news of The Clean Industrial Revolution spreads on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, we’ve opted to give a 27% discount on the book – we want the discount to be big and different.
I have signed copies of the book to give away, 9 copies every month for the next 3 months. Signed books will be given for new ideas, comments, suggestions, feedback.
First thing, while I’m waiting to meet Ben, is to think of a hashtag for twitter that can also be used as a code to get the discount on the Publisher’s website. Suggestions welcome (preferably something to do with the subject matter), and whichever suggestion we use will get the first of this months free signed copies.
We would like to start this officially by Friday, so I’ll need suggestions for #hashtags before then.
Some excerpts from the book:
In 2007, I was in Canberra as a young scientist pushing the scientific case for action and learning very quickly that the government was completely blind to the gravity of potential threats to Australia beyond just the environment. At a high-level meeting in the Cabinet room, as I looked in awe around me, all I could see was a sea of grey hair and suits clustered around the biggest table I had ever seen.
Sitting to my right was the Prime Minister, John Howard, the Minister for Education and Science, Julie Bishop, the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane. Scattered among the rest of the Cabinet were the heads of every science, research technology and education body in Australia.
Before my presentation, three of Australia’s most influential climate scientists presented an exhaustive report of recommendations on how Australia could actively respond to the emerging climate of change. As I stared down the Cabinet room I wondered why the two most senior government minsters responsible for the economy and foreign policy were not in the room. Where were the Treasure and the Foreign Minster? It seems for many years the Australian Government reflected a broad and dangerous public misconception about combating climate change: that is it has nothing to do with Australia’s long-term economic prosperity or national security.
This book has one overarching theme: that climate change and our over-reliance on fossil fuels will put Australia’s economic prosperity, not just the environment, at great risk. The only way to boost the prospects of stabilising our climate, and grow Australia’s economy in a world that will move away from carbon, coal and oil, is to slash carbon emissions and foster a new, clean low-carbon industrial revolution. These new Australian products and technologies will be craved in a world short on oil and high on carbon and would position Australia as a leading clean-tech hub for a growing Asia.
Dont forget to leave your ideas for a codename/hashtag reference for people to use. The best we’ve come up with is #GreenCollar…
Declaration: I will at no point be receiving any money from sales of this book.
Collaborative learning is all very well, but how do you assess quality of individual learning in multi-authored projects and collaborative tasks such as wiki projects? How do students, who know nothing about a subject, teach other students about the same subject, and assess each other along the way – and what happened to the lecturer?
The concept: students mark each others papers, set each other questions with associated answers (which aren’t checked to see if they are correct) and assess each other.
New tools to measure the quality of learning, were described by John Hamer, (University of Auckland, NZ) at a recent EducauseAustralia conference. For example, Aropä and PeerWise support collaborative learning in large, undergraduate classes – Aropä enables students to referee their peers coursework and PeerWise is a data bank of multi-choice questions contributed, explained and discussed entirely by students.
“These systems leverage the latent intellectual capacity of a large class to provide new opportunities for learning. Using Aropä each student might review three or four essays and receive a corresponding amount of feedback, all within a few days. The immediacy and diversity of the feedback is substantially greater than can be produced by a tutor. While the quality of the reviewing is typically variable, there are affective benefits in challenging students to distinguish between good and poor feedback. By eliminating the stamp of authority and introducing diverse, possibly conflicting feedback, students are required to exercise their critical judgement in deciding what information to accept and reject.
Peerwise leverages the energy of a large class in a different way, building an annotated question bank that can contain 1000’s of multiple-choice questions. Each question is accompanied by an explanation written by the question author, overall quality and difficult ratings assigned by students who have answered
It is no longer about right or wrong answers but about the learning process, applying and understanding what you are learning, while you are learning.
A whole new way of learning but also questioning, changing from one that is hierachical, (experts vs students) to being able to learn from your peers.
Feedback from students shows high levels of participation – students state that they don’t value the feedback they get from other students highly but they do see benefit in writing reviews and also value seeing other student work, benefit perceived in reviewing both exemplary and weak work.
Other tools include trac an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. It allows wiki markup and includes a timeline showing all current and past project giving an overview of the project and tracking progress very easy.
Uses the trac environment to visualise a wiki structure and how it changes from the 1st week to the end of the year, showing individual students contributions and teamwork. It answers questions like
* What does the whole wiki look like now?
* What was happening in April, September and May 2009?
* What did the wiki look like at the end of 2008?
* Which wiki pages did Mary contribute to?
Developed by the Universityof Sydney supports collaborative writing, particularly for students writing academic essays.
Glosser supports the writing giving a series of tools to help reflect and improvie writing by 1) scaffolding their reflection with trigger questions, and 2) using text mining techniques to provide content clues that can help answer those questions.
They didn’t learn me like that when I was at school, that’s for sure.
And to see coverage on the Educause Australia Conference on Twitter, including this presentation, search twitter using #EdAust09
“How do you trust what you’re reading is quality?” “When does quality become quality?” These are recurring themes encountered with regard to some of the websites that offer free content. However, aggregator sites gather content of a certain standard or type which may offer an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of peer review or defining quality.
This is an excellent new educational resource which gathers video lectures from leading Universities such as MIT, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. Lectures are free to use and download and there is plan to include social features for users. As an example:
Private Equity and the Financial Crisis — Yale University lecture by Stephen Schwarzman Co-Founder of Blackstone Group
For a more detailed description on Academic Earth see also Life in the Fast lane’s Academic Earth Open Source Lecture Series.
This site features bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines and only includes those posts which have reached a high academic standard. Launched in January 2006, ScienceBlogs claims to have the largest online community dedicated to science.
Research Blogging automatically aggregates only blog posts about peer-reviewed research, many of which appear in Science Blogs and can be recognized by the green tick telling reader they are reading a blog on peer reviewed research. If you don’t know this site I can highly recommend having a look – topics covered range from Computer Science to Psychology.
Newly launched, YouTubeEdu collects all the educational content being uploaded on YouTube by Colleges and Universities. However, in this case there is no guarantee being made of educational quality and the standards will undoubtedly vary but it is another excellent resource.
Although not aggregator sites as such, it is probable that top Universities offering content on a variety of subjects will have reached a certain standard. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to providing OpenCourseWare recently opted to publish their research articles free online (in addition to sending them to journals for publication) in order to give greater access to the university’s scholarship. Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have also decided on a similar policy. The Education Portal lists some of the best free online University courses available.
Overall, does content go through as rigorous a review process compared with more traditional routes – maybe, maybe not. There are new ideas like GPeerReview being developed, however, for sites such as Academic Earth, ScienceBlogs, or MIT to be able to continue to draw traffic by virtue of hosting only the best means they must ensure that content meets their standards – much in the same way as happens in the more traditional routes of peer review.
For more information on the role of blogs as institutional educational tools which also tackles the issue of quality control very well see an article published by PLoS Biol: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy.
