Academic Evolution

Scholarly Mobile Computing: ArXiv hits the iPhone

With the first three iPhone applications now available to serve up scholarly papers from the arXiv.org repository of scientific papers, mobile computing has now officially entered the domain of scholarly communication and is poised to demonstrate the inevitability and superiority of Open Access publishing. What's more, the appearance of bonafide scholarship on smartphones will accelerate the metamorphosis of modern scholarship because the social, geographic, and interactive aspects of mobile computing are going to reshape research, field work, peer review, and the integration of scholarship into formal and informal teaching and learning.

Galileo opened the heavens with Open Access

The telescope was not the instrument through which Galileo opened the skies four centuries ago, forever changing our concepts of worlds terrestrial and celestial. No, Galileo's breakthrough was not a technological one, nor an intellectual one per se. Copernicus and Kepler had laid out the concepts before Galileo pointed his modest tube into the sky. What made all the difference, the lever that finally displaced the constraining, earth-centered Ptolemaic cosmos and ushered in a heliocentric worldview and the many advances that came in the wake of empirical science, was nothing so concrete as lenses nor so abstract as mathematical formulas. No, it was Galileo's strategy for freely and publicly communicating his findings. Galileo opened the heavens with Open Access.

Podcast #005: Interview with Michèle Lamont

In this interview with Michèle Lamont, Harvard Professor of Sociology, we discuss her new book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard, 2009). How professors judge the quality and significance of scholarship depends upon disciplinary standards not always consistent with one another, rhetorical strategies of those submitting and reviewing scholarship, and the pragmatic constraints of review processes that together form the dynamic culture and "technology" of evaluation in higher education. Lamont brings greater transparency to these standards and processes. We specifically discuss a set of key standards that academics across disciplines gravitate toward in making their judgments. These include clarity, quality, originality, significance, methods, and feasibility.

Even academics may register surprise at how these standards are understood and weighted so diversely across disciplines, and yet Lamont shows how professors transcend differences and arrive at workable and reliable decisions. My more complete review of the book will follow.

Listen to the episode here (or subscribe to the podcast here).

Intellectual Liquidity and Academic Impedence

Traditional academic practices lack intellectual liquidity, making them unfit for the digital age.  Liquidity is that concept from economics that accounts for the ease of exchange made possible through currency or credit. Liquidity is crucial for a prosperous economy: the greater the ease of exchange, the more trade, the more general benefit to all.

But academia is based not on the idea of increasing intellectual liquidity; it is based on impeding it. Think about it. Traditional teaching and learning, publishing, and credentialing all require submitting to various academic structures (classes and classrooms, the editorial review process, program requirements). Those structures slow the flow of knowledge by artificially restricting it to traditional times and places (a semester or class period, a classroom or a campus) or by subjecting publications or individuals to editorial evaluation or institutional oversight (peer and tenure review). What is the result? Those students, scholars and their ideas are actually kept out of circulation while the slow wheels of evaluation (grading, editorial review) decide when and how ideas or people will get certain privileges or credentials.