Academic Evolution: The Book

This blog is intended to become Academic Evolution, the book. My model is Chris Anderson, whose Long Tail blog helped bring about his seminal book of the same name. Similarly, I am beta testing my ideas, developing them in keeping with the principle of transparency and with the goal of inviting public review and collaboration. I'm smart enough to know others are often much smarter, and I firmly believe that publishing one's thinking process improves it. So, here's the working table of contents for the book. Obviously I will be making each of these proposed chapters the subject of my various blog posts. Let's figure this out together! I welcome your suggestions:

Table of Contents for Academic Evolution (version 12-27-08)

Preface: Urbino's Pride
During the early days of printed books, Frederick, Duke of Urbino, bragged that his magnificent library did not contain a single printed book. In fact, he had printed books recopied onto manuscript pages so his peers would see them as legitimate. Meanwhile, the cheap editions of classical works printed by Aldus Manutius were reaching a generation who cared less about illuminations and more about being illuminated. Each media revolution embarrasses the status quo, and properly so. Academia, it's time to own your shame.

1. Academia is Not the Creative Commons
   In fighting to preserve traditional publishing, teaching, and credentialing, academic institutions are betraying their core educational missions, working against the goals of scholarship, retarding the creative growth of students and faculty, and effectively squandering their best assets. 
2. Stuck in Print
   A print-based paradigm has structured academic knowledge, publishing, and teaching; it is based on restriction, elitism, and control. The digital paradigm now supplanting it is based on principles of openness, the democratization of knowledge, and collaboration. The question is not which paradigm will win, but how costly academic institutions will make the transition.
3. Academic Publishing is Old School
   Traditional academic publishing is a $7 billion business that quarantines knowledge, exploits faculty and students, biases research, and intentionally restricts the influence of scholarship. Traditional publishing once made scholarly communication possible; now, it impedes it.
4. Academic Review Reviewed
   The print paradigm for knowledge made quality control coincide with scarcity economics that are no longer relevant. Traditional peer review is fundamentally flawed, is being clung to and enforced at great cost, and is being superseded by web metrics and reputation systems that fall largely outside of academic control.
5. The Web is My Classroom
   Students are bypassing traditional academic routes and authority systems, taking control of their education through new media and collaborative learning (see Jim Groom on "Edupunk"). Smart educators (within or outside schools) are teaching to the public, not just the local classroom. This changes pedagogy and turns teaching into publishing.
6. Miswired: Academia's Poor Technology Investments
   Academic institutions put mega-bucks into networks, computers, software, and course management systems. Infrastructure is mission-critical today, but instructional technology is not the answer when used to keep the print paradigm and its limits on life support. When mobile computing rules education, we'll all wonder why that money spent on the Blackboard installation wasn't used to put in campus cell towers and WiFi.
7. Digital Scholars and Scholarship
   The value of knowledge in the digital age correlates to its dynamic design and use, not as much to a publication venue and certainly not to a one-time, limited peer evaluation of content. Digital knowledge also tends to be collaborative and perpetually in "beta." This makes some of the most important digital work invisible to those trained only to recognize knowledge within the controls and genres of academia's print paradigm. By holding to the old paradigm within hiring, promotion, and tenure, academia will sacrifice the very people it needs to retool for the future.
8. The Library Saves the World
   As toll access knowledge becomes even less viable and open access becomes the norm, the library will sustain the long tail of academia through institutional repositories, creative metadata, and collaborative digital publishing with scholars and students. The librarian can be reborn as a concierge, broker, or midwife to research, teaching, and learning. The library will be the university's press and publishing platform, dedicated as much to archiving/publishing student work, teaching media, and in-process scholarly assets as it is to preserving traditionally vetted scholarly works.
9. Serious Play: New Tools in the Old School
   While it is already commonplace to invoke Web 2.0 tools for educational purposes, too few teachers are actually playing with the new media for serious research purposes or are inviting their students to experiment productively with podcasting, blogging, microblogging, video sharing, or virtual worlds like Second Life. And contrary to popular belief, many students lack basic digital literacy. It's time to make the new tools an adjunct to every subject taught, and for schools to encourage faculty to experiment with digital scholarship and teaching the way Google does with its 20% time projects.
   
10. Waking the Sleeping Giant: Academic Activism
    Those wise enough to see where academia is and isn't going can make a difference now--authors, publishers, administrators, accreditors, and the public at large can insist on making the most of our intellectual resources and creative capital by identifying and not tolerating print paradigm impediments wherever they occur. Funding agencies, philanthropists, alumni, and accrediting bodies can pressure academia in the right places, too. Academia can give so much more bang for the buck, but only if we buck the system that dissipates its own intellectual assets.
11. The Digital Scholar's Manifesto
    "WHEREAS, the print paradigm is restricting the productive creation and distribution of knowledge, negatively impacting teaching, learning, and research today, I claim my privilege as a citizen of the digital age to produce, share, collaborate, and publish unfettered by the artificial and outdated systems of publishing and review that academia continues to insist upon to its own detriment..."

Well, what do you think? I'd love to hear.

Comments

[Gideon Burton]

Great questions, Gary. My experiment here is not just with medium but with genre and audience. I sincerely believe more scholarship can be rhetorically adjusted to general (if not popular) consumption than is attempted. In fact, there are strong ethical arguments to do so (as the Open Access principle affects not just literal access, but intellectual access). One of the pride points of academia is that serious ideas only come in the garb of monographs and scholarly articles. I found Chris Anderson's Long Tail to be extremely stimulating intellectually--irrespective of any business dimensions. He combines art, culture, economics, technology--a host of fields synthesized in a very readable way. I should say another model might be Neil Postman. His Amusing Ourselves to Death had a populist tone, but was built on very solid communication theory and historical analysis. Now, if your question pertains to where does this sort of publication fit into my academic career, the answer is complicated by the fact that it does not and cannot by normal academic standards (as if a string of comments were tantamount to a real peer review! as though the self-publishing of a blog were a recognized mode of scholarly publication!); yet, the subject matter is (in my opinion) very consequential. So it is unlikely to contribute to a promotion file, but highly likely to contribute to promoting good ideas, good discussion, and an improved academia. The personal gain is already making it worth it, as I see my ideas shaping and being shaped. It's what I really wanted from an academic career. What could be greater than to see ideas mattering? That said, I can be a bit cavalier about not caring if my book either counts as scholarship or makes money, since I am tenured and do not need for it to do either. I hope that means I'm approaching this in much the same way as my students might--as amateurs who think they have something to say, and who get rewarded by feeling as though, through the process, that they really do.

[Gary L. Hatch]

I'm interested in the "blog to book" model, but I wonder if this works better for journalism or popular media than it does for scholarly publication. Chris Anderson is essentially a journalist, and *The Long Tail* became a management book. (Is profitable management consulting the next step?) Another good example is the *Julie & Julia*, a blog written by Julie Powell that became a best selling book and is in production as a movie. Is the point of having a blog to cash in? If not, then why not just leave the blog as a blog? Why turn it into a book? Is it because one can earn royalities on a book? (Or get P&T if it's a scholarly book?) Is this blog aimed at the trade market (editorial review with an eye toward sales) or the scholarly market (peer review with an eye toward fitting into a scholarly conversation.

[scott]

Looks like this will be a great read. I can't wait for you to get it published.

The preface story of "Urbino's Pride" is the perfect way to introduce the overall topic, but the last sentence seems a bit harsh: "Academia, it's time to own your shame."

Isn't your intention to help bring academia along? Are you sure you want such a forceful frontal attack on the establishment? It may backfire and mentally push someone into a corner for the rest of the book and negatively taint their opinions of every thing else they read.

[Michael Meadon]

Hmmmmm.... it looks like the web ate my comment. The brief version: pre-publication peer-review is, imo, indispensable. (Though it could be improved by being made double-blind and by releasing reviewers names + comments with the paper). The web, it seems to me, will have (and already has had) the biggest impact on post-publication peer-review.

I'm looking forward to your arguments about this, though.

[ictlogist]

Really interesting and appealing: best of lucks in this enterprise.

I find that the issue of students, teaching, schools and so comes in and out of your scheme at random (or so it seems).

I guess it is absolutely needed to be dealt with here, but sometimes it gets messy with other concepts like science diffusion, quality, etc.

Separate, specific chapters for school and teaching issues?

Congrats for the initiative! :)

[Pål Lykkja]

Very interesting. I have one comment thougth:

"The librarian can be reborn as a concierge, broker, or midwife to research, teaching, and learning."

Why only focus on non-specialized librarians? You have subject specialist with over hundred years old traditions.

I think that "concierge, broker, or midwife" is to technical to fully describe the roles to academic librarians. Remember that the German academic librarian tradition from 1870's (Fachreferent) demanded a Phd degree before one specialized in librarianship. The reason for that was that they thought that deep knowledge in their fields was necessary to do a good job as an academic librarian. I think deep knowledge in a specific subject is even more important for doing good librarianship in an academic library in the digital world.

[Gideon Burton]

Thanks for the feedback, Steve. Your proposal regarding a change in peer review is something some are already trying (which I'll highlight in my upcoming blog post on that topic). After looking at your physics lab, I spent some time studying OpenWetWare, the courses offered, the associated blogs, the open lab notebooks, etc. This is something Jean-Claude Bradley opened my eyes to awhile back but I hadn't seen in action yet. Open Science is so much further along than other disciplines. I'm especially intrigued by the publication of protocols (especially "consensus" protocols--http://openwetware.org/wiki/Protocols). It may be that opening our methodologies will play as big a role in advancing knowledge as sharing data or results.

[Steve Koch]

Hi -- I found your blog post via Bora Zivkovic's friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com/coturnix) ... this project looks very cool! I'm very interested in following the progression, and contributing ideas here and there if I have them. For what they're worth, here're some comments on your sections above (numbered by chapter):

Preface. This is an interesting and relevant story that I hadn't heard before.

4. I am very interested in this chapter. I too think anonymous peer review is outdated and failing. As an evolutionary step, I would like editors to try out completely published and non-anonymous (but still assigned by editors) peer review. I view this as evolutionary, but probably many would still think it's too revolutionary.

5. I like this idea too. I think I've had some success towards this goal in an "open science" Junior Physics lab I teach. (http://openwetware.org/wiki/Physics307L:People)

8. I am totally confused by libraries and what they should do and what they're needed for. So I'll be interested in what you say in this chapter.

11. My preference would be for a more positive manifesto...focusing on the good things we can do, and less on the negatives. And I don't know that I'd agree that print paradigm is negatively impacting things on an absolute scale...just that its time for it to move aside.

OK, thanks for the great post!