Antigonish 2.0

M. M. Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny: The Story of the Antigonish Movement of Adult Education through Economic Cooperation (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1939).

For the task is not one of calculating the effi-ciency of different possible means toward an already determined end. It often involves,rather, deliberation about the end itself – about what would count as a satisfactory,or at least not entirely unacceptable, outcome to a particular “case.” And it may onlybe by action – and not, in the end, by any purely analytic process – that thisdeliberation can really be followed through.

The ideal to which technical rationality aspires, one might say,is a practitioner-proof mode of practice.

. Since ePortfolio practice is inherently eclectic, it deserves an equally eclectic learning foundation. In the DLL program, we developed the COVA (choice, ownership, voice, and authenticity) learning approach to give our learners the freedom to choose (C) how they wish to organize, structure and present their experiences and evidences of learning. We give them ownership (O) over the selection of their authentic projects and the entire ePortfolio process—including selection of their portfolio tools. We use the ePortfolio experiences to give our learners the opportunity to use their own voice (V) to revise and restructure theirwork and ideas. Finally, we use authentic (A) or real world learning experiences that enable students to make a difference in their own learning environments (Harapnuik, 2016)

. 141 former graduate students completed

former educational technology students in a graduate program

digital collections of student-generated authentic content that include resources and multimedia elements contained in a person

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

What would that look like? I don’t know, but I suspect that the answer relies on building capacity and a network of colleagues who can share the labor, work together, and change a system to be in the service of those it is charged to serve-to place the system into the obediential service of students and faculty/staff alike.

Reality has not proved kind to those supporting the second scenario

The McLennan Library at McGill University echoes this ambition when it upholds (engraved in stone) that “Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still airof delightful studies,”is its raison d’être. The next fifty years, alas, have eroded much of this superb stance.

Increasingly, sloppy results, tainted research, cheating and unreliable data are coming to light.58These are signs that should not be ignored.

In no case should economic interests be allowed to interfere with the full potential of a free communicating system designed and destined to help humanity –the whole of humanity –grow knowledge.

Science needs two independent layers. In the first one, the optimal dissemination of scientific knowledge can be allowed to take place freely. Call it the “net neutrality” of the Internet of the mind. In the second layers, the process of evaluation canproceed,as it should, i.e. on the values and objectives of the research communities themselves,not on the manipulated metrics favoured by publishers.

t may be a modest dream

sometimes bureaucratic, organizations,

The communication of scientific results is not designed to identify geniuses, but to associate many forms of intelligence to create the best knowledge possible

nane character of the three decimals

The misuse of the journal impact factor is highly destructive, inviting a gaming of the metric that can bias journals against publishing important papers in fields (such as social sciences and ecology)

Most researchers, of course, do more than that

In observing the evolution of Open Access itself, the powerful effects of digital culture and of networks should also be at its centre. In no case should economic interests be allowed to interfere with the full potential of a free communicating system designed and destined to help humanity –the whole of humanity –grow knowledge. Unleashing the full power of the distributed system of human intelligence remains the fundamental objective. Open Access (well-craftedOpen Access, that is)stands at itsvery heart. That is what going beyond BOAI15 really means.

In effect, a network of powerful research institutions help populate the editors and editorial boards of a large, yet minority, number of scientific journals in the world. They are mainly the journals indexed in the Web of Science or in Scopus. Together, these journals are engaged in an endless system of competition that is supposed to energize research globally, and serve its intrinsic objectives. In actuality, the system acts as the pressure system that, in rich countries, keeps armies of scientists in line. Choosing a particular journal, with its specific impact factor, has something to do with career opportunities and advancement, not with quality. Fitting oneself as well as one can within the collective forcefield of these journals is how one manages a career, advances in it, or merely survives in the game thus defined. The point is that the evaluation rests on the proxy of the journals. Whether the communication system and the reputational system of science should be one and the same is the fundamental question that must be brought to light, debated, and ultimately replaced by a different structure. Science needs two independent layers. In the first one, the optimal dissemination of scientific knowledge can be allowed to take place freely. Call it the “net neutrality” of the Internet of the mind. In the second layers, the process of evaluation canproceed,as it should, i.e. on the values and objectives of the research communities themselves,not on the manipulated metrics favoured by publishers.

One simple criterion allows pointing unerringly to the central issue: who controls what? And if it appears that the control of scientific communication escapes the research communities, to what extent does it threaten to corrupt the very nature of scientific communication. Seen from the perspective of the developing or emerging countries, i.e. seen from the perspective of about 80% of humanity, the answer is clear.

Preferring some corrupted OA to no authentic OA is deceiving oneself in the best of cases; it is deceiving others in the other cases

The quality of any work, ultimately, is to be found in a direct study of the work itself, exactly as Mark Walport had clearly stated in 2003 in Bethesda; the quality of the communication, for its part, should be assessed as a general characteristic of the network, and not as a proxy for the quality of its content. In other words, there is no need to try relating bandwidth-related issues with the quality of what is being transmitted. The number of citations that a piece of work gathers in other pieces of work points to a density of connections between research results, nothing else. That density of connections is due to a wide variety of reasons that all enter into understanding what visibility is. However, visibility and quality are two entirely different variables. In short, science research results should not be evaluated by criteria that apply to the visibility of music or movies. In fact, even in films, popularity does not sit easily with quality.

the kind of Open Access really needed should dissociate communication from evaluation.

Publishers do not sell authors; they sell journals.

he question we should ask is whether the communication system and the reputational system of science and scholarship should be one and the same56.

advocates of Open Access often separated around two attitudes: some were in favour of communication reform, and saw Open Access as part of it; others claimed simply to seek access without the need to affect the communication system in its present form. Reality has not proved kind to those supporting the second scenario.

The science communication system, like the Internet, spontaneously places the intelligence of the system at the edge, in the scientists’ heads, and lives little intelligence in the communication system. Alas, the kind of “Open Access” being proposed by the likes of Elsevier, while ostensibly mouthing the vocabulary of openness and of sharing, rests on a vision of networks where control lies in the communication network and begins to interfere with the very doing of science itself. For example, it is impossible to justify the presence of embargoes if optimal communication between researchers is the real objective.

Building on what could be described as “Internet wisdom” may be useful here. The Internet is sometimes described as a “network of networks” where all the intelligence lies at the edges, in the computers, and very little intelligence is contained in the network. This is in marked contrast to other computer-network schemes where the intelligence lies in the network, and the edges enjoy but very limited autonomy. Call this the “Minitel” approach53. The Minitel approach wanted to leave the maximum amount of control (and of profitability) in the hands of an organization called “France Telecom”.

hat Velterop essentially does is to generalize the Wikipedia implementation of distributed contributions by linking it to the semantic web

Sustainability, actually, is a term derived from ecology, and it refers to biological systems working well over very long periods of time, for example in terms of diversity. Ecological sustainability, therefore, appears quite different from what the major publishers appear to refer to when they make use of this metaphor: their objectives, if only measured by therelentlessly increased concentration within the industry, do not augur well for the future of a sustainable diversity. However, speaking of “sustainability” has a rhetorical function: it conceals the differences between those speaking in terms of durability and efficiency, and those speaking in terms of profitability. Note finally that STM’s Gold is, once more, APC-Gold. Nil novi sub sole...

The concern for the industry’s economic health –i.e. its ability to maintain a certain profit level to please investors –is also and often referred to in the literature as “sustainability.”

To keep this tragedy under control is obviously important to Elsevier –a form of “moral hazard” no doubt –and it is ultimately simple: make sure that the commons are somehow less than commons, and present this substitution as a way to be fair to the subscribers: as good payers, like good boys and girls, they should have immediateaccess to a subscription article; the “bad” free riders, for their part, are penalized in the form of a time-based embargo.Elsevier’s arguments are not unique to this company, but, in exemplary fashion, they provide an analysis entirely constructed around an economic, rather than a communication, imperative.

a form of “moral hazard” no doubt

Jan Velterop has introduced the notion of nanopublication which is clearly inspired by distributed software writing and which he defines as follows: “Nanopublications combines an assertion, the provenance of the assertion, and the provenance of the nanopublication into a single publishable and citable entity. B

Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedraland the Bazaar, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html. Perfectly coherent with itself, this document is presented with its full revision history.

Amusingly, it can be observed that the daunting energy of free software projects has never been anything more than a translation of the extraordinary intellectual energy of the Scientific Revolution; it is only fair to see this energy paid back as the scientific world takes fuller advantage of the digital context of communication, and takesa leaf out of the free software textbook.52

Rather than trying to restore the conditions of documentary existence familiar to print, a versioning system would open up the full potential of distributed human intelligence.

software writing is probably the best and first example of digital writing.

Attaching comments and increasing links of related information are also ways to characterize digital texts as pertaining to a “society of documents.” All this differs markedly, of course, from the kind of relatively isolated and fixed objects that print made familiar in the last few centuries. As a result, dealing with digital documents and their full potential requires a rational system of versioning. Such a system, it turns out, can be designed without having to anchor it into one particular and authoritative text or document. We do not have to design a digital environment on the model of canonical texts as we meet them within various religions. Science does not live by tradition and fixity; on the contrary it feeds on the sound and the fury of change, of controversy, of debates.

In insisting on owning the “version of record” or“reference” as the case may be, publishers seek to position themselves at the centre of the communication system of science. From their perspective, this is easy to understand, but is thisthe right solution to an important question? In other words, should the transition to the digital age be allowed to proceed only ifit ensures an equivalent, or even enhanced, role for publishers at the centre of the communication system of science? Or should it proceed to enhance the communication system of science and then decide from there what the role and position of the publishing functions should be? If it is argued that the two objectives are not necessarily antagonistic to each other, should not the communication system and its overall qualities at least clearly prevail over the status of publishers, rather than the reverse?

easy to assimilate version of record with version of reference, and this derivation of one to the other has already been the object of public discussions.50

f a researcher should deposit a copy of his/her publication in a local repository, that copy would not be considered authoritative (by Elsevier), but would be treated as some inferior version of the authoritative copy. The only function, therefore,of the copy deposited in a local repository appears to provide eye contact with its content. Presumably, it should not be cited as such, even though a good university name and an honourable author’s name may stand behind it. In fact, it may even lead to interesting paradoxes: for example, if, in the process of self-archiving, the author(s) decide(s) to correct some minor errors, to eliminate a few typos, or marginally to improve some of his/her formulations, the self-archived version of the document would be “better” -yet, (according to Elsevier) it should not be the versioncited!

Elsevier deploys the use of the CrossRef-derived CrossMark system, which is designed to point to one and only one authoritative version of a document. CrossRef, let us remember, was launched as a cooperative by publishers, not by librarians. The “authoritative” version is stored in the Elsevier servers.

ubsidized journals are defined as journals where “the APC is subsidized by an organization or society,” as if subsidies could take only the form of subsidies.49This fits well, of course, with the attempt to pass off Gold as being exclusively APC-Gold.

muddying the water is certainly part of the game plan, as is offering a benign facade to the world, and particularly to politicians. However, this is merely tactical and, as such, a weak hypothesis. Better is it to see that the publishers are indeed intent on blocking forms of Open Access that they see inimical to their business, while, at the same time, promoting their own version of Open Access. That is what must be understood with the publishers’ version of Open Access. Its function is to increase revenue streams.

Small elites of editors do manage to graft themselves onto the system with some rewards attached to the position, but in so doing, they find themselves exposed to the kinds of social rules that guide the quest for power and influence, rather than quality and integrity.

the objective of the gold medal is the gold medal in itself, but the objective of doing science, for most scientists, is simply the opportunity to do good science and thus bring one’s contribution to the distributed system of human intelligence. The communication of scientific results is not designed to identify geniuses, but to associate many forms of intelligence to create the best knowledge possible. To put it yet another way, the Olympic Games identify champions; the scientific and scholarly efforts identify solid concepts, theories, laws which all contribute to our ability to do a few things with the fraction of reality that we sufficiently apprehend.

Fundamentally, regulating the management of careers around a metric as flawed and unreliable as the impact factorrests on a mistaken notion that the best efforts that can be extracted from any individual is only through extreme competition. And that competition between researchers is regulated by a variable that is not under their control as a community

the three decimals of the impact factor, just like the timing of sprinters to the one hundredth of a second, are designed mainly to intensify competition between journals. And that is exactly what editors and publishers are obsessed with. In admitting both the inane character of the three decimals, and the need ascribed to ISI to avoid two journals with the same metrics, Garfield reveals both the artificial and the extremenature of the competition that dominates so much of science communication.

It is a strange paradox that a long –probably too long –discussion of the science communication system should end with the observation that researchers’ role in the scientific communication process may well be quitemarginal.

In any case, highly-placed members of the administration should accompany the librarians in their negotiations with publishers.43The experience would undoubtedly be just as valuable for deans and departmental heads. Directly witnessing the negotiations around scholarly publications would probably lead many administrators to revise their evaluation procedures. It could also underscore the importance of accessing the local production in one’s own institution:

The same institution that, through its evaluation behaviour, increases the legitimacy of journal rankings also ends up having to pay for it through the library budget. The left hand does not always measure its effects on the right hand. Hereagain, Mark Walport’s admonition deserves being recalled: it is the intrinsic quality of the work that should always count, and reliance on proxies, allegedly to save money through streamlined evaluation procedures, ends up being costlier down the line.

Administrators of universities and research centres, Janus-like, tend to present themselves to the world in ways which are not always entirely coherent. For example, in evaluating researchers for promotion, tenure and funding, administrators tend to rely on the usual, familiar elements that are deemed to characterize a “good” or “not so good” career. Publishing in highly visible, prestigious journals is such an element. As a result, researchers seeking promotion or tenure will play the game accordingly by publishing their papers “where it counts”. All this, of course, reinforces the warped manner in which symbolic capital, visibility and prestige are currently generated in the scientific communication arena. The journals that do best in this kind of competition will tend to see their impact factor increase, and this will illogically be interpreted as an increase in quality. For the administrator such an outcome also appears positive because the institution under his/her stewardship is ranked by various organizations, and most of them also look at where the faculty publish.

when applying for research funds, submitting scientists should never be judged according to the journals where they publish, but rather by the quality of their work.

y seeing the dissemination of scientific research as an integral part of the research cycle, SciELO simply decided to wrap the costof publishing into the cost of doing research.

Scientific research has never been sustainable. Ever since the 17thcentury, it has been heavily subsidized;•The cost of communicating scientific research is a tiny fraction of the cost of research, somewhere between 1 and 2%;•Why should we ask that particular phase of the research cycle to obey particular financial rules couched in terms of “sustainability” while the overwhelming part of scientific research has to be constantly subsidized?Part of the answer to the question is the legacy of the print era. The digital world works differently.

At the recent meeting, “Envisioning a World Beyond APCs/BPCs” held at the University of Kansas on November 17-18, 2016, several participants warmly greeted the idea of gradually growing the financial support for a comprehensive inside-out library project. Such a vision would rely on a number of leading libraries deciding to decrease their annual acquisition budget by a certain percent each year. Reallocating funds in this manner could catalyze a powerful movement and gradually attract even more institutions to the point of being irresistible. In such a context, a framework such as OpenAIRE might be a good starting point to provide the initial momentum and provide the needed common operational framework

If, for example, all concerned institutions put in trust the amount of money they use every year to provide access to the literature, and used this money to reconstitute the system, and if some money were left at the end of the conversion operation, as is most probable once you get rid of thirty percentprofits or more, it would not be difficult to reimburse each institution in proportion to its contribution, and the “mismatch” would disappear

The Max Planck policy paper has the advantage of underscoring a crucial fact: the source of money for the whole science communication system lies first with the libraries. Re-allocating these funds to build a different system is appealing, but how to proceed remains elusive.

Where there used to be only one business model (subscriptions), there would now be two, thanks to the added selling of services.

Between 2006 and 2012, large commercial publishers had indeed come to the conclusion that they could safely embrace Open Access, at least a certain version of it: with OA, not only could they maintain their position in the publishing world, but they could even improve it by adding new business models to their old, print-inspired, subscription revenue stream.

https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/19/reaction-to-the-finch-report/

The message conveyed by William Garvey, “Communication: The Essence of Science” had been surreptitiously transformed into “Commercial Publishing: The Essence of Science.”

The FASTR (Fair Access to Science and Technology Research)Act would codify these polices into permanent law has passed through various hurdles in the U.S. Congress, but has yet to be implemented as law.

Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,

The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, introduced in 2009, and the Research Works Act, introduced in 2011, were both successfully stopped by supporters of Open Access. Notably, Elsevier removed its support for the “Research Works Act” (102 H.R. 3699) when it came to light that Elsevier-related personnel had made 31 contributions to various members of Congress, out of which 12 went to Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), a primary sponsor of the Research Work Act.29

Somefunding institutions, mostly public, embraced the Open Access movement. As public institutions, supported by taxpayers’ money, they have a fundamental need to demonstrate that they serve the public good.

As publishers, while research institutions may not presently appear to amount to much, they own and can deploy all the need publishing functions they need, and they can do so by restructuring the work flow itself.

are involved in the task of ensuring a vibrant knowledge-nurturing life for their documents: they will circulate, be discoverable, be interoperable, be evaluated, etc. With the first function, each library ensures it safe and strong function within its host institution; with the secondfunction, the libraries connect to bring the knowledge infrastructure that we all really need.

n the end, libraries can point out the fact that their future role actually points in in two, apparently opposite, yet deeply complementary directions: on the one hand, they plunge deeply into the local production scenes since they aims at systematically sweeping, storing, preserving, and curating all that is produced in their hosting institution;

The acquisition mentality, be it linked to buying objects or signing access contracts, should be given up for a different kind of project: sweep all that is worth sweeping within one’s hosting institution, store it, curate it, addthe right metadata to it, preserve it. Then comes the crucial step: link into a network of other libraries (and repositories). Then, each library contributes to a number of crucial operations around the stored documents: they should be easy to discover, easy to identify, easy to navigate, easy to cluster with other documents. Means should exist that will permit having some idea of the value and quality of each document, for example, a number of metrics having to do with views, downloads, comments, corrections. All these “traces of interest,” of use, of appropriation, and also of corrections and of refutations, would form the “reputation” of a given document. But the latter functions would be carefully kept separate from the communication issues.

the best of what the hosting institution allows to produce.

the building of an efficient system of distributed human intelligence.

the convergence process helps foregrounding terms such as functions rather than objects –e.g. the journal-function, the platform-function, and the server-function. In the digital world, the emphasis on functions refers to the fundamental principle that processes constantly tend to replace objects. Speaking about functions, rather than things will probably facilitate and deepen our understanding of the meaning of articles, books, journals, platforms and so on. In short, our comprehension of our rising digital culture will grow.

The term journal, on the other hand, is also relevant to this discussion: a journal, if one moves beyond the object that print has made familiar, refers more to the communities that form around collections of texts; it characterizes a discipline, a speciality, or delineates a problem that is complex enough to engage a large group of people, sometimes for years or even decades.25On a platform, clustering sets of documents in different ways can lead to the creation of temporary journals that evolve in a flexible manner. A single paper could even belong to several such “journals” with obvious advantages for visibility.

Regaining an unquestionable role in this context requires redefining libraries. In particular, it requires them to abandon their perception of being a splendid, yet isolated, knowledge silo. Libraries, instead, must see themselves as interconnected nodes that help a knowledge infrastructure to emerge. Actually, this interconnected vision is of even nobler proportion than the old temples of knowledge that hark all too easily to the old “ivory tower” syndrome.

On some campuses, major projects were planned to bury them underground in compact-shelving systems without anyone apparently paying much attention to the symbolic charge of such a move. In short, the library world, from the 1990’s until now, has met with some difficulties in defining its mid-to long-term objectives: within digital culture proceeding apace, the ownership,as well as control, overdigitized documents were inexorably slipping away from them.

in effect, the cultural dimension of the library was downplayed. At the same time, the increased concern for technical issues quickly revealed a deeper anxiety for the profession: what could librarians really do in this new context that either specialists of contract negotiations and IT specialists could not do?

The Canadian Consortium rapidly favoured negotiating “Big Deals” with the arguments that the cost per title was going down, and that such arrangements created an “even playing field” for research in all universities, large and shall. However questionable the claimed results, it was felt that they had to be protected by maintaining a good “relationship with the vendors,”as the phrase went. But there was never any way to verify such claims as the Consortium, still in the name of “good relationships”, all too readily acquiesced to confidentiality and non-disclosure clauses.

It also hit the university presses that had always shouldered the considerable and important task of producing important books that could not be produced by commercial presses. Charged with recovering their costs, and no longer quietly subsidizing non-commercially viable ventures, the presses began to emulate commercial presses and, therefore, to compete with them, while facing a shrinking market.

The category of pseudo-journals (or“predatory” journals)needs to be mentioned. Such journals have exploited the APC-Gold business model. One could add thatwithout APCs, the “predatory” journals could not exist. Part of the attraction of the APC model is thatit provides a risk-free way to publish, since all costs are covered upfront. Some “creative” businessmen have simply dispensed with peer-review altogether, and push articles out on the web as a means to justify collecting APCs. A market exists for this lunacy, but only because many authors feel their careers depend on publication at all costs. Naive or not, they are ready to pay for the appearance of being published. The first consequence of this illegitimate business strategy is a pollution of the scientific archive.22The second result is more indirect: the presence of “predatory” journals makes all journals with lesser-known titles more questionable. Uncertainty about them increases. Symmetrically, the presence of “predatory” journals tends to reinforce the status of the “core” journals,as they will presumably be considered “safe.”

On the other hand, smaller societies with “non-core” journalsfound themselves gradually squeezed out of the subscription market, particularly after the “Big Deal” came into play. For such societies, there were few choices but to sell or lease their journal operations to larger commercial publishers. Many did so, even though, in many cases, it also meant that the name of the journal became the property of the large publisher.20The humanities and the social sciences journals tend to fall in this category.

The “Big Deal” was often justified, including by librarians, by the fact that it tended to be accompanied by a lower per-title cost. However, the whole point of a collection is to tune the holdings of journals to the needs of the targeted research community so as to decrease the cost per consultation

In1996, Academic Press introduces the “Big Deal.”14It refers to a bundling practice which offers a discount to an institution that buys access to a whole set of journals. At the same time, the bundle is set up to cost more than the set of journals initiallytargeted by a library, thus increasing the revenue stream of the publisher. It also protects the publisher against libraries trying to cut back on subscriptions by making it quite costly. The deal is generally justified by a decrease of cost per title, but it does not decrease the cost per consultation, on the contrary. It also erodes the concept of collection. Finally, in a period of tightening library budgets, “Big Deals” accelerate the concentration of publishers by putting smaller publishers at a competitive disadvantage.15The business model is quite successful and is adopted by other big publishers.

In 1991, Elsevier announces the TULIP experiment. Taking a page off the software industry playbook, Elsevier abandons the sale of journal issues and of books in favour of licencing access to them. Libraries now purchase a right of access to documents, rather than owning them. The whole concept of collection building in libraries begins to erode;

By proposing a way of ranking journals thanks to a metric based on citations, Garfield creates a competitive framework for the “core” publications. This has led to reorganizing the whole world of scientific publishing in profound ways;

Eugene Garfield’s Science Citation Index (SCI), first proposed in Sciencein 1955, and launched in 1964, leads to slicing the world literature into two categories: “core”

a brutal acceleration of scientific research (and scientific publishing).

The term “science publishing” covers many facets of a trade that, until recently, was confined to some form of print output.

Publishers and librarians, on the other hand, took centre stage: not surprising, given the fact that the majority of the money supporting the scholarly communication system flowed directly from the latter to the former. However, it also meant that the shaping of the future of science communication was not always in the hands of those who needed it most to communicate and work.

It remained, however, that Harnad’s persistent defence of the repository turned out to be a very important element in defining both what Open Access meant, and what arsenal of tactics and strategies could be deployed to protect and extend it13

During the Budapest meeting, credit should be given to Stevan Harnad for saving the repository solution. He did so despite his minority position, and the difficulty he had in making his case convincingly. Not that this difficulty was his fault: once issues of intellectual property emerged, concerns surrounding whether depositing papers in repositories could be assimilated to infringing on copyright emerged.

When the meeting in Budapest took place in late 2001, quite a bit of history had already and effectively contributed to skewing the general dynamics of the meeting.

Eugene Garfield’s Science Citation Index was partially to blame for this new situation: it claimed to identify a limited set of journals as “core” journals, and it proceeded to rank them on the basis of a citation-based metric –the impact factor –that referred to visibility within this limited set of journals, but was too quickly assimilated to quality. Librarians, trying to establish value for money, lined themselves up like iron filings within a magnetic field: they began to envision the “core” journals as “must have”, which led to the emergence of an inelastic journal market. The situation was promptly exploited, first by commercial publishers, and later by the broader community11.

the bestway to interpret this transposition of printed materials into digital publications is to accept that we are still living through the age of “digital incunabula”; in the future, new perspectives -and formats -will undoubtedly emerge8. Once the proper documentary flows,appropriate to the digital context of scientific and scholarly work emerge and stabilize, it will be clear that Open Access was always essential to unleashing its full potential.

To produce knowledge as well as is possible, identifying worthwhile interlocutors that can be part of a fruitful conversation is fundamental.

Communication is, indeed, the essence of science.

The result of our system of distributed intelligence is always an uncertain form of knowledge that can always be swept aside. But when it is swept aside, it is by some other expression of reality: scientific knowledge is certainly refutable, but it is not mere opinion.

The reach of a distributed system of human intelligence is ultimately limited by the constraints placed on human communication. The notion of Open Access aims precisely at describing how far a distributed system of human intelligence, unencumbered by artificial shackles, may reach.

the communication system of science and its objectives trump business plans, not the reverse

The key is moving from inquiry to reflection and integration—that is, from the generation and analysis of data to the thoughtful consideration of implications and the intentional design and implementation of change.

he Ribbon Tool is an example of the use of learning analytics to enable faculty to better understand the impact of their learning designs, which could be particularly valuable in improving courses that are bottlenecks to student success, such as large-enrollment lower-division courses.

Successful implementations, such as that at Georgia State University, demonstrate that the technology that enables integration must be embedded in a broader network of information and support that is qualitative as well as quantitative and that is accompanied by key institutional changes that are supported by key stakeholders from academic affairs, student affairs, and other processes that support student learning.

Domain of One’s Own

wamped by legacy structures and practices that serve as barriers to the widespread adoption of innovations that have demonstrated effectiveness.

echoes the broader conversation about “unbundling” and “rebundling” within higher education.

disputing the need for any kind of coherent learning system

A 2015 EDUCAUSE report on the “next generation digital learning environment” asserts that a new system cannot merely add to current enterprise (i.e., campus-wide) learning management systems, but instead has to be built around new digital architectures that are designed for learning and “that contribute to and enable the transitions that higher education is currently experiencing.”

n some cases connecting communities in the institution to the broader web

cultivation

help institutions be their “best selves” in this tradition.

earning and the best principles of American higher education. This commitment holds that educating the whole person, with knowledge, skills, and the larger capacities for a life of purpose, is essential both for professional success and for a life of fulfillment and flourishing. Colleges and universities, at their best, are distinctive as institutions that can produce this kind of learning.

Learner-centered digital tools must respect the sovereignty of student identity, of data related to a student’s own learning, and of intellectual work itself (representing knowledge, skills, and abilities) as well as the relationships among all three.

meld, seamlessly and transparently, with the platforms that support the best assessment practices

Domains, the Personal API, and related efforts are all emergent examples of how learner-centered technologies could be fundamentally reimagined within broader digital strategies at the institutional level.

New majority students are typically the most in need of support in learning how to make use of such tools; the skills and capacities for using the web effectively are distributed very unevenly. This further strengthens the argument for taking the most authentic digital learning environment as the starting point for remaking higher education.

There is an intricate and inalienable relationship between attaining digital fluency and being liberally educated in the twenty-first century. Yet in most institutions there is a mismatch between the most common digital environments where students spend their time, on the one hand, and the commitment to developing students as critically capable agents in a networked world, on the other.

With technology fluency, a student not only navigates within a single environment, but also begins to ‘demonstrate an ability to make effective choices and use the tools to advance their understanding and communication.’...[T]he ultimate sign of technology fluency is the ‘ability to manipulate, transform and move information across various media and platforms.’”

How are students being empowered to curate their learning? Are all students—especially new majority students—being given the full range of tools and capacities they need to thrive in digital environments? Is the collection of student data transparent? Are students being given the tools to make their learning portable and to make their learning records flexible, so they can be reshaped for different purposes during multiple job and career changes?

We have as human beings a greater opportunity than ever before to narrate, document, and shape our digital lives. We are also subject to having our data and behavior tracked and our information profiles shaped and manipulated in ways we may not even understand. It should be a distinctive responsibility of higher education institutions at least to prepare students for this world.

diverse instructional staff (including faculty) are engaged in the redesign of learning experiences,

Digital learning environments are not merely scaled systems through which students pass; they are empowering environments in which students learn to make meaning, solve problems, and marshal their best work in communities of practice.

Higher education can no longer allow anachronistic divisions between learning and development and between academic affairs and student affairs to block a focus on such critical social and institutional goals.

Purposeful self-authorship extends beyond the academic realm, helping students develop an inner voice and the internal commitments needed to function as empowered individuals. Building a stronger sense of self, reflective self-authorship also develops capacities related to initiative and self-direction, risk-taking and resilience, critical empathy and engagement with difference. These habits of heart and mind are critical not only for college success, but also for intentional lifelong learning and students’ capacity to shape society and their own lives.

At small elite institutions, the traditional vehicle for faculty-student connection is advisement or mentorship. Such relationships are rare at large public institutions, however—especially at community colleges, where students most need connection and support. And even at elite institutions, as the data suggest, mentoring often takes place on the margins, pushed aside by other priorities.

integration: the ability to connect different forms of learning and weave them together into a deeper understanding of the self. For digital strategies to become transformative, we must find ways to connect what is often left unconnected. Countering the disintegrative tendencies of the current digital context, higher education must find ways both to link formal course-based learning with informal learning and personal development, and to synthesize cognitive science with emerging insights into the affective dimensions of learning and identity development.

If the focus is on encouraging constructivist student authoring with multimedia tools, for example, it is important to create an experiential reference point for discussion and design by engaging faculty in processes that model the authoring process. At LaGuardia Community College and other Connect to Learning campuses, for example, professional development is guided by three design principles that address both faculty and student learning (see table 4.1).

By building analytics-enhanced teaching portfolios, faculty were able to identify the aspects of powerful teaching that work best for them, document and track their use of these practices, and get immediate feedback from their faculty colleagues. Data from this project suggest that it helped faculty refine and strengthen their craft and improve outcomes for high-need students.6

Learning analytics, e-portfolios, and other digital resources

learning how to use new applications

to take advantage of the digital opportunity

the most important step is recognition in the tenure and promotion process

One-shot workshops are minimally, if at all, effective.

faculty expertise

Pedagogical insight is also critical to the faculty’s ability to contribute to the development of new digital resources and to provide thoughtful guidance

new technology tools and resources,

Focusing only on faculty designs and ignoring what students actually do and learn misses a crucial element of the equation.

I t respects and builds on what faculty know. While faculty may not be experts in technology, they bring key expertise to the conversation. “Training” that disregards faculty expertise misunderstands the nature of professional learning, discards crucial knowledge resources, and is unlikely to produce meaningful engagement.

Effective faculty development around digital learning goes beyond technology training to focus attention on pedagogy.

n contrast, our contention is that, just as colleges and universities must rethink and rebundle to make college learning more integrative and adaptive, so too must the faculty role be rebundled in the emerging digital learning ecosystem.

implemented

to focus on teaching and learning

analytics, adaptive learning systems, e-portfolios, and other tools for making learning visible

Stepping carefully

adequate support and incentives for integrating effective tools and resources into current teaching practices.

At Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), e-portfolio leaders developed a reflective planning tool, the Personal Development Plan (ePDP). Used in IUPUI’s first-year experience program, the ePDP provides a structure for helping students engage in sustained reflective inquiry into their goals and their learning. Guided, as the above graphic indicates, by the work of Marcia Baxter Magolda on purposeful self-authorship,35 the ePDP has seven sections, including “About Me,” “Educational Goals and Plans,” “Campus and Community Connections,” and “My College Achievements.” Each section includes prompts to guide students in considering their lives and developing a more purposeful approach to their education.

Learning analytics” is a more focused usage that refers to the harvesting of data specific to what learners understand in the case of so-called “smart systems” and “intelligent tutors.” When that kind of data is integrated into larger patterns of student behavior and institutional pathways, it becomes what some call “academic analytics” or “institutional analytics.”

racked in virtual space.

We have always lived in a world dominated by networks,” says Howard Rheingold,

The starting point has to be that the abundance of knowledge is a good thing. Full stop

W hat could liberal education look like if we were inventing it at this moment in history? What forms of liberal education are only possible now?

core practices of formal education

information abundance

The E2Coach System

And Google, Netflix, Amazon, they’re all trying to learn us better, observe us better as consumers. We can use that same approach to observe us as learners, both so that we can make the individual learning experience for that individual better, but also so that we can understand learning better.”

Connected learning previews the new ecosystem where learners move easily between formal and informal contexts, connect knowledge and lived experience, and deepen learning through engagement with others.

OLI materials have been tested with diverse students at different types of institutions, and they have been shown to produce comparable or superior learning outcomes in significantly shorter time spans.

real-world problems

Open Learning Initiative Learning Dashboard

Community college students in poor urban neighborhoods and remote rural communities can now access resources previously available only to students at elite institutions with vast library systems. Museums, libraries, and grant-funded resource-development projects are supplementing the explosion of information available on the web, from news media to blogs and YouTube. Faculty who wish to draw on the well-established tenets of inquiry pedagogy no longer struggle to locate rich resources to be used in addressing authentic, real-world problems.

the tools of the twenty-first-century learning ecology, shaped by networked data and adaptive learning systems,

iterative

inquiry learning

“uniquely human brain strengths, ‘flexibility—the ability to process and integrate many kinds of information to perform a complex task, [such as] solving problems for which standard operating procedures do not currently exist, and working with new information—acquiring it, making sense of it, communicating it to others.’”7

the future of the middle class rests on higher education’s ability “to sharply increase the fraction of American children with the foundational skills needed to develop job-relevant knowledge and to learn efficiently over a lifetime.”6

AN INTEGRATIVE DESIGN

This concept of interest-driven learning is also central to AAC&U’s LEAP Challenge, which calls for every student to do “Signature Work”:

learners move easily between formal and informal contexts, connect knowledge and lived experience, and deepen learning through engagement with others.

eedback, for example,

the three core elements of liberal education—engagement, community and mentorship, and integration

redesigning the ways we work, collaborate, and structure learning

As the “openly networked” design principle states,

we develop students’ digital fluency

their unique value proposition—not merely the transfer of content or skills, but the development of knowledge by engaged communities of learners with guided mentorship in integrative contexts.

commitment to institutional, programmatic, and curricular designs that privilege all three in a mutually reinforcing way, it is unlikely that a focus on any one element will be transformational, no matter what digital tools are used. Indeed, to spotlight any one tool as a solution for advancing isolated elements is to risk exacerbating internal inequities in access to quality learning experiences.

engagement, community and mentorship, and integration

The central tension between disintegration and integration is not a binary opposition; in the emerging digital ecosystem, they can be deeply interconnected.

learning outcomes

the demands of the workforce

These new learning organizations draw heavily on the native capabilities of the web.

Over the last decade, there has been a vast expansion of web-based educational resources, with offerings that go far beyond MOOCs.

“engagement analytics.” This kind of activity may be tracked as a proxy for learning behaviors, but it does not really reflect learning.

In many different domains, it has been demonstrated that human judgment is more powerful when it is informed by data and predictive models than when it is exercised alone.

he web is a tool like any other that extends our individual capacities (another manifestation of what Andy Clark and David Chalmers dubbed the “extended mind thesis”3).

the university was built around information scarcity.

networks have a multiplicative effect on knowledge growth, innovation, and social understanding. 

ProSolo creates an interlocking set of integrative functions that connect planning, social interaction and networking, and competencies to track student progress. Functioning on integrative learning analytics, ProSolo strives to shift as much control as possible to the learner in planning, shaping, and tracking progress.

Virtual exchange at institutions like St. Edwards University

Some Ways Digital Tools Can Support the Core Elements of Liberal Education

NOTE

A proposal to flip scholarly publishing is actually a form of scholarly colonialism, shutting out the Global South, forcing scholars from half the world to chose between predatory publishing or the charitable whims of large Western conglomerates.

the “victims” of predatory OA journals were overwhelmingly from the Global South. That is, the high cost of “real” APCs is driving scholars from the developing world into the arms of those offering low APCs and little or no actual publishing support.