306 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
  2. May 2022
    1. Three principal conclusions may be drawn concerning the significance and implications of the ideas that have been presented.6a First any possibility for improving the effective utilization of the intellectual power of society's problem solvers warrants the most serious consideration. This is because man's problem-solving capability represents possibly the most important resource possessed by a society. The other contenders for first importance are all critically dependent for their development and use upon this resource. Any possibility for evolving an art or science that can couple directly and significantly to the continued development of that resource should warrant doubly serious consideration.6b Second, the ideas presented are to be considered in both of the above senses: the direct-development sense and the 'art of development' sense. To be sure, the possibilities have long-term implications, but their pursuit and initial rewards await us now. By our view, we do not have to wait until we learn how the human mental processes work, we do not have to wait until we learn how to make computers more intelligent or bigger or faster, we can begin developing powerful and economically feasible augmentation systems on the basis of what we now know and have. Pursuit of further basic knowledge and improved machines will continue into the unlimited future, and will want to be integrated into the "art" and its improved augmentation systems—but getting started now will provide not only orientation and stimulation for these pursuits, but will give us improved problem-solving effectiveness with which to carry out the pursuits.6c Third, it becomes increasingly clear that there should be action now—the sooner the better—action in a number of research communities and on an aggressive scale. We offer a conceptual framework and a plan for action, and we recommend that these be considered carefully as a basis for action If they be considered but found unacceptable, then at least serious and continued effort should be made toward developing a more acceptable conceptual framework within which to view the over-all approach, toward developing a more acceptable plan of action, or both.6d This is an open plea to researchers and to those who ultimately motivate, finance, or direct them, to turn serious attention toward the possibility of evolving a dynamic discipline that can-treat the problem of improving intellectual effectiveness in a total sense. This discipline should aim at producing a continuous cycle of improvements—increased understanding of the problem, improved means for developing new augmentation systems, and improved augmentation systems that can serve the world's problem solvers in general and this discipline's workers in particular. After all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power. Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing "neural power?" In the long run, the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.

      关于所提出的观点的意义和影响,可以得出三个主要结论:

      首先,任何提高社会问题解决者知识力量有效利用的可能性都值得我们予以最认真的考虑。这是因为人类解决问题的能力可能代表了一个社会所拥有的最重要的资源。其他最重要的竞争者都严重依赖于这种资源的开发和使用。任何发展艺术或科学的可能性,只要能直接且显著地与该资源的持续发展相结合,都应该得到双重的认真考虑。

      第二,所提出的想法要从上述两种意义上考虑:直接发展意义和“发展的艺术”意义。可以肯定的是,这种可能性有长期的影响,但它们的追求和最初的回报正等待着我们。根据我们的观点,我们不必等到我们了解了人类的心理过程是如何工作的,我们不必等到学会如何让计算机变得更智能、更大或更快,我们就可以开始在我们现在所知道和拥有的基础上开发功能强大、经济上可行的增强系统。对进一步基础知识和改进机器的追求将持续到无限的未来,并希望融入“艺术”及其改进的增强系统——但是现在开始行动不仅会为这些追求提供方向和刺激,而且会提高我们解决问题的效率,从而实现这些追求。

      第三,越来越清楚的是,现在就应该采取行动ーー越快越好ーー在一些研究机构采取行动,而且是大规模的行动。我们提出了一个概念框架和一项行动计划,我们建议将这些框架和计划作为行动的基础加以认真考虑。 如果考虑到这些框架和计划但发现它们不可接受,那么至少应继续认真努力,制定一个更可接受的概念框架,在此框架内看待总体方法,制定一个更可接受的行动计划,或两者兼而有之。

      这是对研究人员以及那些最终激励他们、资助他们或指导他们的人来说,是一个公开的呼吁:把严肃的注意力转向发展一门能够在总体意义上解决提高智力效率问题的动态学科的可能性。这一学科的目标应该是产生一个持续的改进循环——对问题认识的提高,改进开发新的增强系统的手段,以及改进的增强系统,可以服务于世界上的问题解决者,特别是本学科的工作者。毕竟,我们为旨在理解和利用核电的学科花费了大量的资金。为什么不考虑发展一门旨在理解和驾驭 "神经力量 "的学科呢?从长远来看,人类智力的力量确实是两者中更重要的。

  3. May 2021
    1. Who Blinked First?

      If you see this annotation, you're in the wrong place. Select our private Hypothes.is group from the drop-down menu at the top left of this sidebar.

  4. Feb 2021
    1. y Pat

      Greenway misspells the name: should be Sandy Paton with one "t" in surname. Apparently "Sandy Patton" was a jazz singer; Discogs warns against confusing the two singers.

  5. Dec 2020
    1. Currently available as digital downloads per LOC 12/15/2020:

      L-02

      L-08

      L-09

      L-12

      L-14 through 16

      L-18

      L-21 through 23

      L-25

      L-28

      L-33

      L-34

      L-36 through 40

      L-43 through 46

      L-52 through 57

      L-61 through 66

      LBC-7,

      LBC-8

      LBC-13

  6. Jul 2019
    1. if “annotation can do all of those good things […] why hasn’t it caught on?”

      This question strikes me as faux-naive for the sake of provoking argument, sorry. First, many good things about student learning are already blocked or discouraged by the educational systems we've devised. Second, the list of web-enabled deeper learning strategies adopted by higher education is very short indeed (see first point). And third, "catching on" has never been a reliable criterion for judging the goodness of anything.

    2. student success

      Which I always say is not the same thing as success at being a student, though I hope they're related.

    3. relevance

      This one always kills me. Relevance to what? The free unstructured play of mind across multiple areas of apparently unconnected inquiry in the pursuit of new connections and insights is one activity where the human brain is manifestly better than anything computers have to offer.

  7. May 2019
    1. intellectual function any of the mental functions involved in acquiring, developing, and relating ideas, concepts, and hypotheses. Memory, imagination, and judgment can also be considered intellectual functions. See higher mental process. Also called intellectual operation.

      Very interesting to find this definition so clearly stated, and so confidently advanced as an essential part of human flourishing if not also essential to a normative definition of human beings. Why has higher education not been able to fasten on the clinical literature as a way to anchor and conceptualize its core mission? I realize this question awakens other questions regarding neurodiversity and neurotypicality.

  8. Mar 2019
    1. civics with interest and thoroughness.

      Here's a charming attempt to teach civics with interest:

      https://youtu.be/FFroMQlKiag

    2. to help safegyard the food, clothing and hygienic welfare of pupils

      I'm reminded of some of Theodore Roosevelt's reforms around food and drugs:

    3. secure tenure of office

      Teacher tenure (interestingly, here called "tenure of office") is still far from a settled matter. From the Phi Delta Kappan in 2018:

      "Originally enacted to protect against potential evils in state and local employment systems, such as nepotism, arbitrary dismissal, and political favoritism, tenure has become a common expectation of teacher employment. State teacher tenure laws are not a job guarantee but rather protection against arbitrary or politically motivated maltreatment. But is tenure on the way out?"

  9. Feb 2019
    1. II. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

      Here's the beginning of the first excerpt we're focusing on for Week 2: Section II, parts A & B.

      The second excerpt is below, Section III, Part A, subsections 1 and 2.

      We are focusing on specific excerpts to make this lengthy document a little more manageable for this iteration of the project. That said, you are of course welcome and encouraged to annotate any part of the document you find noteworthy.

    2. III. EXAMPLES AND DISCUSSION

      This is the beginning of the second excerpt we're focusing on in Week 2 of the Engelbart Framework Annotation Project, This second excerpt comprises Section III, part A, subsections 1 and 2. Engelbart tells his readers early in this report that Section II often proves very difficult at first reading, and advises those who find Section III tough going to head to Section III, read it, and then go back to Section II.

      Section III also includes the "Joe" section, the "fiction-dialogue" as Engelbart calls it. This section will be our focus in Week 3.

    3. the H-LAM/T system's repertoire hierarchy.

      These words mark the end of the first excerpt we're focusing on during Week 2 of the first iteration of the Engelbart Framework Project.

      We'll focus on the rest of Section II, probably the hardest section of the document to understand readily, in a subsequent iteration. As always, you're welcome and encouraged to annotate you find noteworthy in any part of the document.

    4. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.

      To get to this moment in the document, Engelbart had struggled past many requests for just such clever tricks. People around him imagined that computing would make this thing faster, that thing more comprehensive, that other thing more automatic. What people couldn't imagine was that computing could, if understood and used wisely, lead to a way of life in an integrated domain that could be more mindful and potentially more humane. A human-computer symbiosis that could be a greater force for good than we had yet seen. And sometimes that is indeed what has happened. And sometimes, spectacularly, not.

      Nowadays, with deep digital and network literacies apparently on the decline, it seems that surveillance capitalism has become a nightmare inversion of the integrated domain. While most of us live our fragmented digital lives full of clever tricks that help in particular situations, sinister people who think largely about integrated domains engineer our entrapments, not the liberations Engelbart envisions here.

      All the more reason to rewind to 1962 and read this remarkable document together.

  10. Jan 2019
  11. Sep 2018
    1. 100,000 CRIMINALS•

      Fascinating numbers. Largely invented, I imagine. 100,000 seems to be the top of the scale (except for cold, hard cash). 100K orphans, 100K drunkards die yearly. 100K Boys take their Places (not exactly sure of the logic there). 100K criminals. 100K insane. Interesting rhymes, so to speak.

    2. VIRGINIA AN'l'I-SALOON LEAGUE,
    3. What the Book Says.

      What part of the Book says. No quotations here from the New Testament.

  12. Aug 2018
    1. Introducion: The Odd Couple inTales as Old as Time

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    1. (Sometimes, in the early years, I called these the Service System and the User System)

      As he does in the Project MAC memo, summer 1963.

    2. By 1959 1 was lucky enough to get a small grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR, from Harold Wooster and Rowena Swanson) which carried me for several years -- not enough for my full-time work, but by 1960 SRI began pitching in the difference.

      Actually, I think Doug has this backwards, at least from what I can see in the archives. SRI did pitch in half of his salary, but that seems to have been the first funding, in early 1960. The AFOSR proposal was submitted in mid-December 1960 and the funding, which allowed Doug to go full-time, kicked in in March, 1961.

  13. Feb 2018
    1. Web We Want campaign to foster debate on how to resolve the trade-offs between security and privacy, and between the needs of business and decentralised innovation.

      Hey Sir Tim, let's have a link here! https://webwewant.org/

    2. an idea, a search and some open-source software, and that idea is live

      This miracle continues to thrill every fiber of my being. But how much of this thrill is part of the education our students experience? Not much.

    3. this concept of linking

      Four words that are vitally important. Pause and think: how is "linking" a "concept"? I confess that after twenty years of working with folks to help them understand this environment and its potential a little better, I find that very few understand or even care about linking as a concept. I don't know why.

    1. If we are to understand the web as it is, rather than as it once was, we need more realistic mental models of it

      Again, the vital importance of mental models. Conceptual frameworks!

    2. Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.

      And understanding why the open web is so important--as well as why so many companies are trying to kill the open web--is another part of the wisdom we should seek.

    3. all you need is a smallish number of big ideas

      I keep getting suckered in by this hope. A teacher's optimism, I guess.

    4. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious.

      This, this, this. Education ought to fuel curiosity about the world we continue to design and build for ourselves. Why are we terminally incurious? I believe part of the answer is that we think we know more than we do--and that we make the fatal mistake of not realizing that "technology" is really made out of ideas, ideas that can and should fuel our imagination and yes, our curiosity.

  14. Sep 2017
    1. an engaging curriculum; a safe, caring community in which to discover and create; and a significant degree of choice about what (and how and why) they are learning.

      Alas, this conclusion (and others like it) seems too pat to me. What is an "engaging curriculum"? What is the relationship of rigor and challenge to a "safe, caring community"? And what about the unavoidably developmental aspect of learner-initiated study, one in which one doesn't yet understand or experience desire to learn as fully or as broadly as one should?

    2. assessment practices geared toward helping students experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information.

      Good insight here.

    3. grading

      Properly understood, grading is only pass and fail. Everything else is commentary--useful, perhaps essential, but commentary.

    4. First, classroom management programs that rely on rewards and consequences ought to be avoided by any educator who wants students to take responsibility for their own (and others’) behavior–and by any educator who places internalization of positive values ahead of mindless obedience. The alternative to bribes and threats is to work toward creating a caring community whose members solve problems collaboratively and decide together how they want their classroom to be (DeVries & Zan, 1994; Solomon et al., 1992).

      Two thoughts. One is that most models of analytics are classroom management programs on steroids. The other is that the collaboration and "deciding together" needs to be complicated. I went to college in no small part because I wanted to be in the company of learned, curious, intellectually stimulated and stimulating people. I looked to my professors to be such people and to encourage such dispositions.

    5. The data suggest that the more we want children to wantto do something, the more counterproductive it will be to reward them for doing it.

      Classic Bateson double-bind.

    6. Many educators are acutely aware that punishment and threats are counterproductive. Making children suffer in order to alter their future behavior can often elicit temporary compliance, but this strategy is unlikely to help children become ethical, compassionate decision makers. Punishment, even if referred to euphemistically as “consequences,” tends to generate anger, defiance, and a desire for revenge. Moreover, it models the use of power rather than reason and ruptures the important relationship between adult and child.

      Yep. Cf. Ted Nelson's observation that surveillance breeds evasion.

  15. Jun 2017
    1. Seeing our own ways in relation to those of otherreasonable people enables us to see ourselves and our customs more clearly.

      Dangerously close to banality, platitude. What is this seeing? What empowers it? What puts us at risk, if we accomplish it? What does "give-and-take" suggest, or mean?

    2. Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, chapters 7 and 8) offers a powerfulset of arguments to show that managerial expertise in modern bureaucratic institutionstrades on the fiction rather than the reality of scientific generalizations about humanfunctioning, giving us “not scientifically managed social control, but a skilful dramaticimitation of such control” (p. 107).

      yep

    3. Rather than imposing a design on materials to bring about a product,adepts here intervene in a field of forces or immerse themselves in a medium, inwhich they seek to bring about a propitious result; and insofar as the play of chanceand the vagaries of timing are ineliminable, they need a kind of opportunism, ortalent for improvisation, that responds to the dynamism in the materials themselves.

      Would Kay & Goldberg agree? Papert?

    4. 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.

      Deeply insightful,

    5. Something impersonal is involved here that freesone from traps of the “ego”; and yet it is quite personal in that one’s judgementramifies into the recesses of one’s mind and being, expressing the kind of person onehas become

      Yes.

    6. The adeptness of the person of judgement, then,lies neither in a knowledge of the general as such nor in an entirely unprincipleddealing with particulars. Rather, it lies precisely in the mediation between generaland particular, in bringing both into illuminating connection with each other. Thisrequires perceptiveness in one’s reading of particular situations as much as flexibilityin one’s mode of “possessing” and “applying” the general knowledge (Schön, 1983).

      O yes.

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

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

    8. A division is made between “means” and“ends”and, while ends are conceded to “deliberation,” the organization and deploymentof means to these ends is still claimed to fall exclusively within the competenceof technical – or, as it now appears, instrumental– reason. “Deliberation,” however,all too often turns out to be no more than an assertion of some personal butultimately unjustifiable commitment, a positing of some brutely given preference, ora mere plumping for one of several imponderable options. This manifest absence ofreason from the determination of ends (or “values” as they are now called) thenleads to a strange inversion: the most rational calculation of means is made normat-ive so that a combination of efficiency and economy becomes, in itself, the singleoverarching end. Technical reason is taken, by default, to be equivalent to reasontout court.

      the fate of higher learning

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  16. May 2017
    1. 37. Learn from Fahrenthold! Nothing I have said so far addresses the hardest problem in journalism right now: recovering trust while doing good work. But David Fahrenthold, the Washington Post reporter who uncovered the fiction of Donald Trump’s philanthropic giving, is single-handedly showing the way. It’s not just the great stories he’s digging up, or the way they hold power to account. It’s also the social turn his investigation took, and the lesson in transparency that he’s teaching the press

      Right. On.

    2. This is a crisis with many overlapping and deep-seated causes, not just a problem but what scholars call a wicked problem— a mess. You don’t “solve” messes, you approach them with humility and respect for their beastliness. Trying things you know won’t “fix” it can teach you more about the problem’s wickedness. That’s progress. Realizing that no one is an expert in the problem helps, because it means that good ideas can come from anywhere.

      Good overview of wicked problems and "strategies" for addressing them.

    1. The ceiling of the sea is drawing strcamsi\rrrong thc lLrlliug engincs of the sea- Of shining answcrs through its question-sieves:Is matter thc enchanted lathe? Or mind?

      A crucial moment. We'll discuss it. An utterly enduring question, one that reminds me of the end of Yeats' "Among School Children."

  17. Apr 2017
    1. Reality has not proved kind to those supporting the second scenario

      The eternal question: what must be defended and preserved, and what must be changed to effect that defense and that preservation? All comes back to mission.

    2. 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.

      Is this not a mission statement? Shouldn't it be?

    3. 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.

      Brilliant. Bravo.

    4. 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.

      Brilliant description of the status quo in higher ed research. I'd argue it applies to the humanities as well.

    5. 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.

      Indeed yes.

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

      Indeed so. Reminds me of Tom Woodward's dogfood analogy.

    7. 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.

      Fascinating argument, but it's incomplete, as "popularity" will differ across populations, even within something like the Oscars.... Merits further investigation.

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

      Key point.

    9. Publishers do not sell authors; they sell journals.

      Indeed.

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

      Huge and central question.

    11. 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.

      Indeed. Many analogies here to the questions about designing liberal education for the new digital ecosystem

    12. 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.

      Beautifully said.

    13. 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”.

      This part will make me cry over the possibilities that have been lost. But perhaps not gone forever?

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

      Fascinating. Mark this for followup.

    15. 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...

      Brilliant, devastating.

    16. 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.”

      Indeed yes. Classic Newspeak. And despicable.

    17. 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.

      This point cannot be made too often. Bravo.

    18. a form of “moral hazard” no doubt

      I'm not a snarky guy, but I wholeheartedly approve of the tone here. Viva @jcdrg!

    19. 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

      What a fascinating idea.

    20. 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.

      Note to self: I must, at last, read this writing.

    21. 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

      Excellent.

    22. 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.

      So very close in spirit to Xanadu.

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

      Yep!

    24. 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.

      Doug Engelbart would be very happy to see these words, as would Ted Nelson. Amazing. Hopeful to see such strong and clear thinking.

    25. 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?

      Again, beautifully synthesized.

    26. 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

      Interesting to see how "version of record" and "version of reference" become conflated. Fascinating.

    27. 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!

      Wow. QED. Amazing. We must invent something better!

    28. 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.

      Fascinating. For CrossMark system, see https://www.crossref.org/board-and-governance/

    29. 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.

      Very important point, though the writing obscures it a bit.

    30. 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.

      Right. Follow the money. Nothing else matters in a market economy. Note in particular the strategic hypothesis vs. the tactical hypothesis. Nice.

    31. 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.

      yes

    32. 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.

      Very beautifully observed.

    33. 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

      Succinct and devastating summary.

    34. A competition that is designed exclusively around journals, but then it is extended as a proxy to evaluate individuals, institutions, and even countries, can only serve publishers: the journal becomes the anchoring point of the power to evaluate scientific achievements

      The heart of the matter.

    35. 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.

      Impact factors to three decimals. I had no idea.

    36. 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.

      Strange paradox and cruel irony.

    37. 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:

      An excellent suggestion.

    38. 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.

      Exactly.

    39. 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.

      A vicious cycle.

    40. 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.

      Indeed, but this will be difficult to manage. Nevertheless, an essential goal.

    41. 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.

      Brilliant! And why not?

    42. 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.

      Key questions about scientific research and publishing.

    43. 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

      Look for info on this conference.

    44. 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

      One way to move forward.

    45. 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.

      Fascinating observation. Customers control the businesses, or could; but how?

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

      Wow. FOLLOW THE MONEY.

    47. 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.

      Golly. Great example of why it's so hard to craft good laws. Unanticipated consequences proliferate. Or perhaps they were anticipated. Hard not to default to conspiracy theories.

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

      Why are links not live in this document? Is the hypothes.is extension interfering? Must test.

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

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

      Follow the money. Disgraceful!

    50. 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.

      Note to self: be sure to urge my reps to support this act. Also, why has progress on this bill stalled?

    51. Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,

      A "beautiful" example of Newspeak. Orwell, we need you now more than ever.

    52. 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

      As always: follow the money.

    53. 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.

      VITAL observation, and reciprocally, an excellent validation of maintaining public institutions as a public good.

    54. 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.

      Key insight. Meta-comment: interesting that the document here is clearly not proofread well. What will happen to my annotations if and when it is?

    55. 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.

      "at the same time, the libraries, with their sister 19institutions, 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."

    56. 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;

      Yes - with second direction on the following page.

    57. 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.

      Dempsey on the "inside-out" library.

    58. the best of what the hosting institution allows to produce.

      ESL problem here? "To be produced"? Not sure what's meant here. "Is allowed to produce"?

    59. the building of an efficient system of distributed human intelligence.

      This is indeed the goal of all communication, particularly that involving documents.

    60. 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.

      Really fascinating. But now the next step: what is the relationship of PEOPLE to processes/functions and things?

    61. 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.

      Fascinating thought-exercise here.

    62. 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.

      Indeed yes. How to get here, especially when the network owns us?

    63. 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.

      Symbolic charge, cultural value: these are the first things to be thrown overboard in late-stage capitalism, which has run amok in the digital age. It is to weep.

    64. 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?

      Wow. Preach. Mutatis mutandis, this also applies to the university generally, and to teaching and learning specifically. Wow.

    65. 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.

      Case study in what happens when a) you don't have the time or will to think deeply about a communications revolution and b) you don't have the time or will to act always in alignment with core mission and purpose. Maintain a good relationship with the vendors? Sounds like maintaining a good relationship with temple prostitutes (of any gender), or becoming one (again, of any gender).

    66. 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.

      It is to weep. What have we done to ourselves.

    67. 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.”

      Extremely important observation about predatory pseudo-journals exploiting APC-Gold OA.

    68. 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.

      And now the collapse of university presses speeds the general degradation along.

    69. 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

      A collection. Imagine that. Seems a completely quaint notion now, but this essay makes me think it's the idea that was overlooked or abandoned in ways that betrayed a fundamentally important conceptual framework.

    70. 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.

      How could the academy permit such a thing? At the same time, of course, we permitted Blackboard to take over the online learning space. An extraordinarily troubling development in both cases, directly related to higher ed's inability to reorganize its practices in light of the digital world. I still believe faculty could have been part of the solution.

    71. 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;

      Key development in Elsevier takeover. I'd love to do a deeper dive into the corporate mentality at this point.

    72. 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;

      Analogous to US News rankings?

    73. 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”

      Hmm. Maybe the problem is that I cannot select text across a page break. Specific comment: This SCI was unknown to me in anything like an historical context. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Is there a similar SCI for the humanities? if only an informal one?

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

      Well, no, now I can annotate a bulleted item. Specific comment here: "brutal" is an interesting adjective.

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

      meta comment re hypothes.is: it appears that I cannot annotate anything in the bulleted list, nor can I highlight such material. This appears to be limited to docx format documents (?). Similar probs annotating sidebar material in the Bass/Eynon book. Related?

    76. 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.

      Astutely observed

    77. 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

      Great lesson in the value of strategic persistence.

    78. 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.

      Guedon articulates this history with a truly extraordinary gift for mapping out agents and the larger contexts that complicate or enrich their agency.

    79. 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.

      Important history here.

    80. 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.

      Very very helpful history here. @laika57

    81. 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.

      Truly inspiring to see first principles articulated so clearly and forcefully. This intelligence, this clarity is needed to build well.

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

      I wish students could see each other as "worthwhile interlocuters."

    83. Communication is, indeed, the essence of science.

      And of all scholarship.

    84. 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.

      Cf. Popper.

    85. 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.

      So beautiful and strong. Yes!

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

      A beautiful call to action.

    1. 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.

      My chief concern is that higher education will ask only those questions for which we imagine data can provide answers (the famous dictum that all decisions must be "data driven"), then use that shallow beginning to simulate "thoughtful consideration" that merely reifies current practices in automated and thoughtless ways, all focused on "change" that is judged not even primarily, but solely by graduation and retention rates. Then Campbell's Law kicks in and our downfall is secured.

      A true digital ecosystem will not simply give us tools to visualize the status quo and devise procrustean beds to fit everyone. A true digital ecosystem will help higher ed understand the principles of networked learning, and the opportunity provided by what is left of the glorious and uncertain capacities of the distributed mind that can be the Internet at its best.

    2. 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.

      Several thoughts. One is that this visualization assumes the "system" is one thing, and a fixed thing, and a good thing. Otherwise, measuring performance and pathways would not be the first thing to do. The first thing would be to think about the system. This leads to the second thought, which is that large-enrollment lower-division courses make highly questionable, even dangerous assumptions about curriculum, domain knowledge, and effective pedagogy and learning. The question then becomes why we need large-enrollment lower-division courses at all. It would seem difficult to advocate for them as a boon for learning. The reason we have them is that large universities want to drive the costs of instruction down, and faculty are expensive, and space is scarce, and intro courses are being imagined as primarily about memorizing content, which then makes the instructor more or less irrelevant after the course content is fixed and the learning is modularized and the adaptive release structures are in place, and with any luck at all AI will take us the rest of the way there. And then the unexamined assumption is that students and parents will continue to pay full price for an instructional environment in which the institution has reduced its costs dramatically without passing those savings along to the consumer, which is all the student now can claim to be. And thus we come full circle, to visualizations that are said to "empower faculty" but in all likelihood will end up disempowering faculty because they will no longer be needed. We can simply rent them (adjuncts) or do some kind of gig economy via Pearson, etc. And the folks who continue to run the world will have elite educations where there are no large-enrollment lower-division courses.

      And bottlenecks to student success? The quickest way to address them, and I have seen this in action, is to make the courses easier. Given the economic pressures involved, and then Campbell's Law kicking in, the DFW rates will be the primary drivers for "course improvement" or "redesign." Those DFW rates should be noticed, tracked, thought about, certainly. But our assumptions should also include robust consideration of instructional integrity, curricular design, and the student's own agency.

    3. 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.

      More attention to digital ecosystems in support of advising would be welcome in this essay. The Georgia State University system is fascinating--and it took a lot of political capital and creative re-organization along with the money for the software.

    4. Domain of One’s Own

      A very important project and movement. Sadly, it does not have a pervasive presence in any curriculum that I know of.

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

      Note too that considerable sunk costs in "legacy structures and practices" mean that change becomes nearly impossible to afford.

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

      I'm still not sure about this. I argue for work in a distributed online environment, not that the learning resources and experiences should be modularized and a la carte. This is an important distinction, I think.

    7. disputing the need for any kind of coherent learning system

      I don't think Jim (or I) advocate incoherence. In fact, I'm sure we don't. Instead, we advocate for a student-centered and creatively distributed web-based learning environment. The implicit argument is that students should know how to make a web for themselves, and that the web affords a deep coherence as well as distributed properties that, like the Internet it rests on, allows for creativity at the edges, emergent phenomena we can learn from.

    8. 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.”

      As I understand it, NGDLE is largely Gates-driven and largely concerns various kinds of Gates-sponsored "digital courseware." Such approaches cast in stone all the aspects of digital engagement that should be agile, creative, and learning centered.

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

      I'm struck by how the welcome inclusion of this strategy is advanced rather timidly, "in some cases," etc. Why not "in many cases," or "wherever possible"? That's still cautious, and not an absolute prescription, but the tone is quite different and doesn't suggest that the broader web is something most cases won't need to acknowledge or incorporate.

    10. cultivation

      Great word, one that recalls a more organic approach to some of these issues.

    11. Too often, education technology views students as objects, not as subjects of the educational process. (

      She's quoting Seymour Papert here.

    12. o effectively take advantage of digital advances, colleges and universities must become learning organizations;

      Indeed, and this "becoming" may well mean a rather broad and deep rethinking of many organizational practices and structures, not simply more workshops or faculty development programs.

    13. kind of moves that we as practitioners know students are making when they are learning

      How might the idea of "moves" connect with Paul Silvia's work on "knowledge emotions"? See http://nobaproject.com/modules/knowledge-emotions-feelings-that-foster-learning-exploring-and-reflecting

    14. Integration

      Much of this stage could be described as "understanding." There's something not quite present yet in the description, a combinatorial disposition, a platform that supports, displays, and helps to generate the practices of integrative learning. I also like Hofstadter's idea of "generalization" as a property of inquiry, reflection, and integration: "the ability to internally reconfigure an idea."

    15. ProSolo Learning Platform

      The learning dimensions seem fairly narrowly imagined here. Simon Buckingham Shum's approach seems more nuanced, especially with regard to metacognitive elements.

    16. 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).

      Merits more discussion.

    17. 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

      Note to self: drill down into this example.

    18. Learning analytics, e-portfolios, and other digital resources

      As above! :)

    19. learning how to use new applications

      Ouch. Faculty should be brought together to think about the digital opportunity, and then (and only then) move to "new applications."

    20. to take advantage of the digital opportunity

      Nice phrase. My concern is that the nature of "the digital opportunity" is poorly understood, and this runs all the risks brilliantly outlined by Guedon in the context he analyzes.

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

      Yes. I don't want to think of this as a "reward system," though--shades of Skinner. I know it is a reward, but there must be a better word.

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

      Amen to this!

    23. faculty expertise

      And because "faculty expertise" sometimes becomes a stick that faculty beat each other with (true story--just try to get a conversation between two disciplines), perhaps we should include a broader term like "commitment to the life of the mind" or some such. Talk about stepping carefully ... I am trying to do this in good faith here as I find myself stepping carefully ... we badly need straight, thoughtful, smart talk about the university today. Guedon's essay on "The Internet of the Mind" is a great illumination in that regard.

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

      I'd have highlighted the entire last sentence on this page, but for some reason Hypothesis seems to fall down when it approaches page breaks.

      Now the comment. I absolutely love this phrase "pedagogical insight." My current work on insight as a "quark of learning" obviously shapes my response. I think that insight into learning and insight into teaching overlap considerably but are not synonymous, just as observation and representation are clearly and profoundly related but not the same. I think of William Kerrigan's description of poetry as "a revelatory redescription of the world" and I think of how much meaning is packed into those apparently simple words. So too I think of this idea of "pedagogical insight" and I think about how much meaning is packed into those words. I think even more about "deepening pedagogical insight" as another and perhaps even more admirable phrase, one that is a revelatory redescription of what's called "faculty development." At the same time, I worry about which conceptual frameworks regarding the digital ecosystem empower that deepening of pedagogical insight, and which ones block it while appearing to deepen, and which ones simply ignore it (because we need to "produce more graduates" and "deliver content more efficiently" and so forth).

      In short, this moment is a great crux in the entire argument this book advances. Worthy of extending mulling.

    25. new technology tools and resources,

      Again, a disappointing moment, when the complexity of "ecosystem" becomes the industrial-raw-material of "tools and resources." A small distinction with enormous ramifications, in my view anyway.

    26. implemented

      I'd add "imagined." Good implementation is important, but the conceptual framework is more important. Otherwise, GIGO.

    27. to focus on teaching and learning

      To avoid the research vs. teaching/learning dichotomy, can we have a both/and, and say "to focus on teaching and learning with the energy and inquiry that characterize their research activities"? (P.S. I don't think Boyer has helped much--he may actually have hurt the cause.)

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

      Three tools are named, and they are all institution-centered. The ecosystem outside this infrastructure must be in the "other tools" category. A disappointingly limited ecology!

    29. Stepping carefully

      Again, this word "delivery." I fear that "outcomes assessment" is too close to "output assessment" and has helped to drive the paradigm of "input-and-delivery."

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

      Support, yes. Incentives? Maybe. In my experience, much faculty development lacks rich intellectual engagement or deep commitment on the part of faculty. I don't know how to incentivize (ugly word) deep commitment or as sense of vocation. I think it can be identified, recognized, and rewarded, but that's not exactly the same thing as offering an incentive. Vocation depends on far deeper motivations.

    31. 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.

      The goals here are admirable and the conceptual framework, at first glance, appears to be useful. When I look at the graphic and read the description, however, it all seems to collapse into the kind of walled-garden and technocratic operation that gets in its own way. Rather than stuffing an ePDP (I have a very hard time with such names) with "My College Achievements," which sounds a little bit like asking students to fill in their own baby books (my apologies to those who worked hard on this ePDP, but ouch), why not ask students to design and populate an ePortfolio along the lines of what Yancey et al. have been recommending since 2009? I'd also like to know (and am afraid to ask as well) how the ePDP hooks into institutional research/assessment metrics.

    32. The E2Coach System

      "Personalized" is not the same as "personal." I see Audrey Watters is quoted later on as making this exact point. It would be helpful to have the point/counterpoint explored in more integrative ways--the document sometimes seems at odds with itself.

    33. 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.”

      Weren't we just talking about moving beyond "recommendation engines"? Striking and troubling to see this uncritical citation here.

    34. 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.

      Again, I'd like to know more about what the "outcomes" were, and what kinds of higher-order thinking emerged. I'd also like to know what kinds of social or connected learning strategies were included, if any.

    35. real-world problems

      I agree that problem-based learning can be very powerful and integrative. On the other hand, I wonder where contemplation, or study, or much of the arts end up living in these "real-world problems." Is learning about the forms and theories of poetry inquiry-based or a "real-world problem"? I sense the outlines of a trap if we are not careful.

    36. Open Learning Initiative Learning Dashboard

      Still not sure what is "open" here.

    37. 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.

      Stirring tribute to OER, especially the open resources that do not come from formal learning or their institutions.

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

      Ouch--fairly reductive list.

    39. iterative

      And reciprocal, even recursive.

    40. inquiry learning

      Which also means "inquiring into inquiry itself." Jerome Bruner, you are needed now more than ever.

    41. “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

      Fascinating to link this list to Ted Chiang's story "The Evolution of Human Science." I'm just going to leave that here. :)

    42. 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

      The future of the middle class also rests on American children who understand how our democratic form of government works, as well as how and why they should exercise their franchise. The focus on jobs should be only one part of the larger project of education in a democracy.

    43. AN INTEGRATIVE DESIGN

      A very stimulating project to consider. But is it openly networked?

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

      Yes, and this is very exciting if the conversation remains learner-centered.

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

      Great outcomes for learners, to be sure. Do they describe faculty as well? They should. They're an important part of the very idea of a university, in its origins. Yet Clark Kerr's indictment of the "multiversity" suggests the unbundling happened internally long before the computer arrived.

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

      Fourth mention of the three elements.

    47. redesigning the ways we work, collaborate, and structure learning

      Yes. I wish the book took notice of efforts in these directions from the visionaries of the digital age. It's striking that Papert, Kay, Goldberg, Nelson, Engelbart, etc. are completely absent from this discussion.

    48. As the “openly networked” design principle states,

      Crucial element. I'm glad to see it identified here. The irony, alas, is that we cannot openly network our activities around annotating this document, as it's behind a paywall.

    49. we develop students’ digital fluency

      And how they develop ours.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. This appears to be page one of the book, an interesting choice (if that's true). The note is important for context but also as a way of establishing a certain tone. GS usually supplies such notes.

    2. NOTE

      Noun and verb. In the latter case, an imperative.

    1. but it’s the cracks in the crystal,

      The reviewer should read "Imaginary Prisons."

    2. What if the form of this poem had rebelled against the clock’s sinister precision? What if Schnackenberg had roughened the meter or broken a line or two in half? In that case the poem would have taken a stand against artifice, made a good-faith attempt to embody the messy reality of death. Instead it maintains a sort of complicity with the clock, which never misses a beat. It’s as if the poet were saying: here is a small, perfect work of art. It neatly, even wittily encapsulates the experience of losing my father. And in its very perfection, it is a terrible lie.

      I believe I understand why one would say this, or might say this (or conclude this). But it still makes me gasp and shudder. No poem can take a stand against artifice. The notion is absurd, self-cancelling, a terrible coarsening of fragile, essential ideas. And to top it all off, it's a bad reading. Does "oarless" not make "a good-faith attempt to embody the messy reality of death"? What part of the "mess" would the writer have her embody? The decomposition? ("Embody" is deeply ironic in this writer's thoughtless, heartless evaluation.) The financial tangles? What? Why is the image of a clock as the engine of the maelstrom of time that pushes our small craft into seas we cannot steer in NOT an attempt to convey the ultimate disarray of death? The mind boggles and the heart's gorge rises. Are people upset with Schnackenberg because she's smart and learned? Are we come to this?

      Perhaps a better question is: "a terrible lie about what?"

    1. DRAFTpresentedtoNMCBoard,November12,2015v.0.3

      Was this draft approved by the Board?

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. 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.

      Important observation.

    2. 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.

      Wow. APC thus widens participation gap, preys on the disadvantaged, and devalues all of OA.

    1. Evil is always evil, and it may be thought of, perhaps, as essentially destructive, a willed and deliberate negation of organic life. It is always evil to kill another human being, even though it is sometimes right to do so.

      A fascinating distinction.

    2. We probably have no duty to like Beethoven or hate Coca-Cola, but it is at least conceivable that we have a duty to distrust the state.

      Beautifully wry.