Scientific publication as narcissism? Or is it lack of responsibility?

Dan Cohen is hacking the academy in a week (#hackacad). In his pursuit he talks about open access publishing and scholarly values. There appears to be an attitude problem among scientists: they increasingly use Googlebooks and other publicly available digital sources as jump off point for their research. However, when it comes to publishing their results, they opt for the traditional journal. Sharing will be done only after the finished product has been published and resulted in a new line on their CV.

Of course, this has much to do with academic funding and subsequent publication rules. All fair enough. But Cohen wants us to share work in progress. Weblogs, tweets, wikis...

Stephen Ramsay responds to Cohen's post by stating that scientists don't have time to read other's work. Therefore the judgement of value is outsourced to publishers. They will value the quality of research. In return you hand them over copyrights...

Honestly, I think our goal as a community should be to present our colleagues with as many inscrutable objects as possible. We should be making lots of videos, podcasts, maps, "books" with a hundred authors, blog posts, software, and web sites without any clear authorial control. And yes, we should put open content licenses on all of it and give it away to everyone we meet. And then we should dare our colleagues to tell us that our work isn't of sufficient intellectual quality.

Software for qualitative analysis

Jeffrey Keefer is currently attending the QI2010 conference (hashtag #icqi10) and liveblogging about sessions. His post about a session hosted by Judith Davidson and Silvana diGregorio on technology and qualitative analysis showed interesting new developments.
I always thought there was the Dutch application Kwalitan and there was Atlas-ti for QA. Of course, you could use wiki's or tagging applications. But recently, 'new' platforms such as mobile devices, have become hosts for QA software as well. A small list to be considered:

Judy is now sharing some sorts of apps that may help with this, including wikis, A.nnotate, tagging (del.icio.us), Everyday Lives (an ethnographic software tool for iPhones), blogs, IBM Social Research Group – Many Eyes, Word Tree (for document analysis), and how these things will move forward.

The use of interactive media among today’s youth

The pilot study about young people's interactive media use I did has been published by Computers in Human Behavior. Here's the abstract:

The intensive use of interactive media has led to assertions about the effect of these media on youth. This paper presents a quantitative study on the position of interactive media in young people’s lives. Rather than following the assumption of a homogeneous generation, we investigate the existence of a diversity of user patterns. The research question for this paper: Can patterns be found in the use of interactive media among youth? We answer this question by a survey among Dutch youngsters aged 10–23. Four clusters of interactive media users, namely Traditionalists, Gamers, Networkers and Producers were identified using cluster analysis. Behind these straightforward clusters, a complex whole of user activities can be found. Each cluster shows specific use of and opinions about interactive media. This provides a contextualized understanding of the position of interactive media in the lives of contemporary youth, and a nuanced conceptualization of the ‘Net generation’. This allows for studying the intricate relationship between youth culture, interactive media and learning.

Download the full text

Networked Learning Conference 2010

I just came back from two inspiring days at #nlc2010.

Repository:
conference site
Cloudworks
Matthew Allen's liveblog
Archived twitterstream
Jean Lave's article on learning