The US National Institute of Health has become the first major US agency to require those who receive public money to make their results available to the public. Within twelve months of publication researchers have to make their articles available at PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, according to an article at Science Codex.

This news was slashdotted here. [Tags: open_access science ]

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The Question Tool (AKA The Question and Answer Tool) is a Berkman-built, JZittrain-invented, open source resource for letting a backchannel come up with, discuss, and rank questions which then might be discussed in the frontchannel. It works well. Now it’s being made available through Sourceforge.net.

Gene Koo blogs about it here. And you can run it as a Web service right now here. [tags: open_source berkman]

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Two completely fascinating presentations on technology and education, from very different points of view.

Dylan William brilliantly advances, step by step, toward concluding that technology has a quite particular role to play in education:

What I’m going to argue is that the role of technology in improving learning is primarily in what I call third generation pedagogies. Where we have automated aggregation technologies, which actually take the responses of different students and do some smart things with those things. And give the teacher advice about what are the sensible next steps. The really brilliant teachers are doing this already. But most teachers can’t do it. And so the challenge of third generation pedagogy is to have the contingencies of teaching—that what you do when you know that the teaching didn’t work quite the way you intended—that is supported by technology.

Google’s Peter Norvig, among other things, adds to the mix the value of having students learning in teams so they can teach one another.

(Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the pointers.)

[Tags: education teaching dlan_william peter_norvig ]

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Mark Pilgrim does some mighty provocative juxtapositioning of then and now quotes about books and reading.

The juxtapositions certainly make the case that things are different. They certainly point to things we’re all be sorry to give up, like being able to lend a friend a book. But, of course, they don’t tell the whole story, because the whole story is not only complex, and it’s not only unwritten, but it’s the story of the coming change in norms. And a change in norms rewrites all the stories leading up to it.

Anyway, it’s a terrific piece. Totally worth getting riled up about. [Tags: ebooks amazon kindle drm copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous]

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If you’re interested in the future of books and libraries, and if you’re in Cambridge MA on Tuesday, you should come to the Berkman Center at 12:30 to hear Aaron Swartz talk about the Open Library project, which is gathering a global, open and free list of every book it can find out about. It’s also attempting to help with the problem that books exist at multiple levels of abstraction: There’s Hamlet, editions of Hamlet, Hamlet in anthologies, Hamlet in translation, books based on Hamlet, etc. This is an important and fascinating project.

We serve lunch. Please RSVP. See you there…or on the webcast. (Details) [Tags: open_library aaron_swartz libraries books_everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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After years to talking about our move to “good enough” information, I’m just a little late to learning that Herbert Simon coined a term for this phenomenon in 1957. Yes, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of “satisficing.”

I found this via a very interesting blog post at Just Communicate by a knowledge management grad student who, in the course of discussing the wisdom of Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap article, also points to a post by Steven Bell at the Association of College & Research Libraries blog, on using social sites to move good enough research beyond good enough. [Tags: satisfice herbert_simon everything_is_miscellaneous cory_doctorow just_communicate ]

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Berkman.TV has posted a video in which Wendy Seltzer and Angela Kang explain why the Harvard Coop was deliriously wrong when it used copyright to justify its kicking out a student for copying down book prices. [Tags: copyright berkman wendy_seltzer angela_kang publishing harvard harvard_coop ]

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According to the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ governing body has proposed an open access policy according to which faculty members would make their research available for free either on a university site or on their own site. This would be in addition to publishing in academic journals, some of which charge $20,000 a year for a subscription. It’d be an opt-out program. The Harvard Crimson has a good editorial supporting it.

Yay! Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.

I’m actually not sure how this will work, especially with regard to its being opt-out. If I’ve just had an article accepted by The Journal of Hydroponic Pediatrics. do I then also submit it to the Harvard open access server? If so, in what sense is that opt out?

Obviously, I’m also interested in what sort of metadata and aggregation facilities Harvard will supply to make these articles easily findable.

But what pleasant questions to contemplate! [Tags: open_access harvard publishing copyright a2k everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Karen Schneider (the Free Range Librarian) is one of those strong-voiced writers who makes a real difference in her domain. Now she is leaving the American Library Association’s TechSource blog — which she was instrumental in beginning — in order to follow her writerly instincts. Her last post is a message to librarians that usefully points them toward their fears. [Tags: karen_schneider libraries ala everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Our sixteen year old son is being required in his junior year to memorize the state capitals. This is at the excellent public Brookline High School. It’s like the educational system is trying to give us examples of how bad it’s become. What next? Have them spend a month making a papier-mâché recreation of a fort? Grade them on how well they cut out paper snowflakes to decorate the classroom?

The amount of time our son is being required to spend memorizing whether Bismarck is the capital of North or South Dakota will dwarf the total amount of time he would spend in his lifteime looking it up at Google. This is information that adds nothing to this comprehension of the world. Memorizing the dates of the states’ admissions to the union might at least sometime in his life help him notice a relationship of some consequence — that Texas was admitted before the abolition of slavery has some possible effect on his understanding, whereas that Austin is the capital will only matter if he runs for governor of Texas and doesn’t want to look foolish in the debates.

It especially hurts me that this sort of crap education is going on in history, a field essential to filing away our natural human arrogance by showing us that we got where we are because of what other humans did. And what could be more fascinating than our own story? Obviously, then, we want to teach it by telling students that there will be a quiz on Monday, so could they please memorize the fricking state capitals.

Aarrrggghhh! [Tags: education history state_capitals ]

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