[iDC] iCollege

[Simon Biggs]

In relation to open academic publishing and social media, are people aware
of the P2P academic publishing platform Mendeley? Does anyone use it? Does
it do what it says on the tin? I am signed up but haven't yet had the time
to dig into it. My main concern is for how long it will remain free. It is
still in Beta and already has a premium version.

Best

Simon


Simon Biggs
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
Skype: simonbiggsuk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/

Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
http://www.eca.ac.uk/
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
http://www.elmcip.net/
Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts


> From: Jon Ippolito <jippolito at maine.edu>
> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 12:07:26 -0400
> To: <lizlosh at uci.edu>, <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] iCollege
> 
> Thanks for passing on these links, George and Liz, to Neil Selwyn's "The
> Educational Significance of Social Media" and to the UC Berkeley study
> "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication." They sure helped
> fuel my anger at academic reactionaries.
> 
> http://www.scribd.com/doc/33693537/the-educational-significance-of-social-medi
> a-a-critical-perspective
> 
> http://dmlcentral.net/blog/liz-losh/dml-field-listening-critical-voices
> 
> Yes, I'm impatient with professors who justify their obsession with inbred
> subdisciplinary journals while Fox and Facebook steamroll over public
> discourse. Of the two reports, I guess I appreciate Selwyn's more, because he
> expressed caution more than outright dismissal. Caution about new technologies
> is fine, though sometimes it's hard to distinguish from inaction prompted by
> fear of upsetting the status quo.
> 
> I'm more disturbed by the Berkeley crew, who assembled interviews that confirm
> (surprise!) that junior faculty are still being advised not to publish in
> blogs, multimedia monographs, or "new, untested open-access journals." I can't
> tell why they saw fit to blow a Mellon grant on this foregone conclusion, but
> I can tell you the effect of publishing such a study. It will only reinforce
> the most conservative voices on today's university committees, which in turn
> will result in tenure candidates who, to echo the advice parroted in the
> study, "avoid spending too much time on public engagement."
> 
> Perhaps most telling of all was the study's conclusion that Web 2.0 platforms,
> despite their unsavory status as venues for "high stature" erudition, provide
> a wealth of publicly accessible primary data on which to base that study
> you'll publish in the Journal of Obscure Sociology. If poo-pooing
> peer-reviewed open access journals doesn't already smack of academic elitism,
> then how about data-mining participatory media while archiving your findings
> far from the public's prying eyes?
> 
> It's time we remembered that tenure was invented to encourage risk-taking. So
> I really wish academics who are skeptical of existing social networks--count
> me in, I despise Facebook--would get out of their armchairs and do something
> about it. Assemble a team of like-minded folks and roll your own academic
> network, or suggest improvements to one of the up-and-coming scholarly
> platforms that already exist (ThoughtMesh, CommentPress, Sophie, Scalar). Or
> devise and publish promotion and tenure criteria that are more suitable for
> the digital age, as in:
> 
> "New Criteria for New Media"
> http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/275.php
> 
> This white paper, and its attendant sample guidelines, also happen to be the
> most downloaded article ever from Leonardo magazine:
> 
> http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showMostReadArticles?journalCode=leon
> 
> So somebody's listening, even if it's not the authors of the reports listed
> above.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> jon
> ______________________________
> Still Water--what networks need to thrive.
> http://still-water.net/
> 
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Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201