Here are his topics:

• Scholarly communications must be open
• Scholarly communications must be standards-compliant
• Scholarly communications must be syndicated
• Scholarly communications must be Integrated Into the Cyberinfrastructure
• Scholarly communications will transform via Cybermetrics
• Scholarly communications must be mobile, and
• Scholarly communications must be scalable
• Scholarly communications in the Long Tail of knowledge
• Scholarly communications must not wait for peer review.

Enjoy!

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been some discussion online about the worth of peer review.  Is it valuable, or is it antiquated?  As an Assistant Professor who goes up for tenure next fall, allow me to contribute my two cents.

I guess the real question behind this whole publish or perish (which leads to peer review) comes back to the idea that if a university is going to grant tenure to a faculty member, they want to ensure that the faculty member is actively participating in their field and contributing meaningfully to the field’s body of knowledge.

Do we have a problem there? Not me, I’m good.  I look forward to tenure and the security it affords me, so I can see it as a valuable right of passage for a faculty member.

The question behind publish or perish that I have a real problem with IS peer review.  I agree with the questions that have been asked of late.  Allow me to catch you up.

February 5, 2010 (my 41st birthday!): Cameron Neylon posts “Peer Review: What is it good for?” The basic premise of the article is that the process needs to be more open.  Journals should publish which articles have been submitted as well as reviewer’s comments.  He thinks reviewers should be held accountable for their part in the process so they aren’t purposely blocking others’ work. He also talks about the cost associated with rejecting an article.  I found his take interesting.  The transparency of the process isn’t the problem I have with it.  I review articles for a couple of journals, and I always try to be fair.  I think we ought to HELP each other share our ideas rather than try to prevent others.

February 17, 2010: Terry Anderson responds with “Journals as Filters and Active Agents.”  His article talks about the peer review process from a journal editor’s perspective.  It was actually very interesting. His main point: “So Peer review is certainly not perfect and does consume scholarly resources, but it serves to both filter and to improve the materials we use to build knowledge within our disciplines and (at least open access journals) to expose these ideas to everyone. Neylon’s ideas of just relying on happenstance and popularity ratings of posts, seem to be a recipe for compounding, rather than solving the challenges of utilizing relevant, interesting and important works.” Honestly, I can see that.  We have to have some sort of bar to meet as far as quality goes.  Not all research furthers the body of knowledge, and those of us who make this our profession should accept this.  And, heaven forbid, if our work doesn’t do it, then we need to change topics!

February 17, 2010: Steven Downes chimes in with “On Peer Review.”  First of all, I’ll say that I’m a big fan of Steven’s, and I appreciate his hard work compiling OLDaily and reading his Half an Hour blog. In his response to the peer review debate, Steven wrote: “I don’t think of knowledge and scholarship as static; I think of them as fluid, and therefore to me it seems counterintuitive to attempt to capture a paper and fix it as a definitive statement of fact (or knowledge, or findings, or however you want to represent it).”   Further, he contrasts what he does with his blogging to publishing in academic journals, saying: “The difference between me, and an academic reviewer, is that I am held accountable for every harsh word, every appeal to an academic standard, every suggestion of a missing reference, every appeal to theoretical support. I can’t secretly lobby for a certain theory, undercut an opponent or competitor, bias the evidential basis for a proposition, or any of the many other things that can and do happen in peer review.“  Well, AMEN, brother!

I guess this really all started coming to mind for me a couple of years ago when two posts I wrote on this blog, Have we reclaimed Instructional Design and Instructional Design in Academia: Where theory and practice RARELY meet, were listed on OLDaily.  I remember being pretty excited about it–especially because Steven didn’t completely rip on me!  At any rate, I remember telling someone higher up than me here at the university about it, and the response I got was, “Well, it doesn’t help you towards tenure!”  So here something I had written was going out to 26,000 + readers, and these posts still get heavy traffic on my blog, but because they weren’t in a refereed journal, they don’t matter.

As many know, my major professor was David Merrill, and he always told me that one of the reasons he wrote so much was to be part of the conversation.  He said he didn’t mind writing something and having someone disagree, because he liked having to defend it.  I think that blogging is just that–having to defend your thoughts and ideas.  Now, I’m not in any way saying that blogging should be equivalent to refereed publications as far as tenure goes, but if something generates *real* conversation in some sort of quantifiable manner, then why not have some way to count it?

In his widely watched TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Well, I agree with him.  And that is the whole problem.  The academic system rewards people who reuse data sets incessantly, others who run meaningless research studies, and others who just know how to get things published.  And yet, as Downes mentions, they never have to defend a word of what they write.  But I guess that’s the underlying problem with the whole academic system: it rewards those who know how to play the game.

And that, my friends, is why I believe that peer reviews and the whole publish and perish mentality are the plague of academia.

So let me have it . . .

Here is what classmate N. responded:

I completely agree with you and I do not see why grading participation is so important. Obviously the ultimate goal is to teach the topics covered in a course effectively by enforcing critical thinking. As long as a student demonstrates that he/she has learned the topics introduced through his/her performace in exams and assignments why we should force an individual to participate in a discussion by assigning grades to participation.  I think having a forum to exchange ideas is helpful but a lot of people can learn without participating or  by passive participation (by just reading the posts that interests him/her) in a discussion group. My approach would be to provide all the learning tools available to the students and let them choose the most effective method themselves. As instructors our job is to measure the outcome.

To that, classmate J. responded:

I don’t see that there are any secrets to the educational process.  Students must interact with certain amounts of information in order to make it their own.  Participation has been proven to improve the levels of comprehension and absorption for the kinds of things most graduate students are expected to learn in their programs.  Yes there are some things that we can learn the first time we see or hear them, but most things take time.  Maybe I miss the point of this discussion but some of this is the reason I think I will always prefer the face to face discussions for some subjects.

Here’s what I wrote back:

The real issue is that the educational process is so variable.  We can design, design, design to get effective educational materials and activities for our instruction, but we still can’t account for the variability in humans as learners.  We can design multiple entry points into the instruction (audio, video, verbal, etc.), but we’ll still never hit all the learners.

As for your comment that “participation has been proven to improve the levels of comprehension and absorption for the kinds of things most graduate students are expected to learn in their programs,” I’m gonna disagree with you on that, but it could just be semantics.

When I teach my instructional design courses, I spend an entire day discussing the question “what is the difference between information and instruction?”  Answers are all over the place.  Most instructors think they are providing instructional activities to their students, but in reality they are just disseminating information; they are regurgitating content.  The difference between information and instruction is the ability to practice.  Instruction will involve the ability for the learner to practice and receive feedback. Here is a link to a blog post I wrote on just that topic, with an example of what a grad student response to the question might be (mine from grad school is posted there).

If you take your quote and change it to “PRACTICE has been proven to improve the levels of comprehension and absorption for the kinds of things most graduate students are expected to learn in their programs”, then I’d agree (thus my assertion that we just might be disagreeing on semantics.)  Otherwise, I think your comment is an overgeneralization.  Content is too variable.

I do agree with you that some content lends itself better for face to face instruction.  Even as an instructional designer and educational technologist, I don’t think everything should be taught online.  It just doesn’t work.  Once I was an instructional designer for an online college algebra class.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever designed.  The technology we have today wasn’t available, and it was a nightmare.  Now, with that said, online components and simulations can ENHANCE face to face instruction (as can be seen with this story about brain surgeons practicing on virtual brains), but I still want my doctors and pilots to have practiced and learned on someone else before I need their services.

Question #1: How would you implement online discussions in your course?

Question #2: To help students become involved in an online course, what should be included in the syllabus to help guide the students toward active/successful participation?

Here is my (partial) response:

Well, before I get to my answers, I think it may help a little to give you my background so you’ll have insight into how I got here.

I feel like a kid here at the university (I’m only 41), but all through grad school all of my research was in online learning.  As a master’s student I was selected to design and teach the first fully online course in the state of Utah.  Also while a grad student I helped design the Syllabase online course delivery system (a precursor to products like D2L). I’ve probably either designed or taught almost 30 different online course during my career (I worked in faculty development at my last school–much like H. and K. here).  My Ph.D. is in instructional design–specifically focused in this area.  So if there is ANY WAY to screw up an online course, I’ll be I’ve done it at least twice . . .. I put all this on the table because I find this stuff VERY interesting.  I’m taking the course here to help myself be better, and to hopefully share some of what I’ve learned.  So you can take all of this with a grain of salt, but here are my answers . . .

2) As I stated in my response to someone else, “participation” in an online course is a HORRIBLE criteria.  It’s extremely difficult to measure effectively, and it’s very subjective. Some will think they participated well, and other’s simply won’t care.  What you have to do is structure the assignments so that you take “participation” out of the equation when it comes to assessment.  Either they did the assignments, or they didn’t.  There are plenty of ways to make sure that learners do this.  I’m not a fan of counting posts.  BOOOOO!  There are actually a lot of published rubrics that evaluate the content of a post rather than the number.  Think about it.  Would you rather have a student in your face to face class who talked constantly (online: posts all the time), or would you rather have one who inputs meaningfully into the discussion, even if it is only one comment?  I’ll take meaningful discussion anytime.  The trick is not letting your students get away with meaningless posts.  I find when I teach online I spend a lot of time responding to students saying things like: “Do you really mean that?” or “Is that what you really want to say?”  See, students, if they think they can get away without having to back up their comments, will say anything.  In a f2f class, we’ll question them and press them for follow up.  It’s harder and more time consuming to do in an online format, but I’d argue it’s almost MORE important to do.  So long story short (too late!) I never grade “participation” as a criteria.

As for what needs to be in the syllabus? DETAIL, DETAIL, DETAIL.  You have to spell it out, brother!

As I said, I go up for tenure this coming fall, and that brings with it extra pressure.  And last semester wasn’t a good one.  Yes, I got three publications, but my teaching wasn’t to the level I’m accustomed to.  And to make matters worse, while I research and design online instruction, they were all online courses, and I definitely didn’t practice what I preach.  So I figured I needed to “sharpen my saw.”  To do this, I enrolled in a course offered by the faculty development group here at Oklahoma State University. The title of the course? The title of this post: Preparing Online Instructors.

We’re one week in, and I’m already feeling weird about taking the class.  There is quite a range in technological expertise amongst the students, and an even broader range about pedagogy.  To be honest, as an instructional designer and when it comes to online instruction, I feel that I’m more experienced than the instructors.  Now that’s not a knock on them, I just think I’ve done more.  So as we’ve started discussions, I find I write a lot more detail–based on my experience–than the other learners.  I’m afraid I’m going to come off looking like the “know-it-all,” and I don’t want that.  But if you’re going to ask me a question, you had better want my answer, because I’ll give it to you.

I thought the course would be a good way to get back to blogging, so here’s what I’m going to do.  As I participate in discussions, I’m going to post my responses here.  I don’t really know why other than if I’m going to spend that much time writing, I’d like feedback on my ideas and thoughts from those within my field.  So feel free to comment.

One more thing, I’ll never identify a classmate by name.  I’ll use an initial.

Here we go . . .

The questionnaire has been closed. Thanks to all those who filled it out (119 of you!), and please be prepared for a follow up.

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