Posts filed under 'academia'
May 15th, 2008, 10:00am
Have you ever looked at one of those strangely patterned posters with the hidden 3D picture inside? You know, the ones you stand in front of for five to ten minutes crossing and uncrossing your eyes to see the hidden tropical island, bunny, or house your friends are describing to you. Well, I was the fourth grader who could never quite pick out more than just blobs in the pattern. I still remember that day in eighth grade when I looked up at my English class wall and instead of little squiggles I saw a whale in the sea. It was a great day. Read More »
May 6th, 2008, 08:11pm
My name is Caleb. I am another new guy here at nGenera aka (New Paradigm). This post is about a bone that I, and many other students, have to pick with the current education system.
In college, everyone has those professors that can really get under your skin. It drives us crazy because, when they look at you, you can almost see their mind weighing the value of your comments and opinions upon the number of degrees you have. If you’re a freshman, you might as well be five years old. This attitude could be one reason why many frustrated people view school as being “just another hoop to jump through.”
This message is not a shot at professors…well, maybe some professors (the kind nobody likes, that get the frowny faces on ratemyprofessors.com), but more a shot at the way many universities see their students. Are students assets or liabilities to administrators? Read More »
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April 28th, 2008, 06:28pm
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Today’s youth, the Net Generation, is increasingly comfortable with exchanging real life experiences for virtual ones. The latest is the annual college tour that many high school students undertake before selecting a post secondary institution. While their parents would take the time and incur considerable expense to visit the few colleges that they were interested in, their children rather jump online to browse hundreds of schools at once.
One of the largest virtual college tours is put on by CollegeWeekLive. The first event which took place in November attracted 15 000 students from 28 countries who “visited” 130 U.S. colleges. The events are highly interactive – there are live video sessions with admissions experts and counselors, live chat with current students, virtual speakers and video contests. The events also allow schools to set up virtual booths with brochures, videos, webinars, podcasts and live IM.
While it is unlikely that the physical college tours will be eliminated entirely, the virtual experience allows N-Geners to be more informed when narrowing their choices to a few schools they will want to visit. It also provides international students with the ability to learn more about the schools that they will likely not have a chance to visit before they make their decisions. It will be interesting to see what other experiences will be taken online as the gap between the physical and virtual world narrows further.
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April 23rd, 2008, 10:44am
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There’s a fantastic article in this month’s Scientific America about the merits of open access and collaboration in science. We’ve certainly been of the minds that openness, whether in relation to data, patents or ideas, is at the heart of an array of potential advances in the sciences. Projects like the MSF-led Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative or the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid offer great examples of the positive outcomes enabled by openness and sharing that would have been largely impossible in a closed, proprietary model.
But despite such successes, there remains a great deal of scepticism about the merits of an open model in science. The usual response is that as potential profits, attribution and, for academics, tenure and promotion, are closely tied to their research efforts, opening up risks livelihoods, etc. Sounds all too familiar. Read More »
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April 22nd, 2008, 08:42pm
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The first chapter of Wikinomics opens with the story of Rob McEwen and GoldCorp, and it’s a story that Don continues get questioned about fairly often. At the centre of the story was a contest where GoldCorp opened up their proprietary data to see who could answer a couple of “simple” questions - do we have gold, and if so where is it? In the end, the contest allowed GoldCorp to find the uniquely qualified minds that could find gold on their property, and they went from a $90 Million company to a $10 Billion one almost overnight - at the cost of about a million bucks in prizes.
At first blush, it sounds like a great deal for everyone - but these types of contests strike a nerve with a lot of people. Trevor Scholz would be one of them, and Don has a post linking to his article Market Ideology and the Myths of the Web 2.0. To quote Trevor’s take on wikinomics:
When interpreting the new conditions for production and consumption online, his sole mission is a socially friction–free update of the timeworn capitalist power dynamics. He discovers and celebrates how today, perhaps more than ever, fewer and fewer people can become richer and richer by using the very many who earn less and less.
Read More »
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April 18th, 2008, 10:15am
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My colleague Thusenth and I are working on a short piece on the democratization of data and knowledge enabled by data visualisation applications like ManyEyes, Swivel and TrendAnalyzer.
But valuable as these tools may for discussion and decision making, they pale in terms of coolness to the recent move by Cambridge University Library to put all of Charles Darwin’s research papers online. The Darwin Collection holds some 20,000 items and 90,000 images, and are now available at http://darwin-online.org.uk .
Given that these are the materials that helped shape Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, and helped form our understanding of evolution, progress and human development, their value for discussion, debate and learning is priceless.
Moreover, in a future world of dynamic wiki’d curriculum, being able to learn online from the thoughts, ideas and insights of the world’s greatest thinkers will be one more step towards the democratization of knowledge and a huge step towards improving access to educational materials in developing countries.
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March 12th, 2008, 12:33pm
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So what should universities do about facebook groups acting as “study groups”?
This is a very important question at Ryerson right now, as a student is facing possible expulsion because he created a facebook group where, according to him, students could collaborate on small homework assignments. His supporters argue the group was productive in helping each other collaboratively learn problem solving methods. That’s good. The counter-argument, of course, is the forum effectively “invites” people to post and share answers… which can sound a lot like cheating. That’s bad.
It’s quite a tricky issue to deal with. Read More »
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February 15th, 2008, 01:10pm
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As Don and Anthony write in Wikinomics, a new age for science is around the corner. The ability to quickly and seamlessly share information and collaborate online allows scientists to eliminate many of the inefficiencies associated with research. However, scientific knowledge is not disseminated freely due to the barriers posed by high subscription costs of many scientific journals. The serial crisis, as it is called, leads to libraries spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get access to the latest research. As an example, a library subscription to the journal Brain Research costs over $20 000 as does a subscription to the Journal of Applied Polymer Science.
The problem is exasperated by the growth in academic fields and the ‘publish or perish’ mantra of the academic world. It doesn’t help that the publishing industry is dominated by a few large companies each owning multiple journal titles. This allows them to freely set prices, which have been rising fast in recent times. Publishers contend that they ensure a rigorous, and costly, peer review process is in place to control quality. However, as the Wikipedia model shows, peer review can work in an open and free environment.
Efforts, such as the Public Library of Science, strive to overcome this problem by creating a library of free-access journals. Harvard has joined the movement by electing to post research from the arts and science faculty on the Internet for free. While this decision is important due to Harvard’s size and prestige, the publishing industry is unlikely to give up their lucrative model anytime soon. However, it does seem that the power to change things is in the hands of university faculties who ultimately will benefit from a more open academic environment.
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February 14th, 2008, 08:54pm
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Set to launch in August of this year, Flexbooks is a new open source model of textbook creation that will allow schools, teachers, parents and even students to create custom textbooks in a way that is faster and cheaper than the traditional method. Using open source tools such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and WikiUniversity to create content, Flexbooks allows users to drag articles and images into an easy to use user inerface to create various standards based learning materials.
The project is in its infancy right now but its future prospects seem very promising. The first step will be to pool together a large collection of educational assets mainly through a combination of licensing activities, incentives for community-based authorship, and university collaborations. Following that, Flexbooks will continue expanding its knowledge base and team up with various print companies to provide paper-based materials in addition to its core set of online offerings.
Why do we need Flexbooks? the makers of Flexbooks CK-12 explain:
“Today, textbooks that are used in K-12 system are limiting, expensive and are difficult to update. Because of this, K-12 teachers find it hard to introduce new concepts and cater to different needs. What we need is a more flexible and less expensive system to create and distribute books and online content. FlexBooks, by their very nature, satisfies this need. They contain high quality online content, and are easy to create, update and print. They provide a new system that will follow an open source philosophy to place content on-line that can be “mixed, modified and printed.”
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February 11th, 2008, 05:11pm
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An innovative website called “Love Earth” is bridging the gap between the scientific world and people’s interest and concern over endangered species. The website tracks five species of animals along with the activities of scientists studying them. The result is an online blog and Google mash-up of the animal’s locations. An interesting way to bring home what mammalogists and cetologists actually do.
With the ever growing endangered species list, animal science and conservation could definitely use some popular support. The inaccessible nature of scientific work, however, makes it difficult for people to identify with the cause. While in some cases this may be mere apathy, there seems to be pent up demand for more accessible and interactive ways to learn about the environment. A perfect example of this demand is BBC’s Planet Earth series, a nature documentary, which was the most popular DVD sold on Amazon in 2007.
The work of thousands of scientists and conservationists is critical to the survival of many species. Finding a way to bring this battle into people’s living rooms could galvanize them to lend their support. Interactive, online experiences such as “Love Earth” might go a long way in doing this.
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January 17th, 2008, 12:56pm
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The lack of transparency and information has for decades been a friend to rampant polluters. On the flip side, without objective comparisons, it is very difficult to recognize the positive efforts of some industrial plants to clean up their acts. Now a project called MapEcos is bringing the kind of transparency that tackles both sides of the problem.
MapEcos, which is an effort by a team of Harvard, Duke and Dartmouth academics and students, is a mashup that maps environmental performance of U.S. industrial sites. The emission information comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The mashup also includes information reported by plant managers on their efforts to improve their environmental performance.
Without information sources, such as MapEcos, most people view the environmental problem as an abstract issue that does not affect them directly. Finding out that a massive polluter may be located next door will bring the issue home. This type of information has the potential to galvanize communities into putting more pressure on companies to improve their performance.
MapEcos also has the potential of highlighting the positive efforts made by industrial managers. As good environmental performance will not be overlooked, managers have an incentive to come up with ways of cutting pollution. This in turn, puts additional pressure on polluters to fall in line.
The value of the site can be increased by adding new information sources and analytical tools. MapEcos already gives the ability to sort by industry, corporate owner, chemicals emitted and emission levels. An easy way to calculate industry averages or displaying the environmental profile of a chosen area would be useful. A difficult, yet worthwhile undertaking, would be to develop an objective green rating for every U.S. industrial plant that would quickly allow stakeholders to assess environmental performance based on the plant’s activities.
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January 7th, 2008, 12:51pm
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Interesting article on the NYT site today that points us to a new, YouTube for ideas. Backed by former Harvard Pres and Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, “Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system.”
I’m a big fan of this idea – while Wikipedia offers a non-visual repository of thoughts and facts – you can’t (for the most part) attribute them to anyone, and thus it serves as a rather limited reference guide. This, however, has the potential to play a large role in the facilitation of intellectual debates, and, if it gathers enough support among academics and thinkers, the spread of knowledge outside of academic journals and libraries. Now all that said, I have to point out that this isn’t exactly novel. Last spring, as a grad student in the UK, I often used the video interviews at BigPicture to get new ideas and thoughts from top thinkers from across the globe. And therein lies BigPicture’s current advantage over the BigThink – while the latter has a roster of experts almost exclusively from the US, the former has a more robust worldwide composition.
Nonetheless, if packaged correctly BigThink could play a role in broader open source education efforts, where informal students could use this and another OS curriculum to formulate theses and thoughts for peer-review and, eventually, some sort of accreditation. Think the Open University - a core component of what could be a neat menu of Education 2.0 projets.
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November 23rd, 2007, 11:08am
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As was to be expected, the U.S. Copyright Alliance has approached each of the U.S. Presidential candidates on their approach to copyright protection.
From the CA’s perspective: “The future of our creative output in the United States is at stake in the 2008 presidential election. It is critical not only for members of the creative community but also for the US economy to ensure that copyrights are respected and piracy is reduced. We are asking you to let us know what you would do to help preserve one of America’s greatest strengths, its creative community.”
Copyright protection, and intellectual property protection (IPP) in general, has engendered a lengthy debate pitting those who see copyright law as an incentive to innovation (which one cannot deny) against those who see the too broad application of such laws as inhibiting innovation and creativity. Moreover, it pits history versus the future. History insofar as most innovations are shown to be incremental in nature, and in a developmental perspective, usually borrowed from others (i.e. Cabot-Lowell “borrowed” designs for cotton gins while in the UK that once reverse engineered led to the development of the U.S. textile industry, and the decline of the previously famous UK equivalent). And thus a concern for the future focuses on the preservation of industry leadership, and thus necessitates protection.
Read More »
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October 4th, 2007, 09:34am
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Taking a page out of MIT’s OpenCourseWare book, UC Berkeley has not only opened up its academic materials to the world, but they’ve done it via video’s posted to YouTube. They’ve posted over 300 hours of academic lectures on YouTube allowing anyone and everyone to learn as if they were in the classroom.
From the press release, “UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life - academics, events and athletics - which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare efforts and Berkeley’s previous podcast models were indeed good starts but providing the actual video of lectures is a significant step forward. And while it still doesn’t allow for the engagement that makes academia what it is, it’s a heck of an improvement over readings lists, course notes and audio recordings.
Moreover, imagine what this could do for developing country efforts to improve post-secondary education. One of the impacts of the international community’s push for universal primary, and at least semi-funded secondary education, has been a large increase in the number of students wishing to attend post-secondary institutions. But given that in many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, meagre budgets are directed at primary, and then secondary, education, the post-secondary segment has seen its budgets slashed. For example, in the mid-80’s nearly a fifth of the World Bank’s education spending went to higher education whereas a decade later it had dropped to just 7%.
Projects such as this may just enable a re-invigoration of developing country colleges and universities, whether formally by institutions and governments or informally by students, by allowing for the exploitation of content developed elsewhere. Evidently it doesn’t solve the issue of ICT infrastructure but given the paucity of resources available in many DC institutions it might just act as a major complement for students wishing to learn and able to afford an internet cafe.
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September 24th, 2007, 11:12am
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We’ve written a couple of times about friend of New Paradigm’s Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop project (see here and here), and while most of us are effusive in our praise of the program, I for one am rather ambivalent about it.
It’s not that it’s not a great initiative; its potential for improving access to educational materials and the Net is great. But in the context of developing countries, and in particular the least-developed countries, there are much more immediate needs. So when I read this article on the BBC about the project I couldn’t help but think “no kidding.” In it, Negroponte notes, “I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a cheque written…And yes, it has been a disappointment.”
But herein lies the disconnect between what we’ve hyped as technological solutions to under-development and reality. While this project stands to create substantial long-term benefits for future generations, it doesn’t put food on the table, power in street lights, or create jobs in the short-term. A good friend of mine, and former colleague at TakingITGlobal, likes to tout the “information as power” argument with respect to projects such as this but I’m a structural power guy at heart and thus am more in tune with the “money as power” thinking behind projects such as Kiva.org or Global Giving.
Question is whether any of these projects will work at a broader macro level – thoughts?
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September 7th, 2007, 11:10am
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While the main scope of Wikinomics is on the value of collaboration and engagement across traditional customer/producer/supplier/competitor lines, there is also significant applicability of the Wikinomics concept in the field of government and governance in developing, and developed economies.
Highlighted by the increasing use of public-private partnerships in infrastructure development and social service delivery, these joint projects highlight the move towards a much needed compromise between neo-liberal advocates for a minimal state and promoters of the activist, developmental state.
In essence these partnerships will act as the third level of economic ideology seen since the 1980s. This evolution has seen the focus on privatisation and unimpeded liberalisation introduced by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, which (depending on your perspective) can be argued to have done little to help the developing world, and which gave way to the Stiglitz-led calls for a return of the State as a regulatory body. But this more recent return of the State has yet to provide the hoped-returns of economic growth, as without a strong tax base or significant exports earnings, such governments continue to lack the funds necessary to implement foundational social services and infrastructure projects.
And therein lays the opportunity for a Wikinomics-like model of collaboration in government services. Public – private partnerships in both social service delivery and infrastructure development are becoming increasingly more popular as means of building capacity where little, if any, currently exists. The model allows governments, rarely noted for their innovative or efficient project implementation abilities, to tap into a broad network of skills, talent and financing available in the private sector. The benefits for the private sector include market access into parts of the world that have long-remained too risky given political and social uncertainties.
Evidently there are huge debates still to be had, let alone cheques to be written, especially with respect to partnerships in social service delivery in healthcare and education, but the model is a step in the right direction for economies that lack the social and physical capacity needed for economic growth.
You can check out examples of such projects at the World Bank’s Global Public-Private Partnership in Infrastructure Portal.
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August 7th, 2007, 11:44am
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Its not just tech-savvy computer addicts who are spending hours of their time a day on Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Researchers and scholars around the world are turning to online venues to garner new insights on issues ranging from economic development, monetary policy, human behaviour, and philanthropy. To this group of interested academics, online virtual worlds are more than just fun and games.
At Cornell University – Professor Robert Bloomfield is using Second Life to teach students about regulatory policy, based on the principle that the lack of such policy in the virtual world makes it somewhat similar to the U.S. economy of 100 years ago. As he explains in a recent Business Week article, “Virtual worlds like Second Life give students an opportunity to understand what the purpose of regulation is, why it arises, what forces drive it to look ultimately the way it does.” And we can expect this sort of research to only increase in the future, as new programs continue to emerge that evaluate and study the role of such virtual worlds in society, and vice versa. According to Business Week, Bloomfield is also working on “Worlds for Study [whose wiki you can check out here], a project he initiated that will bring together professors and tech experts to develop a virtual world platform just for teaching and researching business.”
The basic premise behind this research is the belief that people in a virtual world will act much like those in the real world – motivated by incentives and deterrents, be they economic or social. That said, you have to wonder, when your forty year old neighbor is donning the avatar of a 20 year old to peruse his second youth Second Life in, how much of a replica of real world behaviors can these venues truly offer? From an academic standpoint at least, Bloomfield and others seem to believe the macro similarities will outweigh the micro differences.
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July 15th, 2007, 08:39pm
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One of the hot debates in the human capital world is how much should recruiters review the online profile of new employees — especially those who have recently graduated from college and most likely to have less than professional content on their Facebook and MySpace pages.
Anastasia Goodstein and I discussed this recently in a study we wrote for New Paradigm’s Net Generation study. An excerpt:
Decide whether or not to look. If you do look at social networking sites and blogs, create specific corporate criteria for what constitutes a red flag. Recruiters or HR professionals should not be rejecting people according to their own personal biases.
Context is key. Everyone has different personas for different situations. You’re not the same person with your boss as you are with your friends. If you’re searching for information about a potential candidate, consider the context in which it is posted.
Let them explain. Instead of ruling out a potential candidate right away because of a questionable post or photo, use the opportunity to ask them about it. Check the date of the post. If it’s from high school, their thinking has probably evolved. Use the interview as an opportunity for them to explain themselves to you—even talking about their mistakes can reveal a lot about character.
Partying can be a job skill. If you’re hiring for a position in sales or marketing, finding a N-Gener’s profile full of party pics could indicate that they have a skill set that might be help them do their job.
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May 29th, 2007, 11:20pm
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It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Every day it is adding more functionality and the network effect keeps exploding (see Metcalfe’s Law for the effect your mom will make if she joins).
One of the subtle, but important features on Facebook is the birthday reminder – it alone accounts for a great deal of “wall on wall” communication. Many websites in the past have tried to incorporate this into their online calendars – often pleading for you to purchase an e-card or some sort of gift. Facebook, on the other hand will sell you an animated gif(t) such as boxer shorts or fuzzy dice, but really make it appear that they don’t really need your money. Especially with all the new applications such as the Compass and Horoscopes all loaded with potential (extremely profitable) revenue.
A good example from my personal life. I’ve been very close friends with Stephen J. Morrison (seen below in his only onscreen credit opposite Dean Wormer) for about fifteen years. Never once has it occurred to me to call him on his birthday. To be honest, I didn’t even know when it was, other than vaguely earlier in 1968 than mine. If asked, I would have guessed September. Not this year (in, uh, May)…I was on Facebook anyway, so I managed to make an extremely little effort to spread a little cheer.
In other Facebook news…the Wall St. Journal reports that the University of Michigan and M.I.T. among others are offering a masters program in social computing.From the article…
Schools not traditionally known for their technology programs are also venturing into the study of social computing. For the past year, Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas has funded two research projects that use social-networking site Facebook to examine student retention trends, in part because the school noticed its students were already spending so much time on the site, said K.B. Massingill, executive director of the division that funded the research. A group of undergraduate students also studied faith-related conversations in Facebook and MySpace and presented their findings to what Mr. Massingill called an unusually well-attended faculty session. “We filled up the room,” he said.
For an upcoming issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by Indiana University, researchers Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison issued a call for papers on social-networking Web sites. “We wanted to encourage scholars to get their research out there because we both knew it was brewing, but folks were being slow about publishing,” said Ms. Boyd, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley’s school of information. Expecting a handful of papers, she was surprised to receive more than 100 submissions.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the peer reviewed thesis “the poke function and the human condition.”
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May 15th, 2007, 03:17pm
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MIT’s Media Lab has developed an easy to use programming tool to introduce children to coding. The tool, called Scratch, allows a user to mix and match music, sound and movement through a graphical interface much like moving around building blocks. In fact, one of the researchers in the group is the inventor of the popular Lego Mindstorms toolkit that allows children to program movement into their Lego creations.
Educating and encouraging children to modify their online environments at such an early age gives us a glimpse into what the web will look like in the not so distant future. As these children grow up they will demand as well as create customizable experiences to suit their needs. A further blurring of the lines between consumers and producers. Could this be the start of Web 3.0?
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