I just finished Jeff Jarvis’s WWGD.  An excellent, if not perfect, read that I highly recommend to colleagues in education. There are some things missing, however, with his chapter on education.  He didn’t go far enough. 

I am thinking specifically about the role that certain institutions play in the hording of research.  For example, when you click here, you are being sent to an article I wrote on the role re-reading plays in schools.  (If you haven’t done so yet, click here.)  What you see is an abstract.  That’s it.  There are eight other pages—fairly well-written ones, too, thank you very much—that non-academic colleagues cannot access.  (It’s worth mentioning that if Jeff clicks on the link from CUNY, where he teaches, he probably can access the whole article.) 

In his section on law, Jarvis points out that there are open-access movements to make the law, cases, and commentary available for free online.  Yet, in academia, we are still under the subscription-stranglehold of companies like Proquest, LexisNexus, and JSTOR.  For instance, I can’t link you to my entire article because of the business relationships the journals have with the online databases.  It’s an old way of doing business that is depriving others from knowledge. 

Ideally, I would want academic articles to be free (as Jeff argues news organizations have learned in recent years).  But, if not, why not have an iTunes-like 25 cent purchasing of articles.  If I need an article, I’d pay for it.  Especially if the fee was conveniently low.  What’s more, researchers should be getting a cut of the action, which, currently, we don’t.  (John Wilinsky addresses some of these issues in his book The Access Principle, available for free as a PDF file from MIT.)

Whether it for free or for cheap, the tyranny of database subscriptions really does deserve disruption.   

Related posts:

1. Open Access Curricula
2. From the Journals :: Social Networks 4 Educators
3. Free Learning on iTunes U

Open access to each other’s lessons, units, projects, and curricula is the necessary next step for educators.  Over the past several months, I’ve been reading books about online businesses and how the new web technologies have affected business models.  In Wikinomics, the argument is that businesses who resist opening up their knowledge reserves to consumers will crumble in the new market.  In Disrupting Class, they extend these ideas to say that the old way of schooling children is costing more money than it needs to: improve online courses and children will learn better.  In What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis writes that there are myriad platforms that provide “elegant organization” on which businesses and communities can create content and change. 

One way for teachers to use such platforms is to elegantly organize their teaching resources for others to take for free.  While there are sites that do offer this service, their interface and search functions are atrocious.  While Ning provides a fantastic platform that many educators are taking advantage of, it doesn’t easily facilitate the searching and sharing of files. Teachers need a simple open platform on which they can easily post resources (imagine a really effective lesson plan), tag those resources (say “The Iliad”, “mixed method”, “simile”), and a wiki-like function for modifying/improving each other’s resources so what we end up with is a mega-archive of best practices. 

The technology is there for it.  The need is there for it.  What is holding it up?  

Related posts:

1. From the Journals :: Social Networks 4 Educators
2. TCETC
3. Laptops in Classrooms