Multilitteratus Incognitus

Part II of my 2024 academic wayfinding ponderings! 🎓🤔 If you remember my last post of 2023, you probably remember that perhaps the thing that's been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth has been the CIEE journal ( Current Issues in Emerging eLearning ).  This is a journal that I co-founded with my friend and colleague Alan Girelli back in the day (in 2012-2013, if I remember correctly). At the time, Alan was the director for the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning (CIEE), which was part of our College of Advancing and Professional Studies. The idea behind the center was to foster innovation on research (across the UMass Campuses), and to provide venues for the dissemination of knowledge.  The center was the brainchild of the CAPS Dean.  Alan arranged for a variety of events over the years, including events on MOOCs, learning analytics, active learning, and so on. The journal on his end was also a means to this end. At the same time, I had this crazy idea t...

This is Part IV of V of a look back to 2022. I know, my blogging is lacking a bit of urgency LOL 😂. The  first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the  second part discussed professional development more broadly .  The third part branched off a bit from the second part, discussing professional development a bit more from an academic development frame .  Continuing with that academic framing, part IV will explore some of my ponderings about... Determining where research fits in for me... At the end of last year I was reflecting on where research fits into my professional and hobby life; keeping in mind that my job does not require, nor does it make provisions for, me to do research - thus it's mostly a hobby.  My relationship with doing research, and where it fits in for me, has really evolved over the last decade. When I was attending my last Master's degree (before completing the degree), I had a hard time even imagining writing 7000 words...

Choose your Destiny Over the past month or so, IHE has published a few opinion pieces about the issues with academic peer reviews; specifically that there is a bit of a dearth of peer reviewers which is holding up the publication of papers.  For lack of a better way of explaining this, it sounds to me that older academics who write these pieces (who had privileges that current-day academics don't) seem to chalk it up to "Darn these young academics! Nobody wants to work anymore!" I suppose that one  take on the current situation, but I think it's a shitty take. I suppose that if I were still an editor at an academic journal, I might be feeling the pressure a bit more, but I am not, so I can ponder some things from a relatively disconnected position. For what it's worth, I think the field™ has done this to themselves by (1) artificially keeping tenure-style  jobs low† and (2) increasing the stress, pressure, and sometimes the opaque requirements for obtaining tenure...

I originally posted this as a response in a post that Paul Prinsloo wrote on facebook (in response to this Chronicle Article on Beall's list and why it died ), but it seemed lengthy enough to cross-post as a blog post :-) -------------- So many issues to dissect and analyze is such a (relatively) brief article. It is important to see and analyze predatory journals (and academic publishing) in general systematically with other trends in academia. This includes the fetishization of publish or perish, and the increased research requirements to even get a job in academia ( see recent article on daily noos as an example ) One thing that bugged me was this line --"Good journals are not going to come to you and beg you for your articles. That should be your first clue." There are legitimate journals out there that are new, and hence don't have any current readership because they are new, so they can't necessarily rely on the word of mouth to get submissions for...

Pondering like it's 1999 It seems like forever ago that Sarah H. posted a link to an article on Times Higher Education titled The worst piece of peer review I’ve ever received .The article doesn't seem to be behind a paywall so it's worth going and having a read either before or after you read this blog post.  As I was reading this article my own thoughts about peer review, and now being a journal editor, sort of surfaced anew. I wish I had taken some notes while I was reading so that this blog post could be more rich, but  I'll just have to go from memory. One of the things that stood out to me was this: if your peer reviewers are not happy with your submission you are doing something right. OK, this is quite paraphrased, but I hope I retained the original meaning.  I am not so sure I agree with this.  I've done peer review for articles and when I am not happy (well, "convinced" would be a better word) is when there are methodological issues, or l...

Over the last few days I've been thinking about The Great Big MOOC Book , something that's been a project of interest since my first MOOCs (cMOOCs back then) and something I finally got the wheels off th ground, posted a call for chapters, even though I didn't have a publisher, got a number of great proposals that my two great colleagues, Rebecca Hogue and Alan Girelli, helped read, evaluate as well, and provide comments to the authors, and we're off! The call for papers also got the notice of JHU press, which was a nice compliment to my modest effort, and it seemed that we were nicely on track. Of course plans change, things happen, and one of them being that I am starting a doctoral program at Atahabasca Univeristy this fall (EdD in distance education). I am wondering how much of my time The Great Big MOOC Book will take this fall semester. I've got 8/10 chapters in for review by me and my fellow reviewers. I was planning on having a rough draft ready for my...

Happy New Year to all! 2012 was, as most people might argue, the year of the MOOC.  While the xMOOC (coursera, udaciy, edX, and Canvas Network) enjoyed most of the limelight, some traditional MOOCs (cMOOC) have also gotten some notice with the publication of research articles. One of the things that really took me by surprise was the massive amount of coverage that MOOCs got from everywhere ! It went from me being able to keep track of MOOC comings and goings; through the research literature coming in in drips and drabs, and some blog posts, to me having to save articles for later mulling over! Truly amazing! That said, I have not read all of those articles, and I do want to write a year-end-review position paper on MOOCs and Higher Education based on that primary material.  If someone is interested in co-researching and co-authoring let me know :-) This past year is also when I tried my first few xMOOCs (through coursera).  Before the year ended I also created accou...

here's an interesting read by by Ken Buckman In recent years,there has been an ocean of ink poured over page upon page concerning the topic of assessment. I’m a philosophy professor in Texas where assessment seems to have its epicenter, so I think I have a unique perspective on the topic. Not only is assessment on the march due to misguided Texas legislative initiatives, not only is the Governor of Texas,Rick Perry,pushing an agenda of assessment and standardization,but the man who chaired U.S.Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education,Charles Miller,is in the vanguard of the advocates of assessment and is himself from Texas. Assessment is one of those wonderful buzzwords that receivetraction every few years,accumulating a bandwagon of popular sentiment,but which remains so vapid and ill defined that it really has no meaning at all—except that it does have consequences. One serious consequence is that assessment often equates with sta...