Category Archives: Academia

To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees – Advice

To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees

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Advising Illustration - Careers

Mark Shaver for The Chronicle

By Karen Kelsky

Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you’re not doing your job.

Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those services, but rarely am I asked for them.

A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. That’s right: I am doing graduate advising for pay. I am teaching your Ph.D. students to do things like plan a publishing trajectory, tailor their dissertations for grant agencies, strategize recommendation letters, evaluate a journal’s status, judge the relative merits of postdoctoral options, interpret a rejection, follow up on an acceptance, and—above all—get jobs. And business is so good I’m booked ahead for months.

via chronicle.com

I see how this is just really good advertising on the part of the author, but it’s really an interesting issue. I can see the benefits of hiring someone like this from the very beginning of your Ph.D. program. Seriously, someone needs to be on you to publish early in your studies.

Of course, the other question is why don’t faculty do this. Overburdened? Organizational?

Princeton bans academics from handing all copyright to journal publishers

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via theconversation.edu.au

This is good news. The dominoes are beginning to fall. Pay journals are a dying breed. Yeah!

For non-academics or for those academics at huge universities with large library budgets, this might not seem important. For guys like me on faculty at a university with very little access to international journals in my field, this is a much welcomed movement..

I would easily pay $500/yr for access to these works, but that wouldn’t even get me in the door. For an average research paper, I need access to roughly 15-30 difference journals (not just different issues). This is particularly true for me as I do research that spans the fields of Education, SLA/TESOL, and technology, not to mention other tangents that some research flows into.

As stated in the article (http://theconversation.edu.au/princeton-bans-academics-from-handing-all-copyr…, this model is built on the backs of academics doing this work for free (or as part of their university roles). Publications really could offset costs with minimal advertising on their sites. In addition, as most journals are associated with professional organizations the cost of providing journal access could go back into member services and even, perhaps, cut membership costs and increase membership. (Yes, I see the potential for those who join solely for the publication to cut and run).

Some might say that the publishers offer a platform that innovates in delivery, but this is a joke compared to what other 3rd party products could do if they were competing on service rather than content.

Maps of Citations Uncover New Fields of Scholarship

Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship’s Hidden Terrain

Maps of Citations Uncover New Fields of Scholarship 1

Stephen Brashear for The Chronicle

Front left to right, Carl Bergstrom, Martin Rosvall, Daril Vilhena, and Jevin West, design an algorithm to map scholarly research.

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Maps of Citations Uncover New Fields of Scholarship 1

Stephen Brashear for The Chronicle

Front left to right, Carl Bergstrom, Martin Rosvall, Daril Vilhena, and Jevin West, design an algorithm to map scholarly research.

By Jennifer Howard

Imagine a Google Maps of scholarship, a set of tools sophisticated enough to help researchers locate hot research, spot hidden connections to other fields, and even identify new disciplines as they emerge in the sprawling terrain of scholarly communication. Creating new ways to identify and analyze patterns in millions of journal citations, a team led by two biologists, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, and a physicist, Martin Rosvall, has set out to build just such a guidance system.

via chronicle.com

This is a great idea. However, I see a problem with their rewarding larger journals with higher scores (relevancy). The biggest problem is how they will judge which is a “good” journal. Distribution? If so, I sure hope that open online journals will benefit from viewership numbers. If they do this, I’m all for the new system. I think it would be a great place to do research and simply browsing for interesting stuff.

Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online? [seriously?]

Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online?

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Brian Taylor

By Rob Jenkins

Online learning has become the third rail in American higher-education politics: Step on it and you’re toast.

That’s especially true at community colleges, where many leaders have embraced online courses with an almost religious fervor. And we all know why. It’s not because anyone is seriously arguing that online classes are consistently better than the face-to-face versions. And it’s not even necessarily because students are clamoring for them (although they’re clearly popular in certain segments of the population, such as stay-at-home parents, people with full-time jobs, and deployed members of the armed forces). It’s because colleges can produce online courses much more cheaply while charging roughly the same tuition.

In other words, at many community colleges, online classes constitute the proverbial cash cow. And if you say anything about them—other than that we should offer more and more, forever and ever, virtual worlds without end, amen—then you will be branded as a heretic, ridiculed as a neo-Luddite, and shunned.

At least it sometimes seems that way. But isn’t it time that we had an honest national conversation about online learning? With countless studies showing success rates in online courses of only 50 per cent—as opposed to 70-to-75 percent for comparable face-to-face classes— isn’t it time we asked ourselves some serious questions? Such as: Should every course be taught online? And should we allow every student—or any student who wishes to—to take online courses?

via chronicle.com

I’m all for discussions on the improvement of education, both online and off-line. However, this piece is just a mess. What is the real message here? Please, tell me. The title is about why “so many” are failing in online courses, but the content doesn’t really support this. The content leans toward the observation that not all classes can or should be taught online, but the support for this is so poor I just can’t believe that the Chronicle is publishing it.

I think it is pretty obvious that not all classes should be taught online (at this time). There are many classes that require interactions with tools, objects, and individuals in ways that cannot be done well in online spaces, even with an excellent virtual replacement. The real discussion here should have been about the design of quality courses, which the author seems to probe lightly at parts in the article. The problem is that he primarily holds the face-to-face version of a course as the model to aspire to. I’m sure that this is not his real intent, but is does come off that way in the article. Face-to-face courses can be just as bad as the worst online courses. I’ve been in many myself in my many years of schooling. I hope I haven’t taught any of them 🙂

Whenever anyone talk about a poorly designed and/or taught online course and then generalizes to online education as a whole, I cringe. These are folks who would chastise you for generalizing research finding on a single subject to a population, yet they are doing the same here. The reality is that in the rush to put courses online, many organizations have not done quality control and have not provided adequate support for not only translating a face-to-face course online, but more importantly to interpret what that face-to-face course SHOULD look like online.

I’m not going to ramble any longer here. I really thought we were beyond these types of articles. It’s time to move the discussion to more important matters.

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist

Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers

Monday 29 August 2011 21.08 BST

College Students Library

‘Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets.’ Photograph: Peter M Fisher/Corbis

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

via guardian.co.uk

I think Monbiot is pushing it quite a bit, but there is no doubt that academia can’t afford publishers anymore…at least not like they are now. It’s at the point now where I’d gladly pay $1,000/yr for access to a good database. I’d even consider paying nearly that amount to get access to a student’s VPN and login credentials at a top university. Now that I’m thinking of it, I bet I could swing something for $50/month. I’ll have to look into it.

Now, if I’m not prosecuted for “hacking” and tossed into a deep dark dungeon somewhere, I’ll try my hardest to push publication in open journals. It’s tough to do that as a young faculty member. The pressure to publish pushes us to many of the same journals (publishers) that we are railing against. Some of us skirt this by putting up manuscripts similar to those published on personal websites, but this isn’t a real solution.

I don’t go as far as Monbiot in this article, though. There certainly is a need to fund publication. These companies have gone a long way in promoting digital distribution and other innovations. Of course, much of that probably would have been done by Google if they hadn’t. The biggest problem is the terribly restrictive pricing models, as mentioned in the article.

In the end, they may push authors to open journals, which are likely to influence citation numbers in the future (they don’t yet). However, in the short and long run this result is people going to secondary resources, which is just bad research and leads to bad science. We will all suffer for this.

The IRB and the future of fieldwork – Amen, sister! preach on.

The IRB and the Future of Fieldwork

August 12, 2011, 7:40 pm

By Laurie Essig

Institutional Review Boards exist, according to their websites, to protect research subjects from unethical researchers, the kind of researchers who would recreate prison situations to see how nasty humans could be to total strangers or would tell their subjects that they had to administer electric shocks to a stranger with heart disease just to see if they’d do it.

It makes sense that after some of these incredibly unethical experiments, universities cracked down with some oversight. After all, these sort of human experiments were not just unethical, but ultimately gave us little information that we didn’t already have: people basically suck and they more or less will do anything if a white guy in a lab coat tells them to.

But as any field researcher—that is, the kind of researcher who actually speaks with people (as opposed to experiments on them)—will tell you, IRBs have effectively shut down our ability to actually find out about people’s lived experiences. IRBs have treated speaking with someone as equivalent to experimenting on them and have almost killed fieldwork in the process.

via chronicle.com

Amen, Sister! I also see the need for IRB, but it is simply silly to require IRB approval for non-experimental interviews and observations. One of the things I love most about being in Korea is that I am not required to do so. Do I still provide information on the study, yes. If I’m going to use identifiable information I still get approval from participants; it’s just the right thing to do. However, for much of the research done in education, it is simply ridiculous to require IRB approval.

I’d like to see “exempt” status research expanded on, and it would help if it were no longer “approved” but rather “reviewed”. This would allow researchers to be more nimble and engage situations that arise without concerns of hours of paperwork for doing non-approved research. Let’s face it. Many folks just do it anyway and then fudge the paperwork later.

For-profit colleges are issued new rules by Education Department – OR government is privileging traditional universities

The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday issued long-awaited regulations to increase federal oversight of for-profit colleges, despite an intense, year-long lobbying effort by the colleges to fight the new rules and opposition from Republicans and some Democrats on Capitol Hill.

The regulations aim to rein in for-profit education programs that saddle students with more loan debt than they can reasonably repay. They also try to reform “some of the career college programs [that] do not succeed” and “bad actors” that have misled students, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters on a conference call late Wednesday.

via politico.com

When it comes to the entertainment industry, I am critical of the government stepping in to support their failing models through legislation that will harm the Internet and innovation. I think I would be a hypocrite if I supported the government doing the same for traditional universities.

I’m no fan of for-profit universities in general. I find many of their classes to be low-quality, low-interaction, lowest common denominator. However, that’s not really the point. The point is, this is a marketplace. If their customers find that they are fill a need, then they should be able to compete, with the same benefits that non-profit universities get. Non-profit universities should change to address the needs of “non-traditional” students (though they are far from non-traditional these days).

I know the complains about recruitment into these schools. The recruitment is downright criminal, but no more so than credit cards or even military recruiters in some instances. I once know someone who did that type of recruiting. It was essentially a call center job with great bonuses for getting someone signed up. He made a ton of money, until he couldn’t stand doing it any longer. He felt like a predator, and he was. But all of this still doesn’t justify these controls on for-profit universities.

And, really, cutting funding for programs that don’t pay well after graduation? Try doing that for traditional universities. There are plenty of programs that don’t pay well. Liberal Arts is an umbrella term for those programs.

Universities want protections from the government to protect their failing models, which is completely unacceptable. I hoped that this sort of competition would prod them to change their own programs, but instead, they are trying to hobble the competition.

What does this mean? This means that universities will probably still feel the pressure to change, but they will have much more time to do so. Is that a bad thing? No. Certain not. But it is a bad precedent to set. What it means for for-profit universities is that they will likely be cutting many of the programs that don’t lead directly to jobs that pay well. Maybe this is a good also, but what about the people who really want to study in those areas. The for-profit universities are likely the only places that offer those programs in a manner that is accessible (online, flexible scheduling). It’s sad that some of the diversity will fade based on these policies.

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