Open Access and Sharing

Yesterday I posted news of the publication of the Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of Computer Science in Sport. When I checked my WordPress Dashboard this morning I found this response to the post:

Overnight (in Australia) there were 200 visits to the post following an email alert earlier in the day. I have posted the Proceedings in Box.Net at this link and the Internet Archive at this link. To date there have been 20 downloads of the Proceedings from Box.Net and other downloads of SlideShare presentations.
By coincidence shortly after posting the Proceedings I received a request to provide an abstract for a Panel Discussion at the Australian Institute of Sport. The question I and several colleagues will address is ‘How can we optimise the research effort into high performance sport throughout the Australian network?’ This is my response:

There is a wonderful momentum growing around the aggregation of effort in many aspects of social and professional life. Following on from my presentation at the NESC Forum 2009 I am going to propose that a connected network of practice is essential for sport to flourish in Australia. This connected network will be open and through aggregation will ensure that we grow a research culture that has a cumulative approach to knowledge production. For this to be really effective it will require many institutions to transform their Internet presence. I will suggest there is no wealth but life .


The dynamic possibilities of online sharing enabled me to add an Addendum to the Proceedings this morning (a paper by Alexis Lebedew). Shortly after doing so I received an alert from the Scholarly Kitchen with Ann Michael’s post about the 2010 STM Spring Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ann reports that some common themes emerged:

  1. Librarians want to supply their users with content electronically and, more specifically, via mobile devices.  This is not limited to journals.  eBooks of both monographs and textbooks were also discussed.
  2. Librarians want all of these content forms at the same time.  They don’t want to wait for electronic versions.
  3. Tools provided to search library collections must be straight-forward and intuitive for users; training should not be required.
  4. However, training and preparation is needed in overall “information literacy.”  Especially at the undergraduate level, students need guidance in becoming discriminating consumers of content to develop the “mental maps” of context that help them to evaluate the quality of the content they come across.
  5. In relation to the academy, as budget pressures increase, the need to publish research is becoming more critical.  Research is an avenue to grants, contracts, and private donations. Since state funding is decreasing and tuition can only be raised so much, research-related sources of funding will be critical.
  6. Finally, several speakers raised the point that it’s very difficult to secure referees for the peer-review process.  Even authors who submit multiple papers often decline requests to review the work of others.


I should have been participating this week with 500 other colleagues in a delightful online course facilitated by Dave Cormier and George Siemens. The course resonates with so many of my interests:

Discussions and proclamations of the future of education, learning, training, and development are popular topics at conferences and in publications. For educators, leaders, and administrators, it’s easy to “get lost” in the numerous predictions. What is the next wave of technological change? Are learners really different today? Is our current model of education unsustainable? What can educators do to anticipate and respond to trends?
Unfortunately, predictions of the future are often more of a guessing game than a rigorous process. This course will utilize methods of futures thinking to explore a variety of trends and statistics and provide a series of potential scenarios and future directions. Participants will be actively involved in tracking critical trends, exploring their educational impact, and plan for ways to prepare for important changes.
In order to explore potential paths for education, learning, and training, we will spend time developing a framework for analyzing trends and for generating and evaluating scenarios.
The course will focus on developing methods and mechanisms for making sense of change patterns. Future-focused thinking is an important skill for all educators, leaders, and administrators. During the eight-weeks of this course, we will explore approaches to separating “the nonsense” from “the potential” proclamations of education’s future.

It has been quite a twenty-four hours. This week I am still dealing with my jet lag from my visit to the UK and so I have had some extra time to work on the web. The intensity of what happens in a global community underscores why connectivism is so important to emergent learning, open access and sharing.
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