muraPOI: January 6, 2012

Thinking Time: A post by Jacob Gorban made it’s way to a number of sites I frequent. He talks about “thinking time”, and I’m all in favor of it. Reflecting on my work at COSL, one of the things I “got” out of all the traveling I did was the opportunity to get away and just “think”. At OEIT, I’ve adopted a slightly different practice. I’m making myself take the time to do the reading and thinking that allow me to write#muraPOI. This does two things, it gives me a reason to “write” and also makes me pay attention to what’s going on in the world at large in educational technology and design.

(StartupDigest, December 16, 2011)

Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry (a rant) by danah boyd. With respect to publish or perish, I’m lucky I’m not an academic and beholden to a system that relies on publishing in “high impact” journals (often “high cost”). Though at MIT (and a few other places) the faculty have adopted an open access policy.

The scholarly publishing industry used to offer a service. It used to be about making sure that knowledge was shared as broadly as possible to those who would find it valuable using the available means of distribution: packaged paper objects shipped through mail to libraries and individuals. It made a profit off of serving an audience. These days, the scholarly publishing industry operates as a gatekeeper, driven more by profits than by the desire to share information as widely as possible. It stopped innovating and started resting on its laurels. And the worst part about it? Scholars have bent over and let that industry continuously violate them and the university libraries that support them.

(I don’t recall why I went to danah boyd’s site and thus found this article, perhaps it was a link from David Wiley.)

Assessing a Company: Questions you need to ask in an Interview: Steve Buckley in a guest post at InterviewStreet (a startup trying to match new hires and employers based on challenging programming questions) has a good list of questions to consider asking. I’m reminded of an interview I did where the interviewers were surprised by the number and depth of questions I asked. Duh, I’m evaluating the job just as much as you’re evaluating me. (I didn’t get the job.)

(StartupDigest, December 23, 2011)

On Being Wrong: A good post by Navneeth Mandavilli on Computer.org. To succeed we need to be able to fail. Harkens back to a workshop I co-organized with Erik Duval on What Went Wrong, trying to learn from our failed educational technology projects.

(IEEE Computer Society csconnection email, December 19, 2011)