Thanks for this Mark, interesting. Of course the other side of the coin is that there is no longer a need for a hidden curriculum because the state now confidently promotes education in service of industry, as opposed to the people/citizenship, and people accept it as a no-brainer--"Why else would we need education other than to get a job?" One only has to look at the name of former ministrys of higher education. In Alberta, for instance, "enterprise" is confidently asserted ahead of education: Enterprise and Advanced Education. The "hidden curriculum" has been outed and is being heartily hailed.
In a particularly "out" campaign, Mohawk College has imagined their graduates as a set of packaged "futureready" action figures: http://www.mohawkcollege.ca/futuready-action-figures.html
These images have been made into billboards used in bus shelters, targeting a portion of the community that uses public transit for education that might get them into (slightly) better paid positions.
Couldn't agree more that presenters should indicate their preference for live-tweeting during their sessions and that peer-panelists ought not to be live-tweeting from the panel.
- Michael Shouldice
I don't see how 140 characters could be considered plain-spoken. I understand it can be useful for oneself putting ideas into context, but I am skeptical of the quaility of it as an outgoing communication especially to someone who is not at the conference and therefore does not have the context. I recognize that this could be a personal bias because I see tweeting used primarly a marketing tool and public relations tool. This of course assumes you are not using tweeting as a two way communication tool.
From an etiquette perspective I do agree that panelists should devote their attention which does not preclude someone from following incoming tweets. I think it is a useful way of asking questions. As for the audience as long as the venue is open then they should tween if they want to.
I've bookmarked an article in The Guardian that provides some excellent, practical advice on best practices and courtesy for live-tweeting (and using other forms of social media) at academic conferences.
I've been a member of Academia.edu for a few years. Can't say that it has been really useful, and the setup- with uploading some papers or links (duplicating what I do with AUSpace), is time consuming. But I do regularly get notifcations, that people are searching for me on Academia (I didn't know I was lost :-)
Like many social networks it has taken years to reach critical mass, but they may be getting there (like the Landing!!)
Terry
You could of course use our new RSS import tool to suck down your del.icio.us feeds and, for that matter, anything you put on academia.edu.
I've had an academia.edu account for some years and get the odd notification of people following me on it, but I've not been motivated to add anything to it so there's not much value for them or for me on the site. Way too many tools to play with, way too many identities to manage.
While I'm very fond of the Landing and am obviously a bit biased in its favour, I don't think it's the end game here. Data on the Landing are, unlike those on most commercial sites, owned by you, and it has some capacity to interoperate with and export to other sites, so it's a good alternative to commercial systems with some neat tools and services that are, in principle, available to be used by other sites, with (rather mixed) support for standards like RSS, OpenDD, FOAF, OpenSocial and its own service APIs. However, what we really need is the means to completely control our own data, and any centralized system is going to be flawed, even one with a lot of hooks into it like Twitter used to have, Facebook pretends to have (its 'open' graph is a sick joke designed to farm you) and Google Plus nearly has. I had some hopes for Diaspora but that has turned into another Elgg-like me-too that doesn't work as well as Elgg and still strongly retains the centralized model. Too much hype, too little intelligence. OneSocialWeb was a good idea that seems to have dried up. AppleSeed is moribund. I really thought OpenSocial would sort things out but that is failing in spades. Even simple protocols that perform basic tasks like OpenID seem dead or dying in the water. Most of these failures are down to Metcalfe's Law being ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Facebook and RenRen. I'd really like those systems to catastrophically fail as soon as possible because, until they do, the incentives to innovate and give people back their data are pretty minimal.
Gusterson's premise suggests individual professor would be paid for the work. That only holds true if they are doing the work outside their university position otherwise the university (as employer) would get paid for the work.
Actually, the work of research is an expected core duty of a professorial position, but the remuneration for such work goes to the professor, not the institution; this arrangement - quite standard across most if not all research universities - reflects the traditional interconnectness and distinctions among an academic's main duties: research, teaching, and service. As a research university, AU, for example, claims copyright for any and all teaching materials I produce, like courses. But I retain copyright in and I get the payments (if any are forthcoming) for any and all research I produce, like articles or books. Academic culture recognizes that research and teaching are vitally linked and mutually constitutive, but the modern university recognizes that copyright and royalties provide strong incentives to produce excellent research and retain excellent researchers.
I understand that is the current situation. I maintain that the current relationship exists because the outside compensation professors recieved is more like a bonus that supports a positive university work environment than base compensation. if there was signficant monetary compensatiion (eg. Billable which should generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for each professor) as is an implied by what Gusterson's suggests then I expect the relationship between a professor and the university would change to something much more like that in a for-profit employer and employee. My personal opinion is that would be a bad thing both for the faculty and for society in that amount of money would destroy academic culture and sharing.
So sum up my perspective. I believe the answer in this case of to certain entities in a process (eg. publishers) profiteering is not to increas and distribute the profits among all entities (eg. professors, universities, publishiners) but rather to decrease the financial incentive. Which is why I believe Open Access is better. It supports a culture of sharing while not eliminating the possibility of monetary bonuses for the professors.
Agreed; billable hours are decidedly not the answer. I've edited my prior comment to play down the importance of royalties for academic authors; anarguably stronger incentive - idealistic as it may sound - is the open dissemination of knowledge as a public good in its own right. Hence Open Access, yes. This open access ideal gains new force and urgency under a government regime that is systematically undermining and destroying what Janine Brodie calls Canadians' "social literacy" in a program of "manufacturing ignorance" (30).
See:
Brodie, Janine. "Manufacturing ignorance: Harper, the census, social inequality." Canada Watch Spring 2011. 30-31. http://robarts.info.yorku.ca/files/2012/03/CW_Spring2011.pdf
---. "On courage, social justice, and policymaking." Rabble.ca 16 Sept. 2012. http://rabble.ca/news/2011/09/courage-social-justice-and-policy-making
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