acad lib future
jdupuis | February 4, 2014
Silicon Valley goes to school – notes on Californian capitalism and the ‘disruption’ of public education
The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age
The Death Of Expertise
Closing Time for the Open Internet
Tech Workers, Political Speech and Economic Threat
Does Ikea Hold The Secret To The Future Of College?
Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women
Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube?
Who Takes MOOCs? For online higher education, the devil is in the data
Making It: Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution
Higher Education Is Now Ground Zero For Disruption
Stupid Simple…
jdupuis | December 10, 2013This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders.
Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see.
Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…
jdupuis | December 2, 2013Some capsule reviews of books I've finished over the last little while, in the spirit of catching up.
van Grouw, Katrina. The Unfeathered Bird. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 304pp. ISBN-13: 978-0691151342
This is a seriously beautiful coffee table-sized scientific illustrations book on birds. Basically the idea of the book is to explore birds through drawings mostly of whole or partial skeletons but also some of musculature and "plucked" bodies. A bit odd, a bit creepy but breath-taking. The book opens with a very general section on what birds have in common and then goes into…
jdupuis | November 29, 2013
Do Librarians Need Tenure? Depends on Which Ones You Ask.
The Hunt Library, Innovation, and Tenure
Academic Freedom! Huh! What is It Good For?
My Thoughts on Faculty Status for Academic Librarians
How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
An Academic Cartel?
Women and the Internet in Four Parts: Online and Offline Violence Towards Women; Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows; Sexytime, Gender Roles, and Credit Where Due; Feminism's Twist Ending
The Gendering of Technology Work
Academic scattering
We Are Not Hypnotized (rejecting the extremes wrt online ed)
Libraries in the Time of MOOCs
The…
jdupuis | November 28, 2013
The College Boom Has Peaked
The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students
Why I’m quitting the academy
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself
Dear corporations, we’ll trade you a few cents for a better life
MOOCs and Economic Reality
When MOOCs profit, who pays?
Miami-Dade County Will No Longer Close Any Public Libraries But 169 Librarians Would Lose Jobs, Hours Reduced
Rebuilding the world technology destroyed
College for Free
Blood Money, or How Academia is like The Sopranos
A…
jdupuis | November 13, 2013
Admitting Our Agendas
A queer, feminist agenda for libraries: Significance, relevance and power
Agendas: Everyone has one
I dreamed of a book …
Why I'm not waiting for tenure to change the world...
Value of Libraries Megapost
Librarians, Gender, and Tech: Moving the Conversation Forward
Silencing, librarianship, and gender: award hate and the silencing of recognition
Public Libraries as Social Innovation Catalysts
The private-data-for-services trade fallacy
Business Model of the Internet Has Been Surveillance
Science and Its Skeptics
Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley
You Can't Get…
jdupuis | October 25, 2013It's been kind of a crazy week for me, so I haven't really had much of a chance to contribute to or even read a lot of the Open Access Week calls to arms out there right now.
So I thought I would kind of commandeer my Friday Fun silly lists habit and redirect that energy to open access.
So here it is, from Peter Suber:
Open access: six myths to put to rest
The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals
All or most open access journals charge publication fees
Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves
Publishing in a…
jdupuis | October 22, 2013Sarah Boon (Twitter, blog) has organized a series of posts on science policy in Canada over the next month or so to be published in the iPolitics online magazine. The first four are out with another eight (two approximately every Monday) between now and November 18th. Which is just in time for the upcoming Canadian Science Policy Conference in Toronto starting November 20th.
The articles are available open access. I'll list the first bunch here, including my own contribution comparing what's going on at Library and Archives Canada with similar assaults on science. I will update this post as…
jdupuis | October 16, 2013With Open Access Week next week, there could be no greater open access-related news here in Canada than that the three granting councils are coming together to draft a common Open Access Policy.
Of those agencies (Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institute of Health Research), the CIHR already has a OA policy in effect. The process will be to first release a draft policy based on the CIHR one and then consult widely in the various communities that are involved and come to an agreement for a new common policy…
jdupuis | September 18, 2013It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…
jdupuis | August 31, 2013
Choosing Real-World Impact Over Impact Factor
Practicing Freedom in the Digital Library
Dandelions, Prestige, and the Measure of Scholars
Programmers insist: “Everybody” does not need to learn to code
Digital Decay by Bruce Sterling
New York Public Library Rethinks Design
CIOs Wear Second Hat (ie. head of small colleges libraries too)
Can't Buy Us Love: The Declining Importance of Library Books and the Rising Importance of Special Collections
A New Polemic: Libraries, MOOCs, and the Pedagogical Landscape
Ethical reflections on MOOC-making (Rebecca Kukla)
Why Teach English?
Learning Styles:…
jdupuis | August 24, 2013
I'm Not Your Sweetheart (& interesting counterpoint)
Library and Repository Communities Join Together to Identify New Competencies for Academic Librarians
How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative
Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
Anonymous asked: Have you personally received crap for being a Mover and Shaker, or are you taking statements against the award as being directed at its recipients?
30 Years of Change and Hype
ITHAKA 2012: A BELATED ANALYSIS
Why We Need Radical Change for Media Ethics, Not a Return to Basics
The Great Lakes Ecosystem: Uses, Abuses and the…
jdupuis | August 17, 2013
Wanted: Nonlibrarian Librarians
Image, Public Perception, and Lego Librarians
I'm Not Your Sweetheart
Why your librarian is a superhero
Are the Boomers Ruining Libraries?
Hurtling Towards Relevance
The Long Suffering Librarian
Self-Censorship in Libraryland
How to Answer “So You Need a Degree to Do That?”
Yes, Virginia, it matters which library school you go to
Silencing, librarianship, and gender: it is worse to speak ill than to do wrong
I Do Not Want My Daughter to Be ‘Nice’
To Move Ahead You Have to Know What to Leave Behind
Making Open the Default Position
Restoring Trust in Government…
jdupuis | August 16, 2013Sometimes The Onion just nails it. I don't have to say how funny/happy/sad/conflicted/overjoyed/suicidal/smug/ your average librarian is going to find this one.
Print Dead At 1,803
Reaction to print’s tragic demise was overwhelming, with countless individuals within the publishing sector left reeling at its death.
“I’m in absolute shock right now,” said Charles Townsend, CEO of Condé Nast Publications, who reportedly worked closely with the beloved medium throughout his career. “I knew that it had been struggling recently, but, still, I thought it had many more happy, healthy years in it. I…
jdupuis | July 27, 2013
Change Rhetoric: Good and Bad
Three challenges: Engaging, rightscaling and innovating
Time for a little dissent
To Be Or Not To Be A Library Director
How to Answer “So You Need a Degree to Do That?”
Putting Things in Perspective
Here’s how Amazon self-destructs
Amazon vs. your public library
Small Pieces Loosely Kludged: Peer Review and Publication in Math Scholarly Communication
The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life
If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them? Data Sharing and Reuse in the Long Tail of Science and Technology…
jdupuis | July 25, 2013
How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
The Fall of the American Worker
The Internet’s destroying work — and turning the old middle-class into the new proletariat
Giving Away Our Lunch
Reminders about the Economics of Becoming an Academic
Econ 101 is killing America: Forget the dumbed-down garbage most economists spew. Their myths are causing tragic results for everyday Americans
What Is College For?
The Great Dereliction
The Stakes for All of Us (higher education reform must be approached very carefully)
Cash-Strapped Universities Turn to Corporate-Style Consolidation
Information Consumerism: The…
jdupuis | July 18, 2013
Silencing, librarianship, and gender: a preface
Silencing, librarianship, and gender: what is silencing?
Gender and Digital Identity
Does the library world squash public dissent?
Library Schism: How Do Librarians Define Their Profession?
The Librarian Shortage Myth & Blaming Library School
Waiting for Batgirl
The MLS quasar, and Lists for the Perplexed
New Services, New Skills, and Renewing Staff
Breaking Up with Libraries
Hey Libraries: It’s Not Me, It’s You and Part 2: Who Gets to Keep the Couch?
SUL supports conference anti-harassment policies and My library supports anti-harassment…
jdupuis | July 10, 2013On May 20th, 2013 I published my most popular post ever. It was The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment. In it, I chronicled at some considerable length the various anti-science measures by the current Canadian Conservative government. The chronological aspect was particularly interesting as you could see the ramping up since the 2011 election where the Conservatives won a majority government after two consecutive minority Conservative governments.
As an exercise in alt-metrics (and here), I thought I would share some of the reactions and…
jdupuis | July 5, 2013
Harvard’s First University-wide Library Mission Statement Approved by Library Board
Declaration for the Right to Libraries
Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practices
The Cooler: PLoS ONE and the Panic Over Impact
NIH sees surge in open-access manuscripts
Academics don't let themselves be free
Guide to Creative Commons
Surge in 'digital dementia'
Library DIY: Unmediated point-of-need support
Ten trends shaping the future of publishing
Risk, responsibility, and public academics
‘Is the BA a ticket to nowhere?’ No. Employers want independent, critical thinking workers
Be employable, study…
jdupuis | June 26, 2013For various reasons, I've been collecting some resources around open access, open data and scientific and technological innovation in Canada. Since they might be more broadly useful that to just me, I thought I'd share them.
Of course, this list is incomplete. I've most likely left out whole swaths of stuff out there, both in terms of organizations and relevant posts and articles as well as institutional OA mandates and author funds I may have missed. Please feel free to suggest items in the comments.
One thing in particular I would like to add in a future iteration is a list of library/…