We are starting to see examples of post-publication peer review and see it radically out-perform traditional pre-publication peer review
access to the software usually goes away after the student leaves the institution. Using institutionally-owned software applications can feel like borrowing a book from the library
if you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering the very best minds from around the world, from every discipline. Since we're living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you'd curate the lectures carefully, with a focus on the new and original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You'd create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, and by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You'd also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever and from wherever they like, and you'd give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university's millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?
If you did all that, well, you'd have TED.
Forget the ivory tower, the cathedral or even the bazaar, or even that campuses are islands of knowledge and learning. Knowledge and information resources are everywhere. Learning tools are more widespread in the culture than on campus.
Plenty of professors still allow laptops. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at U-Va., generally permits them in his classes. He remembers his own college diversion: reading newspapers surreptitiously on the floor beneath his desk. He believes that, ultimately, it is a professor's job to hold the class's attention.
"If students don't want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems," he said.
Vaidhyanathan, an Internet scholar, senses a losing battle. In an era of iPhones and BlackBerrys, Internet-ready cellphones have become just as prevalent in classrooms as laptops, and equally capable of distraction. If professors had hoped to hermetically seal their teaching space by banning laptops, they might be about three years too late.
higher education has this tripartite challenge:
1.Quickly and intelligently adapt to the new higher education learning ecology enabled by digital tools; the current curriculum, seat-time business model, credit model, and learning approaches are re-structuring far too slowly.
2.Understand the skills needed in the knowledge economy, which is itself a new ecology. In just ten years, the nature of work has changed so much that many of the personal qualities needed to succeed now have no obvious roots or antecedents in the classroom-based part of the total learning experience in undergraduate education.
3.Align learning experiences in the undergraduate years with the knowledge economy. High-impact learning experiences are the best model for change.
the trade group is arguing that a password-protected space on the Web is not a classroom [and thus doesn't qualify for 'fair use' for copyright purposes].
