#OAWeek 2018: My Personal Journey

This week is the Open Access Week 2018. Yesterday we spent some time during a student advising meeting talking about the what and why of Open Access.

The Open Access Week website has provided a great list of ideas for researchers to get involved in Open Access. My own institution does have an Open Access policy. Our univeristy library system also provides support for Open Access including an Open Access Publishing Fund, a Digital Conservancy system, a Research Data Repository, etc. Not to mention my college is spearheading the Open Textbook Library.

An Ongoing Experiment: Public Scholarly Annotation

Background stories

I value Open Scholarship and have been practicing it for years – both in terms of doing it and learning to do it. Stian Haklev, an OER and Open Access champion, introduced me to this idea. He built a wiki-based workflow system, named researchr, and convinced a few OISE friends, including Cresencia Fong and Alisa Acosta, to share our annotations publicly, in a well-organized manner. For us, the benefits of using researchr are obvious: the system scaffolds the scholarly process of reading and annotating articles, as well as summarizing and organizing our notes. Its openness adds another important piece that’s a bit murkier. What does it mean to share out annotations publicly – to academics who annotate, to authors of an annotated article, and to academia?

Open Textbooks and Open Educational Practices

I was included in an MN Daily story about open textbooks last week. It was actually a bit embarrassing as I thought a few other colleagues would ‘co-star’ with me in this story because there are exciting work on open textbooks and affordable content going on at UMN.

University of Minnesota professors use their free time to write free textbooks: https://t.co/iCgMCxC3qf @mndailynews @bod0ng @dernst @UMNews #UMNproud #CEHD Learn more: https://t.co/eydHtKE8Em @open_textbooks #oer @LTMediaLab @UMN_CI pic.twitter.com/zweg5n1FB5

— U of Minnesota CEHD (@UMN_CEHD) April 19, 2018

In this blog post, I’d like to share some personal thoughts that were not included in the news story.

Episodes from my trip in China

I am not an ethnographer.

But there were a few episodes from my trip to/in China last month that caught my attention, or ‘gaze’. To put these episodes into perspective, my most recent trip to China took place in October 2016.

On the Escalator

As more subways are built underground, I encountered more of those super long escalators in mega cities. On one escalator in Shanghai, I heard its accompanying ‘voice reminder system’ saying:

Web Annotation of Research Articles in Learning Sciences

As a member of the Outreach Advisory Board of the Journal of the Learning Sciences (JLS), I was really glad to see the journal putting together a web annotation event during December 11-22, 2017. This activity is yet another move made by the editorial team to engage its readership on various social media venues.

Coming Soon: Web annotation of JLS articles in Hypothes.is.
The first article is a study by Akkerman and Bruining published in 2016 in Volume 25 (2).Read the full article at https://t.co/tGoOiQKLUR and visit https://t.co/2dYOBe15L8 for instructions for using @hypothes_is pic.twitter.com/z5oSHleIKB

The Forest

(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

The universe is expanding, but at what price.
The Milky Way is a beauty, but at what price.
The Sun is shining, but at what price.
The Earth looks blue, but at what price.

All continents are moving, but at what price.
Civilizations boom, but at what price.
A wall defends ‘us’, but at what price.
Pyramids are built tall, but at what price.

AERA-NSF Workshop: Data Sharing and Research Transparency (Part II)

Story continued, after Part I.

In the 2.5 days of the workshop, the group continued to deepen the discussion on Data Sharing to more concrete and practical items. In Part II of my personal reflection, I summarize key Data Sharing resources/initiatives to be aware of, possible action items, and some personal random thoughts on future directions.

The 3-day workshop on "Data Sharing and Research Transparency at the Article Publishing Stage" comes to a close today in D.C. pic.twitter.com/XpXIKp459g

AERA-NSF Workshop: Data Sharing and Research Transparency (Part I)

It was an honor to be invited to attend the AERA-NSF Workshop on Data Sharing and Research Transparency at the Article Publishing Stage in Washington, D.C. during July 25‐27, 2017. I am attending as an early career scholar from the International Society of the Learning Sciences — my academic home.

It’s only a half-day into the workshop but I’m already amazed by so many great thoughts from a full room of journal editors, program officers from funding agencies, and early career peers. Below I’m sharing some general (not necessarily representative) themes of ideas discussed so far at the workshop.

Changing Value and Valuation in Education

In his arguments against the Common Core, Prof. Yong Zhao, a known educational thinker, referred to his home village:

When I was growing up, the most valued talent was the ability to handle water buffalos used to plow the rice field, other than physical strengths to carry things such as newly harvested rice or sweet potatoes. I don’t know for sure how good a water buffalo handler she [Lady Gaga] could be, but I am quite sure she will not be able to run on bumpy muddy paths with 200 pounds of sweet potatoes dangling on each end of a bamboo pole.

Graphing the Reddit Place Sensation with Neo4j

I’ver never liked the April Fool’s Day, until this year when Reddit decided to launch a social experiment called Reddit Place.

The idea is simple. The whole world – or all Reddit users – were given a 999 x 999 blank canvas to draw on. Some simple rules apply:

Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one. ( source)