I’ve just read Lave and Wenger’s (1991) book Situated Learning on the recommendation of Isla Gershon. Like many books I’ve been reading this was radical in its time but reads in some ways to me today as common sense. It’s actually quite hard for me to reconstruct the world view in which this was seen as a dangerously radical departure.

I had a twitter rant and a few people asked if I would convert it into a post. It also seemed worth preserving.

Following on from my post yesterday a couple of questions popped up about collective and collectivist models in scholarly communications. Richard Poynder is skeptical, which left me nonplussed because from where I sit what I described is happening all over the place. Funders are looking at investment strategies, collectives are forming and some of them are growing very rapidly. Which brings us to the second and more concrete question.

One of the things I find frustrating about discussions of economics in scholarly publishing is the way that discussions that are built around critique of capital models or neoliberalism are dismissed as impractical. Most recently Stuart Lawson’s interesting provocation, Against Capital, got a range of dismissive comments as being irrelevant because it required the overthrow of the capitalist system.

The following will come across as a rant. Which it is. But it’s a well intentioned rant. Please bear in mind that I care about good practice in data sharing, documentation, and preservation. I know there are many people working to support it, generally under-funded, often having to justify their existence to higher-ups who care more about the next Glam Mag article than whether there’s any evidence to support the findings.

This is my submitted paper to ElPub, a conference running in Cyprus over the next few days. I’m posting it here as a kind-of-preprint. Comments and thoughts are welcome. The version in the proceedings is available online as part of Chan and Loizides (eds) Expanding Perspectives on Open Science: Communities, Cultures and Diversity in Concepts and Practices.

Over the past week this tweet was doing the rounds. I’m not sure where it comes from or precisely what its original context was, but it appeared in my feed from folks in various student analytics and big data crowds. The message I took was “measurement looks complicated until you pin it down”. But what I took from this was something a bit different. Once upon a time the idea of temperature was a complex thing.

My normal practice is that nothing posted here has been seen or vetted by others.

This is the first draft of the second chapter of a book that I’m starting to work on. The initial draft of the first chapter is also posted here. My recent post on evolution was a first pass at exploring some of the ideas needed for later chapters. It’s 5,476 words incidentally so don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t think I would like to meet myself as a twenty year old.

It’s been a big weekend for poorly designed blacklists. But prior to this another blacklist was also a significant discussion. Beall’s list of so-called “Predatory” journals and publishers vanished from the web around a week ago. There is still not explanation for why, but the most obvious candidate is that legal action, threatened or real, was the cause of it being removed.