Here is a cool infographic from Edudemic on different learning theories, namely behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism and connectivism (the first three being “traditional” while the latter is from the “digital age”) :

I was recently asked to review a few submitted articles for scholarly journals and I found myself wondering about what topics to include. A colleague shared the following insight:

Your evaluation, which does not need to be very long, should assess the submission based on 1) The importance of its contribution to the field (originality); 2) the soundness/rigour of its method (scholarship); and 3) the quality of its style (diction, grammar, structure, etc.). The evaluation should include one of the following recommended actions: 1) Accept; 2) Accept with revisions; 3) Revise and resubmit; 4) Reject.

A colleague recommended the PLOS ONE Reviewer Form – I have made a PDF version for this form and saved it here: PLOS ONE Peer Review Form (should the original change or move).

I ran a quick Google search (because I deemed probabilistic authoritativeness as a valuable search strategy) and here are a few links to some guidelines and other sources on this topic:

The National Institutes of Health (US) has extensive resources on these issues, called Guidelines and Fill-able Templates for Reviewers. Of particular interest is the Review Criteria at a Glance – Research (PDF) (“Significance ; Investigator(s) ;Innovation ; Approach ; Environment“)

Elsevier’s Reviewer Guidelines first has you consider if you are fit to act as a reviewer (“Does the article you are being asked to review truly match your expertise? ; Do you have time to review the paper? ; Are there any potential conflicts of interest?“) and then, advises you on conducting the review (Originality, Structure, Previous Research, Ethical Issues)
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/reviewershome.reviewers/reviewersguidelines

On the McGraw-Hill Companies’ website, I found a free ebook from Marting Maner entitled The Research Process: A complete guide for writers. Section 4 covers Peer Review Guidelines and specifically, some review questions (“The thesis sentence ; Support for the thesis ; Organization ; Insight ; Overall quality ; Suggestions for revision“)

Nature.com’s Peer Review Policy (Provides strong evidence for its conclusions ; Novel ; Of extreme importance to scientists in the specific field ; Ideally, interesting to researchers in other related disciplines)

On the topic of peer-review, Murray Dineen’s piece in UniversityAffairs.ca is worth a read: Time to rethink peer review: Evaluating scholarly work in the Internet age (Dec 5 2012):

Anonymous peer review is rarely anonymous. By the time one’s research reaches the level of sophistication necessary to attract scholarly interest, one’s identity is known to peers. Nor is peer review always objective. Reviewers often hide behind anonymity to deliver unwarranted attacks. (And authors rarely have recourse to a vehicle by which to respond to the reviewer.) For these reasons, anonymous peer review has been called unjust and inhumane in some quarters.

It doesn’t have to be so. The Internet allows for timely and humane forms of exchange in scholarship. In the hands of an editor, peer review could become a form of colloquy, an exchange between author and reviewers. “Open peer review” and “open peer commentary” should become fully accepted practices of scholarly review. [Read more]

Also worth a read in UA is Rosanna Tamburri’s Opening up peer review in the April 2012 issue.

UNESCO announced that an OER workshop was held last week – sorry for not highlighting this on time! Most of the material seems to be online, from the WikiEducator.org website.

Also of interest is the UNESCO OER Declaration, dating back to June 2012. Also, there are many groups active on this front: OER Foundation, WikiEducator, the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Creative Commons.

ACFAS publishes an essay/interview with Normand Baillargeon on critical thinking On the French Canadian scientific community association’s website:

« Les vertus épistémiques : l’honnêteté intellectuelle, l’intégrité, la capacité de soumettre à la critique d’autrui ce qu’on avance, une certaine et indispensable méfiance à l’endroit de nos sens et de notre mémoire, la capacité d’envisager des hypothèses autres, la pratique du doute constructif, la reconnaissance du caractère faillible de nos connaissances, et ainsi de suite. »

From a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, see Reacting to the Past: An Open Game Based Pedagogy Workshop at Duke, January 19-20:

I was not in a time machine. I was at the Reacting to the Past Institute at Barnard College, one of the most exhilarating new methods of revolutionizing higher education that I have experienced. Reacting to the Past (RTTP) is a series of elaborate games, set in the past, where students take on the roles of historical characters, and through arguments and gameplay, have the potential to reshape history. In order for students to “win” the game, they have to thoroughly master literary and historical texts for their games’ time period, and to be able to fight against their in-game opponents through a series of oral presentations and written work. In other words, students in Reacting to the Past have to basically do everything their professors want them to do in a college class—read and analyze texts, learn about historical contexts, learn how to construct forceful and convincing arguments—but in the guise of a game. I played two characters in two games—a follower of the Ming Confucian extremist Hai Rui in Confucianism and the Crisis of the Wanli Emperor , set in 1587, and an undiscovered, young Walt Whitman in 1845 in Frederick Douglass and Abolition .

This reminds me of “role playing” in the old Dungeons & Dragons sense, but also the psychology-based trick to foster empathy.

In its Schumpeter colums, The Economist this weeks presents Gamificatiln, through a new book published on the subject:

As video games have grown from an obscure hobby to a $67 billion industry, management theorists have begun to return the favour. Video games now have the dubious honour of having inspired their own management craze. Called “gamification”, it aims to take principles from video games and apply them to serious tasks. The latest book on the subject, “For the Win”, comes from Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, from the Wharton Business School and the New York Law School respectively.

Gamification proceeds from the observation that, to non-players, a lot of what gamers do looks suspiciously like hard work. Improving a character in “World of Warcraft”, an online fantasy game, is a never-ending treadmill. The most dedicated players sign up for weekly sessions with two dozen other players which can last for several hours—vital if they wish to defeat the toughest monsters. Jokes about the game being a second job are common. Other gamers will spend hours trying to shave fractions of a second from a record lap time in a driving game or chasing a high score in “Angry Birds”.

The authors of the book have launched a website, featuring a business gamification symposium.

Also of interest, TED talks, like these on the theme of Gaming (not quite the same as gamification though).

A colleague passed on this nifty project – it aims to survey the digital authorship tools out there… Bamboo DiRT
From the Bamboo DiRT “about” page:

Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.

According to Radio-Canada, local business university HÉC Montréal launches three open courses on the SAKAI platform. The courses are, in French, Intro to Marketing, Understanding Financial Statements and Economic Policy Analysis.

I’m attending a WebCast of DataCite, CISTI’s research data management program. I like this slide to answer “why manage data?”:

The goal is to assign a DOI to datasets used in research.

The Association of Research Libraries has issued a brief discussing legal and policy issues of MOOCs. Legal issues focus on copyright. The conclusion summarizes the issues at had for research libraries:

It should be clear from the preceding discussion that libraries have a significant stake in the way their parent and partner institutions approach the MOOC phenomenon. In addition to the strategic concerns already described—keeping fair use on the table, protecting and extending open access policies, ensuring accessibility—research libraries have a more general stake where MOOCs are concerned, which is the continuing relevance of libraries and library collections to university teaching. Will materials in library collections be incorporated, by means of fair use or licensing, into MOOC courses? Will research librarians be trusted experts to whom MOOC instructors turn for help identifying and locating educational resources, whether owned or licensed? Will library values of openness and equal access hold sway, or will the novelty of the MOOC phenomenon lead institutions down a different path? If, as some believe, MOOCs are the future (or at least a significant part or indicator of the future) of university teaching, it is important that research libraries think strategically about how they support this new phenomenon in its formative stages. (p. 15)

Institutions in Canada (and most of Europe) also should consider privacy & anonymity issues of MOOCs. In fact, students are called upon to create accounts and post some information about themselves and their learning process in certain public or quasi-public forums. Although this legal issue can be fixed with clear terms of use, some students may not enjoy the loss of privacy & anonymity that “openness” brings… It seems to me that some thought should be placed on this issue.