Elsevier has recently announced the Article of the Future project (I’ve learnt about it via Tony Hirst’s blog post) that aims to “redefine how a scientific article is presented online”. They also released two prototype articles from the field of cell research to illustrate their approach. The original article’s format follows the usual page layout and text organization.
The text is broken up into more manageable bits and these are navigated by tabs. The first page features the title, authors and their affiliation (in a pop-up window), abstract as well as bulleted article highlights, author interview (audio or video) and a visualization of the article’s contents. The last three features are to assist the readers in deciding which articles to read and which not and also get more easily to the parts of the article they are interested in most.
Articles of the future will also display figures in ways that will connect them. This will allow readers to have a closer look at the ones they are interested in most and drill down through related supplemental figures.
This all sounds great. I wonder though how this will affect the language of science. How will the interaction between author and reader change? Can’t wait to find out.
When management of higher educational institutions don’t know much about e-learning, they tend to assume (at least the ones that I’ve had to deal with) that it’s simple, fast (something that can be done in teachers’ free time) and that it’s a cost effective replacement for face-to-face teaching of foreign languages in small groups. When they want to cut institutional costs, foreign languages seem to be the ones that have to be sacrificed first. It’s not a new story – I know.
What I can do as a teacher is probably just to keep providing professional explanations for why cutting classes of foreign languages will not be good for students’ study and future careers and explaining language acquisition theories and results of research that serve as a basis for FL pedagogy. I’m also ready to share my knowledge of pedagogy with my colleagues who tend to specialize in a subject field but know little about teaching. In a similar effort I’m trying to introduce them to the open documents movement, PLEs, wikis, blogs, open courseware for e-learning and some pedagogy underlying e-learning. At least those who are ready to listen and learn.
It seems knowledge of course authoring tools might also benefit my colleagues (some of them have recently started to get familiar with Moodle), so based on the list of course authoring tools at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies I’m now trying to explore the ones available for free. The commercial tools do look great but as a teacher I know that good looks cannot hide poor contents. I’m sure the free tools will do. So just a quick starter for those interested in course authoring tools and learning objects (LOs).
One of my favourite downloadable course authoring tools is Xerte – a tool that is simple and efficient. You can learn how to use it by watching this video. You can use it in Moodle too.
Planner tool - GloMaker 2
Glo Maker 2 seems promising especially because of its planner tool that is especially helpful to people with less pedagogical knowledge. It’ll be released in August this year. It’s downloadable.
My favorite online course authoring tool is MyUdutu. You can build a learning object online and download it for free. Hosting is also provided but they charge for it. You can check their tutorials. Udutu LOs can be used in Moodle.
The scenario is the same as in so many other countries. High university officials set their goals boldly: they want a young university (it was founded in 2003) to become a world-class research university in a few years time. The goal is to get the university on the Shangai list of 500 best universities. In five years.
It sounded so surrealistic that I just couldn’t take them seriously. If you just consider the assessment criteria used by the University of Shangai, it is patently obvious that this is not a realistic goal. But it’s obvious to me and not to them. So, let’s start by taking a closer look at the rating methodology of the Shangai list.
Quality of education is determined by the number of Nobel Prize winners and field medals. You can accuse me of being blind but I really don’t see anybody coming close to getting a nomination.
The quality of faculty is determined again by the number of Nobel prize winners and by the number of researchers that are the most highly cited within 21 subject categories of Thomson ISI. As I said, we can forget the Nobel Prizes winners (unless the university imports one). As regards becoming one of the most cited researcher in a field, well, if it takes more than a year to publish excellent papers in academic journals with a high impact factor, becoming highly cited in the field takes much much longer. I doubt it can be done in 5 years.
As regards research output, the story is the same. It takes funds, which the university does not have, time, good researchers and a lot of effort before research output meets the high standards of the Shangai University list. My colleagues expect our university’s research output will be excellent in five years from now although the university is less than 10 years of age and has been focusing all these years on troublesome and competitive relationships between university colleges, on infrastructure and education. Not that these things have been sorted out! Oh yes, I’ve forgot to say, the university has been chronically financially undersourced. Consequently, per capita academic performance of the university obviously reflects these meager conditions.
However, this is not where the story ends. The university officials have decided they would achieve higher productivity of faculty by putting a price tag on time spent out of class. So they are putting together a long list of various chores teachers can/should do (each with a different tag on it expressed in “physical hours”, e.g. if you publish a research article in a journal with a high impact factor, you get a huge number of hours done, if you do a page of translation, you get 3 hours, etc.). How this new system is going to be implemented, nobody knows yet. However, they want our blessings for the list!
While exploring Alec Couros’ Computers in the classroom website, I came across this TED talk: Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom. He put it so nicely.
The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) is a corpus of transcripts of 151 audio-recordings of naturally-occurring, face-to-face interactions among 753 speakers of different first language backgrounds using English as a lingua franca. Impressive! And available free of charge for non-profit research purposes.
And a word about the people involved: the project director is Barbara Seidlhofer, and her team: Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski and Marie-Luise Pitzl.
Just a quick link to those interested in learner corpora. Falco focuses on the acquisition of German. It’s just a pity I can’t speak German. However, two articles are available in English from the site:
One of my favourite downloadable course authoring tools is 
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