Re: SPARC white paper

["Downes, Stephen" <Stephen.Downes@xxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: digital-copyright-digest-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@xxxxxxx>
> 
> The paper seems to think of publishing as production (no) and
> distribution (no).  It's really about identifying opportunities and
> filtering raw content.  By analogy, publishing is to the process of
> scholarly communications what the admissions office is to an elite
> undergraduate institution.  Without someone whose job it is to say no,
> reconstituted communications schemes will be awash in 
> material (as though we weren't already, but it can and will get worse),
which will 
> in turn give rise to new entities, whose task it will be to guide 
> selection.  We may not call these new entities publishers, but that's what
they will be.

I don't think that anybody denies the need to filter raw content. Rather, I
think that the question is whether this function should continue to be
centralized in the hands of a few organizations, and whether we should
continue to pay such a high price for this service.

Various approaches to distributed evaluation networks exist. One flavour
emphasises the use of what (I call) third party metadata to add evaluative
content to original resources. Recker and Wiley (2000) suggest something
like this in their paper 'A non-authoritative educational metadata ontology
for filtering and recommending learning objects'.
http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/non-authoritative.pdf 

A second flavour involves the use of a network of what are now being called
weblogs for similar purposes. A weblog consists of the selections of a
(trusted) individual from the body of current work available on a subject.
John Hiler, writing about news media, expands on this idea in his article
'Are Bloggers Journalists?' (2002)
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/bloggingjournalism.htm

In both cases, the evaluator or the blogger performs the filtering function
of the publisher, but with some important differences: first, they
collectively constitute a network working over the same body of literature,
ranther than individuals working with separate streams of (submitted)
literature; second, their decision to say 'no' to an item does not mean that
the item is not published, but rather, that it is not recommended; and
third, like journal editorial board members, they provide this service
(generally) for free, but unlike journal board members, they do not do it
within the context of an expensive publication.

-- Stephen

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Stephen Downes ~ Senior Researcher ~ National Research Council
Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

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stephen.downes@xxxxxx   http://www.iit.nrc.ca/e-learning.html

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