I’ve heard you are involved with Ahref, the new foundation in Trento. I’m involved as well, so it might happen we will finally have a real meeting, at least one more successful than that video conference I tried to set up for the doctorate course in ICT4Development time and time ago. ;)

Ciao! ;)

It sounds like academic publishers need to learn a little bit from wikipedia, which is one step beyond peer-reviewed – it is peer-generated. It is not that difficult to imagine review models for academic journals that are more streamlined than the three-reviewer model that currently dominates, where your article sits untouched on the desk of a reviewer for four months until she finally gets around to reviewing it. For instance, academics could flag themselves as “available” or “unavailable” to review an article within one or two weeks, and articles for review are sent to those who are at a point where they can conduct a review quickly.

As for OLPC, I think you’re right that the implementation approach is the key. If the laptops sit under lock and key, to be used for structured learning, one hour every week in “computer class”, then they won’t have very much impact at all. I’ve both taken and taught such computer classes, and while they can be beneficial, they are not transformational, because they constrain the child’s pace of learning to that of the teacher, which is dramatically slower, especially in technology.

But if it’s open access, the challenge will be to stop parents who lack the vision from selling the laptop at the local market – even $50 goes a long way in the places where the laptop wants to be used. Especially if the Ministry of Education is committed to replacing “stolen” laptops.

Maybe a secure, public environment is finally best, where use is free and open, but laptops are locked down and difficult to steal. While it lacks the coolness of kids playing with laptops in their mud huts, I imagine such computing centres would still be quite popular.

In any case, these sorts of things will surely face the buyers of the OLPC in the years ahead. Hopefully they can have sufficient vision to realize the potential of the device, and the wisdom to learn from their mistakes.

Perhaps the lesson to be taken from this is not that academic writing is bad — that would be a sad lesson — but that it is ill-suited to covering developments that might otherwise be called “news.” News develops too quickly, and is too susceptible to the desire for controversy. One cannot peer-review the news. Imagine what a peer-reviewed issue of Rolling Stone or The Economist might look like. (Or perhaps we are too far down that road already, but that’s a thought for another day.) So where academic writing crosses over with news, it is built for a wide audience, its underlying basis becomes a moving target, and it becomes a hybrid with popular writing. Which is okay, but it doesn’t strike me as terribly academic. It’s designed to get eyeballs on the page.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except to say that I think this experience isn’t a condemnation of the academic press as much as it is of this particular editor, and of the hybrid between academic and popular press. And yet another ratification of blogs as providing something that the elephantine press cannot. But what you learn from the blogging experience in real time can create the basis for something more “academic” (say, an article about learning theory or about the democratization of information flow) as well. No?