Those charging for the research results are the publishing companies who publish the research. Now this is of course totally crazy because any researcher or research institute can nowadays publish anything on the internet for the whole world to see, virtually (sic!) for nothing. But the business and the sociology of western science has not allowed that to happen, and companies like Elsevier are quite happy with their 37 % profit margin. Springer and Wiley both lay around 30 %.

Socially-wise the payment for a researcher is measured in reputation, and reputation does not come through interesting or useful  results per se, but through how respected the institute s/he works for is and how respected the  journals  s/he publishes in are among other researchers in the field. And the respected journals are owned by the big publishers. A real money making machine, which leaves important information hidden for those who cannot pay. Like the developing countries. Ethics in science is limited, as we can see.

But there are cracks developing in the machinery. Recently, two major actors have made statements that show that things might change. First out was Harvard University, recommending their researchers to publish in open-access journals due to the huge cost for the library of Harvard to buy all ”commercial” journals needed by Harvard’s researchers and students. This is an excerpt from the memorandum:

Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access.

Here in Europe EU has made an important decision to make at least some of the research which is funded by the EU, public:

To make it easier for EU-funded projects to make their findings public and more readily accessible, the Commission is funding, through FP7, the project ‘Open access infrastructure for research in Europe’ (OpenAIRE). This ambitious project will provide a single access point to all the open access publications produced by FP7 projects during the course of the Seventh Framework Programme.
‘To try and push more open access publishing, the European Commission has made open access publishing mandatory for around 20 % of FP7 projects,’ explains Natalia Manola, the project’s manager.

May be  information really will be free sometime?

Despite reports funded but Government, academic institutions and professional psychologists, decrying learning styles theory, and VAK in particular, it persists across the learning world, promulgated by poor teacher training and ‘train the trainer’ courses. It would not be far wrong to describe it as a theoretical virus that has infected education and training on a global scale, kept alive by companies peddling CPD to teachers. Its appeal is clearly in the intuitive appeal that learners are different, which is certainly true but there appears to be little evidence to support the idea that they can be put into these simple boxes. Learning professionals certainly need to understand the considerable differences between learners but the debate seems to have fossilised around this caricature of a theory.

- Donald Clark

If the weather is good tomorrow afternoon we will take her for a testflight.

People don’t like to be measured, they like to be valued

Blog post header of Social Media Today

The schooled creative mind is a bright mind’s thinking tamed. It plods into its problem, satchel full of things it knows, ticking off its checklist as a pilot would, disciplined, methodical, incisive, systemitized, hoping to find a truth.

The feral creative mind, in panic to find a truth, jumps back and forth, turning over stones, sniffing the air, all at once, up and down, a niggling doubt removed, another rising, something far away related, something not, a howl in the night, until, through all the crumpled paper in a cluttered mind a light is struck that’s soon so bright a problem fades, and a feral creative mind can live another day. We need more of these feral minds.

It’s a Cinestar 6 multicopter, a technological marvel that can be seen as a cross between remotely controlled hobby helicopters and modern military UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). I bought it from Mikrokopter.nu in Sweden as a so called ARF, ”Almost Ready to Fly” package. In practice it was quite far away from flying, because I’m not good at soldering electronical parts, and even if most of the soldering was done beforehand It took some time to get the components together. And when that was done, the Flight control circuit bosrd did not work, so I had to send it back. Now I’m waiting to get it repaired, but if I’m lucky I might have it flying in a few weeks time.

Expect to see some fotos and videos in this space in the future, taken from 100 meters!

And in the mean time, enjoy this:

However, when learners and educators have to fight the existing education system in order to learn and teach, it’s time for dramatic change.

- George Siemens

My interest has motivated me to read books, articles and blogs on management, mostly of course critical texts. The connection between complexity theory and the inner workings of an organization has been particularly interesting, as has that of management in relation to knowledge ”management”. I’m quite happy that my intuitive suspicion towards the effectiveness of traditional, hierarchic management systems during recent years has gained more and more support among both thinkers and managers. Gary Hamel, Ricardo Semler, Daniel Pink, Clay Shirky and many others have in one way or another commented on the shortcomings of central leadership, both in general and especially in the rapidly developing knowledge society. North Korea being in the headlines right now reminds us again what hierarchic leadership looks like when driven to the extreme.

Now of course, depending on the kind of organization or system you’re involved in, there is always a need for signalling. By signalling I mean conveyance of information about how the system is doing and what effects different actions have. In a traditional, hierarchical organization there is an idea that the manager is collecting all relevant information, and then distributes that part of it that he (sic!) deems sufficient for the employees to be aware of. This information is often adjusted and embedded in a way which both is aimed at strengthening his own position and to make the employees less likely to react in a ”negative” way (=react at all). I have very recently seen typical examples of this.

What actually inspired me to write this post was a short article in the RSA Journal, where two entrepreneurs who have taken a different path are presented:

Holm and Wilson have taken an unusual approach to doing business. When they began working together in 2003, Matt Black Systems was going through a challenging period. They initially tried to improve performance through traditional means, but found that employees quickly returned to old ways of doing things. So, they looked for opportunities to bring about longer-term behaviour change. They dispensed with management – which, according to Holm, was “an expensive resource whose cost outweighed its benefits” – and created a non-hierarchical organisation in which all employees were accountable for their own actions.

Now that is responsible management!

Their experience that ”employees quickly returned to old ways of doing things” is a key here, I think. Most people don’t actually want to get rid of management, because it’s convenient to not have to take a wider responsibility, especially if one considers oneself as one who is ”just working here”. Momentary new insights gained during a seminar or course will therefore not stick unless there are drastic changes both in the way the organization is run and in the way people relate to their jobs – and an important part of the latter is how they relate to management and being managed. The same can be said about education, most students still want a fairly traditional teacher out of conveniency, however counterproductive that might be for building a learning strategy that works in real life.

It’s often useless to criticize the behaviour of the majority, so let me frame the problem in a different way:  how come the management philosophy (including how employees look at management) has changed so little when the educational level has changed so much during the last 50 years? Have a look at this graph, from the Statistical Bureau of Finland:

Number of students in higher education institutions

Yliopistot = Universities
Ammattikorkeakoulut = Universities of Applied Sciences

There is a huge development in the education level during 90 years (the population of Finland has only grown from 3 to 5 million during that time). And still people are treated – and allow themselves to be treated – as children. Either this is because the education does not live up to enlightenment ideals emphasizing the free, knowledgeable individual, but is instead geared towards production of a standardized, industrial workforce. Or then there is an inherent, evolution-based tendency to find and follow a leader. Maybe a combination of the two? Karl-Erik Sveiby shows that the latter isn’t necessary the case, at least not if we are talking about leadership in it’s vertical form. In it’s horizontal form (the most knowledgeable leads the others when performing a certain task) leadership is just rational, a way to get things done.

Sveiby:

However, there are (and were) no leaders at all in hunter-gatherer bands. Instead, there are several codes of behaviour, among them the kinship system. Guided by these rules adults have and feel a responsibility for the functionality of the band and they initiate and apply ‘management practices’ to influence the functionality. (p. 13)

But the main common criterion for leadership, irrespective of continent, seems to be generally acknowledged expertise in the matter under deliberation and the situation. (p. 14)

If we now combine these insights and add to this concoction the tendency for egoism and narcissism among many of us, we arrive to the conclusion that the reason why the outdated management systems still linger around in most organizations is because we are all socialized to them, we are lazy to take responsibility, and some of us gain a lot of respect and/or money for acting as a leader is supposed to act (according to the western tradition). There is no biological reason why we would need a central leadership, we are educated enough to be able to take care of our selves if we are allowed to do it (at least most of the time), the communication tools of today make it easy to communicate horizontally and if we want a progression of the knowledge society this demands a more horizontal kind of leadership.

Unfortunately, the development towards larger management units in society – both in government and business – makes unreflective people think there is even more need for central management. In reality, the only way of avoiding alienation in such cases is to increase democracy within the organization.

Then I needed to get the date for the blogs, there was just one long 11 digit number which I guessed was some sort of a code for the date and time. I found the Unix time converter which was able to convert the time code into a date and time, one date at a time. I’m sure there is an algorithm out there that could be used in Excel for converting several dates at the same time, or?

Finally there was the cutting and pasting of blog posts from the Word document, one by one. Word retained the formatting and HTML code but Drupal had put some extra characters there which needed to be erased. The date and time I also had to enter manually.

All this took me almost ten hours, but what are holidays for? Now I’ll use WordPress in the foreseeable future, together vid the Canvas theme from Woothemes.

Successful research does not obey general standards; it relies now on one trick, now on another; the moves that advance it and the standards that define what counts as an advance are not always known to the movers.