Riding the Tectonic Plates 3: The Future

Posted on by John Helmer
Photo: The Grand Canyon, USA

Image: Tobias Alt

Report from the Third Semantico Online Publishing Symposium Technology is driving disruptive change in scholarly publishing – as well as altered expectations and behaviours among scholars, researchers, students, librarians and those who set institutional and governmental policy. This symposium was held recently in London to discuss how publishers can survive and thrive within this fast-changing landscape. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules. Delegates were from organisations including Beilstein-Institut, BioScientifica, CABI, Cross Ref, eLife, Mendeley, Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Sage, SIPX and Springer. The discussion was in three parts, covering the following themes:
  1. The changing user
  2. Changing business models
  3. Future tech trends
This post looks forward to how the technology trends identified as driving disruptive change in the previous two parts are liable to play out in the future, and how further developments of educational and publishing technology look likely to impact the business of scholarly communication. Continue reading →

MOOCs: threat or opportunity for publishers?

Posted on by John Helmer
Spoof horror movie poster: MOOC Hysteria

Image courtesy of CogDogBlog http://cogdogblog.com

It’s official: there is disruption in education. Who says so? Clay Shirky for one (Napster, Udacity, and the Academy). What’s the source of all this fuss? The latest runaway internet phenomenon: MOOCs. Massively Open Online Courses are courses delivered over the web to potentially thousands of students at a time - to adopt the definition coined by Educause in their briefing sheet. The New York Times has called 2012 ‘The Year of the MOOC’. Though egalitarian in spirit, and related to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, this is is is not exactly a grass-roots thing. The roll-call of elite educational institutions offering MOOCs – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Dartmouth, etc. – includes 22 of those listed in US News’s top 25 best college rankings. The charge is being led by the Ivy League, and elite institutions around the world are piling in on a weekly basis. Continue reading →

The growing popularity of responsive web design

Posted on by John Helmer
Since Andrew Grimes first posted about responsive web design on this blog in February, interest has grown rapidly. The chart below, shared by elearning company Kineo, shows Google searches for responsive design outstripping those for mobile web design over the last few years. Continue reading →

The form of the ebook: ox-turning, bodies and UX

Posted on by John Helmer
Image of bookshelf print dressIn an age of unease like this, it can sometimes seem that almost anything is up for grabs. Is there a single feature of the traditional publishing landscape, we begin to wonder, that can’t be disrupted, transformed beyond recognition or threatened with extinction? Even as the ebook begins to achieve mainstream acceptance, we see the beginnings of an anxiety about the book itself. Can it continue to maintain its status as the definitive instantiation of a text in the online realm? Deprived of its physicality, its strokable covers and rustling stock, has it any reality at all, or is it just a graphical metaphor? And if we find the idea of the book dissolving away, what form or forms will come to replace it, in doing that essential job of letting us know exactly what kind of entity it is that we are engaging with when we read? Continue reading →

I’m getting mad (with Marshall McLuhan)

Posted on by Rob Virkar-Yates
 

‘You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.’

I would imagine that Understanding Media (1964) is surely one of those books – like Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Klein’s No Logo – owned by many yet read by few. Great then, on the occasion of McLuhan’s centenary to be able to remind oneself of his ideas online over a sandwich. Through Tom Wolfe’s excellent introduction I learned of the influence on McLuhan of catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin. Now, in writing this, I thought it’d be useful to link through to the excellent entry on de Chardin (who shaped the religious and intellectual outlook many a mid-century catholic intellectual including Belloc, Chesterton and Auden amongst others) in the ODNB. But if I did that, the majority would end up here, on a page so utterly dreadful that it is to user experience what Fat Burger is to healthy eating. Instead I have few choices but to direct you to here. More depressingly, and completely unsurprisingly, if you Google ‘de Chardin’ the first result is from Wikipedia and you give up long, long before you find a scholarly hit in the results. Continue reading →