New player in digital content access and management

Official press release
Related HBR article discussing The Present and Future of Digital Publishing

Higher Education Emerging Technologies for 2011

Per Educause press release:

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

Does online access boost citations?

This is the question posed by two researchers in their working paper:
Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature? (SSRN)

Mark McCabe, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, and Christopher Snyder, economics professor at Dartmouth College question the often reported 'citation advantage' to publishing in online open-access journals.

This Steve Kolowich article explains more about the study and its potential  impact for the proponents of open-access publishing.

Data visualization tools

Brief round-up of data visualization tools mentioned on the web lately:

O'Reilly Radar started a new series this month tagged: Strata Gems
Example: using Twitter for graphs:

Taken from post.

Google Books and Google Labs released: Book Ngram Viewer, here is more about this new product.

Example:

Finally, this post details 10 Best Data Visualization Projects:

Example: Where the Tourist Really Flock (using Flickr)

New ways to measure impact

This Inside Higher Ed. article: New Measures of Scholarly Impact describes attempts at integrating new metrics in citation analysis and research impact.

Eigenfactor is currently looking into how to incorporate real-time usage data, as well as “citation-like references” from scholars on social networking sites. Shout-outs on scholarly blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, along with digital dog-earing on social bookmarking sites such as CiteULike and Connotea, might also be used as proxies for influence

The article also references research from the MESUR (MEtrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources) project.

image from the MESUR website.

Tenure expiration date?

Tenure: Mend It, Don't End It  Arthur Levine describes some the advantages and - in no uncertain terms - gives his views on the weaknesses of the tenure system.

More often tenure provides a lifetime of job security not to professors whose work requires protection, but to a significant minority of "deadwood" — individuals who are unproductive, out of date, or poor in their research, teaching or institutional commitment.

His suggestion is to have a 30 year contract to limit the length of tenure and thus insure an institution's ability to maintain 'intellectual vitality'.

Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings

New York Times article questioning the reliability of university rankings after the release of the Times Higher Education ranking where Alexandria University in Egypt had placed 147th.

Paul Wouters - director of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies and professor of Scientometrics at Leiden University  - wrote on his blog about this issue: 

[...] the reason for this high position is the performance of exactly one (1) academic: Mohamed El Naschie, who published 323 articles in the Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals of which he is the founding editor.

His article mentions the fact that THE has "outsourced citation analysis to Thomson Reuters" 

THE World University Rankings 2010-2011, powered by Thomson Reuters

Tenure-track Job Satisfaction Survey

Harvard's COACHE (Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education) released the survey The Experience of Tenure Track Faculty at Research Universities in the Summer 2010.

This month they released the names of the participating institutions with the highest level of pre-tenure faculty job satisfaction: Nov 15, 2010 press release

The battleground that is business research

FT article

[...]in business research, [...] an exceedingly interesting battle rages. Only HBS, Darden and Ivey believe in case-based research and create a meaningful number of cases each year. The remaining schools focus primarily, if not exclusively, on what might be called contemporary social sciences research.

Yale's School of Management gets $10m to build new library

FT article: Business school news - Wilbur Ross gives Yale $10m to build new library

Article from Yale's School of Management site: Investor Wilbur Ross Makes Major Gift to Support New Yale SOM Campus

Picture from Yale's website."An illustration of a proposed design for library space in the new Yale SOM campus."