John Willinsky

The new literacy : redefining reading and writing in the schools

Table of Contents and Chapter Abstracts 1: The New Literacy 2: Finding the Voice of the Writer 3: The Reader Forms the Text 4: The Schooling of Literacy Theory 5: The History and Hopes of a Popular Literacy 6: The Roots of this Curriculum in Romanticism 7: The Romance and Dilemma of Expression 8: The Politics and Promsie of an Assertive Literacy 9: The Realization of the Childrens Voices

Open Journal Systems: An example of open source software for journal management and publishing

Purpose – To provide an insiders review of the journal management and publishing software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), from the Public Knowledge Project, which the author directs at the University of British Columbia. Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines the history, development, and features of OJS, including some of the experimental aspects, as well as early research results and work underway, on which it is based. Findings – OJS (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) is an open source solution to managing and publishing scholarly journals online, which can reduce publishing costs compared to print and other traditional publishing processes. It is a highly flexible editor‐operated journal management and publishing system that can be downloaded for free and installed on a local web server. Originality/value – OJS has been designed to reduce the time and energy devoted to the clerical and managerial tasks associated with editing a journal, while improving the record keeping and efficiency of editorial processes. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of journal publishing through a number of innovations, from making journal policies more transparent to improving indexing.

The Strategic Education Research Program and the Public Value of Research

The National Research Council seeks to obtain considerable federal funding for its proposal to improve student learning through its Strategic Education Research Program. With its focus on the effective translation of research into practice, however, the proposal fails to acknowledge or develop the public and professional value of research as a source of understanding, reflection, and action. In an effort to extend the proposal in this direction, this article presents the educational, political, and technological arguments for making the knowledge at issue more widely available and accessible, with an eye to increasing educational research’s contribution to the quality of public reason and deliberative democracy.

Getting Personal and Practical with Personal Practical Knowledge

ABSTRACTClandinin and Connellys research on teachers “personal practical knowledge” has made a substantial contribution to study on teacher thinking. Yet as their research is currently constituted, its conception of teaching tends to isolate the teacher, as it fails to deal with the institutional elements to this form of work. Two fundamental principles of this research project are reconsidered: one is methodological as the researcher strives to collaborate with teachers, and the other is conceptual as the researcher pursues an individuality that lies at the center of “personal practical knowledge.” A return to Clandinin and Connellys data suggests that limiting factors in their collaborative efforts include discourse conventions and the press for narrative unity. The principal challenge to their conception of the individual comes from poststructuralist theories of the subject which would allow for a more open, if less unified, experience in the teaching of school.

Public Access and Use of Health Research: An Exploratory Study of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy Using Interviews and Surveys of Health Personnel

Background In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy mandated open access for publications resulting from NIH funding (following a 12-month embargo). The large increase in access to research that will take place in the years to come has potential implications for evidence-based practice (EBP) and lifelong learning for health personnel. Objective This study assesses health personnel’s current use of research to establish whether grounds exist for expecting, preparing for, and further measuring the impact of the NIH Public Access Policy on health care quality and outcomes in light of time constraints and existing information resources. Methods In all, 14 interviews and 90 surveys of health personnel were conducted at a community-based clinic and an independent teaching hospital in 2010. Health personnel were asked about the research sources they consulted and the frequency with which they consulted these sources, as well as motivation and search strategies used to locate articles, perceived level of access to research, and knowledge of the NIH Public Access Policy. Results In terms of current access to health information, 65% (57/88) of the health personnel reported being satisfied, while 32% (28/88) reported feeling underserved. Among the sources health personnel reported that they relied upon and consulted weekly, 83% (73/88) reported turning to colleagues, 77% (67/87) reported using synthesized information resources (eg, UpToDate and Cochrane Systematic Reviews), while 32% (28/88) reported that they consulted primary research literature. The dominant resources health personnel consulted when actively searching for health information were Google and Wikipedia, while 27% (24/89) reported using PubMed weekly. The most prevalent reason given for accessing research on a weekly basis, reported by 35% (31/88) of survey respondents, was to help a specific patient, while 31% (26/84) were motivated by general interest in research. Conclusions The results provide grounds for expecting the NIH Public Access Policy to have a positive impact on EBP and health care more generally given that between a quarter and a third of participants in this study (1) frequently accessed research literature, (2) expressed an interest in having greater access, and (3) were aware of the policy and expect it to have an impact on their accessing research literature in the future. Results also indicate the value of promoting a greater awareness of the NIH policy, providing training and education in the location and use of the literature, and continuing improvements in the organization of biomedical research for health personnel use.

Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press

The laptop-sized cellulose-based artifact that has for so long symbolized academic life is losing its place at the center of scholarly life. The scholarly book, particularly the singularly focused work known as the monograph is not being done in so much by the new digital publishing medium, but by its long-standing junior companion, the journal. What has long played a supportive role for the book is now becoming the principal measure of academic achievement in most disciplines, assisted certainly by how adeptly the journal has moved online (if after an initial awkward period). But before the rise of online access, the journal was increasingly displaced the monograph in university library budgets though both growing numbers of titles and steep price increases (Steele 2008). As publishing monographs has become less attractive from a university press perspective, from where the scholar sits, so does laboring away on a book-length project, and more’s the pity intellectually speaking. While much of the concern today over the monograph has to do with the consequences for university presses and scholarly publishing, we should not forget that the monograph alone, among scholarly works, provides researchers with a stage for sustained and polished acts of inquiry and thought. The monograph is the single-most means of working out an argument, marshaling evidence, calculating consequences and implications, and confronting counter-arguments and criticisms. It might well seem, to risk a little hyperbole, that any decline in the ability of scholars and researchers to turn to this particular device for thinking through a subject in full, both as writers and readers, speaks to a troubling reduction in the extent and coherence of what we can know of the world. In response to the threat of this loss, with more on its exact dimensions below, I am proposing a most un-book-like device, the components of which are presented here while they are still, as we once said, on paper. This device, a piece of software really, is intended to that might address a number of the issues that pertain to at least the near future of peer-reviewed book-length projects. I say near future because article and book, so clearly print artifacts, are both bound to be reshaped by this new medium. This device I am calling Open Monograph Press is a system designed to further the presence of the monograph as we move into this transformation process, ensuring that the scope of the such work is not lost to sight. Yet I do not see the issue as one of print versus digital publishing models (as fetishly fond as I am of the printed and bound monographs that sit on shelves). For what I propose here is an online publishing system that may be able to advance the development, management, and publication of monographs in print and electronic editions. Such a system will hardly be a solution for all that currently troubles university presses and traditional forms of monograph publishing. But it does hold out the

Access to Research in Cameroonian Universities

This study examines both the state of Internet access in Cameroons institutions of higher learning at the turn of the century and the perceptions of faculty, librarians, and graduate students of their current state of access to research literature in both print and electronic forms. It is based on a review of existing technologies at six of the seven universities in Cameroon and a survey of 91 faculty members, librarians and students drawn from six of the seven universities in Cameroon made during the academic year 2001–2002. The survey asked the participants about the current state of access to both print and online journals, while seeking to establish their priorities and interests for scholarly communication for the future. This work seeks to provide a greater understanding of the potential impact of the Internet on access to the scholarly literature in Cameroon and other developing countries. What was found as a result of this survey was both a source of concern and hope. Although university students, faculty and librarians in Cameroon had very limited access to the Internet, and often at personal expense, they saw the possibilities of this medium for increasing their access to scholarly resources. They saw it as a means of overcoming the currently unsatisfactory state of access to research, and a way to obtain online journals both from overseas and, more so among students, from Africa, which could be used for their research and teaching

Situated Learning in High School Information Technology Management

AbstractThis study examines the performance of a single information technology management (ITM) class to determine the ways in which this program manages to provide situated, authentic, collaborative, and reflective contexts that can be said to support student learning. Our aim here is not to determine what precisely students have learned, although aspects of this become clear; rather, it is to assess the extent to which the learning environment, as it relates to the claims of the situated learning literature, can be said to be indicative of situated-learning. At the same time, we also hope to provide a more complete description of service learning than is typically available.

Access of primary and secondary literature by health personnel in an academic health center: implications for open access

PURPOSE The research sought to ascertain the types and quantity of research evidence accessed by health personnel through PubMed and UpToDate in a university medical center over the course of a year in order to better estimate the impact that increasing levels of open access to biomedical research can be expected to have on clinical practice in the years ahead. METHODS Web log data were gathered from the 5,042 health personnel working in the Stanford University Hospitals (SUH) during 2011. Data were analyzed for access to the primary literature (abstracts and full-text) through PubMed and UpToDate and to the secondary literature, represented by UpToDate (research summaries), to establish the frequency and nature of literature consulted. RESULTS In 2011, SUH health personnel accessed 81,851 primary literature articles and visited UpToDate 110,336 times. Almost a third of the articles (24,529) accessed were reviews. Twenty percent (16,187) of the articles viewed were published in 2011. CONCLUSION When it is available, health personnel in a clinical care setting frequently access the primary literature. While further studies are needed, this preliminary finding speaks to the value of the National Institutes of Health public access policy and the need for medical librarians and educators to prepare health personnel for increasing public access to medical research.

The educational politics of identity and category

This paper attempts to strike a new educational path through the politics of identity and multiculturalism by arguing that we need to equip the young with an understanding of how such powerful categories as culture, race, and nation have been constructed. It uses the philosophical position of Simone Weil on the need for roots to establish the importance of learning to judge how the ethical qualities of the categories of identify. It then turns this position against the shortcomings of Charles Taylors politics of recognition, in its attempt to reconcile liberal individualism with the collective rights. Proceeding into the arena of public policy, the paper applies these philosophical perspectives to the multicultural and anti-racist initiatives of two Canadian provincial Ministries of Education. Finally, it reviews the impassioned critiques of multiculturalism by Neil Bissoondath and Arthur Schlesinger exposing the currents of ethic nationalism which underwrite their position and which again obscure what should be the educational priority of uncovering the political processes, including schooling itself, which give these points of identity their public weight and personal significance.