The problem is mainly about costs applied by editors. Currently, buying any article costs something like 25$ per article for a limited access (between 24 and 48 hours). This is absolutely outrageous once you see that this price includes ONLY the editing process (and the data storage on a server). The authors usually give all their copyrights to the journal.

Compared to any other publication, it’s overpriced. For 25$, you can usually buy a good book in its paper version and it includes the editing, the copyrights and the library benefit.

Here, you get only an electronic version of something between 3 and 40 pages long. Make the math, but it makes the cost of the page rather high.

I admit that editing and organizing the process of peer-reviewing has a cost, but as the reviewers are not paid, it’s not that expensive either. A more reasonable price would be of a few dollars per article for a limited number of copies.

This price policy is made to oblige universities to subscribe to full sets of catalogs at a high prices.

Besides, researches are compelled to publish in journals for their scientific career. They are caught in between the need of publishing and the need of subscribing to journals.

As the price of the subscriptions is increasing by something between 10 and 30% per year (you’ve correctly seen the numbers) the system will soon start to break apart.

Something really strange is that the scientific foundations paying researchers do not try to keep the copyrights for the produced work.

As both a teacher and a scientist, I fully regret that teachers do not have access to scientific articles. It would help them to keep in touch with recent science and link it to the “old science” taught in high schools and universities. I am personally using full articles from the last few years to illustrate some concepts presented during my full course at the university.

In terms of dissemination, journals such as Education Week are still very helpful in getting your message across as they have a well-developed readership, but they still have to agree that your message is worth sharing before you are published. Individual blogs are easily published, but it is challenging to distinguish yourself from the peloton and build a following.

As for quality control, anything that goes through peers or editors must pass their standards. Weak content is weeded out but material that is ahead of its time or out of the norm may also fail to make the cut, resulting in a limited range of ideas. On the Internet, everything goes and crowdsourcing is the only realistic means of quality control. Messages that resonate are spread with amazing speed. Others never see a single viewer.

One thing I have come to realize is that trying to “win” social media is an effort in futility. Someone is always going to have more subscribers, get more retweets, and in general receive more attention than you. Professor Wineburg laments the lack of attention his work receives even though he believes that it is of higher quality than commercially available work. I’m not sure his viewpoint would be changed even if he had thousands of Twitter followers.

In regards to what Michael Pershan wrote, “Are hits measuring the same thing as journal circulation numbers?”, I think the bigger question is how do we measure how successfully a message is being spread. Professor Wineburg begins by showing how many subscribers several major journals receive and later compares that to his website downloads and Twitter followers. It is in human nature to want to rank things, but I wonder if simply looking at total views ignores the quality of those views.

Another point worth reflecting on is who any of the people reading this stuff is anyway? What percent of your colleagues read any type of math education news/blogs/tweets? What percent of your colleagues use Twitter academically? I imagine this will change over time, but I think the answers are slivers of the overall group of math educators.

I think what it comes down to is that when a person spends significant resources on something and wants to share it, they want to be validated by others for their accomplishments. That part of human nature will not change, but how we determine whether we feel validated is certain to evolve.

Also, if you want something a even less academic, you could go with “Research to Action”

So… why that article now? An attempt to curry favor for his newly Common Core aligned projects with conservatives? Covering his program’s right flank?

I don’t know, but it certainly seems carefully calculated (or very oddly random), and doesn’t seem consistent with his “they don’t teach us this stuff in grad school” shtick.

I also think it is curious that the Gates Foundation’s support for the Beyond the Bubble’s work is not acknowledged on their site.

It needs to be non-threatening so non-researchers will be willing to read it.

I can even imagine a “Research to Practice” blog that serves as a forum where researchers can post their work and dialogue with teachers about their findings.

We next feature a kind of “best of…” from heavy-hitting blogs (here, nowak, nguyen, shah, danielson, etc.).

Which would better serve:

-student achivement?
-student engagement?
-teacher pedagogical content knowledge?
-teacher content knowledge?

In other words, what is the optimal mix of the old and new worlds?

What I want are more math ed researchers to start blogs. If Terry Tao can manage to make a post every time he publishes a new paper, so can you.

What I don’t want are trainings (like I have been to many times) which gives some system with a mnemonic using a dodgy acronym and being told “research says this is best practice” without any backing or details.

For one thing, in some cases I know of contradictory research or significant controversy.

Additionally, there is often some nuance being smoothed over to enough of an extent that I have no idea what to believe. For example, we’ve known since Ebbinghaus if people memorize a list, the beginning and the ending are remembered best. This principle has been applied to other contexts, but by the time it gets to a training it has translated to “exit tickets are the best thing to use to end a class” which is several leaps removed from basic psychology principles.

(1991). “On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy,” American Educational Research Journal (28) 3, p 495-519.

If you’re doing any thinking about novice and expert, authenticity of discipline, or how we teach students how to learn, I really recommend it. It was eye-opening for me way back when. I re-read it this year, and it was eye-opening all over again.