Stephen Downes

Via Keith Lyons I learn of The Scholarly Kitchen, another of these fantastic resources I feel like the last person in the world to discover. In this particular case, in addition to the post Lyons cites, on the idea of self as the center of technology, I find post after post worth passing along:

- Privatizing Peer Review - The PubCred Proposal, which proposes that reviewers earn 'creds' they must accumulated in order to publish a paper, and its companion piece, When Solutions Take On a Life of Their Own/. Of course, if you really wanted to "privatize" peer reviews, publishers would pay peer reviewers real money - but that's not likely to ever happen.

- Starting From the Mobile Web - An Argument for Rethinking Deployments to Reach People - links to and embeds a great presentation arguing that web design should begin for mobile applications, and work out, something that was directly relevant to me as I redesigned this newsletter.

- Why the Open Access Financial Model Will Continue to Transmogrify, which looks at the economics of open access publishing and makes the telling point that though digital publishing may appear to be cheap or even free, publication is only the beginning of costs - such as bandwidth and electricity - that never end. This is just the sort of thing MIT is considering as it looks to make money from distance learning (and not, we are told (at least for now) its Open Courseware library).