HI Simon
Thanks for replying to my posting. I've put together a few comments in
reply that will be of interest to lis-elib too.
>In response to Nicola Clare's posting on this issue, you may be
>interested
>to hear about a project at the Knowledge Media Institute to develop a
new
>digital journal - JIME (Journal of Interactive Multimedia in Education).
>This will also have a structured argumentation environment to support
the
>review process (and a correspondingly different review model).
>Our view is that many efforts to use digital media for knowledge
>dissemination are still tied to the old paper-based models, simply using
>new technologies to speed up paper generation. They aren't exploiting
>the
>new media to reflect on and radically change the _process_ of scholarly
>debate.
One of the annoying things about culture change is it doesn't happen
overnight (:-) - our project certainly uses the existing paper based
model and electrifies the process although we are attempting to take
things forward with greater speed of publication and publishing work in
progress articles which can be argued about and then turned into full
reviewed articles.
Our "Issues"approach also reflects this - we tend to stick to the big
bang approach although we exploit the medium by publishing between dates
of issues.
However as Steve Hitchcock replied previously - people will only comment
if they have something to say and fell strongly enough about it. While
electronic journals make this easier people are not sufficiently clued up
in computers to be able to access them. While most staff have access to
computers in our law school - the general computer literateness varies a
great deal - and this is before the Internet gets thrown in. While I have
to to keep upgrading my web browser and other technical packages due to
the nature of my job the academics are not under the same pressure (or
rather the computer support behind them that maintain the machines are
overworked as it is and can't keep up on a mass scale).or their "old"
machines can't keep up with the development.
I think true interactiveness in law journals will be the norm some time
in the future and that our job at the Electronic Law Journals is to get
it going. As its proving to be hard work the fruits of our success will
be all the sweeter.
Nicola also said:
>I have read about class discussions on the web that are only available
to
>course members and
>that at least one was succesful in getting a big name scholar to
participate
>in that class.
>However these were "Closed" environments which journals won't mimic
unless
>they use
>subscription models and limit discussion and access to subscribers.
>You may want to check out 'KMi Stadium', which is experimenting with
>Web-based environments for bringing together small and large groups to
>listen to and discuss ideas with tutors, or as we have most recently
been
>doing, a series of leading researchers: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/stadium/
I checked this out very briefly and who do I see but the big name scholar
I was obliquely referring to namely Don Norman. Unfortunately I don't
have real audio installed (or a sound card yet for that matter) so was
unable to benefit fully from the visit but I'll go back later when I have
a bit more time. Incidentally I liked Norman's expression that he enjoyed
hecticity. I thought the idea behind computers was to make life easier?
Thanks for replying
Best wishes
Nicola
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Nicola A Clare e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Production Editor - Electronic Law Journals
Centre for Law, Computers and Technology, University of Strathclyde,
173 Cathedral Street, Glasgow G4 0RQ
Tel + 44 (0)141 552 4400 X3289 Fax + 44 (0)141 553 1546
http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/Law/staff/nicola.html
***JILT*** http://jilt.law.strath.ac.uk/elj/jilt/
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