Here is some more detail on the new journal I described recently.
Pitch ? A new journal facilitating discussion of open, sustainable learning opportunities
What?s the Pitch?
?Pitch? is a free, online, peer-reviewed journal focusing on facilitating discourse related to free and open access to learning opportunities for all. The goal of the journal is to provide a forum for discussion that will lead to better understandings of the problems and solutions associated with providing broadly available, freely available educational opportunity.
Submissions to the journal should concentrate on one or more of the following four key areas, and the difficulties and opportunities presented by reconsidering them in the context of broadly, freely available learning opportunity:
- Pedagogy, including models, strategies, and methods for facilitating meaning-full, scalable learning in formal and informal environments both on and offline (such as project-basing, peer mentoring, or model-centering);
- Technology, including technologies and technical standards which enable scalable learning (such as learning objects, Wi-Fi infrastructures, content packaging standards, or blogs);
- Legality, including licensing terms for freely distributable content and other copyright-related issues, and
- Morality, including individuals? rights to education and sustainability issues for content producers and those providing learning support.
When writing about one or more of the core areas, it is critical to cast them in the context of providing and /or supporting free and open educational opportunities.
How do I Pitch in?
Although Pitch will provide a peer-reviewed publishing outlet for research and theoretical articles relating to open, sustainable learning opportunity, Pitch will not run like a traditional academic journal. Pitch specifically takes advantage of some affordances of the medium.
- An open, democratic, and efficient peer review process. Rather than having articles reviewed by two individuals on a 6 – 12 month timeframe, articles will be reviewed by the entire readership immediately after submission, with decisions frequently coming in days instead of weeks. Submitted articles will be entered into an article queue for editorial commenting and voting by the entire readership. Comments and votes can result in two forms of rejection (rejection by vote or by author withdrawal) or publication. Voting will occur via a small Likert scale including considerations of originality, significance, clarity, and other qualities.
- Contextualized discussion. Each published article has an associated threaded discussion space where authors are encouraged to engage readers, with both implicit and explicit quality ratings made of the comments.
- Free availability. All articles and discussion posts published on Pitch will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
- A migration path for high quality discussions to evolve into published articles. When a quantity of discussion about a formal article crosses a quality threshold, major discussion participants are invited to submit a formal article formalizing and extending the conversation around the topics of the discussion.
- Breadcrumb trails connect related articles. Trackback-like features allow intelligent referencing in bibliographies and article metadata, allowing a reader who stumbles upon an article to discover the rest of the conversation both forward and backward in time.
- Standards-based content syndication allows easy subscription. RSS or the syntax-formerly-known-as-ECHO-based syndication allows readers to ?subscribe? to the journal (and its article queue) in the same application they use to track and manage information everyday.
I’ve invited some individuals to fill “editorial” roles over the four main content areas. So far, the incomparable “Janette Hill”:http://it.coe.uga.edu/~janette/ from UGA has accepted for pedagogy, “Erik Duval”:http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~erikd/ has accepted for technology, and
“George Siemens”:http://www.elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/ has accepted for morality. I’m still awaiting a final response.
So, since supporting infrastructure is still being developed (trans. there’s plenty of time for formative feedback) what do you think?