Engaging Academics and Reimagining Scholarly Communication for the Public Good: A Report

JustPublics@365 began as a discussion about how an interdisciplinary group of scholars at the Graduate Center, CUNY (located at 365 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) might be able to bring their work together to foster greater social justice by sharing it in the public sphere. We live in an era in which inequality is rampant. Media reports on inequality often gain little traction in a 24-hour news cycle dominated by the trivial. Activists work to address inequality in a myriad of ways, online and on the ground, but often lack connections to research or media that could further their cause. Key research produced by academics can help us explain the causes and consequences of the growing problem of inequality, yet often remains disconnected from activism and locked within volumes and journals unread by the broader public. JustPublics@365 was launched in January 2013 as a bold experiment in bringing together academics, activists and journalists, across the usual silos, to address social justices issues through the use of digital media. Neither the media nor academia nor Internet activists can address the pressing problems of the 21st century by working in isolation. The 21st century calls for radically different strategies that share data and research through networked communication techniques, leveraging the reciprocal power of social activism and the connected platforms of digital media to meet demands for accessible and impactful information that retains the integrity and authority of scholarly research. What JustPublics@365 set out to do was launch a project of cross-skilling new hybrid intellectuals – in the academy, in social activism and in journalism – who combine the best of these worlds and can work together for the public good. And, so we have. Today, those involved with JustPublics@365 are among the thought leaders in the transformation of higher education. The initial start up year of JustPublics@365 has been a huge success across several key domains: Summits, Innovative Knowledge Streams, the participatory, open, online courses (POOC), MediaCamp Workshops, and Altmetrics. The following report offers details of each part of the project in turn, and there is an extensive set of appendices that provide an in-depth examination of the project

Being a Scholar in the Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice for the Public Good

What opportunities do digital technologies present scholars? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching, and how can academics apply them to further social justice activism? The authors, a sociologist and a librarian, examine scholarly practice in the digital era to explore how academics, journalists, and activists can combine efforts to support social justice issues. With scholarly communication undergoing rapid change, and with digital innovation applied in higher education for many reasons, authors outline what scholars can do to channel their work to benefit the public good

Open Scholarship for Open Education: Building the JustPublics@365 POOC

This article outlines the collaboration between librarians at the Graduate Center Library of the City University of New York (CUNY) and JustPublics@365 (http://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about/), an initiative designed to open scholarly communication in ways that connect to social justice activism, part of which involved producing an open, online interdisciplinary course with a geographical focus on East Harlem. This Participatory Open Online Course, or POOC, was developed locally without a licensed provider platform or licensed scholarly content. It was designed to be open to CUNY students, to citizens of East Harlem, and to a global public with an interest in social justice. Counter to the trend in most Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the POOC creators wanted assigned readings for the course to be open. Librarians identified open access course material and assisted assigned authors in self-archiving their work in open access contexts according to publishers’ standing policies. In the end, 76 of 117, or about 65%, of the identified course readings were available in open access journals or archived in open repositories either permanently or for the duration of the course. In order for open online courses to deliver high quality education, supporting texts and other works must be open and available to every reader. The success of open online education is fully intertwined with the expansion of open access scholarship

Opening Education, Linking to Communities: The #InQ13 Collective’s Participatory Open Online Course (POOC) in East Harlem

Drawing on experiences with the JustPublics@365 participatory open online course, or POOC, this chapter discusses the politics and possibilities of open access pedagogy and the broader engagement with communities that academics might achieve. We situated the POOC in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood and to use the course to form an academic-community partnership. Rather than replicate the broadcast model employed by many MOOCs, in which an instructor delivers education to a broad audience of otherwise disconnected students, the POOC sought to engage participants through open site-based and online experiences, including lectures and class readings posted openly for any member of the public to reach

The Inq13 POOC::A Participatory Experiment in Open, Collaborative Teaching and Learning.

This article offers a broad analysis of a POOC (“Participatory Open Online Course”) offered through the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2013. The large collaborative team of instructors, librarians, educational technologists, videographers, students, and project leaders reflects on the goals, aims, successes, and challenges of the experimental learning project. The graduate course, which sought to explore issues of participatory research, inequality and engaged uses of digital technology with and through the New York City neighborhood of East Harlem, set forth a unique model of connected learning that stands in contrast to the popular MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) model

Treating sample covariances for use in strongly coupled atmosphere-ocean data assimilation

Strongly coupled data assimilation requires cross-domain forecast error covariances; information from ensembles can be used, but limited sampling means that ensemble derived error covariances are routinely rank deficient and/or ill-conditioned and marred by noise. Thus they require modification before they can be incorporated into a standard assimilation framework. Here, we compare methods for improving the rank and conditioning of multivariate sample error covariance matrices for coupled atmosphere-ocean data assimilation. The first method, reconditioning, alters the matrix eigenvalues directly; this preserves the correlation structures but does not remove sampling noise. We show it is better to recondition the correlation matrix rather than the covariance matrix as this prevents small but dynamically important modes from being lost. The second method, model state-space localisation via the Schur product, effectively removes sample noise but can dampen small cross-correlation signals. A combination that exploits the merits of each is found to offer an effective alternative