TrendMD: Helping scholarly content providers reach larger and more targeted audiences

• With over 6,000 new peer‐reviewed articles published daily, scholarly content providers face growing challenges of reaching their target audience.
• There are few evidenced‐based strategies for disseminating online scholarly content to a targeted audience.
• TrendMD increased weekly page views by 49% relative to baseline traffic for a group of articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
• Future studies are needed to determine how article page views correlate with other article‐level metrics such as Altmetric scores and citations.

     

From the podium to the boardroom: Encouraging gender parity in scholarly publishing

• Despite their nearly three-fifths industry majority, women trail men in key leadership positions, occupying about one-third of CEO positions, and one-fifth of Board chairs.
• Speaking at industry conferences is key to professional development and to consideration for senior leadership positions.
• An analysis of seven major scholarly publishing conferences held in 2015 showed an average gender split of 63% male to 37% female speakers, with nearly two-thirds of all keynote addresses given by men.
• To correct for this disparity, the authors propose three distinct challenges, to include a potential accreditation for conferences that prioritise diversity.

     

A new approach to assessing the technological complexity of different categories of R&D (with examples from Singapore)

This paper attempts to develop a set of generic questions the answers to which allow any given R&D activity to be correctly classified in one or another conventional R&D box—basic, applied, development, etc. Such systematic pigeon-holing allows latecomer countries to gauge the distance of their R&D activity from the world frontier, and how policies may be designed to overcome the hurdle that divides applied research and developmental research.     

New Visuality in Art/Science: A Pedagogy of Connection for Cognitive Growth and Creativity

New visuality in art/science pedagogies challenges teachers to rethink their curriculum and the role of digital new media in facilitating conceptual thinking and the role of the creative representation of knowledge. Recent neuroscientific research on cognition, perception, memory, and emotion inform and provoke implications for 21st-century learning. Analysis of student artwork uncovers pedagogical challenges for teachers. Teachers use visual learning and its forms of higher process thinking to allow students to make cognitive connections with images, giving them the capacity to integrate concepts for the communication of art/science learning. Examples of student learning from years 3–5 and 15–17 illustrate these ideas.     

Liberal Education and the Teleological Question; or Why Should a Dentist Read Chaucer?

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post‐religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos.     

The Benefits of Part‐Time Undergraduate Study and UK Higher Education Policy: a Literature Review

Part‐time study in the UK is significant: nearly 40 per cent of higher education students study part‐time. This article reports on a literature review that sought to understand the economic and social benefits of part‐time study in the UK. It concludes that there are substantial and wide‐ranging benefits from studying part‐time. The article also aims to place the discussion in the current policy context by drawing attention to the fact that while part‐time study is seen as important for increasing the global competitiveness of the UK economy, expansion of higher education has tended to focus on the young, full‐time student; furthermore, part‐time study is less generously resourced compared to full‐time study. New policy pronouncements made in 2009 appear to recognise these policy contradictions, which state that most future growth will be in provision other than the full‐time, 3‐year undergraduate degree. Indeed, the Government's independent review of fees has recognized that parity of funding is an issue and its recommendations on part‐time study have been endorsed by the government.     

Cable and New Media

Mary Alice Mayer Phillips' CATV: A History of Community Antenna Television (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972—$9.75)