After 2 years of collecting data, I finally got to a more exciting point in my PhD: analyzing the data and publishing the results.

In my first study, we search for reasons behind the technology acceptation of learning management systems (LMS) by secondary school teachers and also investigate the instructional use of the LMS. I ‘ve been writing 2 conference papers about it and they are submitted to international conferences. My first scientific article is almost ready to be submitted. If they get accepted, the results will be available… somewhere next summer.

So unfortunately, I can’t publish lots of details already, but I did publish my first international conference presentation on Slideshare.

Looking forward to your comments.

I started this blog almost a year ago, when I followed my first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course): CCK09. From this week on a new MOOC, PLENK 2010, will be facilitated by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Rita Kop and Dave Cormier. PLENK 2010 stands for “Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010″.

I’m especially interested in weeks 2 topic “contrasting personal learning with institutional learning”. More specifically the question: is a PLE the opposite of an LMS, or can it be part of it? Just in case you don’t know, my PhD research is about the use of LMSes (also known as VLE or ELO) in secondary schools.

My focus on the LMS topic is one of the main reasons I guess, why this MOOC will be different for me then the previous one. I have this one niche domain now I will focus on. Other reasons are the fact I did CCK09 for credits (Belgian PhD requirements) and I was a MOOC newbie last year. To conclude: I will focus and scan this time, instead of drowning.

If you want to follow the course, you can still subscribe. If you just want to lurk, you can choose between the daily newsletter, the Moodle course, all sorts of online publications tagged #plenk2010 or my favorite (non-official) channel: the #PLENK2010 Daily.

Can you imagine a community that’s spending between £209,976,000 and £1.9Billion worth a year of unpaid labour for a commercial organisation? (via Martin Weller, the Ed Techie)

That’s exactly what scientists do by peer reviewing articles of other scientists for the academic publishers. Research being a tax-payer funded activity, one could expect the output is freely available. Wrong. Most universities suffer from an almost never ending subscription price increase. Last week, this resulted in the University of California considering a boycott of the Nature Publishing group (via Frederik Questier on Twitter).

So I wondered, me, being a junior researcher and a big fan of open access, who wants to publish 2 articles next year (*), would I be able to publish in Open Access journals only?

The answer today is ‘No’. I did some research, and it looks like in my field almost no journals are already indexed in the ISI Web of Science. So I guess I will have to spend some tax-money myself (by writing an article for free) in order to obtain my Ph.D. Disappointing.

(*) At my university, only articles published in journals who are indexed by the ISI Web of Science databases ‘Science Citation Index’, ‘Social Science Citation Index’ and ‘Arts and Humanities Citation Index’ are considered ‘valuable’ (**) for a Ph.D.

(**) Update: Only students who published at least 2 of those articles will receive their Ph.D.

I don’t like all their comics, but this one is funny (and so true):