Revisiting my own (blog) past

Here’s a fun thing to try if you’ve been blogging for a while (Warning: may not actually be fun). Get a random date from when you started blogging until present (eg using this random date generator), find the post nearest that date and revisit it. The date I got was 27th October 2010 (remember those crazy days?). Luckily I had a post on that very date: An unbundled publishing business proposal.

In revisiting it I set myself four questions:

1) What, if anything, is still relevant?
2) What has changed?
3) Does this reveal anything more generally about my discipline?
4) What is my personal reaction to it?

Answering questions 1) and 2) first, I was proposing an academic publishing model that allowed self publishing, but with a set of services. Authors paid for peer review and copy-editing, and perhaps most importantly, the prestige of it being ‘approved’ by a publisher. But they could then own the rights and distribute freely. I would suggest this is still relevant, and we haven’t really seen a model this ‘unbundled’ take off. Publishers such as Ubiquity offer a range of services, and they publish the book under a CC license, which is pretty close to the model I was suggesting (except I removed the publishing costs and used external services). Not much has changed really, except I think we have seen a gradual development of such models, and wider acceptance. But the traditional academic publishers still dominate and not owning your own work is still the norm for academics.

In terms of what it reveals about ed tech I think it shows that change happens slowly. There are lots of cultural issues around processes such as publishing and dissemination that are deeply embedded. The point I was trying to make was less about new publishing models but more about how we can rethink traditional academic practices by considering what are the core functions they provide. We publish books because we want to share knowledge, but we use publishers partly to handle the logistics, but also to give legitimacy to the work (it has passed a “is it worthy of publication?” test). Six years on I think we are probably as, if not more, conservative in our approach to publishing in academia.

In terms of my personal reaction, I was pleased it wasn’t too embarrassing (there are lots of such posts in my back catalogue). But I do think I was still a bit enamoured of the whole new shiny digital thing, and it might be a bit more nuanced if I wrote it today. I think I overlooked the value of marketing and the lock big publishers have on many channels. But generally the lack of an emergence of exciting new, viable, publishing models in academia in the six years since I wrote it I found kind of depressing.

Anyway, the revisiting your past posts is the equivalent of those episodes in long running serials that consist of flashbacks. It’s cheap, but sort of fun.

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