Blurts

With all that is going on, I think that learning about the dangers of climate change has been slighted. 60 Minutes has had two recent segments relevant to climate change that educators wanting to discuss climate change might use in their classrooms.

The first segment is an interview with David Attenborough who has spent a lifetime bringing the study of the Earth through BBC documentaries. The interview itself contains some spectacular video segments.

The following week 60 Minutes had another interview focused on recent evidence of climate change (severe weather, California fires) with scientist Reed Rankin considered by many to be the “father of climate science”. Again, the program segment contains some great video in support of the narrative.

Richard Byrne had a recent post describing the Internet Archive Scholar – a new project from the Internet Archive focused on scholarly publications. This is new resource is still under developed, described as as alpha, but it intends to cover the academic journals from 1800 through the present.

So, I made an effort to investigate and like any good scholar exploring such a resource I decided to search for myself. Those who who regularly search for scholarly articles probably understand that the alternate publicly available service would be Google Scholar.

So, the Internet Archive found 8 hits for my name and some were references to my work and not information on my actual publications. I am not the most prolific scholar, but 8 is a little low. An interesting capability of the Archive is the opportunity to access actual articles. So, the 1973 article was published when I was an undergrad and the Contemporary Ed Psych article was based on my dissertation. What is interesting about this document is that it appears to be the full dissertation as stored in the Iowa State library and not the published version. If you take a look, you may be the first person other than those members of my committee and myself who have gazed upon this masterpiece.

This is the same search conducted using Google Scholar. This search offers more resources and to prevent any misconceptions about my productivity the total includes many sources that cite my work and the work of students I worked with.

One of the significant issues in scholarly publication is the issue of access. When you try to access most of the publications listed here, you will be asked to pay for a copy. The amount tends to be quite substantial so I don’t know that anyone actually pays to receive a copy from the publisher. Some see this as unfair as our salaries as professors at state institutions are paid by citizens, but our work is not easily available to these citizens. Just to be clear for those not involved in higher ed, we are not paid for our publications from the outlets for our work. Different institutions may compensate researchers for publications (assumed to be a measure of productivity) as part of annual merit pay. For those interested, libraries located on college campuses typically have the journals containing these publications and many allow access to the stacks allowing visitors to make photocopies.

One more things – writing we do through a source such as this was not part of my actual job as a faculty member (I am not retired) and had no bearing on employment or salary. We do this type of writing for personal enjoyment and hopefully because we address topics that may be interesting for those in the public who have an interest in common with our own.