elearnspace

Clayton Christensen is well known for his work on disruption. His discussion of disruption at a systems level – i.e. how a new technology is able to develop on the edges of an industry and eventually reshape an entire field – is simple and intuitive. But last year, he co-authored wrote an aggravating little book called disrupting class (a lovely text of how great education could be if we could just get rid of the human element). Since then, my general fondness for Christensen has plummeted. I’ve been looking for critiques of his theory since, but haven’t found anything particularly useful. I’ll keep looking.
Micheal Nielsen applies Christensen’s work to a variety of fields: construction, news, and scientific publishing. It’s a thought provoking piece, but I don’t share the author’s vision for journals in the future (i.e. technology innovation organizations). Scientific (or more broadly, academic) publishing is a surprising industry: it takes work generally paid for by the public (through government research initiatives), relies on peers within the field to review research and articles (done without fee), and then sells it back to the government (through university access to journals). If ever there was a field built on sand, this is it. Changing scientific publishing is only partially about technological disruption. It’s mainly about common sense. If it comes from the public purse, it belongs to the public.