Week 12 Reading Response

Open Access and the Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over. Rick Kopak


Like the University of British Columbia professor in this article, I to like to check for evidence on how well students are understanding my lessons. Now it is true, that his students are older and have perhaps chosen to take the course he is offering, and my students do not always have the chose of taking the class that I am teaching. For example, English 10 is a mandatory class for high school graduation. However, it might still be an interesting experiment to see if experiment to see what website students would search during a lesson on Romeo and Juliet.

This could be possible with Open Access. With Open Access, resources are “free of charge” and “ easily obtainable, usually in digital form and transmitted by electronic means”. I agree with the author that this would allow libraries to increase the number of journal and make up-to date information more accessible. However, the concept of Open Access is new to me and I am not 100% sure I fully understand the concept. Does it simply mean that students are provided with free wireless in the classrooms? If this is so, at this time of huge budget cuts within School Boards, we must keep in mind that not all schools are fortunate enough to have class sets of lap tops computers. My school being one of the unfortunate ones. The Romeo and Juliet experiment, would also show me what “searching” skills my students possess. Do they know how to search successfully, evaluate the information provided, use quality information found? My first guess is no. When I observe students in my school working with the internet, they generally tend to go to Wikipedia first and then choose what ever source first comes up in Google. Before Open Access is used in my classes, I think that some of the above mentioned skills will need to be taught.

Kopak also writes about Open Journal Systems. “The purpose of OJS is to facilitate greater access to scholarly research by providing an open platform for the production and distribution of the main currency of the academic research process, the scholarly journal article”. OJS is free and locally installed and controlled. The system hopes to provide critical engagement as well. This engagement would include a basis for judgment as well. Students can de-code reading, but have problems with some of the higher thinking skills that are associated with reading. If OJS, can truly help them improve their judgment skills, teachers at my school would be easily convinced to implement it into their lesson plans. It is claimed that this is achieved because the reader can keep focus on the article while searching for related materials. This sounds easy, but once again, the skill will need to not only be taught to students, but will need to be practiced often.

OJS comes with its own set of Reading Tools. The Reading Tools are situated on the right hand side of the document. Some of the Tools that are available are “Abstract” and “Review Policy”, “ How to cite then”, “Indexing metadata” and others. All the terms and definitions were confusing. After two readings, they still seemed to be written in a foreign language. Perhaps, working through an actual OJS document, may solve this problem. This would have to be done before introducing the system to students, staff or parents.

The idea of being able to access free Journal Articles, is extremely appealing. However, like any new technology, one will not be able to simply open up a program and automatically now how to use it. Time will play a large factor in being able to introduce and use OJS in a school setting.