The “Publish and Perish” syndrome

During the last 30 years, 10 as editor of this journal, I have been a privileged witness of six important evolutions in our field. The most obvious one is the technological evolution: from punch cards and floppy disks to mobile devices and ambient intelligence. Secondly, there is the pedagogical evolution from textbook-based knowledge-driven lecturing to student-centered competence-oriented interaction. These two evolutions are obvious and well known by the readers of this journal. The following ones, however, are less apparent. The third evolution is related to business, more specifically to the concept of the product: from closed software packages and proprietary textbooks to Open Source, Open Knowledge, Open Data and Open Educational Resources, each with their respective communities and peculiarities. This evolution is mainly noticeable on two axes: the product/service axis and the individual/collaborative axis. Products are more and more supposed to be offered free of any charge: companies are expected to build their business plan on the services they can offer around these products. Products, including educational artifacts, have evolved from individual realizations to collaborative achievements. These two alleged paradigm shifts entail a serious impact on the notion of ownership, hence the increasing success of Creative Commons. The roles of all actors involved seem to change rapidly, which I consider a significant fourth evolution. Learners become semi-autonomous self-managers, communicators and administrators, writing detailed reports on their reflection process and progress. They are expected to be peerand co-evaluators, and even coconstructors of knowledge as they can contribute to course content and research data. They are also easily turned into cheap ICT support staff (although I am the first to reduce these so-called innate technological skills of our ‘‘digital natives’’ to their right proportions). Teachers become facilitators and coaches who formulate challenges and offer support, they co-author learning materials and participate in real-world research. They have to be more and more available (anytime anywhere: students expect feedback on Monday morning on assignments submitted on Sunday evening). Parents can follow the learning process of their children almost in realtime, and communicate with teachers through electronic learning environments. Publishers reconsider their product range and their production process, as they want to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, language pedagogy, market mechanisms and user expectations. A fifth change can be observed on the level of research design in CALL. Our reviewers surely remember the early years of CALL research when authors wrote ‘‘I used this program and my students just loved it’’ as proof of concept. Computer Assisted Language Learning Vol. 25, No. 5, December 2012, 383–391