Researcher 2.0

Liveblog notes from Researcher 2.0 event – sponsored by the Technology Enhanced Learning research cluster (part of CREET) at the Open University, and the OLnet project.

Patrick McAndrew – intro

True Researcher 2.0s – weather not a barrier, see what technology to employ. So multiple channels. Elluminate, Twitter, Cloudworks. Video and audio capture. And face to face in the room!

The Cloudworks site for it, and remote people coming in via Elluminate –http://learn.open.ac.uk/site/elluminate-trial/ (if you are have an OU login, and then follow link Open Learning network trial ) OR http://elive-manager.open.ac.uk/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1232970332920 (if do not have an OU login). And Twitter using #olnet as a tag. Also professionals doing video, and amateurs with Flips and other videocams.  Hope to learn from this for future workshops.  Not fully planned out (but very 2.0/lazy planning stuff).

Patrick – Researcher 2.0: Research in an open world

Open world, many users, what does it mean? How does our technology link out to the many users? Came up for Patrick in the OER world, but true in many areas. Transform to world where there are many more options for what we can do, many more options.

How do we change to network with more people, network as researchers in a new way. Draw in people, use their willingness to co-operate. Gráinne opened up in a f2f workshop with a Twitter request for ideas to flow in, worked really well.

Also new ways to get data in – video, audio capture. But what to do with the data? Need to make it part of the routine. Who does the research? Distributed models.

Want to find out: What is Researcher 2.0, What are the big questions?

Researcher 2.0 – discussion about what it means.  Not a Microsoft product, like Web 2.0. Is snappy – new improved way of doing research, using better ways.

Discussion broke up, and went in to Cloudworks en masse to add comments. Many new clouds and comments and so on. Challenge of multiple channels a new technologies is clearly a challenge, even for this roomful of fairly-techie people.

Gráinne Conole – Exploring by doing: Being a researcher 2.0

Personal Digital Environment – like a PLE. Technologies used on a daily basis. Crosses boundaries of learning, work and research. Increasingly, if it’s not available on Google, it doesn’t exist – so what’s the point in putting it locked in to print-only?

Mentioned 2800 people signing up for online Connectivism conference – of whom 200 really active. Very lively, multiple channels. George and Stephen contacted people casually and asked for an hour-long session.

Changing landscape: a step-change over the last few years.

Reports which encapsulate things:

• NSF Fostering Learning in the Networked World.
• The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, Open Knowledge (Iyoshi and Kumar)
• EU review Learning 2.0 Practices (ipts)
• The Horizon Reports annually

Changing content. What does it mean to be more open? Distributed dialogue makes it harder to attribute ideas. Especially group consensus. Will need to change.

Mediation: co-evolution: Oral, symbols, technology-mediation.

Thinking differently: OU Learning Design initiative, Compendium/CompendiumLD/Cohere, Cloudworks, Pedagogy schema, OLnet.

The vision underpinning OLnet: analysing the cycle of OER development, and who’s involved. What tools and schemas do (could?) people use to select, design, use and evaluate open educational resources?

Discussion: How do information resources fit in? Issues of quality?  Need to develop new ways of digital literacy and competency. Not just using Google, how we use it. How do I make judgements about what you find?  Share practices.  Different in different disciplines? For computing, ACM Digital Library is the information repository for that community; Google is merely a nice addition.

Challenge for OU classic course-in-a-box; Tony Hirst’s uncourse model right up the radical opposite end. Martin Weller noting that his journal publishing has gone down as his blogging has increased. There’s major issues here about what we consider to be quality. How to blogs compare to articles? Depositing your articles in open access places increases citation count.  Not just communicating with the public – it’s more becoming part of communities that are attentive to things you’re saying, which gets your name/reputation recognised. Concern that it’s transient, forget it. Have to foster the skills of discernment in our students, particularly.

Martin Weller – Digital Scholarship

YouTube video of Guitar90 kid playing guitar … got 55m views.  We are all broadcasters now.  A fundamental change in society in general, and education too.

You can’t predict what will be useful to people.

iCasting – new coinage – simple stuff you can do from your desktop, you don’t have to be an expert. Anyone can create YouTube movies, blogs, slidecasts on SlideShare. Blog is the hub of all this: aggregate your content and share it with other people.

What about quality? Caravan – you have a certain amount of money to spend on a holiday.  One holiday in the Caribbean is about the same cost as 30 holidays in a caravan – trading quality for quantity.

The power of sharing – getting views in from Twitter.  Passed on ideas from one to the other – it’s the sort of resuse we always wanted from learning objects.

What is the fundamental aim when you publish something? We’ve lost that aim and started thinking it’s about getting RAE credits. But ultimately it’s about sharing ideas. Martin’s experience is you get much more feedback and benefit from sharing through the blogosphere and other online routes than from locking stuff away in a printed journal. Blog gets 1000 views, lucky if a journal article gets 20 readers.

The cost of sharing has disappeared, but we act as if it hasn’t. Example of mixtapes: you had to buy physical tape, spend ages with the buttons recording each song, then had to give the tape away. Now to share music you can do it via iTunes, share URLs through lots of services. No more time, effort to share.

What to do? Find your inner geek. You don’t need to go on a training course to learn how to use Flickr or Slideshare, just use it. (I’m starting to not be so sure about that for people in general, based on evidence at this meeting).

Have fun! YouTube video from JimGroom pretending to be an Ed Tech survivalist.

And Just Share – RSS, OPML, etc. Make sharing your default mode.  Currently writing a 10k article – instinct is to just post it on his blog to get more readers. But then no formal publisher will take it; and with REF credits want to get it there. So a tension between sharing and getting cash.

What can your university do for you? Provide support and guidance.

Danger of not doing it? Universities need to look relevant. Remember the Viz Pathetic Sharks, who couldn’t swim properly, were scared of water. Universities in danger of looking like that.

Current project: Year of Future Learning (on his blog) – a bottom-up way of trying to do distributed research. Anyone can join in. Multiple modes, multiple ways to contribute, support/facilitate discussions.

Is sharing the same as making public? Martin says share earlier in the process – at conceptual stage and then throughout, not just publishing at the end.

REF has implications for what we share as researchers, but also as teachers. What do we do? Easier when established; earlier in the career need to play the game a bit more to advance. And easier if you’re in the right domain (IET) where part of the day job is to explore this.  Critique on blogs is similar to expert peer review, but also different.  Issue of saving it for posterity – 25 years ago, paper document. Failing to leave a reliable paper trail if everything’s in blogs – not preserved in the same way. (!) Not saying burn all journals, but the peer review process ‘is over-rated’. You can publish anything on your blog, but if you’re trying to build up a serious reputation, you’ll be taken to task for what you put up. ‘Publication process is designed to remove anything interesting or engaging or challenging’ (not universal agreement). Example given by Giddens at his Pavis Lecture – Internet can be empowering, democratising versus trivialising.

Eileen Scanlon – Digital scholarship in science

Interest came up in MSc in Science Studies. Communicating Science course.  Gold standard community having radical shift in how they behave due to new tools. Main example of a transformatory tool is physicists’ pre-print repositories.

Interesting perspectives on peer review – Nature did an experiment on open peer review. So not just small scale journals.

Many recent articles in the June 2008 issue of Journal of Science Communnication. Open Science.  Eileen wrote a book with that title … which was about OU teaching practices, not this.

Recognition of e-science as a new way of doing things.

Zvivocic science blogger – commentary piece.  Predicted that journal paper of the future will be a work in progress, with collaborative development.  There are some very serious bloggers, based in major research institutes, discussing what’s happening. Tola science journalist – growth of blogging. Cozzini – e-scientist – massive investment in e-infrastructure (e.g. Grid computing), vast quantities of data for analysis. There are technical problems, and other challenges – but need some imagination to see new ways of working. This stuff is hard.

Proposal submitted to ESRC – understanding the changes in the communication and publication practices of academic resarchers in HE.  Christine Borgman book on Scholarship in the Digital Age. Two case studies: one team in an e-science area. How is the landscape changed, what do people do? Now at a stage to see what people are actually doing, not looking at the rhetoric.  Sub-questions about different forms of publication, how they relate to open peer review, how the i

Doug Clow on Scholarly Publishing 2.0 –

No blog notes from me! But the slides are on Slideshare. One point from my talk: big barrier to going all-open is perceived esteem of publishing in particular named journals with particular named publishers. Big money at stake. Also change in who might sign up for OU courses, given that currently they get access to all our journals while they’re registered.