Science of the Invisible

Measuring stuff at #bathcr

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:52:00 +0000

At #bathcr yesterday I preached the gospel of Heaphy's Law:

For a successful career
Find something to measure
And measure the f**k out of it.

Simple targets work best, for example, if you're measuring interactivity, count number of Twitter @ replies or followers. And definitely count the number of hits on your web properties originating from Twitter, Google+ or wherever. If you insist on having fancy tools, there are lots available, although I'm slightly dubious of the value of tools such as SocialBro, and outraged at the spurious influence claims made by Klout. So keep it simple and measure your impact by setting clear targets to aim for.

For more in the same vein, be sure to follow the live video stream from Martin Weller's keynote talk at #dr12vitae.

Promoting Your Research Using Social Media #bathcr

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:22:00 +0000

Tomorrow I'm in Bath giving a workshop:

Aim: To help you understand how social media can support your research and which tools are the most appropriate for you to use.
Date: 26 Jan 2012
Time: 10:30 - 13:30
Location: University of Bath 1E 3.6
Speakers: Alan Cann, University of Leicester, with Jez Cope and Geraldine Jones, University of Bath.
Funded by the EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account.
This workshop will show you how you can use social media to help your research and your career. Social tools have important implications for how researchers (and educators) communicate and collaborate. This session will provide you with information to make informed decisions about using social media and help you select from the vast range of tools available. Social media has downsides as well as upsides, but on balance there is real value for researchers, from information discovery, through dissemination of your research, to impact metrics.

The hashtag for the session is #bathcr. I don't know how many of the participants will be tweeting, but if you'd like to follow along and contribute between 10am and 1pm tomorrow, that would be great.

This is the introductory talk for the workshop:

Maximizing your personal impact

more presentations from Alan Cann

Reflections on open peer review

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:26:00 +0000

Last week I put up a manuscript for open peer review (It's academic publishing Jim, but not as we know it). In that post, I explained my reasons for doing this rather than going down the conventional (journal) academic publishing route. The review process, which I arbitrarily set at 14 days, is still running, but in this post I want to discuss my reflections on the process to date.

As I expected, reviews started to come in rapidly, 7 within the first 48 hours, then stopped equally rapidly. Internet attention is transitory, but in part this is a reflection of the fact that I drew the blog post to the attention of a number of people by email, inviting reviews. However, this pattern is typical for Internet content - a fast decay phase followed by a longer, slower tail (The Spread of Scientific Information: Insights from the Web Usage Statistics in PLoS Article-Level Metrics. (2011) PLoS ONE 6(5): e19917). There were no "spam" comments, which I had anticipated, and even though I had attempted to make clear in the post that anonymous reviews were entirely acceptable, all reviewers chose to identify themselves. Ironically, this is a concern, as while I suspect that reviewers consider named reviews to be somehow more "valid", I am worried that potential negative reviews are simply not posted, rather than being contributed anonymously. Interestingly, relatively few colleagues from my own institution, who I had alerted by email, contributed a review. In part this may be because they were wary of possible conflict of interests. When I repeat this process in future, I will simply post the article and reviewing guidelines online, without individual email notifications. Another concern for the future is the possibility that familiarity may breed indifference, limiting the number of reviews received.

I am grateful to Martin Weller for his additional comment on the review process:

"I tried to put my official reviewer hat on and review it as if I was doing a standard (blind) peer review. It may be that this is an inappropriate transfer of process, and instead I should adopt a different style for open, informal review. But we fall back on what we know. My review may be a bit harsh, but I was conscious that 'asking your mates to review' isn't really comparable to anonymous peer review at all. I might be far less likely to criticise a friend. My colleague Gill Kirkup maintains that anonymity in the peer review process is essential because it protects the reviewer, particularly a young reviewer who is reviewing a paper by someone eminent in the field. Of course, it also allows people to be ruder than they would be otherwise, and often to say incorrect judgements because there is no debate or come back.
So this may be a good way to get feedback on a paper, but would it equate to peer review? I don't think so, but then maybe it's a sufficient filter to allow publication and then post-review. It's also quite a brave thing to do and I suspect many colleagues might be reluctant to go this route. If you write a crap paper that gets rejected by a journal, only a handful of people have seen it - if you do it this way, potentially hundreds will."

A number of people commented on various forums that I was "brave" to expose my work in this way. It doesn't feel brave to me, it feels liberating, although possibly foolish. Specifically, it feels far less brave than exposing my work to non-transparent peer review. Maybe I've just had a run of bad luck, with editors taking capricious cost-based decisions to refuse to even send my work out for review. Entering that lottery - now that's brave (or foolish). Accepting that my peers may tell me that my work is of little or no value (and I have no doubts about the honesty of people who responded, so I feel confident they would), the whole process feels right to me. If some papers are slammed, then I either work on them further or abandon the concepts they contain.

So will I repeat this exercise in future? Most definitely - I already have a manuscript in mind, although this one is perhaps more of a technical report than an investigation. Will this become my sole future publication channel? No, not because I do not believe in it, but there are circumstances (collaboration with junior colleagues for example) where the alleged kudos attaching to publication in conventional journals is important for their careers. Should you repeat my experiment. That's up to you, but if you feel your circumstances permit, I would encourage you to try it for yourself. As I commented on Frances Bell's blog, "... I am not suggesting the approach I have taken is the “best” solution, nor necessarily appropriate for everyone – I have already identified a number of flaws. I do suggest that it is an improvement on the current model of closed, and frequently capricious, peer review. Open is good. If we support open access, why not open peer review?".

Update: Storify capture of Twitter discussion:

Still the same old iTunesU

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:17:00 +0000

The fuss over Apple's launch of iBooks last week obscured what could have been much more important - the launch of the "new" version of iTunesU, together with accompanying free iPad/Phone/PodTouch app.

At first, I was excited by this, because it appeared that this was iVLE, aka VLE in the cloud. And the iPad app is very nice. But sadly, the app functionality is not replicated well in iTunes, thus cutting out students who do not own iPads, and all Windows users. iPhones/Pods are OK for listening to a couple of podcasts, but no-one in their right minds is going to attempt a full-blown statistics course on an iPhone. And the content on iTunesU is still as variable in quality as it ever was.

Presumably Apple could not see a revenue angle in iVLE. Oh, what might have been.

The Digital Scholar @ #dr12vitae

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:11:00 +0000

I'm delighted to say that Martin Weller will be giving the keynote address at The Digital Researcher conference next month (#dr12vitae). I've been preparing materials for my sessions and part of that involved generating this wordcloud of Martin's recent book, The Digital Scholar.

#dr12vitae is sold out, but the intention is to livestream parts of the meeting and certainly Martin's keynote talk, so follow the hashtag for details.

Trying to help

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:21:00 +0000

In my module questionnaires our students say they want face to face sessions - but do they? Very few students attend voluntary help sessions intended to supplement detailed notes online. In the past I have tried "Office Hours" but still very few takers. I put this down to the fact that our students are not familiar with the "Office Hours" culture.

So what is the way forward? How do I give the "personal touch" with >250 students? Any suggestions? (Google+ discussion)

Update: This post is somewhat relevant:
Enhancing Out-of-Class Communication: Students’ Top 10 Suggestions
Sigh, maybe I should just give up and encouyrage thenm to use email. It's probably what they want :-(

Oral versus written assessments

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:19:00 +0000

At our monthly PedR meeting yesterday we discussed the following paper:

Mark Huxham, Fiona Campbell, Jenny Westwood (2011) Oral versus written assessments: a test of student performance and attitudes. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 37(1): 125-136
Student performance in and attitudes towards oral and written assessments were compared using quantitative and qualitative methods. Two separate cohorts of students were examined. The first larger cohort of students (n=99) was randomly divided into ‘oral’ and ‘written’ groups, and the marks that they achieved in the same biology questions were compared. Students in the second smaller cohort (n=29) were all examined using both written and oral questions concerning both ‘scientific’ and ‘personal development’ topics. Both cohorts showed highly significant differences in the mean marks achieved, with better performance in the oral assessment. There was no evidence of particular groups of students being disadvantaged in the oral tests. These students and also an additional cohort were asked about their attitudes to the two different assessment approaches. Although they tended to be more nervous in the face of oral assessments, many students thought oral assessments were more useful than written assessments. An important theme involved the perceived authenticity or ‘professionalism’ of an oral examination. This study suggests that oral assessments may be more inclusive than written ones and that they can act as powerful tools in helping students establish a ‘professional identity’.

I enjoyed reading the paper and was happy to see oral assessment "winning out" over writing as the sole means of assessment. Nevertheless, I was disappointed not to see any accounting comparing time taken for oral and written tests - in reality, this is the factor likely to scupper any back to the future return to the Socratic method.
Our discussion at the PedR meeting pulled out a number of statistical errors and other possible confounding factors not discussed, but overall we agreed this is a good paper worthy of note. What a shame the authors did not subject the manuscript to open peer review to make it an even better paper.

The Digital Researcher #dr12vitae

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:12:00 +0000

I'll be writing about The Digital Researcher over the next month:

Vitae in partnership with The British Library are running Digital Researcher 2012: an innovative, thought-provoking one day event to help researchers make the most of new technologies and social media tools in their research. Designed for both postgraduate researchers and research staff within any UK institution, this interactive event will be held at the British Library on Monday 20th February 2012, and will provide an opportunity for researchers to think about how they undertake research and to consider whether new technologies could improve their research.

Although this popular event is now full, there is a waiting list, and this year, we are looking to make the online event better than ever so that everyone can participate.

It's academic publishing Jim, but not as we know it

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:27:00 +0000

I have a manuscript currently in press with an academic journal which describes work that we performed three years ago. In part, the fault for the delay in publication lies at my door, but the original version of the manuscript now in press was written 18 months ago and first submitted for publication over a year ago. There followed a catalog of errors, some due to me, others due to editors and journals. The current incarnation of the paper was submitted to the journal where it will appear shortly six months ago. It is still not published. I should feel lucky - others have had worse experiences than this:

"Because of the work described in the paper had already been talked about in public forums and included in grant applications, and because publication was important for moving forward with our grant applications, job applications and other papers, we felt we could not spend another year in the review process. The very essence of the scientific process is to challenge paradigms and share the experimental details with other scientists who can then reproduce or refute the findings. Publication is key for this process. We needed to publish."

I have recently been depositing my papers in our institutional repository (How to fix academic publishing again already), but now it's time to move up to the next level: post publication peer review.

I invite reviews of the following original manuscript:

An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment (PDF download via Dropbox)
Abstract:
Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

How it works:

Please read the manuscript then leave your review as a comment on this blog post. Please use page and paragraph numbers to refer to specific sections of the manuscript.
Reviews may be named or anonymous as you wish.
To expedite the publication process, this manuscript will be open for review for 14 days from today.
Following the review period, all substantive reviews will be taken into account and the manuscript revised accordingly. (My best estimate from blog stats is that between 1,000 - 2,000 unique visitors view the content on this site. If 1% of visitors take the trouble to leave a substantive review, that's a much more rigorous review process than any academic journal I am aware of.)
If the majority view is generally positive, the revised manuscript (including reviews and author responses) will be published on the Leicester Research Archive.

I think this is as efficient and transparent as I am able to make the academic publishing process, but if you have any comments or suggestions, I welcome them. Most of all, I would welcome your review of the manuscript as a comment here. I cannot offer you any payment or other inducement beyond the knowledge that you will be helping to fix the broken model of academic publishing. And of course, given the opportunity, I will be happy to reciprocate your time in reviewing any papers I feel competent to comment on should you wish to participate in a similar process.

Notes:
Other options considered for sharing the provisional PDF were Slideshare and Google Docs. These were rejected due to problems with PDFs being reformatted and Dropbox selected as the best general purpose solution, but potentially any site which allows free PDF downloads would be suitable. if this blog had been hosted on Wordpress, that would have been a suitable choice, but Blogger does not allow PDF uploads.

I suppose I should make a fuss

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:57:00 +0000

not because I'm particularly proud of having 1000 followers on Google+, although I'm happy they are there, but because 1000 followers is a benchmark social networks tend to use to categorise users.

In any case. Google+ is where my attention is focused these days, at the expense of Twitter.

Using Blogs and New Media in Academic Practice

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:26:00 +0000

"As an outreach vehicle, blogs with well-structured messages and delivery mediums reach beyond the uni-directional information provision typical of many scholarly communication efforts to connect with readers and compel them to look critically at sources of information; to search out more information; and, ultimately, to influence practices. The flexibility and ease of publishing a blog allows for greater engagement between researchers, stakeholders, and the public through rapid dissemination of commentary and analysis on research. The accessibility of new media, such as blogs, helps create a multi-way dialogue and exchange of ideas so as to complement traditional communication avenues used in research, teaching, learning, and extension work carried out at higher education institutions.
Recognition and reward frameworks used at higher education institutions to evaluate scholarly activities have been structured around traditional forms of academic publication. New media, such as blogging, provide new channels for conducting and disseminating scholarly work. We suggest that ample evidence can be provided for new media practice and products to be considered for promotion and tenure within an academic portfolio."

Douglas A. Powell, Casey J. Jacob and Benjamin J. Chapman (2011) Using Blogs and New Media in Academic Practice: Potential Roles in Research, Teaching, Learning, and Extension. Innovative Higher Education doi: 10.1007/s10755-011-9207-7

Governing the Commons

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:14:00 +0000

I've been intending to read Elinor Olstrom's Governing the Commons since Michael Nielsen recommended it at Solo11, but I only got around to it over Christmas.
The work, for which Olstrom won the Nobel Prize, is about the allocation of "common-pool resources" (CPRs) mostly of a physical nature such as water or fishing rights and gives many examples of where solutions have been reached.

I was particularly interested in Olstrom's discussion of the "theory of the firm" (entrepreneurs) and the "theory of the state" (rulers), and how this relates to academics working in universities struggling with OER production and use. All I have to do now is read Hobbes Leviathan, something I had an inking I might need to do when all my university contemporaries had it on their shelves while I had biochemistry textbooks. Olstrom's solution to CPR allocation is to address three problems: supply, commitment, and mutual monitoring, giving us a framework for addressing OER issues. What is apparent from reading the many case studies analysed is the absence of heavy-handed institutional intervention in successful and stable CPR allocation.

Although Olstrom states that "in a highly competitive environment, those that do not search for and select ... rules that enhance net benefits will lose out to those who are successful in adopting better rules" the question remains in terms of OER adoption whether universities are competitive or are in fact a cartel.

Duncan Greenhill he's our man if he can't learn 'em no-one can

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:04:00 +0000

It's a pleasure to welcome Duncan Greenhill as College Web Resources Officer (Twitter). I'm looking forward to having Duncan's input in supporting educational development in the School.

Welcome aboard.

Statistics Explained: An Introductory Guide for Life Scientists

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:19:00 +0000

The recently published second edition of Steve McKillup's Statistics Explained: An Introductory Guide for Life Scientists is an excellent introductory textbook, theory based, nicely contextualized in life sciences. I'm adopting it for my R-based statistics module next term, where it will sit nicely alongside the practical aspects of using R.

Use of Weapons

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

I finally got round to reading Use of Weapons, and it is better than Consider Phlebas. But it's not good enough.

The ideas are there but Banks doesn't know what to do with them, and the punning ship titles are still a distraction.

So my Banks experiment is over. Who's up next? More McDonald I think. Brasyl?

Week off

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 09:18:00 +0000

Took a week off the Internet thing, and it was good. I didn't miss anything important.

A quick glance over what went on when I was away confirmed that the noise is constant but the signal varies, so it's still all about filtering

Where's my "of 2011" filter?

Personal Facebook Pages

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:14:00 +0000

Yesterday Martin Weller wrote about How to undermine Facebook. I've got love-hate feelings about Facebook, and while all my referrer stats tell me I can't afford to abandon it, I can easily image a situation where I might want to move to an asymmetric relationship rather than the symmetrical "friend" relationship I currently have with a very select group.

The way I would do this is via my Facebook page.

Nice to have your exit strategy prepared.

The Costs of Not Being Resident

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:22:00 +0000

One of the most influential pieces of work which has shaped my thinking over the past few years has been Dave White's ideas on Visitors and Residents. A while ago Dave expanded on his original idea in a post entitled The cost of Residency. In this post he makes some good points about the rapidly changing social network landscape, and then goes on to discuss the costs of residency:

Time is the non-negotiable cost to Residency and to maintaining fulfilling relationships of any form. The way this precious resource is spent, especially in the context of learning, needs to be better understood by those of us promoting the idea of digital literacy.

This is one of the most valid criticisms ("not enough time") that people raise in the face of social media advocacy, and this has been seized on in a number of discussions which took place in adjacent spaces around the post. While I accept the issue as valid, after consideration I am left with the uneasy feeling that the way the negative aspects of this post have been seized on neglects to provide adequate balance on the issue of the costs of not being resident. I would like to redress that balance here.

In my video discussing V & R I make the point that a Visitor approach to formal education is more likely to be successful than a Resident one given that all students are likely to end-up isolated at a desk in an exam room at the end of their courses – i.e. the education system assesses our ability to be Visitors not Residents.

My feeling is that this narrow view fails to take into account skills required beyond the hamster wheel of assessment and reward - workplace and life skills which Visitors fail to glean due to the absence of network effects.

Characterising digital literacy as a simple drive towards Residency would be dangerous; digital literacies are required and acquired as much at the Visitor end of the continuum as they are at the Resident.

This is a straw man, Visitor skills are the low hanging fruit, it's residency skills, and the ability to balance them with other pressures, where the advances in technology lie. Dave continues to develop the V & R idea, but it is crucial that we balance the positive outcomes of residency against the downside doubters. So where is the low hanging fruit of residency?

A word of warning

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:13:00 +0000

It's the holiday season so you won't be spending much time blogging over the next couple of weeks. That means to justify your miserable existence or fill your quota of words/posts/drivel before the end of the year, you'll be writing a few list of 10 filler posts. If you not only have no self-respect but also feel positively ill-disposed to the rest of the human race, you might even write a few review of the year / the year ahead posts.

Don't, right. Just don't.

I hate top 10 lists

Social Media and Microbiology Education

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:22:00 +0000

I'm off to the Royal Dutch Society for Microbiology meeting in April, and I've just sent in my abstract.
What do you think?

Social Media and Microbiology Education

Social media is the part of the Internet where the content is generated by users of the service rather than conventional publishers. Such content ranges in scope from short comments on blogs, status updates on social networks and 140 character "tweets", to lengthy blog posts sometimes even containing original research. In comparison to conventional academic publishing, the social media landscape is extremely varied. Although the age demographic of social media users is becoming older and more inclusive, the typical social media user is aged 18-30, spends more time online and gaming than watching television, and gains a much higher proportion of their information by searching and social recommendations than through traditional publishing channels. Social media is the backbone of their information infrastructure. This talk will address the following questions:

What does the current generation of students want?
Their problem is not shortage of information but overabundance. They intuitively expect academics to compete for their attention with professional media such as the games industry and that offered by Hollywood. In an educational context, they want guidance and leadership through the information maze - academic mentors. In the current environment, they also want value for money and a return on their investment, both financial and of their time.

What do we give them?
By and large, we give them what we ourselves experienced in education. Where technology makes it easy for us to increase the pressure on them (by email, online assessment), we do so. When we venture online, we expect them to use information on our terms, not theirs. We wedge them into virtual learning environments planned and built when the Internet was young, when they were still infants and before social media existed.

What do we (academics) want?
We want highly engaged, enthusiastic, self-motivated, lifelong learners who will go on to successful and profitable careers. We want the satisfaction of seeing students gradually awake to an understanding of the subject we love and have spent our careers working on. We want students to look to us for help, support advice and guidance.

So how do we get there?
We need to invest much more time and effort in understanding how new media work rather than putting our PowerPoint slides online. We need to manage expectations - in particular that education is an active process, not passive spoon-feeding of information. We need to give students clear targets and something to aim for. And we need to engage with student attention in social media to achieve these aims.

References:
Junco, R. (2012) The relationship between frequency of Facebook use, participation in Facebook activities, and student engagement. Computers & Education 58(1): 162-171.
Kanai, R., Bahrami, B., Roylance, R., & Rees G. (2011) Online social network size is reflected in human brain structure. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences
Mollett, A., Moran, D. & Dunleavy, P. (2011) Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities: A guide for academics and researchers. LSE Public Policy Group.
Racaniello, V. (2010) Social Media and Microbiology Education. PLoS Pathogens 6, 10, e1001095.
Rainie, L. (2011) The internet as a diversion and destination. Pew Internet.

The nice lady from #OeRBITAL

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:31:00 +0000

For me, one of the concrete outcomes of the OeRBITAL project was that I integrated Jenny Koenig's Essential Maths OERs into my first year key skills numeracy module.

The module has gone very well this year, and one of the students commented in the feedback that they liked "the nice lady in the videos" :-)

Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:01:00 +0000

"One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity. Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority. The reason for teachers’ preferences is quite clear creative people tend to have traits that some have referred to as obnoxious. Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others. Other characteristics, although not deserving the label obnoxious, nonetheless may not be those most highly valued in the classroom.
…Research has suggested that traits associated with creativity may not only be neglected, but actively punished. Stone (1980) found that second graders who scored highest on tests of creativity were also those identified by their peers as engaging in the most misbehavior (e.g., “getting in trouble the most”). Given that research and theory suggest that a supportive environment is important to the fostering of creativity, it is quite possible that teachers are (perhaps unwittingly) extinguishing creative behaviors."

Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom? (1995) Creativity Research Journal 8(1): 1-10

via: Marginal Revolution

Comment: I've got mixed feelings about emphasis on "creativity" in education. Clearly it is an important attribute, but at its worse, education based around "creativity" is part of the cult of the individual afflicting society at present. Are we really doing the best for students by giving them such a self-centred view?

Annotum

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:10:00 +0000

My two friends called Martin have been playing with WordPress. Specifically, they've been experimenting with the Annotum WordPress theme, a.k.a. Journal-In-A-Box. Martin Fenner wrote a nice explanatory post, and hours later, Martin Weller launched his edtech metajournal.

My thoughts have been on the published evidence base recently. As MartinW points out the easy way to collate this information is to use an existing aggregator. I'd probably use a CiteULike tag, such as, for example, my Journal of Experimental Lols, but Scoop.it, Storify, or any of the other burgeoning curation services could do the job. But (subject matter aside), none of these look much like a traditional journal. Wrap Annotum in a custom URL ("Leicester Bioscience Education") and you've got something that walks like a journal and quacks like a journal.

But do I really want another editorial role? I'm currently on the editorial boards of two journals, and to be honest, I don't really get any institutional credit for that (intellectual rewards are another thing). Any idiot can be a journal editor (remember Medical Hypotheses?), but being a good journal editor is a lot of work. That wouldn't be a problem if I thought that such a metajournal would serve the purpose (custom evidence base) that I need. But if it's not published in Nature, does anyone care, and is it worth the extra work over a simple aggregator?

Puzzling Evidence 2

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:13:00 +0000

A few days ago I wrote about the "evidence" base for most educational interventions being effectively useless.

Published evidence now tells us that excessive Facebook use lowers student attainment. Sometimes. For some students. Or not, depending on which papers you read:

"In short, it is difficult to provide any correlation between academic performance and social network usage."

There is no black and white here. Experience and common sense are your only guides.

The truth about Facebook and grades infographic

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:42:00 +0000

Ray Junco, who has done some good work around academic use of Facebook recently, has just published an "infographic" on the topic.

I'm not a fan of the infographic craze since I almost always find that they obscure findings that more conventional graphic techniques would have made more accessible. This is no exception. YMMV.

But what about this?