Science of the Invisible

Platform agnostic

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:59:00 +0000

At a meeting this morning I was involved in a discussion about setting up an online presence to:

Enable online discussions between meetings
Publicize the work of the group
Solicit opinion from a wider community

The question is, how?

My position is that I don't care how we do this as long as:

It's either part of my current workflow (meaning, essentially, Google+), or:
I get in stream activity notification, preferably via RSS (or as a last desperate resort, email)

Which gives us a choice of?

WordPress/Blogger (no in house blog platform available)
Twitter (not suitable/used by all?)
Google+ (not used by many at present) - Google Groups better?
or?

What platform should we go for?

A.J. Cann

The Role of the Lecturer as Tutor: Doing What Effective Tutors Do in a Large Lecture Class

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:44:00 +0000

"In this paper, we share insights into what is known about what effective tutors do and do not do, and we present specific approaches for adapting effective tutoring strategies and applying them to large biology lecture classes"

Wood, W.B and Tanner, K.D. (2012) The Role of the Lecturer as Tutor: Doing What Effective Tutors Do in a Large Lecture Class. CBE Life Science Education 20(1) 3-9

Summary:

What is effective tutoring? Seven key characteristics
Transferring effective tutoring to a large lecture situation

Problem:
- if you're a good teacher, you're probably already doing this ... and if you're not? Old dogs, new tricks?

A.J. Cann

Scientific Publishing: Is Social Media Worth It?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:24:00 +0000

Today I'm in Oxford at the OUP Journals meeting. I'll be wearing my Annals of Botany Internet Consulting Editor hat (the peaked one with the scrambled egg on it), and I'll be saying something along these lines:

Scientific Publishing: Is Social Media Worth It?

More talks from Alan Cann

A.J. Cann

From Research to Policy: Academic Impacts on Goverment #LSEImpact

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I was at the #LSEImpact meeting From Research to Policy: Academic Impacts on Government. I'll be writing more about this later, but in the meantime, here's a short Storify account of some of the discussions:

A.J. Cann

A little bit of evil from Storify

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:15:00 +0000

Now, I like Storify, and I like Society of Biology, but signing me up for subscriptions I haven't asked for and notifying me retrospectively rather than making a suggestion for me to act on is evil. Naughty Storify!

A.J. Cann

Collaboration in social networks

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:32:00 +0000

The very notion of social network implies that linked individuals interact repeatedly with each other. This notion allows them not only to learn successful strategies and adapt to them, but also to condition their own behavior on the behavior of others, in a strategic forward looking manner. Game theory of repeated games shows that these circumstances are conducive to the emergence of collaboration in simple games of two players. We investigate the extension of this concept to the case where players are engaged in a local contribution game and show that rationality and credibility of threats identify a class of Nash equilibria - that we call "collaborative equilibria" - that have a precise interpretation in terms of subgraphs of the social network. For large network games, the number of such equilibria is exponentially large in the number of players. When incentives to defect are small, equilibria are supported by local structures whereas when incentives exceed a threshold they acquire a nonlocal nature, which requires a “critical mass” of more than a given fraction of the players to collaborate. Therefore, when incentives are high, an individual deviation typically causes the collapse of collaboration across the whole system. At the same time, higher incentives to defect typically support equilibria with a higher density of collaborators. The resulting picture conforms with several results in sociology and in the experimental literature on game theory, such as the prevalence of collaboration in denser groups and in the structural hubs of sparse networks.

Names

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:30:00 +0000

Via Sarah Horrigan:

"A few days ago, I had an interesting discussion over on Google+ ... with A.J. Cann - which we both wanted to share publicly but resharing would lose the conversation we'd had... so... here it is. He'd commented on a blog post I'd made and in return I'd asked him what he would rename virtual learning environments if he could and the exchange went as follows:"

and the rest...

A.J. Cann

DIKW

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

In David Weinberger's book Too Big To Know there is a discussion of the DIKW hierarchy:

The origin of this model is murky, but it resurfaces many times, for example, in the form of Bloom's Taxonomy.

The goal of Data is Information, the goal of Information is Knowledge, of Knowledge, Wisdom. Become wise and win a prize. What is the gatekeeper for each stage of the hierarchy? Curation.

Weinberger make the point that Knowledge is Information that is not only true but in which belief is justified. We may, or may not, have "Information overload", we certainly don't have Knowledge overload. Filtering works with Information, but is disruptive to Knowledge. Wisdom - well that seems like too difficult a puzzle to crack.

Now, if all this is getting a bit philosophical, well that's probably the only way to survive ten weeks of teaching first year students statistics. My statistics module has two goals: To get students to realize that statistics is about transforming Data into Information, and to realize that transforming Information into Knowledge requires experience and understanding.

Most of my day is spent curating stuff. When I'm researching, I curate Data to transform it into Information. When I teach, I'd like to think I'm curating Information which students transform into Knowledge. But I still haven't figured out what Wisdom has to do with education.

A.J. Cann

Too Big To Know

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:30:00 +0000

I finally got my hands on David Weinberger's new book Too Big To Know and read it over the weekend.

In Too Big To Know Weinberger continues the thesis of Everything is Miscellaneous that digital information is fundamentally different from what went before. In the Prologue he argues that:

"Transform the medium by which we develop, preserve, and communicate knowledge, and we transform knowledge."

The new extension to the thesis in this book is that

"Knowledge is now a property of the network".

Weinberger gives a good account of exactly the same objections being raised against paper historically as are currently raised against the Internet. There are also many anecdotes about "experts", the bane of our professional existence. The chapter on the Expertise of Clouds shows how the exuberance and enthusiasm of a large Facebook group of thousands can win out over a circle of self-appointed experts.

This book had a difficult gestation. I know this because I followed Weinberger's live blog of the writing process. To an extent, this shows in the book. By taking on such a large topic, it could be suggested that the results is a bit of a mishmash, but perhaps more accurately, the title is not quite for this volume? Which is not to say that I don't recommend reading it, because I do. The exposition on long form thought/writing versus Nicholas Carr is a particularly good read, as is the checklist of "to dos" in the final chapter:

Open up access (open access)
Provide the hooks for intelligence (metadata)
Link everything (required to be a good Internet citizen)
Leave no institutional knowledge behind (paywalls suck)
Teach everyone (online everyone is a teacher)

I can't say that reading this book was as big a wake-up call to me as reading Everything Is Miscellaneous was (I can remember with great clarity exactly where I was when I read that book, one of those formative experiences), but to a large extent that's because Weinberger had already switched the lightbulb on. You still need to read this book.

altmetrics lite

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:49:00 +0000

The ever reliable Martin Hawksey has another classic blog post this morning, What do you get when you combine Twitter and Google Analytics in Google Spreadsheets with a bit of Google Apps Script?

Nice work. I had not realized that Twitter search resolves all shortened links to the original URL, so for yesterday's blog post, I get:

However, since Google+ has gone all hockeystick on me, I'm far more interested in that site these days. Searching for the post url there gives me:

and I can save the search on Google+ to tune into referrer traffic there in real time, thanking referrers and commenting or clarifying as need be. Nice tip :-)

Examples:

SoTI: Twitter | Google+
MicrobiologyBytes: Twitter | Google+
AoB: Twitter | Google+

peerevaluation.org

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:43:00 +0000

I'm not entirely sure what peerevaluation.org is all about. It appears to be an open access repository with a facility for open peer review. It's not clear to me who is behind the site, or would it will be able to establish a critical mass for sustainability in an increasingly crowded space.

Your thoughts?

How the game is played

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:26:00 +0000

An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment was published in the Leicester Research Archive on 7th February, and in 22 days was accessed 1,175 times. This is a very gratifying outcome of my first experiment with open peer review. To put that number in context, the average number of views for a PloS ONE article is 900 per year (but since the distribution of accesses will be skewed by a few very high values, we really need to know the median, which will be lower than the mean).

Given that we know:

this is how the game is played. As I wrote recently, we are all publishers now. That means taking on all the roles that publishers formerly fulfilled, including not only publication, but also marketing. I'd love to know what the numbers are for my papers in Bioscience Education and Research in Learning Technology, but that data is not available to me. If I want value added to my papers, I need to add it myself.

A.J. Cann

Dashboard Delights

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:09:00 +0000

I'm on a long term quest to find workable media dashboards to make sense of the Interwebz and I've seen some interesting stuff over the last few days.

On Friday I had a top secret high level meeting about Project Llama. Oh OK then, I had coffee with Gareth and he showed me the prototype author dashboard for the LRA. It looks good - but you'll have to wait a bit longer to get your hands on it :-)

Then on Friday night Fergus sent me a heads up about Bottlenose:

I'm impressed, Bottlenose is pretty good, although the new visual paradigm takes a bit of getting used to. It's also another destination to visit, rather than being integrated with the sites it abstracts, which could be a disadvantage - at present, it only covers Twitter and Facebook. Google+ integration is planned, at which point Bottlenose might really take off.

Self-selection and the citation advantage of open access articles

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:23:00 +0000

"This research seeks to examine the relationship between the open access availability of journal articles in anthropology and their citation conditions. The paper applies a statistical logistic regression model to explore this relationship, and compares two groups of articles, those published in high-ranked journals and those in low-ranked journals based on journal impact factor, to examine the likelihood that open access status is correlated to scholarly impact. The results reveal that open access articles in general receive more citations. Moreover, this research finds that articles in high-ranked journals do not have a higher open access rate, and articles in lower-ranked journals have a greater increase rate of citations if they are freely accessible. The findings are contrary to the existing theory that a higher citation rate of open access articles is caused by authors posting their best articles online. It is hoped that the research discoveries can help electronic publishers and digital project managers to adjust their strategies in open access advocacy."

Xia, J and Nakanishi, K. (2012) Self-selection and the citation advantage of open access articles. Online Information Review, 36(1) 40-51

OMG he's banging on about Google+ again

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 09:22:00 +0000

I just ticked over 3000 followers on Google+, which has now become my most important social network, outstripping the value of Twitter by some distance. As I said previously, I'm not boasting about this, just making the point that you get out of a tool what you put into it. Not that all tools are equal. My Google+ network didn't happen by accident, it is the result of the time and effort I have spent curating my personal, tailor-made Google+ community, just as I did previously with the now defunct Friendfeed.

Google+ is the most important social tool to appear for years, but as with Twitter initially, most people don't get that yet. Just take a look at what we've done with AoB blog over the last 12 months:

Get the picture? It's hockeystick time at Google+.

A.J. Cann

Putting twitter to the test: outcomes for student collaboration, engagement and success

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:02:00 +0000

"Herein, we present data from two studies of Twitter usage in different post-secondary courses with the goal of analyzing the relationships surrounding student engagement and collaboration as they intersect learning outcomes. Study 1 was conducted with 125 students taking a first-year seminar course, half of who were required to use Twitter while the other half used Ning. Study 2 was conducted with 135 students taking a large lecture general education course where Twitter participation was voluntary. Faculty in Study 1 engaged with students on Twitter in activities based on an a priori theoretical model, while faculty in Study 2 only engaged students sporadically on the platform. Qualitative analyses of tweets and quantitative outcomes show that faculty participation on the platform, integration of Twitter into the course based on a theoretically driven pedagogical model and requiring students to use Twitter are essential components of improved outcomes."

Reynol Junco, C. Michael Elavsky, Greg Heiberger. (2012) Putting twitter to the test: Assessing outcomes for student collaboration, engagement and success BJET 01 March 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01284.x

Rey Junco's latest. Well worth a read, and encouraging that the conclusions about pedagogical integration of social tools match the model we are using for Google+ here. I've got to work on the "faculty participation" though...

For one week only! Innovative learning!

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:15:00 +0000

I don't have any knowledge of Edinburgh University's recent "Innovative Learning Week", but I do have big reservations about the concept.

"‘Normal’ teaching will be suspended for this week"

For me this is sending completely the wrong message.

I do have knowledge of "reading weeks" at other universities, and I am unimpressed. Every week is innovative learning/reading week.

We're all publishers now

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:44:00 +0000

Martin Weller's tweet yesterday set me thinking about publishing overnight. I don't have a problem with commercial publishing. In a free market, companies can charge what they want. And why would a company pay for open access out of their own revenue stream? That's not something you see Sky, Virgin or Marks and Spencer doing - why should they? But that doesn't mean there's not a problem. The problem is that academia is incompatible with commercial publishing models. That's why we need new publishing models. Inevitably, these will involve the Internet. And equally inevitably, they will not fit into the traditional commercial model.

But along the line, somebody somewhere has to pay the costs.

Panelistas

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:03:00 +0000

I was recently invited to be a panelist at a forthcoming event. For reasons I don't completely understand, I said yes.

I'm not a big fan of panels at conferences. I usually find them boring, and I've had some bad experiences in the past. My feeling is that being a "good" panelist (i.e. playing the game), requires rather more ego than I like to display in public.

But having agreed, I've put together an opening statement as requested by the organizers, and now I'm asking myself, how do we leverage emerging technologies to open up academic work to policymakers?
Your suggestions ~~on a postcard~~ as a comment please.

BBC Future is so 1999

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:54:00 +0000

The BBC has a new website: BBC Future. But if you live in the UK, the BBC don't want you to see it. It's so futuristic it doesn't have an RSS feed, but of course you can see the Twitter feed. And of course, if you have half a brain you can resolve the URL by bouncing it though a proxy:

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://www.bbc.com/future

And this is the future? Feels a lot like 1999 to me.

Compare and contrast - baby steps in the altmetrics jungle

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:40:00 +0000

The return of Socky?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:21:00 +0000

Long term followers of this blog will know all about Socky, and I get regular requests for his return. I'm regularly adding videos to my statistics course, and I've been agonizing about using Socky for a while. This week I did some informal student polling, and the result is - no Socky:

Watch this video at 480p or higher for better resolution

However, rest assured that Socky is not dead, he's only sleeping and will return when England's need is greatest. In fact, I have a project in mind that may summon him up...

Too busy to blog?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:51:00 +0000

Too busy to blog? (mp3)

Update: Oh, the irony: "Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now”

Digital Researcher 2012 Roundup #dr12vitae

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:15:00 +0000

For me the Digital Researcher 2012 meeting yesterday went well, though it was very hectic, so here's a quick roundup of some of the outputs:

Thanks to everyone who contributed, in person or online.

Happy #dr12vitae Day!

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:01:00 +0000