5. <Alternative title>
10 things I’ve come to believe after
thinking about the impact of technology
for a few years, accompanied by 10
tenuously connected, and sometimes
amusing, videos
6. Lesson 1: It‟s not just for geeks
• YouTube clip - http://youtu.be/fKXk1VhAuvE
7. But it‟s also about:
• Knowledge sharing
• Knowledge creation
• Networking
• Generating ideas
• Communicating
• Democratisation of learning
9. Sir Martin Rees:
“arXiv.org archive transformed the literature of
physics, establishing a new model for
communication over the whole of science. Far
fewer people today read traditional journals.
These have so far survived as guarantors of
quality. But even this role may soon be trumped
by a more informal system of quality control,
signaled by the approbation of discerning
readers”
11. The Boyer view of scholarship
• Discovery
• Integration
• Application
• Teaching
12. Lesson 2: Researchers are caught
in a dilemma
• YouTube clip http://youtu.be/LnQcCgS7aPQ
13. But researchers aren’t keen
“frequent or intensive use is
rare, and some researchers
regard blogs, wikis and other
novel forms of
communication as a waste of
time or even dangerous” Harley et al (2010)
“We found no evidence to suggest
(Proctor, Williams and Stewart (2010) that “tech-savvy” young graduate
students, postdoctoral scholars, or
assistant professors are bucking
traditional publishing practices”
Carpenter et al describe researchers as
„risk averse‟ and „behind the curve in using
digital technology‟
14. Is it tenure?
“The advice given to pre-tenure scholars
was consistent across all fields: focus on
publishing in the right venues and avoid
spending too much time on public
engagement, committee work, writing op-
ed pieces, developing websites, blogging,
and other non-traditional forms of
electronic dissemination”
15. Is it caution?
Waldrop 2008 (on blogging)
““It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," Duke
University geneticist Huntington F. Willard said... The
whole point of blogging is spontaneity--getting your ideas
out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or
incomplete. “But to a scientist, that's a tough jump to
make,” says Willard. “When we publish things, by and
large, we've gone through a very long process of drafting
a paper and getting it peer reviewed.”
16. Is it habit?
Kroll & Forsman
“Almost all researchers have created a strong network of
friends and colleagues and they draw together the same
team repeatedly for new projects…
Everyone emphasizes the paramount importance of
interpersonal contact as the vital basis for agreeing to
enter into joint work. Personal introductions,
conversations at meetings or hearing someone present a
paper were cited as key in choosing collaborators.”
20. New cultural norms
What are the cultural norms of blogging?
• a willingness to share thoughts and experiences with others at an
early stage;
• the importance of getting input from others on an idea or opinion;
• launching collaborative projects that would be very difficult or
impossible to achieve alone;
• gathering information from a high number of sources every day;
• control over the sources and aggregation of their news;
• the existence of a „common code‟: a vocabulary, a way to write
posts and behaviour codes such as quoting other sources when
you use them, linking into them, commenting on other posts and
so on;
• a culture of speed and currency, with a preference to post or
react instantaneously; and
• a need for recognition – bloggers want to express themselves
and get credit for it.
(Le Muir 2005)
29. • Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Sharing is easy
• Social based
• Connections are „lite‟
• Organisation is „cheap‟
• Crowdsourcing
• Network is valuable
30. Do we need different skills to compete in an
attention economy?
31. Lesson 6: Rethink research
• YouTube clip - http://youtu.be/7KLnXjqKL5g
35. Heppell (2001)
“we continually make the error of
subjugating technology to our present
practice rather than allowing it to free us
from the tyranny of past mistakes”
36. Lesson 7: New skills will be required
• YouTube clip - http://youtu.be/7KLnXjqKL5g
37. • Video
• Networks
• Data visualisation
• Analytics
• Writing for online
• Managing online
identity
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5749192621/
44. Alternatives
• Communication
• Publishing models
• Research methods
• Networking
45. The following are not dead:
• VLEs
• Peer review
• Universities
• Teaching
• Books
46. But they are operating in a different
ecosystem
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/393887467/
47. Lesson 10: Don’t focus just on risk
• YouTube clip - http://youtu.be/w7RIgs3eygo
48. • Doomed - we're all destined to become
stupid, dysfunctional & lessened by the
technology eg Carr
• Marooned - we are placing technology in
too powerful a position and dehumanising
ourselves in the process eg Lanier
• Entombed - the more we communicate,
the more alone and isolated we are
becoming eg Turkle
49. Tversky and Kahneman: We give risk/loss more
weight
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markusram/1361719776/
50. James Boyle:
“We are very good at seeing the downsides
and the dangers of open systems, open
production systems, networks of openness.
.. Those dangers are real… we are not so
good at seeing the benefits and the
converse holds true for the closed system.”
51. To recap
1. It‟s not just for geeks
2. Resolve the researcher‟s dilemma
3. Interdisciplinarity is in the network
4. We‟re all broadcasters now
5. Teaching in an attention economy
6. Opportunity to rethink research
7. New skills will be required
8. It‟ll impact even if you ignore it
9. It‟s about alternatives
10. Don‟t focus just on risk
Written a book recently, so more detail in that if you’re interested.Book was example – published by BloomsburyAcademic – buy hardcopy of read free online under a CC licence
People get hung up on definitions – when I use digital scholarship it’s really a shorthand for these 3 factors:Digital content, distributed via global and social network, and mediated through open technologies and practices
As John Naughton notes we are in the middle of a revolution and it’s difficult to know what the outcome will beTherefore you should always be suspicious of people who pretend to know the answers as they’re usually selling somethingSo, I used the term ‘lessons’ just because it made a better title, a more accurate one would have been:
But I think we all agree that’s not as snappy.So onto the lessons
I spend a lot of time wit geeks and developers. And they’re great, but it sometimes feels like another language and divorced from what you do.
When the astronomer royal says this, you know it isn’t a hobbyist thing.
It’s dangerous to dismiss it as being about a particular technology or for more techy people. It’s about very fundamental scholarly activity and practice
Discovery = ResearchIntegration = Working between disciplinesApplication = taking research and applying it, eg in industry, or public engagementTeachingAll four have equal weighting, and I’ll take an example of each one for my next four lessons
So, is there an equivalent happening in research? Could we speed up the innovation cycle?
Lots of studies recently have reported a rather conservative approachWhy might this be so?
Don’t waste time on all this non-traditional output stuffIs this what happens in other industries?
It goes against our training and instincts
Successful networks have been developed and researchers return to these, thus not valuing online ones as much
The online network forms a new route into interdisciplinary work
Consider creating an interdisciplinary print journal with setting up your own blog now
Are there consistent cultural norms across these new tools? Same could be said of twitter.Do people who use these tools successfully adopt these cultural norms?
How do these new norms then sit with existing disciplinary ones? Are they ‘more sticky’? Have two bloggers in different disciplines got more in common than a blogger and non-blogger in the same discipline?
At the OU we used to do TV programmes for our courses, and here’s a parody of them
We still make TV but are also developing web native content.But more interesting I think is the material produced by individual academics, which wasn’t possible before
As part of their normal function, scholars produce the following:It doesn’t take much effort to turn all of these into shareable digital outputs.
These outputs have different characteristics to the type of public engagement we used to do
I’m talking about teaching here, but the same applies to disseminating research.Many of you will have seen this clip, but I think it makes a good point
We can think of many existing practices as embodying these principles of scarcity
If we have abundant content as our assumption, would our approach change?
Here are some assumptions which might underlie such a pedagogy.Maybe our existing pedagogies can be adapted, but I think few of them start with these assumptions
Competing in an attention economy, you want stuff to be noticed.Development of a slideshare style
Talking about business here, but I think the same applies to research. We have become enculturated into a certain approach to research
We’ve been trained to think of research as funded, and published, but it needn’t be.
Trailer for a course, but could also do trailers or promotions for research projects, publications, etc
We’re only at the beginning of this – all of these might be skills the new researcher will need, and which funders will increasingly want evidence for
I am suspicious of digital literacy programmes as they tend to end up as tick boxes, and are out of date by the time they’re formalised. It seems to me more about an approach and a mindset
This conference is being amplified so others can join inRan the OU conference as all onlineThe backchannel can affect the mood.So even if you’re not involved in any of these media, it will impact upon the conference, which is at the heart of scholarly practice
Network weather
Books and libraries are a good example of things we hold dear. And what better location.
It’s simplistic to think of it as either/or – previously we often only had one approach open to us, eg publish a journal article. Now we have a much richer toolbox to choose from.
Simplistically people like to declare that certain things are dead. But they rarely are.This misses the more interesting picture of how those functions or artefacts are changed subtly by the new technology