Digital scholarship - all day workshop

Digital Scholarship
Martin Weller

This morning
• 10-10.15 Introduction (15 mins)
• 10.15 – 11.15 Digital Scholarship overview
(1hr)
• 11.15 – 11.45 Discussion (30 mins)
• (Coffee?)
• 11.45 – 12.15 Looking at some tools (30
mins)
• 12.15 – 12.45 Planning a strategy (30 mins)
• 12.45 – 13.00 Plenary (15 mins)
• 13.00 – 14.00 Lunch!

Aims of the day
• To raise awareness of digital scholarship
– Possibilities
– Issues
– Concepts
• To share concerns/experience
• To develop a strategy to take away
• To provide a ‘toolkit’ for working digitally

Introduction
State one anxiety & one thing that interests
you about digital scholarship

5 Digital Scholarship lessons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/
Martin Weller

Aim of this session
Get us thinking and talking about issues in
digital scholarship

<Alternative title>
Some things I’ve come to believe after
thinking about the impact of
technology for a few years,
accompanied by some tenuously
connected, and sometimes amusing,
videos

The Digital Scholar book
Bloomsburyacademic.com
Bit.ly/digscholar

What is open scholarship?
Anderson (2009) open scholars:
• create;
• use and contribute open educational resources;
• self archive;
• apply their research;
• do open research;
• filter and share with others;
• support emerging open learning alternatives;
• publish in open access journals;
• comment openly on the works of others
• build networks

Weller (2011) open scholars are likely to:
• Have a distributed online identity
• Have a central place for their identity
• Have cultivated an online network of peers
• Have developed a personal learning environment from a range of tools
• Engage with open publishing
• Create a range of informal outputs
• Try new technologies
• Mix personal and professional outputs
• Use new technologies to support teaching and research
• Automatically create and share outputs

But it’s also about:
• Knowledge sharing
• Knowledge creation
• Networking
• Generating ideas
• Communicating
• Democratisation of learning

Aren’t those all scholarly activities?

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”

Lesson 1: Accept
it’s relevant to you

Researchers are caught in a
dilemma

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”
(Proctor, Williams and Stewart (2010)
Carpenter et al describe researchers as
‘risk averse’ and ‘behind the curve in
using digital technology’
Harley et al (2010)
“We found no evidence to suggest
that “tech-savvy” young graduate
students, postdoctoral scholars, or
assistant professors are bucking
traditional publishing practices”

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”

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.”

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.”

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)

How ‘sticky’ are these cultural norms?

Lesson 2: Resolve the tension
between existing and new practice

We’re all broadcasters now
Public engagement used to look like this:

Research papers
Lectures/Teaching content
Conferences Data
Code
IdeasDebate
A long tail content production
system

Digital outputs
• Low cost (free?)
• Small but unpredictable
audience
• Open
• No compromise
• High reuse potential
• Different distribution

• Video
• Networks
• Data visualisation
• Analytics
• Curation/filtering
• Writing for online
• Liveblogging
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5749192621/
Researcher skills

There is evidence that open access journals
have higher citation measures, downloads and views than those in toll-access databas
(e.g. Lawrence 2001; Antelman 2004; Harnad and Brody 2004), although Davis (2010)
suggests it leads only to increased readership and not citation.
Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication.
(Eysenbach 2012)
Blogging leads to more downloads of papers (anecdotal)
Personal reputation, keynote invites (anecdotal)
Complementary to traditional practice

Lesson 3: Use the network to enhance
engagement and dissemination

Conferences
• Amplified
• Online
• Backchannel

Alternative formats
• Barcamp
• Pre-presentation
• Voting
• Produce something

Network Weather
• The irritating guy with the popped collar standing next to you at the bar? He paid less for
his G&T than you did, because he’s the Mayor of this place on Foursquare, and the
management has cannily decreed Mayors get a 5% discount. Ten minutes from now, the
place is going to fill up with his equally annoying buddies, absolutely ruining your hope of a
quiet drink. And they’re going to show up not because he did so much as call them to tell
them where he’d be, but because he’s got things set so his Foursquare account
automatically posts to his Facebook page.
• You’ll settle up and leave, miffed, and ease on down the road a spell to a place you know
where you can get a decent bowl of penne … Except the Italian place is gone, gone
because it racked up too many nasty reviews on Yelp, or somebody Googlebombed its
listing, or its hundred healthcode violations made it positively radioactive on Everyblock.
• … if you don’t know what they are and how they work, you’ll never have the
foggiest clue why things shook out the way they did. Your evening will have a
completely different shape and texture than what it would have prior to the
advent of ubiquitous mobile Internet. You’ll have been tossed this way and that
by the gusts and squalls of network weather.
• (Adam Greenfield)

The academic version
• When you arrive you are disappointed to find out that someone who has
attended the last three years running and who you always have a meal with
has stayed at home because they can attend remotely. In the opening
session the keynote speaker makes a claim that someone checks and
passes around via twitter and it seems they have misrepresented the
research findings. There is a noticeable change in atmosphere and the
questions the speaker receives are more challenging than you usually
encounter. In another session the speaker takes questions from the remote
audience, which includes students and this generates a very good
discussion about the learner perspective.
• That evening the conference bar seems rather empty that evening, and
seeing an old colleague he informs you that there is an alternative
conference Facebook page, and they have arranged a meeting in a local
bar, with a discussion theme.
• The next day the afternoon doesn’t have any presentations, instead it has a
barcamp format where the participants seek to create a set of learning
resources, and a link up with four remote hubs in different cities.

Lesson 4: It’ll impact even if you
ignore it

• Carr - we're all destined to become stupid,
dysfunctional & lessened by the
technology
• Lanier we are placing technology in too
powerful a position and dehumanising
ourselves in the process
• Turkle - the more we communicate, the
more alone and isolated we are becoming

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markusram/1361719776/
Tversky and Kahneman: We give risk/loss
more weight

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.”

Who knows where it will end up?

Lesson 5: Embrace unpredictability

To recap
1. Accept it’s relevant to you
2. Resolve the tension between existing and
new practice
3. Use the network for engagement and
promotion
4. It’ll impact on all practice
5. Embrace unpredictability

The Good News!
• Exciting times
• Innovation is possible
• New teaching impact eg Phonar
• New Research impact eg social media
• New connections eg virtual research
groups
http://www.flickr.com/photos/306/453957521/

The bad news…
• You have to play the traditional
game too
• There is risk
• Will see increased control
• Not well understood by people
who matter
• Can’t afford not to
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalexanderson/5421517469/

Allows experimentation
Academic identity = Online identity
Complements ‘normal’ practice
Gives a greater
toolbox
It’s the fun part of being a scholar
Take control
Why do it?

Discussion points
• Have you experience of that tension between
existing practice & new possibilities?
• How can you use the network for
dissemination?
• What aspects will it impact upon for you?
• What are the risks you feel?
• Are there new cultural norms emerging?
• If so, how do these intersect with traditional
ones?

Session 2: Tools & Dissemination

Aim of session
• To look at some tools
• To think about a strategy

Getting heard
Establish an online identity
Be a good networker
Tag 16 my secret identity by
chanchan222
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch
anchan222/3219255790/

Some numbers
Blog (since
2006) –
300,000 views
Blipfoto - 92,000 views
over 420 entries
Citations -
1,620
Slideshare - 220,000
views (6 years, 59
presentations)
Colored dice by sgs 1019:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vision
within/133942381/

Confession
• I don’t know what these numbers mean in
terms of impact!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ransomtech/9555643908/
I don’t know what these numbers mean in terms of impact

Complementary process
link
links
promotes
automatic
publish
comments
subscribes
discusses
retweets

Twitter
• Decide the level of personal
• Find good people to connect to
• Look at lists
• Don’t just broadcast
• Project or personal account
• http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialscienc
es/files/2011/11/Published-
Twitter_Guide_Sept_2011.pdf

Blogs
• Project or personal
• Integrate different
media
• Get some momentum
• Reach the pay-off
• WordPress + plugins
• Subscribe to others
• Add comments
• Tweet posts

YouTube
• What will you share?
• Link to other outputs
• Create playlists
• Experiment
• See also Vimeo,
animoto, xtranormal

Slideshare
• Easy way to share outputs
• Sadly no longer slidecasts (create vid)
• Make sharing default
• Good stats

Scoop.It +
• Curation is a very useful contribution
• Often doing this anyway
• Subscribe to others
• Tweet
• Also Mendeley, CuteULike, etc

Academia.edu
• Academic focused
site
• Also ResearchGate
• Department
presence

Google analytics
• Embed on any
webpage
• Build stats into
reporting
• Use to inform
research
• Scholar.google

Others
• Flickr
• Blipfoto
• Facebook
• Depends on your project
and aim

A strategy
• OER Research Hub (oeresearchhub.org)
• Blog – rota (2-3K visits per month, 161 posts)
• Twitter (2k followers)
• Scoop.It
• YouTube Channel
• Slideshare channel
• Impact map (oermap.org)
• Infographics
• Open course
• Integrated part of project

Activity
• Develop a personal or project strategy
using combination of tools
• Explore some tools
• Develop a quick strategy that addresses:
– What tool(s) you will use
– Who is the audience?
– How will you sustain it?
– What would success look like?
– Why would you use those tool(s)?

Some links
• Slideshare.net (http://www.slideshare.net/mweller)
• Youtube.com (oer research)
• Blipfoto.com (http://www.blipfoto.com/rossmackenzie)
• Scholar.google.com (Martin Weller)
• Twitter.com (@oer_hub)
• Animoto.com
• Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/olnet-oer-research)
• Academia.edu (http://open.academia.edu/KatyJordan)
• Wordpress.com (http://cogdogblog.com/)
• http://50ways.wikispaces.com/

Afternoon session
• Session 3
• 14.00-14.30 The art of Guerrilla Research
(30 mins)
• 14.30 – 15.00 Group activity (30 mins)
• Session 4:
• 15.00- 15.30 Openness & you (30 mins)
• 15.30 – 16.00 Your strategy (30 mins)

The art of guerrilla research
Martin Weller
http://www.flickr.com/photos/idfonline/
5981013497/

Aim
• To demonstrate how digital scholarship
offers new methods
• To think about new methods
• To develop a strategy for lightweight
research

What is guerrilla research?
Guerrilla research methods are faster,
lower-cost methods that provide
sufficient enough insights to make
informed strategic decisions
(Ross Unger and Todd Warfel)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/essgee/3411795985/

The research process
• Have an idea
• Write a proposal
• Submit proposal
• {wait}
• Get funding
• Do research
• Write paper
• {wait}
• Publish
• Have an idea
• Do research
• Blog it
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mg7een/4550426/

DIY
• Create a journal
• Interrogate data
• Disseminate findings
• Create a community
• Collaborate

“what’s important here is that
Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced
by half-a-billion people within six years of
its first being launched, without (and here
is the critical bit) asking permission of
anyone. The real story is not the
invention. It is the platform that makes
the invention sing.”
(Larry Lessig)

The manifesto
1. It can be done by one or two researchers
and does not require a team
2. It relies on existing open data, information
and tools
3. It is fairly quick to realise
4. It is disseminated via blogs and social
media
5. It doesn’t require permission

Relationship with ‘traditional’
research
• We think of research as having a certain
shape and size
• This extends that

Complementary
• Demonstrate potential of further work
• Altmetrics as indicator of interest
• Get ideas/collaborators for bigger project
• Increase personal profile

More efficient?
12 days for a
conventional
proposal was the
average (RCUK
2006)
ESRC - only 17% of
bids were successful
in 2009-10
RCUK = 2006
£196 million on
applications to
the 8 UK
research councils
2800 bids submitted
to ESRC in 2009-10,
an increase in 33%
from 2005-6
ESRC - 2000
failed bids x 12
days per bid = 65
years of effort

Example1: The rich world of travel
blogsGuided by a
Bourdieusian lens, this
article examines the
negotiation of
authenticity, distinction
and identity in the
websites and blogs of
companies and tourists
during the 2010 spring Mt
Everest climbing season.
(Kane 2012)
This paper provides
a discussion of the
strengths,
weaknesses and
implications of
using content
analysis and
narrative analysis
on travel blogs
The research reviewed
the published literature
and real-life examples of
destination marketing
organizations and
tourism enterprises
using blogs as part of
their business strategy
One important form is traveling, in which self-
described “travelers” aim to dissociate
themselves from tourism altogether. As
travelers, rather than tourists, these people
present themselves as engaged in a morally
superior alternative that does not create the
same problems as tourism.

• No permission
• Rich source of data
• Would have required interviews,
recruitment, budget
• Different methodology

• No permission (OA licensed articles)
• Quick set up
• No business case required
• Allows for interdisciplinarity

Example 3: MOOC research
Katy doing
MOOC, blogs
final assignment
Picked up by
Phil Hill at
eliterate
Becomes
defacto piece
on completion
rates
Invited to
submit proposal
for funding
Conference &
journal articles
follow

• Used free tools
• Openly available data (reports, papers,
data)
• Relies on open scholarship identity
• Led to proper funding and publication
• Being used for further bids

• No special access to data
• No permission required
• Spare time
• Adopted by OU as official app

Issues
• Will someone steal my idea?
• Can I account for it in my workplan?
• Will it get me promoted?
• Do I need technical skills?

Activity
• In groups
• Decide on one person’s subject area
• Come up with a plan for how one (or two)
element could be tackled by a guerrilla
research approach
– What would you need
– What would it achieve
– Why wouldn’t you do it
• Report back

Aim
• To consider aspects of open practice
• To bring together all elements of the day in
a personal strategy

The Battle for Open
Martin Weller
Sign the
CC-BY
license!

Central theme
Openness has won…
But now the real
direction of openness is
up for grabs

Roots of (modern) open ed
• Open universities – open access, entry.
Focus on methods, removing barriers, not
free
• Free software – 4 freedoms (purpose,
change, redistribute, distribute modified).
Emphasis on control
• Open source – “given enough eyeballs all
bugs are shallow”. Emphasis on efficiency
• Web 2.0 – culture of sharing, open practice

Open access
[Source: University of Southampton, ROARMAP, http://roarmap.eprints.org/ Published
under a CC-BY license]

Major breakthroughs
• “Free online access to scholarly works”
• Major policies in many countries
• Gold route & Green route
• More than 50% have published OA
• OA Impact advantage

Growth of OA
Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. (2011) The Development
of
Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961.

The battle
• Gold route
• No incentive to
innovate
• Elsevier ‘take down’
on Academia.edu
• Predatory OA
journals
• Changes relationship
• Hybrid models

Major breakthroughs
• OpenCourseware since
2001 (LOs earlier)
• Repositories in major
languages and areas
• OCWC 260 institutions
• Open Textbooks

Some findings
Saylor: Increased
enthusiasm for study
(59%). Increased
interest in subject
(58%), Gaining
confidence (50%)
Over 30% of students
reported studying their
subject via OER
before joining their
course
60% CCCOER
identified reduced
cost of materials as a
driver of student
retention
OpenStax downloads
120K times, leading to
an estimated $3
million savings for
students (Green
2013)
Feldstein et al. (2013)
47% of students
purchased the paper
textbooks, 93% of
students reading the
free online textbook

MOOCs
Image – David
Kernohan

Awareness
Figure 5.1: Google Trends plot of relative interest in MOOCs (red) and OERs (blue).

Uptake
• Udacity, Iversity, Coursera,
Open2Study, FutureLearn,
EdX
• Large registrations
(Coursera 17m
enrolments)
• On Newsnight, in NYT, etc
• “If education was grunge,
MOOCs were its Nirvana”
(George Siemens)

The battle
• Not really open
• Commercially driven adoption of open
• Openness is the first casualty
• Contracts with unis
• Support for learners
• Centralised platform & data
• Sustainability

Open scholarship
By Gideon Burton http://www.flickr.com/photos/wakingtiger/3157622458/in/set-72157612021421472/

Open practice
• Online identity is now becoming the norm
• Recognised by institution
• Complements existing practice
• Part of research projects
• Area of innovation
• Open research, open data

Activity
• Develop a personal strategy that brings
together everything from today
• What do you plan to share?
• What tools will you use?
• Will you adopt open licences?
• What will you do next week?

Conclusions & thanks!
“If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really
making art for the twenty-first century.”
Cory Doctorow

Digital scholarship - all day workshop

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to Digital scholarship - all day workshop

More from Martin Weller

Recently uploaded

Digital scholarship - all day workshop

Editor's Notes