For the sake of the context, I must say that I am a social scientist working in the crossroads of the Knowledge Society and development, especially in what is related with individual empowerment (education) and social empowerment (governance). I teach at a 100% online university, which means that all my working tools are a computer, some common software and access to the Internet. My professional life is mostly digitized, and gathered in my personal research portal. I mostly do not work with paper and mostly do not work offline. I am quite a fast typist (my liveblogging sessions a proof of it) and have a very light (circa 1,000g) while powerful laptop which I can take anywhere without hesitation. I do not own any Apple computer and do not plan to own one in the nearest future (i.e. I am not an Apple fan).

So, how does an iPad or a tablet fit in this context at the professional level?

Enhanced Reading

Reading it not anymore what it used to be.

Reading used to be sitting with a bunch of papers. Maybe a pen would be handy to scribble some notes on the margins, underline some sentences. Maybe not on the margins, but on a piece of paper. Maybe even on a notebook. You would stand up to look up something on the dictionary or the encyclopaedia. And that was it.

Now reading is, for starters, not knowing what you will be feeling like reading. Maybe it will it be a couple of academic papers, maybe it will be correcting some assignments, or proofreading a paper of yours. Or them all: some trips are long and you want to carry everything with you. What is the weight of 500 pages? And the weight of 5 MB?

Besides the dictionary, or the encyclopaedia, you might search for a description of Aztec god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli or you might even want to see how Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli looks like; you can wonder how Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray would sound like when playing before Jack Kerouac or just listen to a live performance by Gordon & Gray; or you can imagine Jon Krakauer’s Stampede Trail or locate it on a map and pay a visit to it.

Now combine everything said above: picture yourself with a dozen papers; reading all them at the same time (those papers with interesting bibliographies…); underlining and taking notes on them; writing some other notes on a separate file which you can tag and categorize and store and search and retrieve; accessing on the go the authors’ personal websites and their curricula and their list of published works; writing a short e-mail to them asking them for a pre-print of a difficult to find paper; forwarding your annotated copy of the paper to a colleague; or copying and pasting a table of data on a spreadsheet to plot some graphics (why hadn’t they in the original paper?).

And that is enhanced reading.

Picture yourself doing all that sitting (or standing) on the train. Or sitting on your couch.

And that is a tablet.

Why not an eReader

I tried several eReader devices based on e-ink before trying the tablet. There are two main reasons why an eReader is not an option for me:

eReaders are very slow for academic papers reading. They may be fair enough to read a book (whatever its kind) whose content has been repaged for your device and for you to turn the pages sequentially, once a minute or two.

But if you are reading a PDF, A4-sized, with footnotes or endnotes and definitely with a bibliography, you will find yourself turning pages very often. Mainly because it is not optimized for the eReader. And also because the eReader is not prepared (yet) for continuous and quick page-turning. And if you want to compare different papers in parallel, the exercise of exiting a paper, opening a new one, closing that one and going back to the former one… that is simply not bearable for the common human being.

The second reason is that, usually, e-readers lack everything that is not strictly for reading purposes: browsing the internet, writing an e-mail or running an application (notebook, spreadsheet, etc.) are not usually supported by e-Readers. And if they are… aren’t we already talking about a table?

An eReader is mainly to read and to read plain text. But academic reading, enhanced reading, is much more than that.

Why not a laptop?

First of all, there is weight. Even if we assume that your laptop does not weight much more than your average tablet (which is quite an assumption), the iPad, one of the heaviest ones, is similar in weight as a 200 pages hardcover. You are already used to handle that weight. The best ultralight laptop will normally double that weight (and cut to a half the autonomy, BTW): if you think a hardcover edition of a book is heavy, try holding a pair of them for more than a while.

Second, there is comfort. Let’s speak only about reading for a while: for reading purposes, the extra keyboard in the laptop and the tactile screen in the tablet make a huge difference. Not only a keyboard is almost useless when reading — almost because you just type scattered notes ‐, but it is only uncomfortable: it takes extra space (and weight) of your surroundings (remember the crowded train: I spend, on average, 2h on it, daily) and key operating is much more difficult than simply touching a screen.

Besides weight and comfort, there is a third aspect, very subjective, but that I have tested several times, and is friendliness.

I’ve been to several “serious” meetings where people brought their laptops to take notes while I tapped and typed on my iPad. Unbelievable as it might sound, laptops all raised suspicion on whether their owners would be taking notes or reading e-mail or checking their preferred social networking site. On your iPad “of course” you are taking notes. Laptops are for writing and working and iPads are for taking notes, and you are supposed to take notes during a meeting.

And the fact that laptops raise a wall (the screen) between the owner and the rest and the iPad does not (because it rests on your lap or almost flat on the table) makes a huge “emotional” difference. Really.

Related to that, working at home is also different. We scientists know that there is no big difference between reading a paper for work or for leisure. But there actually is a tremendous difference between reading that paper in your home studio sitting in front of your desktop, or reading it sprawling on your couch. Especially if you do not live alone and it’s Sunday. Believe it or not, my Sundays or afternoons are very different now.

On the other side, laptops — or desktops — are unbeatable for writing. But we were talking about (enhanced) reading, right?

The added value of the tablet

In my own experience, the main added value of the tablet can be summarized in some keywords: read, notes, train, couch, shoulder bag.

Having get rid of most my paper usage in the last years, with the tablet I succeeded in getting rid of all paper. Period. This means, specifically, getting rid of:

• The annoying collection of separate sheets and stickies with casual notes you will never revisit but never dare to trash: the tablet keeps them all together, searchable and easy to transfer (to other people by e-mail, to more serious documents).
• Printouts of readings with limited life-span (destroy after read): thousands of times more digital documents in your tablet than printed ones in your usual bag, immediate transfer, time and paper saving — and healthier back.

Even more important than working paperless, the tablet provides full mobility, especially if accompanied with an Internet connection (embedded 3G or using your cellphone as a hotspot). And full mobility means that the tablet is always in my shoulder bag. Instead of everything else. The laptop is something you consider bringing with you: the tablet is always with you, as a pen or a notebook used to be.

For those more curious, I’ve shared my setup (or most of it) in the following set of snapshots. Enjoy.

Since I began my crusade for the adoption of web 2.0 tools (now social media) to enhance research, I have evolved from the “you do need all this stuff” motto to “you do not need all this stuff… but a couple of things are a must”. So, I would really like to stress a couple of points:

1. In a knowledge society, ICTs are a must. They are a train that you cannot let pass: you will either jump in or you will be crushed under its wheels, but there is no stepping aside. This especially applies for knowledge workers (e.g. scientists). Some people still see the use of some tools (blogs, twitter, RSS feeds) in science as rocket science: this is not even wrong. ICTs are to scientists what tractors are to farmers. Of course you can live without them, but it is very likely that you will be working with less efficiency and less efficacy.
2. Yes, mastering ICTs and those always changing social media require a certain degree of digital competence, which is not innate and, thus, has to be acquired. As the Spanish saying says: there are neither hurries, nor pauses. But lack of digital competence should not stop you from trying to use social media for research (“those ain’t for me”), the same way you began with your elementary maths to end up calculating multinomial logistic regressions.
3. Be digital. Just be it. If you are duplicating your tasks, you are not being digital (enough). Social media is about leveraging what you already did on your computer by putting it online. Your papers, your slides, your notes, your readings… if they’re on digital support, they can be online with minimum effort (if they ere not on digital support, please see point #1). I tend to say that e-Research is about making your “digital life” overlap 90% of your “analogue life”. There is an added 10% extra work, indeed, but it is worth doing it compared to benefits.

Downloads:

Prezi slides:

Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. February 15, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

Slides as a PDF:

Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute. February 15, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

Book chapter:

Peña-López, I. (2009). “The personal research portal”. In Hatzipanagos, S. & Warburton, S. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, Chapter XXVI, 400-414. Hershey: IGI Global.

The seminar had three different parts.

During the first part, I provided an introduction to social media, where I mainly explained the main ways that information can be shared (and, thus, also monitored): RSS feeds, widgets and open APIs. Put short, RSS feeds share preset bits of information (e.g. an article, a list of articles, etc.), widgets share preset bits of information plus a preset way of presenting it (a list of last tweets you can embed on a website, a like button, etc.) and open APIs allow an external user to ask a database for customized collections of data (e.g. put on a map the last tweets on a given subject).

During the second part — the core of the seminar — I went through an imaginary typical research process, from the moment one has an idea that wants to explore until the research is over and a research output can be presented. I draw two parallel timelines where I complemented the traditional way of doing research (on the right in the presentation) and how this could be enhanced with social media (on the left in the presentation). I stressed the idea that social media is a complement and never a substitute of the traditional ways of doing research. That is, tweeting about a topic or writing on an academic blog should not stop anyone from attending conferences or writing academic papers.

The last part of the seminar was a debate about the pros and cons of using social media to do research.

There are four points I would like to highlight from that debate and that were directly or indirectly asked to me during our talk.

1. What is the basic, fundamental tool: RSS feeds. Period. It is for me very important to be aware of the fact that, with the help of RSS feeds, you don’t have to look for information, but information will get to you. And this is a significant leap in reaching higher stages of efficiency and efficacy in managing information.
2. If you are a knowledge worker and you are not present in the information landscape, you are not. Having a personal/research group/research project website is not an option, but a must.
3. Where to start from? It depends. Begin with a part of your research. If you are in the stage of gathering information, set up a monitoring/listening strategy: identify your actors and subscribe to their blogs, twitter accounts, slideshare accounts, etc. If you are in the stage of diffusing your research production, set up a diffusion strategy, upload your papers and slides, comment on others’ websites (pointing back to yours, etc.). Managing efficiently your bibliography (i.e. with a bibliographic manager) is also a way to begin managing your own information/knowledge.
4. Think digital, be digital. e-Research is not about adding a digital layer, and, thus, adding an extra amount of work, but about changing your working paradigm, about levering all the work you are already doing on digital support.

Following you can find and download the slides I used. You can also download a book chapter where I explain in detail the building of a Personal Research Portal. There is a collection I maintain, The Personal Research Portal: related works which gathers everything I have written or said about this topic.

Downloads:

Prezi slides:

Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Open University of Catalonia. January 12, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

Slides as a PDF:

Peña-López, I. (2011). e-Research: social media for social sciences. Research seminar at the Open University of Catalonia. January 12, 2012. Barcelona: ICTlogy.

Book chapter:

Peña-López, I. (2009). “The personal research portal”. In Hatzipanagos, S. & Warburton, S. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, Chapter XXVI, 400-414. Hershey: IGI Global.

Social Networks and Innovation
Eduardo Manchón, co-founder of Askaro and Panoramio; Dolors Reig, Instructional Technologist; Chris Csikszentmihályi, MIT Media Lab; Llorenç Valverde, Vice-President of Learning Technologies, UOC.

Eduardo Manchón

There is a difference between networks where content is generated and is what binds the network together, and networks where the social component is what provides sense to that network. Wikipedia is an example of the first one; Linkedin is arguably an example of the second one. Probably the former ones are more engaging.

To create valuable content, a goal is needed, and thus comes a need for focusing. This goal, notwithstanding, may not be included in the original design, but come with the use that the users do of the social networking site.

Chris Csikszentmihályi points to the decreasing (and almost non-existent) transaction and coordination costs of bringing people togheter and build things collaborativelly that Yochai Blenkler explains in The Wealth of Networks: ICTs have made collaboration so cheap that centralization may not make a lot of sense or, in other words, decentralization of production is now feasible in many more ways than it was before.

Indeed, most people need specific cases or even direct commands so to start up using an online service. I f you’re told you can do “anything” on a web site, that’s what you’ll do: nothing. A good example to kick-start a service was Twitter: “what are you doing?”. With time, it evolved to much more than what one was doing. But for starters, the idea worked.

Discussion

Llorenç Valverde: so, translated to the education arena, problem based communities, addressed to specific topics and with clear rules is what would work. That would contribute in building a community. But, why don’t online students usually gather around virtual communities and/or specific “social learning networking sites”?

Chris C.: And how do you make people engage if 2% will be creators and 98% will be lurkers?

Eduardo Manchón: there actually are two really separate communities (creators and lurkers) and the one that really matters is creators. You have to develop your site for the creators, for the content generators, for the active ones.

Lev Gonick: We have situational communities and we have intentional communities. Sustainable communities are more on the intentional side of communities, strongly motivated and are normally well moderated/led. And we should try and find, in the educational field, what is the difference we are making, what is the advantage we are providing our students.

Eduardo Manchón: (some) noise and (some) trouble helps the community to raise, and to mature. Online communities are small societies and so they need some controversies to grow in all senses. Of course a minimum amount of moderation is needed, especially to avoid the destruction of the community as a whole, but tension is generally good, is a sign of health.

Eduardo Manchón: we may know what does not work in a virtual community, we most probably do not know what does work, but we can only find out by creating the online community and bring it to live. So, the best advice when designing and building an online community is to build it and see whether people “comes”.

NOTE: As usual, this kind of events are much richer than what these humble notes may suggest :)

This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.

The first part deals with infrastructures and how my PLE is built in the sense of which applications shape it. The second one deals with the information management workflow. The third one puts the personal learning environment in relationship with the university.

If in the two previous parts we have seen what can the infrastructure of a PLE be like and what can the workflow be, we here will see how the personal fits into the institutional. I agree that PLEs are not just tools but ways to understand learning on the Net, hence the debate around institutional or non-institutional PLEs may seem void. Still, I think this question is indeed relevant because, beyond their learning specificities, I believe in PLEs as a driver of change in formal learning en educational institutions, as a wedge that breaks through the interstices that have opened in the education system.

An introduction to the (new) UOC Campus, a virtual open campus

In the last years, my colleagues at the Office of Learning Technologies (OLT) at the Open University of Catalonia have been doing a terrific job in preparing our virtual campus for openness.

Being part of the faculty and not part of the OLT team, I’m not fully knowledgeable of all the work that has been done there, but I can speak of perceptions, which is most of the times what in the end matters. And the perceptions are that our campus has undergone (at least) two drastic transformations in the recent years from the standpoint of view of the user:

• The Campus project, a multi-stakeholder initiative, changed our virtual campus from a closed legacy system into a service-oriented architecture that now can interact or incorporate most services and applications existing around, from modules from other LMSs (e.g. a Moodle classroom) to the most common web 2.0 applications (e.g. a WordPress blog). These services can be selected (with the required profile permissions) and set up into a classroom at will. New services and apps take from one to two semesters to be added to the current pool of options, depending on complexity.
• The MyUOC project provided each and every university member with an “i-Homepage” inside the Campus, the flavour of Netvibes or iGoogle thus allowing for a brand new path towards personalization and external information self-integration (i.e. DIY integration of external information, not top-down led).

Fitting the personal into the institutional

So, what have these changes meant? And, especially, how is that new virtual campus coping with my own PLE?

The following image re-visits the infrastructure of a Personal Learning Environment, simplifies it and puts it in relationship with the infrastructure of UOC’s virtual campus (also greatly simplified).

The interaction of a LMS and a PLE [click to enlarge]

Of the virtual campus (painted in green), I listed several web 2.0 applications currently in use. These are the usual suspects: on-site installations of blogs, wikis, fora, repositories, question tools, etc. Of course you do not always (for several reasons) can or want to install something in the campus. Then, you always have the option to install it in your own web server (i.e. your own personal learning environment or, in this case, your personal teaching environment) and either call it with a link from the virtual classroom. But there are better ways to cross the line that separates the walled garden of the virtual campus from the rest of the cyberworld:

• The MyUOC i-homepage, which now can hold information from third parties. Some of this information is retrieved by using widgets especially adapted to the campus. But potentially all kinds of information, apps and services can be embedded by means of iframes. Simple (and not elegant) as this solution may be, it definitely works and lets any user (i.e. me) to add information without bothering or requiring anyone to code anything. I’m currently using this page to collect in there my academic schedule on a Google Calendar, the dropbox account I use(d) to share huge MSc thesis documents and datasets with an student of mine living in Panama, Google Docs with a collectively edited and authored ongoing book, or the teaching blogs that I installed in my own site but for teaching purposes and to be used by campus students..
• The Wikispaces wiki: unlike your typical Mediawiki or PmWiki installation, which resides in your LMS (we use these too), you can now use a wikispace which lives outside the campus (i.e. at Wikispaces), though it has been wired to the campus so that the user is automatically kept logged in so they do not have to bother whether they are in or outside. Again, simple as this might sound, it does not only enables installing external applications to your campus, but use external services that may not be available for custom install.
• Third, the nanoblogging project (being implemented in the next two semesters in different phases) will bring StatusNet to the classroom in a first phase. So long, no big news: there is, of course, technical stuff to be done, but it is “only” a matter of installing and wiring tools and classrooms. I’m not trivializing this part, but “conceptually”, there’s no big difference with setting up the first blog. Hopefully, though, in a second and third phase, the idea is to bring the nanoblogging timeline to the MyUOC i-homepage and to make possible an interaction with Twitter. If everything goes well (time, resources, etc.), it should very much look like what was described in The Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) into practice: an example with Twitter , where the boundaries of the virtual campus are totally overridden.

Back to the Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment

At this point, it is necessary to pay back a visit to the concept of the The Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE). Even if still at a very low level and with a lot of effort invested, the LMS I’ve been mainly using for almost 11 years and the PLE I started almost 7 years ago now speak one to each other. They sometimes speak in smoke signals, they sometimes speak like Italians and Spaniards do (each one in their own language, but more or less understanding each other), but speak they do.

Why is this so important?

It took years to journalists and, especially, to news businessmen to understand that the monopoly of news distribution was over, and that there were news streams outside mass media. Part of the crisis media are living today comes from the late understanding (and negation) of that fact, with consequences in job losses, decreased quantity of quality information, negative effects on democracy… you name it.

While journalism is important, I believe that education is even more important… and much more complex. As it happened with news, learning is increasingly happening “out there”. And if blogs were the main tools of “citizen journalism”, PLEs are becoming the tools of out-there-education.

It is my opinion that all the forecasts about the emergence of life-long-learning, informal learning, social learning, etc. are coming true, but are taking place outside of formal education and its walled institutions. And while educational institutions — and their components, including assessment, accreditation and educators — definitely need a dire transformation, they still play a core role in our society.

And it is precisely here, in bridging what is happening in out-there-education with the important socioeconomic role of educational institutions that PLEs can come to the rescue. As we have just shown, PLEs can permeate the waterproof membranes of educational institutions, the brick walls of classrooms. PLEs as personal research portals (PRP) can turn the academic ivory towers into crystal, enabling peeping the inside… and bringing some external light to its dark matters too.

That is why, in my opinion, PLEs are not only learning tools, not only ways to understand learning on the Net or to understand informal learning. In my opinion, PLEs are transforming drivers with an extraordinary potential for change.

This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.

The first part deals with infrastructures and how my PLE is built in the sense of which applications shape it. The second one deals with the information management workflow. The third one puts the personal learning environment in relationship with the university.

Mainstreaming your PLE

If in The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (I): the infrastructure we saw how a PLE could be built, we here explain how can it work. Or, in other words, how the information flows through it and is fixed and transformed.

An observation, though, should be made about the substance and the form of the PLE which, actually, can be translated into two conditions (necessary, not sufficient) for a PLE to be useful to oneself (not talking here about it being “successful” as measured by third parties). If we understand useful as that it serves our purposes in learning more and better, or doing more research and better, then:

• Setting up a PLE means that you really want to learn or do research, and that you’re willing to confront what this means. This basically zeroes in performing the processes of analysis, synthesis, abstraction and critique. That is: read, note, think and write. Many people think that PLEs require a lot of reading or writing. Wrong: it is learning that does.
• Setting up a PLE means that you just built a parallel structure to your usual pencil and paper procedures. Maintaining two channels requires extra work. The more you mainstream and focus in just one platform, the better. I myself found my PLE useful once it became mainstream in the production of my knowledge and network. With rare exceptions (and reducing), everything is on my PLE.

Reading

I would like to make a point before going on with the discussion. While I argue that open publishing (and your PLE fits in this category) should be part of a scholar’s commandments (especially if in a publicly founded university or research centre), I acknowledge that the idea of where to publish (e.g. paper vs. blog) is at least debatable. But concerning reading, I have instead a very strong opinion: RSS feeds let you reach more information and in an easier way. Thus, I have serious doubts whether a knowledge worker can be up-to-date in their discipline and/or be efficient in their information management without the help of an RSS feed reader.

Now, being a scholar, reading is a total priority, even if it sometimes will imply me lagging behind deadlines in other kind of tasks. Of course there are different categories in the things I read, but besides the ones that are strictly personal, reading usually goes first place. So, first things in the morning are e-mail, feed reader and Twitter (some tags and users come in by through the feed reader too) until the morning reading is done or almost done.

The first exercise is to tell things that have to be read “right now” from things that are going to be saved for later. Amongst these, some will be printed or saved in the mp3/mp4 player for the train, or for a quiet moment, and some others will be shifted to the future. In any case, the key thing to do is to read the important things or at least to know what I’ve got pending reading of interest.

Storing

If what I find to be really important, I at least read the abstract+introduction+conclusions and save it on a folder on my hard drive. This is a folder labelled with the main topic (e.g. e-readiness) under a general “readings” folder. This is useful afterwards when writing: you can make Acrobat perform a full text search for a keyword in a whole folder. You don’t have to remind everything: just know you read something about that and that it has to be “somewhere” in those folders.

If the article is read thoroughly, it will go to the bibliographic manager and sometimes even to the blog with a comment or a reflection.

Sometimes what gets to me is not an article, or the article has some extra information worth keeping apart. In that case, the wiki plays its part. For instance, the last edition of Leonard Waverman’s Connectivity Scorecard will be included in my bibliography. Nevertheless, because the datasets have now been made public online, a Connectivity Scorecard entry will be created in the wiki. This is laborious and makes little sense in the short run. In the long run, your list of ICT Indices and ICT Data sources is always up-to-date, you can easily list all the works you’ve read by Leonard Waverman or Kaylan Dasgupta or under the category of e-Readiness or tagged with connectivity scorecard. In the long run, the effort pays back, it far does.

Once you think you’ve more or less scanned a topic, posted about it and created the necessary references, then you can forget about them: you know they’ll be on your blog with the reflections you got at that time and the interlinked references with other works, comments, authors, etc.

I gather information on a double basis:

• things I know 100% I’ll be using, e.g. the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010, a reference in the field of e-Readiness and digital development.
• things I might use somewhen: politics 2.0, for instance, or e-government. Not sure whether I’ll be using them, but likely, as it normally ends up happening. e.g. Last year I wrote a book chapter on Spanish Politics 2.0. During a year and a half I had een gathering info on that topic “just in case” and storing it in my hard drive, putting the main references in the bibliography and saving the rest “for later”. I knew, when I got the proposal to write the chapter, that whatever I got it had to be there. There was a lot of crap, but enough good references to prepare a fair chapter. “Just in case” also works pretty much well to update syllabuses or to prepare non-academic conferences, as they are full of facts and good examples.

What about delicious? I normally use it just for (a) news or (b) applied practices/examples. In other words: information with expiry-dates or that interest me just to build lists. Delicious is useful for me to quickly share resources that need low elaboration.

So, summing up:

• If I find something that seems really relevant, I scan it and store it the best way possible.
• If I you find something that is just probably relevant, I store it under a “tag” in the hard drive and in a way I can later perform brute force searches without crashing my computer (this procedure is diminishing along time and being substituted by the former one and trashing leftovers).

The following chart plots the references entered in the bibliographic manager since it went online (May 2005). Simple as it is, it shows two things: the first one is that despite some irregularities, the average has always been around the 27 new entries per month, which implies how mainstreamed the tool is with my daily work; the second one is that, besides the long-term regular pace, some months are “better” than others and can be easily identified as (a) periods of preparation of papers/speeches and (b) holidays, often used to “catch up” with pending readings.

References entered in the bibliographic manager [click to enlarge]

Sharing

Some of the sharing can be inferred from the storing, as the whole PLE is open (with just a very very few exceptions).

If we follow the information management timeline, some interesting news are shared through Twitter, either directly (using retweets or bit.ly) or indirectly: my Google Shared account directly sends everything to Twitter and everything that goes to delicious is made public at the moment.

As can be seen in the image image in The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (I): the infrastructure, the lifestream or aggregator and FriendFeed collect all the activity from the several applications and services I use (blogs, updates to the wiki and the bibliographic manager, Slideshare, Youtube… not Prezi), being the main difference that FriendFeed gathers “social” information (Facebook, Linkedin, Dopplr) that the aggregator does not.

Talking of which: I still have to find a return for Dopplr and Google Calendar. I think they give a sense of presence (of “realness”) worth keeping. Besides, Google Calendar holds right now three calendars: one gathers the public events I attend; a second one is my teaching schedule (more about this in the third part: The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment: the institutional fit); the third one is the ICT4D Calendar, a collaborative project and an easy way to keep track of ICT4D conferences while also letting others know about them. I’m pretty sure the latter is the most important as, within its limited success, it is a good trial on decentralized collaboration.

Keep reading: The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (III): the institutional fit.

This is a three-part article whose aim is to serve as an update to my work on the personal research portal, as long as to explain yet another practical example of a PLE, something that many found useful at the PLE Conference as a means to embody theoretical ramblings.

The first part deals with infrastructures and how my PLE is built in the sense of which applications shape it. The second one deals with the information management workflow. The third one puts the personal learning environment in relationship with the university.

A PLE digression

During the Spring of 2007 I wrote an article, The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development in which I proposed the concept of the Personal Research Portal as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher — tied to his digital public notebook and personal repository — and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field.

Later that year, in summer, I attended the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It was for me — and for most in there — the first truly web 2.0 enhanced event (as I put it in OII SDP 2007 (Epilogue): Last thoughts about Web Science and Academic Blogging or Why did not Academia came up with Wikipedia), as it was a fantastic exercise to stress the potential of blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, open bibliographic managers or photo and video sharing websites for knowledge sharing and building; and the (personal) discovery of then emerging tools like Twitter, Facebook and Dopplr.

The academic course ended up with the publication of Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems, where, finally, Scott Wilson et al. formally put together what they had been working on in the previous couple of years, but whose origin could at least be traced back to Olivier’s Lifelong Learning: The Need for Portable Personal Learning Environments and Supporting Interoperability Standards.

Summer of 2007 was, I believe, the actual taking off of the PLE. Though many had contributed to its conception (Oleg Liber, Scott Wilson, Graham Attwell, Mark Van Harmelen or Stephen Downes, to name just a few), I personally consider the publication of Wilson’s article the coming of age of the concept, and most especially because many interesting things would happen since in an explosive way, from the “massive” adoption of the concept to the “massive” adoption of Web 2.0 tools in formal and informal learning (as “massive” as we consider ourselves and our reflections on ICT and education “mainstream”, of course).

Managing the complex

Since 2003 — when this blog was born — and especially since mid 2007, things have changed a lot. Mainly three things have radically changed the information-sharing landscape:

• More people sharing information on the Net, boosted by the popularization of nanoblogging and social networking sites;
• more ways to share information on the Net, boosted by the “cloud” alternatives to desktop applications;
• a likely improvement in everyone’s (including me) digital skills, cause and consequence (make a virtue of necessity) of the former two.

According to that, my personal learning environment more or less looks now like this:

Infrastructure of a Personal Learning Environment [click to enlarge]

I used to rather call it personal research portal, as it had an explicit goal in (scientific) outreach and communication that most PLE do not. I’ll here stick to PLE for the sake of clarity and consensus.

Instead of wiring all the services I use between them, I chose to present it in a more sequential way (more on this in the second part on information management): information acquisition (input, what I get, in red), storage and processing (own self, in gray), diffusion and communication (output, what I create, in blue). Of course we cannot sequence information management this way: many tools are used for several purposes, processing is also a part of diffusion, etc. But I think it puts things in a clearer way.

The personal website — ICTlogy.net — is, of course, the core of the whole thing. I wrote back in December 2009 that:

What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.

I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.

If anything, my vision of this statement has strengthened. I am, for instance, seriously considering shifting from Slideshare to iSpring. Or, at least, doing both: be present in Slideshare but upload and share in my site my own presentations in flash format.

This explains not only why the personal website (the areas shadowed in gray) is not only a huge hub where everything at least passes through, but why most information is embedded in there, especially all my own production. The blogs, the wiki, the bibliographic manager and the repository all are personal installations that surround my digital persona (here pictured as “about me”). Even the e-mail accounts, though managed with G-Mail, are my own domain’s. Moreover, the site also hosts a lifestream that works as Friendfeed collecting most my activity, but storing it on my own site.

Some reflections

First of all, it is important to note how relevant RSS has become as a vehicle to exchange information, but how embedding still is the option to present information, leaving APIs just a marginal role in the whole picture.

Linked to this, it is becoming increasingly industrious to keep record of your own production (whatever its quality). The result of this is that your digital persona and even your e-portfolio is scattered all over the Internet. This has consequences on the perception people have on you, thus consequences in how you are evaluated (knowledge, competences, behaviour). The forces that drive you to being present in the relevant places are opposite to the forces you have to apply to keep your things straightened up and under control. RSS feeds, open APIs and embedding help, and a personal website (including domain) is, in my opinion, becoming mandatory for every knowledge worker.

On the other hand, I would also like to stress the role of web analytics tools. If used for something more than quantitative measuring (pointless in my case, as visitors to my site come one by one and never in herds), these tools provide precious information if monitored carefully. Among others:

• Discover kindred souls that visited you and you hadn’t heard of. Of course, this fact deeply depends of you keeping in topic.
• Discover comments on your opinions and work.
• Discover works that have been listed besides your own, and that you hadn’t heard of.
• By construction, discover others’ ongoing work and projects and, sometimes, even be able to take part in them.

Keep reading: The Workings of a Personal Learning Environment (II): the information workflow.

Online strategies and New Business Models: the Wikimedia phenomenon
Kul Wadhwa, Managing Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia

Wikimedia is about the community, about volunteering. Since the project kicked off in 2001, there have been created 13 million articles in 271 languagesw, 17 million pages, 325 million edits, 330 million visits monthly, 100,000 active contributors (edit 5 times a month at least), over 50 books published on the Wikimedia phenomena, etc. All coordinated by the 27 world chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation, though with only 35 employees.

If we look not at what’s in there, but what people is looking for (visits to the website), some Wikipedias may already be shifting from encyclopedic core to more topical and current events content. On the contrary, though, 1/3 of the hits of the Spanish Wikipedia deals with science and technology content.

Besides current events or news, local content is increasingly searched for. There is also an increase of geotagged content on Wikipedia, thus the interest in local content. As anecdote, it can be said that the second Wikipedia ever created was the Catalan Viquipèdia.

Management model

• Provide physical home (servers)
• Basic rules
• Leave the community work and grow on its own

Power shift to the citizen

• Technology: insfrastructure, tools, open source
• Cultural Movement: free culture (Linux, Apache), free knowledge
• License structure: GNU FDL, Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA)

All in all, the question was that anyone could contribute and the result would be open to everyone.

How do we take care of the community: transparency, trust, thankfulness, respect, responsiveness.

Business Model

Servant-leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve. Collaboration, communication, culture.

Create a platform, let other people build (i.e. Mediawiki). It happens everywhere: Google, Apple, Amazon, FaceBook, etc. This also applies to Education, as everyone has something to bring on the table. You have to figure out how to make people that know be involved in the process.

Small “workforce” that can adapt to market changes very quickly, plus a virtual larger “workforce”, using the community as research and development.

You have to figure out what you’re good at, and forget about controlling the whole value change. Do not try and do everything. Networks form to address needs: you have to figure out where you fill into that.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: would your model be different were the Wikimedia Foundation be Wikimedia “for profit” Corporation? It depends on your project, as everyone is different and there is not a unique model, but leveraging the community might still apply. You definitely have to focus in your goal and where you can contribute best to achieve it. If you’re running a talent based project, you definitely have to share some of the wealth in it. Talent goes where it is appreciated most.

Q: Is it a must to have a professional core? A: It really depends on what you want to achieve. There is definitely not “a” model.

Silvia Bravo: where do we start from? A: Figure out what your goals are and find who’s your champion. Once the project is started, things become easier, but the difficult thing is to start up the project, and the role of the champion is crucial here. Then, you need to create something that people can build things on top of. Make sure you have a clear goal, find out what tools will you be needing and get a champion to promote the project.

Q: how do you deal with security hazards/attacks? A: It is very important to have a clear and shared framework (linked to your goals) that everybody can relate to. And the system works the same way.

Q: what’s the physical structure like? A: only 20 servers [guess I got that right], as most information is only text. But the challenge is how to keep up with changes and still being able to bring the relevant information, which increasingly comes in rich media (photo, sound, video, etc.). That’s why Wikimedia Foundation engages in partnerships with the corporate sector to be ahead of the future.

Llorenç Valverde: how do we engage the community, and invite everyone to add value? A: Culture is the biggest problem. The way collaboration and sharing ideas happens varies a lot depending on the culture, understanding culture not only at the country level, but also at the company level. E.g. if you’re a newcomer to a firm, you might have brilliant ideas but you might not be (self)legitimate to share them openly. Culture is doubtless the toughest part of all.

Llorenç Valverde: so the starting point is to share information within the organization? A: Certainly. Add everybody in the process.

More information

People are always going to want to share their knowledge on the web, an interview with Kul Wadhwa.

My reflections, though not explicitly stated, are more targeted towards researchers and knowledgeable people — to whom the Web 2.0 has at last provided a voice on their own despite their affiliation — and to knowledge workers and knowledge intensive institutions in general.

I here below translate my part into English and reproduce the full document and the “headlines” of all other contributors.

Social media will channel activity towards what is relevant: the portfolio

In the coming years we will be closing the circle and be back to personal and institutional websites, though these will in any way look like the ones we visited in the dawn of the World Wide Web.

We have performed a necessary initiation journey taken by the hand of social media, so that we could be introduced to the new and growing possibilities of the Web. Blogs and wikis showed us what was possible in a bi-directional Web, where content and even services creation could be decentralized and exit institutions. Social networking sites added the human factor to the network we had recently created: bi-directionality became multi-directionality, multi-diffusion. Blogs created the bourgeoisie of the Internet, and social networking sites opened it up and democratized it for the rest of the society.

But it is as easy to use social media as it is difficult to manage them and make them work for out benefit. It is likely that whoever wants or has to have a reputation on the Internet just cannot keep having tentacles without a visible head. Social media must be funnels that lead to us: we neither can manage chaor eternally, nor can we expect that whoever looks for us finds us or reconstruct us amongst this total maze of confusion.

This does not mean that we are not present in the relevant channels: it is there where we will mainly interact. But the critical mass of our digital persona must be as near as possible to our self.

What we do, what we are must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.

I plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.

Predictions for Social Media in 2010

Alfonso Alcantara: Consultor y coach en desarrollo profesional y empleo 2.0
“En 2010 las redes sociales definitivamente serán las autopistas de las ideas.”

Jacobo Álvarez: Director Negocio Grupo Intercom y Socio en Multiplica
“El 2010 el año en el que, al menos en el móvil, la suma de geolocalización y redes personales y profesionales nos liberen del exceso de información y nos ayude a acceder a información más relevante de nuestro entorno”

Jose Luis Antúnez: Fundador de YouAre y Coorganizador de Evento Blog España
“El real-time es la extrapolación de la vida real a la web. Y en la vida real se hace dinero vendiendo y pagando cosas”.

Enrique Burgos: Responsable de Marketing Relacional de Unidad Editorial
“Solo demostrando el valor que aporta a las marcas (económico & imagen) se lograra una mayor comprensión por las altas direcciones de las empresas”

Cesar Calderón: Socio Director en Autoritas Consulting
“2010 será el año en el que las administraciones públicas descubran los Social Media y comiencen a conversar con los ciudadanos”

Marc Cortés: Socio-Director RocaSalvatella y Profesor Marketing Electrónico (ESADE)
“Dejaremos de hablar de Social Media y empezaremos a hablar de Social Business”.

Adolfo Corujo y todo el equipo de Llorente & Cuenca: Director Senior Llorente&Cuenca
“Para el usuario, 2010 será el año de… La explosión de la búsqueda en Tiempo Real”

Roberto Carreras: Consultor de Comunicación y RRPP
“La web en tiempo real, que durante 2009 dio sus primeros pasos como fenómeno, vivirá en 2010 su consolidación.”

Fernando de la Rosa: Socio y fundador de Seis Grados
“2010 es un año de re-invenciones: el principio de nuevos mercados y la agonía de otros”.

Roger Domingo: Director Editorial Deusto / Gestión 2000/ Alienta / CEAC
“La incorporación del mundo de la empresa a las redes sociales conllevará también un incremento de la publicidad en las mismas, lo cual pondrá en peligro la tan deseada “conversación cluetrainiania””

Fernado Fegido: Director de Negocio Digital de Caja Navarra
“El año 2010 será otro año en el que deberemos de seguir evangelizando y capacitando a muchos responsables de Márketing y Comunicación”

Tristán Elósegui: Responsable de Marketing Digital de Canal+ y Organizador del The Monday Reading Club
“La crisis va a favorecer el crecimiento de los medios sociales”

Ricard Espelt: Regidor de Nuevas Tecnologías de Copons
“La ciudadanía, cada vez más consciente del poder de las redes sociales, va a provocar pequeñas “revoluciones” en el devenir de la política española”

Marek Fodor: Emprendedor y Business Angel del sector tecnológico
“Bajará notablemente el crecimiento de twitter, comparado con el año 2009”.

Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez: Responsable de Comunidad del BBVA
“Se dará el caso de comunidades enteras que renuncian a las redes sociales, que se bautizarán como “Amish digitales””

Albert García Pujadas: CEO Nikodemo
“El video se impondrá como formato de comunicación habitual y como soporte publicitario de primer orden”

Xavier Guell: Weyoose y Coorganizador de Cava&Twitts
“Adiós humo, hola servicio”

Javier Martín: Blogger y emprendedor
Es la hora de vender!

Jose Antonio del Moral: CEO de Alianzo
“Volveremos a hablar de Web 2.0 y no tanto de social media. En el fondo todo es social y no sólo los media”

Ícaro Moyano: Director Comunicación tuenti
“¿GRPs? Mejor recomendaciones”

Sebastian Muriel: Director de red.es
“Será el año en el que no se dejará de hablar del Social Media en los medios tradicionales”

José Luis Orihuela: Profesor de la Universidad de Navarra
“La red y sus aplicaciones se vivirán cada vez más como una experiencia móvil”

Alberto Ortiz de Zárate: Director de Atención Ciudadana en Gobierno Vasco
“Empezaremos a hacer un uso inteligente de las redes sociales. En ese camino, la relevancia se desplazará de las herramientas hacia las estrategias de comunicación”

Ismael Peña-López: Profesor Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
“Abogo por una construcción del portafolio, por una vuelta a la web personal o institucional, utilizando los social media como un juego de espejos que nos refleje allí donde debamos estar también presentes”

Genis Roca: Socio Director RocaSalvatella
“En resumen, las palabras clave para este 2010 serán: Indicadores, Gestión y Resultados”.

Esteban Trigos: Marketing Innovator Director – Double You
“las marcas empezarán a incorporar en sus mensajes un nuevo giro a la hora de comportarse: serán más sociales

Marc vidal: CEO de Cink
“Será el momento de los Net estrategy por encima de los Managers de comunidad”.

More information

• Predicciones para Social Media en 2010 (documento colaborativo), original post by Marc Cortés
• Social Media Predictions 2010, the document in Scribd
• Social Media Predictions 2010, the document for download (, 571 KB)
• Preddiciones sobre Social Media para 2009, the predictions for 2009, Scribd document

Parallel session: Trends and advances before the digital divide: assessment systems and good practices
Moderator: Concepción Colomer Revuelta, Subdirector at the Oficina de Planificación Sanitaria and Director del Observatorio de Salud de la Mujer del Ministerio de Sanidad y Política Social

Digital and informational divides in a context of digital, cultural, cognitive and generational convergence
Marcelo D’Agostino, Consultant in Knowledge Management, Organización Panamericana de la Salud

Marcelo D’Agostino believes that the digital digital will shrink, necessarily, as the Internet won’t make steps backwards [he seems to forget that the digital divide is actually widening, especially if we take into account the quality of access, namely, broadband access, and what you can or cannot do with that different quality of access].

Advise to bridge the digital divide:

• Don’t be intimidated by technical jargon
• Don’t be afraid of technology
• Nobody is an expert in everything
• Trust first your capacity and then apply technologies
• Be careful where you look for information

Benefits of ICTs for Public Health: a better link between patients and professionals; better and life-long training.

Open access to health and medical information: a challenge before the digital divide
Helena Martín Rodero, Head of the Sección Bibliotecas Biosanitarias de la Universidad de Salamanca

Raghavendra Gadagkar: open-access more harm than good in developing world (published in Nature, comment by Peter Suber) stating the rich world patronising the poor world, in the sense that rich ones might be more interested in poor ones reading rather than publishing.

We are witnessing a crisis in the system of scientific diffusion, that has lead to the creation of the Open Access movement and several international declarations to foster scientific publishing in open access journals (gold access) or scientific self-archiving in open access repositories (green access).

Open access is compatible with peer-review, professional quality, prestige, preservation, intellectual property, profit, priced add-ons and print (originally in Open access to the scientific journal literature, by Peter Suber.

Access to knowledge will necessarily help to bridge the digital divide, and open access publications and repositories is a way to enable a better access to knowledge.

Web 2.0 and Medicine
Dídac Margaix Arnal, Librarian at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

New generations (digital natives) have been born with new technologies and these are no strange to them. Have different skills towards technology and information, which they manage in different ways.

We might be in an age similar to the Renaissance, where technology feeds cultural and social change, and culture and society feed technological change.

Three kinds of Web 2.0 sites

• The web as the platform: use the web instead of the desktop (e.g. Zoho)
• Remix the web: use the web to mix different content (e.g. Google Maps)
• The social web: it is users what counts, not visits. Users add value to the site (e.g. YouTube)

Medicine 2.0: use of a set of web tools by health professionals applying the principles of open source, open access, etc. It is different from e-Medicine, that is applying ICTs in health issues. There has been an inflexion point that has put humans into technology, from just ICTs to the dimension of community. It is a matter not of technology but of participation.

Some factors:

• “Suppormediation”: support and mediation by non-professionals (in Spanish: Apomediación)
• Collaboration
• Transparency

There increasingly are websites that provide health information on the Internet. We should prescribe more information than pills (or, at least, as much information as pills).

Summing up: new agents, new tools, collaboration, personalization, training.

Internet and Health
David Novillo Ortiz, Agencia de Calidad del Sistema Nacional de Salud. Ministerio de Sanidad y Política social

Related to health, increasingly people get their information from the Internet and less from TV, and more from blogs. In general, e-mail, search engines and social networking sites have entered with strength into the information landscape.

Search for health information in the Internet has gone from 19% in 2003 to 54% in 2008 (Spain, % of total Internet users). There is a gender gap where women score 10 points higher than men, probably due to their role as the person at home that cares for the family members.

In April 2007, the same search terms in 4 different search engines produced only 0.6% of overlap (only 0.6% of all results were the same in the 4 search engines). We should be careful about that, as the information that search engines produce is, by any means, the same one ever.

Indeed, we trust more the people we know that the ones we don’t, that’s why Google Social Search might be adding a lot of value as it will bring personal context to people’s searches.

On the other hand, we can access certified/verified health websites whose information is backed by the reputation of the institutions that publish those websites. E.g. excelenciaclinica.net, a metasearch engine that crawls the best health websites in Spanish.

More information

• Gestión del Conocimiento y TIC en la salud – #5 II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, by Francesc Gómez Morales
• Chan, Arunachalam, Kirsop (2009). Open access: a giant leap towards bridging health inequities, via @KevinDonovan
• A collection of literature on Open Access
• Reader on Open Access for Development

But the fact that the web is increasingly (a) providing best connectivity, access, searchability/findability, ease of use and capabilities of storage, and (b) more social tools so that people can collaborate, has made the debate around video-lectures worth revisiting.

A simple search provides a good bunch of articles worth giving them a look:

• Abt & Barry (2007) The Quantitative Effect of Students Using Podcasts in a First Year Undergraduate Exercise Physiology Module
• Cascaval, Fogler, Abrams & Durham (2008) Evaluating the Benefits of Providing Archived Online Lectures to In-class Math Students
• Whatley & Ahmad (2008) Using Video to Record Summary Lectures to Aid Students’ Revision
• Chiu, Lee & Yang (2006) A Comparative Study of Post-class Lecture Video Viewing
• Cardall, Krupat & Ulrich (2008) Live Lecture Versus Video-Recorded Lecture: Are Students Voting With Their Feet?
• O’Donoghue, Hollis & Hoskin (2007) Lecture recording: Help or hinder in developing a stimulating learning environment?
• Flores & Savage (2007) Student Demand for
  Streaming Lecture Video: Empirical Evidence from Undergraduate Economics Classes

The results from the previous papers can be summarized as follows:

• If the recorded lecture is just a substitute for the live thing, it might not make a difference or, in other words, the impact might be null.
• But the recorded lecture can be more engaging than the live lecture, as it allows for stops and fast-forwards, pauses to check other information, etc.
• The video-lecture can also enable people to attend lectures they would or could not attend, and even make them more efficient in their attendance (see previous point)
• The taped lecture can also be a trigger for teamwork, collaboration and other social learning methodologies, methodologies that, indeed, are normally not used in live lectures because of their (a) unidirectionality (b) time constraints and (c) crowded classrooms — let alone shyness from some attendees that just cannot speak/interact in public
• If students are more engaged, comfortable and willing to collaborate, the impact of having recorded lectures either as supporting materials or as a substitute for the “real thing” can end up having a positive impact and increasing academic performance in relationship with students not using taped lectures but attending classes

Educator.com

With this in mind, I happened to meet online the founders of Educator.com and had the chance to have a guest access to the site — while they invited me too to write this little piece about Educator.com.

Educator.com is a collection of academic lectures [...] helping students that do not have ready access to great education because of geographic location or socioeconomic status. Educator’s instructors are all experienced college professors and guide students through an innovative two video interface that simulates a one-to-one learning environment. In other words, people at Educator.com have put together good professors in front of the camera and taped their lectures, including their slides, whiteboard notes, syllabuses, readings, etc.

At first glance — which sticks at second and further “glances” — the quality of the materials is impressive (see, for instance, what’s being prepared to learn chemistry or Calculus BC), treated with most taste and sensitivity: content is good and is meticulously presented. Most materials include a video of the professor plus his slides and/or whiteboard, while keeping navigation very easy along the syllabus which features subtitles and time codes. Videos add up some quick notes and the possibility to comment them.

That said, and going back to what we stated before about video lectures, Educator.com makes a very good companion to either reinforce or to (maybe) substitute traditional lectures, and I see a lot of potentials in models like Educator.com’s.

Cons of video-lectures?

In my opinion, the cons — necessarily — go in the same line as the “accompanying measures” that the afore mentioned researchers already stated in their papers: while content can constitute a core and a good one, it is context and enablers what will make of a video-lecture a (potential) success — besides the incontestable fact of being able to reach a content you wouldn’t otherwise if not being able to attend live lectures, of course.

A first aspect is exercises, so that oneself can test a specific level of knowledge acquisition. This is something that’s already planned (though not still implemented) in Educator.com and that just seldom is seen in other academic lectures’ repositories.

Related to this, possibility of feedback or guidance should naturally follow. Being myself a professor teaching online, once content is made available, our added value is, simply stated, (a) guidance through path setting and (b) provision of specific feedback.

Which leads me to the third aspect: in distance learning, syllabuses, learning paths, etc. are a must. Much is done in this sense at Educator.com and much more is likely to be found there would their project work, reach a critical mass and enable them to put as many courses as possible.

Of course, it is not only a matter of setting up a learning path, but also help in blueprinting one’s own curriculum. Being able to create one’s own “playlists” (something that other content — not lectures — repositories allow) or be able to go offline by feeding your mp4 player would be interesting add ons to the project and to the freedom of the student.

In the end, sites like Educator.com should enable the student to create their own e-portfolios or, to follow the actual trend, their own personal learning environments.

These personal learning environments would, of course, interact with other students so that a learning community can emerge, be it to share hints, materials, doubts or, in the best scenario, to build together their own learning.

Summing up: initiatives like Educator.com take the best of technology to capture live lectures and make them available to a very broad public. I don’t think just taped lectures are “education”, but:

• They can be complemented with more content, context, guidance, classmates, etc. so that the resulting mix is a real and richest learning experience
• They definitely stress the weaknesses of the traditional lecturing style, challenging the suitability of such methods, and asking them for an urgent update… maybe a blended model were lectures can be supplied by someone like Educator.com and leave live meetings for debates, seminars or something were face-to-face makes more sense and ads real value.

See also e-research tag.

A collaborative experience to visualize social networks
Tíscar Lara, Mariluz Congosto

Blog analysis based on journalists that have a blog, as a middle ground between pro and personal. Of special interest how is the identity built: Identity building: domain name, about section, personal photography, affiliation, etc.

The network of blogs gets complicated with other Web 2.0 services. There’s a need to manage the increasing data with a model: Barriblog.

The model is based on two axes — content affinity and intensiveness of relationship — and measures links, conversations/comments and citations, adding them up in a relationship index.

Improvements on the model: time series, how have other web 2.0 applications (e.g. Twitter) impacted on blog usage and blog networking, etc.

How to visualize?

• Content
• Time
• Maps
• Relationships

(see also: Gathering of visualization tools)

Visualizing Transnationality
José Luis Molina

How can we map transnationality? Focusing on flows; focusing on active contacts with people with the same origin; focusing in the geographical distribution of all active contacts.

For instance, a visualization of Chinese immigration in the Barcelona metropolitan area shows that there’s more relationship with the country of origin (China) or the US, than within immigrants; that immigrants mainly settle in Barcelona and have poor relationship with Catalan rural areas; and that within Barcelona, they move around relatively few places. Visualization allows immediate glance to these facts while raw data does not.

Many ethical issues arise in an ether that covers all, where everything we do is registered/tracked.

Use visualization to make better research questions, to get qualitative observations after quantitative data.

NOTE: difficult session where to take notes, as everything was so… visual.

The round table was cleverly chaired by Juan José Calderón and participated by Julen Iturbe, Tíscar Lara and I.

After a first exposition from each of the participants about the topic of the title, Juan José Calderón would drop his questions on the table and then they’d be more or less answered or commented by some or all of us. What follows are the notes I took during the event, unedited, uncut, as raw as they came. They are nor complete or comprehensive, so important data might be missing. My apologies to the other speakers for not make justice to their insights here — fortunately, the event was taped and will hopefully be soon released online.

Tíscar Lara

Should we be talking about teaching innovation or about student/learning innovation? Isn’t it the student the one that is innovating? Where are people socializing one to each other? Where is learning innovation happening? What’s the role of expanded education? Of informal learning? How do we integrate these phenomena?

Isn’t there a crisis in the segregation of roles between teachers and students? How do teachers learn? Aren’t teachers also learners, and learners that are learning on the Net?

Ismael Peña-López

We’ve been living in a world based on transaction costs: enterprises (the transaction costs of production and distribution), political parties (the transaction costs of direct democracy), schools and universities (the transaction costs of gathering all knowledge)… The Internet cuts down to almost zero most costs of transaction related to knowledge management. And, hence, the need of intermediaries: end of some industries? end of political parties? end of universities?

A new role for knowledge workers: to monitor knowledge, to hub it towards third parties, to enable these third parties and empower them in knowledge management terms.

Julen Iturbe

We’re living a shift from a lab that acts as a simulator for entrepreneurs towards real engagement in the economy and real entrepreneurship. The student is empowered with a more active role enabled by this crisis of intermediation and the fall of transaction costs.

• A change in the idea of student: responsible of their own learning processes. There are no handbooks, no syllabuses, etc.. It is the student who defines the syllabus and seeks their own learning resources.
• The teacher is no more a teacher but a tutor, and normally an entrepreneur themselves.
• The classroom has no more sense in this model, especially as a physical concept that increasingly implies constraints (of time and space). Students can design physical spaces themselves according to their own needs.
• What’s the sense of time? How do we measure the amount of hours required for a specific “subject”? How do we fit all the hours spent — offline and online — working on a project/subject?

No maps for these territories?

Juan José Calderón: there are new territories for which we have no maps [a statement which reminds me of William Gibson's No maps for these territories]. What should we do? Are we in a crisis?

Julen Iturbe: there are (new) generations that feel comfortable enough without maps. That even feel uneasy when the whole path is paved and would rather have more freedom to define their own ways.

Crisis? There’s increasing evidence that students know more than teachers or experts at large.

Ismael Peña-López: I see three “evolution” patterns (simplified):

• Darwin: species change as better phenotypes survive and worse phenotypes extinct
• Lamarck: species change by adapting themselves to the environment
• Meteorite: a meteorite directly kills species by overturning the landscape and some species survive and reign

We have to assume that a meteorite will fall on some “species” (e.g. paper journals, the distribution of CDs). And that some other “species” might just die out and leave no trace (one or two generations of “digital immigrants”). But we have to work the Lamarckian path so to minimize casualties: learn to learn, learn how to map territories or live in unmapped ones, teach competences that enable skills acquisition, bridge old an new… No revolution but evolution.

Tíscar Lara: think with a mobile phone logic: traditionally, switches have one and only one purpose (turn on the radio, switch on the lights, connect the washing machine). But mobile phones have keys with several purposes or functions. And trying to teach each and every function of a single key is useless. We have to teach the rationale behind the multifunction switch. There is no need to know the whole map of features, but learn how to take decisions with incomplete information, and learning in the process.

Put the focus on the purpose, and then discover the tools that can help me in achieving this purpose. And this is risky, and we are risk-averse, reluctant to change. But we have to learn to live with risk and failure. And we have to acknowledge that we are living in critical times, which will help in surviving this crisis.

Collaborative networking

Juan José Calderón: Are we ready for collaborative networking? Can we produce open content?

Julen Iturbe: content will increasingly be open, and this is an unstoppable trend. We should, nevertheless, put the stress on the difference between information and knowledge. In social networking sites the focus is in the “social”, and it is not about content, but networked people. And we learn not through content, but through people: content (publications and so) are but means to identify and reach people.

A problem with the actual system of acknowledgement of diffusion of science is that it is not related with the reality. The practitioner and the scholar do not share the same agoras where to exchange knowledge, and open publications seem to be bridging this chasm.

Ismael Peña-López: we are prepared to collaborate and teamwork and is has historically been this way. The problem is that we are assigning two different goals (diffusion and assessment) to the same tool: journals/papers/essays.

Open content has made diffusion quick and free, and creates tensions with the other goal: assessment. We should focus on assessment methodologies, which are dragging collaborative work as we do not know how to assess it (or are not able to).

Tíscar Lara: we have forgotten how to collaborate and teamwork. And we have to teach again how to, teach how to get over learning routines, already known and comfortable to be carried on.

On the other hand, scholarly journals have played havoc on knowledge diffusion in two ways: On the one hand, they are more focused towards assessment/accreditation than to diffusion. On the other hand, it does not catch knowledge that is produced outside of the system.

Indeed, we should acknowledge all the effort to produce and publish/diffuse knowledge made outside of the traditional/mainstream means, and use it to give credit.

Next steps?

Juan José Calderón: how to go on? next step? what is going to happen?

Julen Iturbe: use the judo philosophy: benefit from the energy and novelty that the student is bringing in, use the “difference” to approach the “different” (the new practices of the younger students).

Ismael Peña-López: we should try not to do the same things in different ways, but novelties should come with no disruptions. An option could also be radically innovative changes but in controlled and piloted projects, in just part of the subject, in just part of the traditional activities, in parallel lines (the revolution within).

Two key aspects for this approach to succeed:

• the sandbox: a place where to experiment without blowing up everything if it fails
• the wildcard: a person, or a team, whose only purpose is to be available to help others’ innovation, with relevant information on state of the art instructional technology and methodologies, being able to set up a “sandbox” in hours/days, etc.

Tíscar Lara: promote “full-contact”, because of the idea of contact, of hands-on. Try to bring back emotions and personal interests into the classroom. Try to avoid knowing our students once they’re given their marks… way too late for corrections. Build spaces where to just meet, as persons.

And the web 2.0 (blogs, social networking sites, etc.) do provide valuable tools to make this contact happen, to build affective links and emotional learning. And, by this, break the artificial rivalry between teachers and students, and amongst students and colleagues themselves.

See also:

Julen Iturbe: Innovación Educativa = Bronca.

See also e-research tag.

Open Science and expanded authority
Antonio Lafuente

Open Science

What is open science? Can science not be open? Are we the product of the scientific revolution or is it the scientific revolution a product of the modern era?

The scientific revolution during the XVII and XVIII centuries was not about a dire change in methodology, but opening the process and results of science, making them public and transparent, opening knowledge to many. And it does seem now that we’re revisiting that era again, threatened by the menace of a closure of science.

During these centuries, a new character appears in science: the fact. And, with it, quantification and measurement of phenomena. But then the possibility appears too to register and appropriate knowledge through intellectual property rights. This leads to a process of privatization of knowledge (and universities…).

Threatening knowledge

We live in a Damoclesian era (Moran), scared masses are easier to lead/manage.

On the one hand, there are increasingly powerful lobbying activities that include positioning “experts” in supposedly independent scientific committees, with manifest conflict of interests. Neutrality, thus, is at stake.

Second, secrecy is a growing practice of which there’s evidence to be dragging the efficiency of the practice of science.

The crisis of peer review, affecting the “market” of scientific reputation, which, at its turn, affects tenures, prizes, grants… and indeed most policy-making and decision-taking depends on expertise and reputation.

Endogamy of citation procedures creates a resonance where most articles state the same discoveries but rely, aggregately, in just a few of them. Thus, there is few practice and experimentation and most (vague) citation and repetition of preceding literature, reinforcing — instead of testing or refuting — ungrounded (or poorly grounded) discoveries.

The speed of times also plays havoc on the slow path that science needs.

Uncertainty — or risk, according to Ulrich Beck — also requires more open and collaborative science, as the complex is too difficult to handle by few scientist working together.

Examples of Open Science

Innocentive: a community “to broadcast problems”. Innocentive has put into practice disperse and multidisciplinary talent.

Scott Page: The Difference, with examples of “why 1+1 is not 2″, or how to join efforts in solving problems.

The US Patent System: Not only the system has to grant patents, but research the prior art of the submitted patent application. But the prior art is so huge, that it just cannot be tracked. To solve this, a peer-to-patent project has been created: when a patent is submitted, it is published and whoever is affected by it (i.e. has some prior rights to what the patent claims) can object to that new patent application.

Electrosensibilidad: 13,000,000 Europeans state being electrosensible, meaning that electrostatic waves disable people to work and even live comfortably. But this “disease” is not acknowledged as so. A citizen platform has been created continent wide to share knowledge in order to define the symptoms, the consequences and force governments to acknowledge this disease.

Open Access: is a claim from scientist to recover an image of people working for the common good. The idea is that all knowledge publicly funded should be made public — and not transferred to private hands by giving away intellectual property rights e.g. to publishers. Besides moral issues, open access pays back both economically and scientifically (in citations, publishing impact, etc.).

How can eResearch contribute to enhance Research?
Ismael Peña-López

Please see How can eResearch contribute to enhance Research?

Q & A

Adolfo Estalella: It is an acknowledged truth that most collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Linux) are run by minorities, though there might be a huge community around them. Is it a problem of values? or what? Antonio Lafuente: Yes, it is a matter of values. Another issue is that authority cannot be automatized and requires curation. In an open review system, there’ll be more transparency and less probability to trick. And technology can enable this. On the other hand, there are several evidences where multitudes can produce quality.

Adolfo Estallella: but, will everyone review everything they read? how can we engage readers of open content to review, without explicit incentives, e.g. the papers they read? Antonio Lafuente: Maybe we should acknowledge and accredit comments and reviews, so that there is an incentive making them.

My part of the seminar will give a practical insight into eResearch — or Enhanced Research —, a concept that meets in the same crossroads as Open Science, Science 2.0 and e-Science do. Unlike what is generally believed, I don’t think about eResearch or Science 2.0 (the two more neighbouring approaches) as opposite to “traditional” science, but as a complement, as a next step, as an enhancement as the name itself implies. Of course, the more an enhancement is mainstreamed, the more it is likely not to enhance but to transform the enhanced subject. Thus, I believe that the Internet brings an inflexion in the practice of Science (and all knowledge-related practices — dozens of them), and that it is only a matter of time to see how new literacies are a must to keep on with such practices.

That said, the presentation begins with a (very) simplified scheme of a researcher’s timeline — again, the extrapolation into other knowledge-based jobs is almost immediate —, from having an idea to seeing it published on a peer reviewed academic journal, and including (some of) the steps the researcher usually goes through.

The timeline is then complemented — enhanced — by some “2.0″ practices that can potentially help the researcher (the knowledge worker) in their work. One of the key points to stress here is that for this potential to (a) materialize and (b) have a positive return of investment, it is strictly necessary to mainstream the “2.0″ practices in the researcher’s everyday life. At least in a higher degree (e.g. 80%).

For instance: this post is but my own guidelines to impart the seminar, which exist not in paper;the presentation that follows is the one I will be using; and the reference to my bibliographic manager feeds the database with the bibliographies I work with, the online repository of my works and my online CV; hence the only “added” effort is uploading the zipped file of the presentation.

More information

• Citation information and downloads of the presentation
• e-Research: oportunidades y desafíos para las ciencias sociales, official website of the seminar series
• The personal research portal, collection of works (of mine) in the field of eResearch
• Research Blogs and Blogging for Science Diffusion, (non comprehensive) collection of works (by several authors) in the field of blogging and science in particular, and eResearch in general
• This event in Facebook

I want to thank Adolfo Estalella, Elisenda Ardèvol and all the Mediacciones research group for the idea of setting up this series of seminars — thanking (or blaming) them for inviting me, this falls on the audience.

NOTE: to comfortably browse the presentation in Prezi.com, open it in a new window, click once in the presentation, and use Page Up and Page Down to move along “slides”.