The Ed Techie

References are like airport security checks

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht>

This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?).

I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see:

1. To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse.
2. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author (they can't make up references or misrepresent them), and also promotes knowledge sharing.

The first reason, that of acknowledgement, is obviously valid. But in an online context this is achieved by linking - the link is the acknowledgement, nothing else is required. And indeed, proper acknowledgement is one of the cultural norms of blogging, twitter, etc. We don't have problems with acknowledgement.

But in compiling the references section for my book, I was struck again by the redundancy of official referencing systems. You want to know where a book was published? Really? Isn't Amazon enough? You need a full reference for a quote when the quote itself is the reference in Google? Is an accessed date for every online reference really necessary? 

But I'm a good boy and I have a properly structured reference section of around 230 sources. It seems especially strange as most of my references are online, so I have to find a way of structuring the link into a recognised format, so something like "As Anderson notes.." becomes "Anderson, C. (2008) ‘Freemium math: what’s the right conversion percentage?’ <http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-w.html> [Accessed 11^th February 2011]". I'm not sure what additional information is conveyed in the second version of this.

This then goes offline into a printed book, fair enough, and will then go back online. But what bugs me is the supposed supremacy of print in this. For an online reference of a journal article, the URL is not sufficient but rather the full journal reference is required, because that legitimises it.

And we treat referencing as such an immutable practice. This is a classic of example of where the method has become confused with the intention. What we want is to find sources and for that work to be acknowledged. In a print world a standard method of describing these characteristics to enable location made sense. It makes little sense in an online world. 

This reminds me of airport security checks, such as questions around whether you packed yourself or are carrying guns, body checks, etc. Any questioning of the practice is dismissed with very serious concerns about terrorism. Just as querying the reference system is met with furrowed brows and deep sighs about plagiarism and proper scholarship. But like those airport checks this adds delay, is cumbersome and only inconveniences people who are happy to play by the rules anyway. It does nothing to catch the hardcore plagiarists, and doesn't guarantee a reference will still be available any more than a link does. Yet we have no choice and have to persist in it.

If I had the courage of my convictions, here is what I should have submitted for my reference section:

JFGI

A tale of two books

Continuing my thoughts on the book writing process, this post is about how the process itself has changed, for me at least, over recent years.

I start my book by comparing the process of writing this book with my last one about 6 years ago. Below is a list of some of the tools and resources I used to write this book:

1. Books – via the library but increasingly as ebooks and on Kindle, and one audiobook
2. E-journals – my university library has access to a wide range of databases, but I also made frequent use of others through tools such as Google Scholar and Mendeley
3. Delicious/social bookmarking – as well as searching for key terms I would ‘forage’ in the bookmarks of people I know and trust, who make their collections available
4. Blogs – I subscribe to over 100 blogs in Google Reader, which I try to read regularly, but in addition I have cited and used many posts from other blogs
5. YouTube, Wikipedia, Slideshare, Scribd, Cloudworks and other sites – text is not the only medium for sharing now, and for certain subjects these ‘web 2.0’ services offer useful starting points, or overviews, as well as insightful comment
6. My own blog – I have kept a blog for around five years now, and it provided a useful resource for items I have commented on, and drafts of sections of this book. I also have a scrapbook type blog I keep using Tumblr where I post any interesting links or multimedia, and revisited this for resources I had harvested over the past few years. The blog was also a means of posting draft content to gain comments and feedback, which could then be incorporated into further iterations of writing
7. Social network – my Twitter network is especially useful for gaining feedback, asking for suggestions, and on a daily basis, as a filter and collection mechanism for sharing resources
8. Work and personal network – undoubtedly working in an intellectually lively environment, and having face to face discussions with colleagues has been invaluable
9. Google alerts – I set up alerts for a few key phrases, which would then provide me with daily email updates on new content containing these key words. This allowed me to find new resources, track conversations and stay abreast of a field which was changing as I wrote the book
10. Seminars and conferences - my attendance at face to face conferences has declined due to other commitments but I regularly attend, or dip into conferences remotely (see Chapter 10 for a more detailed exploration of the changing nature of conferences)

 

If I compare this with the tools I used when I wrote my last book in 2004, then many of these services did not exist or were in their infancy. Of this list I probably used books, journals and face to face conferences, with maybe some initial exploration of blogs. 

In many ways the changes are not dramatic – books and journal articles still constitute a large part of the information sources I draw upon, although blogs in particular have increased in significance. And the output of all this is still that most traditional of information sources, a book. But the changes are also significant for three reasons, I would suggest.

Firstly, the quantity of this information that is available online has increased considerably. I could access nearly all of it from my desk at home, there was no need to visit a physical library or bookstore. The digitisation of relevant content was almost total for the information sources I required for this book, compared with about half of that in 2004.

The second factor is the significance of my online network in the writing process. I have around 3,000 followers in Twitter and around 2,000 subscribers to my blog (often they are the same people), which represents a wide pool of experience to draw upon. Sometimes I would put out a direct call to this network, along the lines of ‘Does anyone have a good example of …’ In other cases I would post drafts of the content to my blog and receive comments and links to relevant material. Even without these direct appeals this distributed, global peer network represents an invaluable information source, comprising links to resources, commentary on issues, extended debate, use of new methods and technology, and contributions in the form of blog posts, videos and audio.  

This last item leads me to the third significant difference from the previous book, which is the range and variety of content that I drew upon. Even six years ago the type of content was largely limited to journal articles and books. Now, this has diversified to include blog posts, videos, draft publications, conference presentations and also the discussion, comment and debate surrounding each of these. The change from 2004 is partly a result of the first factor, quantity. There is just more of this stuff around. But it is also a result of a shift in attitude (at least on my part), in the legitimacy of these other forms of output, and their central, vital role in everyday scholarly activity.  

The comparison of writing these two books is instructive, I feel, because it gets to the heart of digital scholarship: it is both a profound change and a continuation of traditional practice. This can be seen with the final output also: the previous book existed only in traditional, paper format, and the copyright to this was owned by the publishers. The new book is available in the traditional format, but also online, freely available under a Creative Commons licence. In addition there is a set of resources, such as videos, presentations, blog posts, etc which relate to the book, and then comment and reaction to these. And this is becoming more common: my colleague Grainne Conole, is writing a book by blogging chapters and gaining feedback in a site called Cloudworks (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2155). Conor Gearty, a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, is writing a book by posting a weekly video which sets out his theme and encourages discussion (http://therightsfuture.com/). The boundary between Gearty’s book and a course, and the comments of the participants is deliberately blurred.

This conflict between what, from one perspective, seems a substantial change in practice, and from another, appears to be a conservative, minor adjustment to standard approaches, characterises not just book production, but any aspect of scholarly activity, including research, knowledge dissemination, public engagement and teaching. Both radically different and yet familiarly traditional seems to be the story of digital scholarship at the moment, and it is the tension between these two forces that my book sets out to explore.

The book isn't dead, it just has new friends

So the first of my reflections on completing my digital scholarship book can probably be filed under 'No shit, Sherlock':

The book is a good format for some ideas 

I have suggested that books and articles have had a monopoly as the format for the dissemination of ideas, and new media liberate us from this somewhat. In my case the book has grown out of stuff I've been blogging over the past 4 years or so, but it isn't just a load of blog posts bundled together (whatever you may think). The length and format of a book is a very good means of both exploring ideas in depth and pulling together various strands that have been rather fragmented. Who knew eh? One of the points I make (repeatedly, ad nauseum) is that we now have alternatives, where there were previously limited options. It is not the case that the book will disappear, or is dead, but that we have alternatives now to expressing and sharing ideas. Is an article, a blog post, a video, a slidecast, a podcast or conference presentation the best? Sometimes the book really is the best format. 

Perhaps more interesting is not which one of these you choose, but the combination of them. What is the boundary of the book? Is it the physical object? What about the shared comments and highlights on Kindle? Then there will be related media, blogs, twitter conversations. The decision is less about which sole method you select but rather which one you place at the center of this distributed knowledge bundle. 

Higher Ed - room for disruption?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/annetta/1954945479/ by Annetta)

(Another excerpt from my Digital Scholarship book):

In other posts I have looked at some of the impacts new technology has had in other industries and what we might learn from this in higher ed. While the lessons these sectors offer are instructive, it also provides a basis for considering in what ways higher education differs, and thus may not be subject to the same influences. The major difference is that higher education is not purely a content industry. I argued in this talk that HE produces a considerable amount of content, which could be distributed and shared digitally, but its revenue is not predicated on selling this content, unlike music or newspapers.

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast amount of online content means that people now conduct a lot of their learning informally, using free resources. Combined with financial pressures, this creates a pressure, or an alternative competition for learning that is new to higher education. Anya Kamenetz details the convergence of these two factors in her book DIY U, arguing that “Do-It-Yourself University means the expansion of education beyond classroom walls: free, open-source, vocational, experiential, and self-directed learning.” This certainly represents a challenge to the monopoly on learning that universities and colleges have held for centuries, and one they should take seriously (through, I would argue, engagement with the technology and approaches).

However, even in times of financial crisis higher education has a certain resilience for two reasons: the social value of formal education is often increased in times of financial hardship; learning is not a zero sum game. It is this latter reason that I think is of real long-term significance to higher education. Even if people are learning much of what they require via open, online resources mediated through their social network, that in itself can generate the desire for further learning, and itself foster interest in formal education. Competition with informal learning is true to an extent, but it presupposes a set amount of learning by an individual, as if they have a limited number of cognitive learning tokens to be used up in a lifetime. But it is more often the case that learning begets learning. In this respect open, informal education is complementary to formal education, indeed something of a gift, rather than a threat. In a world that generates vast amounts of niche content which people are increasingly engaged with, either by generating their own, sharing or discussing, then the outcome is a larger population of active learners.

The challenge for universities then is to remain relevant to these learners. This means developing an appropriate curriculum, having flexible course options, using technology effectively and generating interest. An example of this symbiotic relationship would be between a photo-sharing service such as Flickr and university courses on digital photography. A great deal of informal learning occurs through the communities on Flickr, which can focus around themes or techniques, or the Daily Shoot site which gives photographers a daily task to perform (http://dailyshoot.com/). At some stage though many photographers want to further their understanding, or have a more structured approach and sign up for a course on digital photography. The Open University’s short course in this area has been one of its most popular, which since 2007 has run two presentations a year of 1000-1500 students on each cohort. 

More radically Jim Groom's open course on digital storytelling (http://ds106.us/), which combines 32 campus based student who are studying for credit, with learners from a global community studying for their own interest. The combination of the two groups is mutually beneficial. Participants are required to create digital artefacts and to share these on their own blogs and sites, which are aggregated together on this course blog. The course is fluid, with participants suggesting assignments, and distributed across many sites, using the hashtag #ds106 to group content.

These two examples demonstrate how the open, informal learning which many people partake in online is not necessarily a threat to the existence of higher education, and, given some adjustments by universities, can be a benefit.

There are two messages that higher education can take from this: the first is that it needs to engage in the sort of experimentation Jim's course represents if it is to turn the digital, networked and open approaches of learners to its advantage; the second is that it has the capacity to do so.

It is this second message that marks another difference with the sectors so often used as a comparison. Many of those industries did not have the revenue streams which come from accreditation and research funding to counter any loss of revenue from consumers finding alternative content freely available online. Higher education is in a position where not only does it need to disrupt its own practice, but it can afford to. It has sufficient resilience to do so because unlike content industries, that disruption does not completely undermine its current model. Higher education can be viewed as a long tail content production system, and with little effort much of what it produces could be shared as open, digital resources. Higher education can afford to do this, because their ‘customers’ (if we use that term by way of analogy with other sectors) are not purchasing that content directly – they are instead students who are paying for a learning experience which comprises that content along with the other elements, most notably support, guidance and accreditation. Other customers include research councils, commercial partners, media, charities and governmental agencies. Again these customers are not directly paying for content, and with the exception of cases of commercial sensitivity and privacy issues, they often have much to gain from openness and wide dissemination.

Some of the concerns relating to the impact of new technologies in other sectors then do not apply in scholarship, or their impact is reduced. The concerns regarding how artistic endeavour is to be rewarded in a world where all content can be easily distributed for free are very real if you are a musician, for example. These concerns are not the same for academics however, who are usually employed and so are not deriving their income from content in the same manner. This is not to underestimate the impact and challenges that face higher education, but to highlight that disruption by new technologically driven approaches is not as threatening to core practice as it has been in other sectors. This may account for why the innovation and adoption of such approaches has been less prevalent in higher education, since the urgency to respond is not as great. 

 

Digital resilience

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/449142212/ by Rev Dan Catt>

Reading some of the posts and papers from Joss Winn and Richard Hall brought the concept of resilience to my attention. I'm probably deviating from their intended use of the concept, but it has been a useful way of thinking about how academia responds to the impact of digital, networked and open technologies and approaches. I was also struck by Joss' comment at Open Ed: "Resilience does not mean withstanding" (Scott Leslie also liked this). This is a useful way of thinking about how new technologies (and more importantly the approaches they facilitate) can influence scholarship, as often the reaction is to think about what we will lose and set about resisting, or withstanding, change. The argument I have been making in my book is that engagement with technology is the key to maintaining ownership of scholarship.  I have used it in one section of the concluding chapter of my book, so thought I'd share this here.

In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.” It is a perspective that has been evolved beyond the ecosystems Holling applied it to, and has found particular relevance to sustainable development and climate change. Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education, and open education in particular. Walker et al (2004) propose four aspects of resilience:

1. Latitude: the maximum amount a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover
2. Resistance: the ease or difficulty of changing the system; how “resistant” it is to being changed
3. Precariousness: how close the current state of the system is to a limit or “threshold.” 
4. Panarchy:  the influences of external forces at scales above and below. For example, external oppressive politics, invasions, market shifts, or global  climate change can trigger local surprises and  regime shifts.

This is a useful means of considering the response of academia to the potential impact of new technologies. This applies across four levels where digital scholarship is relevant:

• Governmental, national agency, research councils
• Discipline
• Institutional
• Individual

Taking these four levels and the four aspects of resilience gives us a ‘digital scholarship resilience matrix’ as shown below. Completing this is an exercise you might like to attempt for your own discipline and institution, and a relevant research council or agency. For each box enter the degree to which that example meets resilience factor, for example if you work in a very traditional discipline, such as law, you may decide that it is very resistant to change.

	National agency	Discipline	Institution	Individual
Latitude
Resistance
Precariousness
Panarchy

How you complete each entry will vary considerably depending on discipline (medical research for instance is arguably less precarious than historical research) geographical location (venture capital funding for technology research will be easier to come by in San Francisco), institution (Cambridge University is likely to be more resistant to change than a modern one) and recent events (universities in Ireland and Greece for example will be subject to the panarchic influence of recent years).

Building on Holling’s work resilience is now often defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (eg Hopkins 2009).

It is this focus on retaining function and identity that is relevant to scholarship I would argue. To return to the point above, this does not equate to resistance. Indeed, a high resistance, is not necessarily a benefit to an ecosystem, as Holling observed some insect populations fluctuate wildly depending on environmental factors, but overall they are resilient.

In terms of scholarship resilience is about utilising technology to change practices where this is desirable, but to retain the underlying function and identity which the existing practices represent. It is a mistake to think of the practices themselves as being core scholarship, rather that they are the methods through which we realise them, and these methods can change. Peer review for example, is a method of ensuring quality, objectivity and reliability. But it may not be the only way of realising this, or at least its current incarnation may be subject to change. A resilience perspective would seek to ensure these core functions were protected, and not just resist at the level of the method.

 

If nobody speaks of remarkable things

For my digital scholarship book I wanted to take a random working day and record my working pattern and my use of technology. Yesterday was that day, and so here is my account:

Before breakfast, while getting my daughter ready for school and feeding the dog, I do my morning communications check, including email, my blog and Twitter. Via the latter I see that Scott Leslie has posted a response to my blog piece on reductionism. Scott is someone I have known online for a few years, but finally met this year. We have been debating this topic in some detail over the weekend on twitter. We have differing views but the discourse has proven, I think, to be mutually beneficial in developing our own thinking. I also see that Google have donated $100k to Bletchley Park in order to try and keep Alan Turing's papers in public ownership. I respond to a couple of comments from the previous night when I had tweeter that I was seeing the film The Social Network.

After my wife and daughter leave, I go to my office to work. As I am writing today my intention is to not engage too much in online chat, so I don't have email or twitter open in my tabs in Google Chrome.

Before I start work on my chapter I post a comment on Scott's blog post, and send a tweet seeking confirmation about the Bletchley Park news (it having only appeared on Twitter thus far). I also bookmark a blogpost on the crowd sourcing of educational tools by NMC, which came to my attention because it is tagged ''digital scholarship' and I have a Google Alert set up for this term so I get daily emails for results.

I then start writing - I have amassed around 30 articles, blog posts and reports for my chapter on academic publishing. These have been found largely through search, following references and names in some papers, links that have been passed to my by my network and my own references that I have collected using Tumblr. All of the articles are open access, although I spend a frustrating half an hour trying to locate one reference which seems to have disappeared.

After writing for most of the morning I take a break, and during this mentally compose a blog post, which some of the book authoring has led me to. The post, around 500 words argues that scholars have failed to take ownership of their own practices, particularly with regards to technology. This will form a theme in my book, so I decide to test it out by blogging it. I quickly find a creative commons image to use in my post, and it only takes 15 minutes to write as I have much of the material to hand. I post it, announce this on twitter and then return to my chapter. Later I want to follow up a particular argument around costs so search for references and find four good articles. 

In my afternoon tea break I compose my a photo for Flickr. I am not a very gifted photographer but I am currently undertaking the informal 'photo a day' project, and am on day 170. Having taken my photo, uploaded it to Flickr and tweaked it with the free online Picnik tool, I take a look at some of the recent uploads from my contacts.

I also check Twitter and see that two people have retweeted the link to my blog post. I check my blog and see that it has had around 170 hits today, which is about normal. In my email there is a message confirming that i am speaking at Cardiff Business school on Friday. This talk has arisen due to a contact I made at the regular social media meetings that were organized in Cardiff.

For my final push at writing for the day I write up the notes of a talk given by Mark Patterson of PLoS, which I attended in Cambridge the previous week. I check some of my notes and find references for this at the PLoS site.

Later that evening I take my daughter to her horse riding lesson. I take my iPad so I can finish reading Anya Kamenetz's DIY U which I have as a Kindle book. I also make some notes for this post.

What does this digital scholarship snapshot tell us? Firstly, it's quite traditional. This is partly because I am writing a book, but it is also representative. I didn't spend the day overlaying different data formats or creating a musical mashup, or anything exciting like that, I spent it writing. Related to this the technology used is fairly simple - there are no specialist tools in use here. There is a mixture between the professional and personal in their use. Even on a relatively unconnected day when I am engaged in the solo pursuit of writing I still maintain social connections with a global network of peers. A significant point is that there is a vast amount of high quality information available to me without leaving my house. I like the way that different elements of work fit in the elements of my day and that there is a wide range of granularity of outputs, from writing a book to individual tweets. Lastly, these are small, subtle changes and yet the way they intermesh to create the fabric of a working day is, I feel, quite remarkable. We've just become so habituated to them that we fail to appreciate this.

If anyone else would like to share an account of a normal working day, I'd love to read it. It is in this detail that the real changes are revealed. 

A failure of ownership

In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are three examples of this in action:

1. VLEs - the central role of elearning was underestimated by many and so we looked for simple solutions. The commercial VLEs offered this, but our return was an attempt by Blackboard to patent the very idea of elearning, and of increasingly costly contracts. Because the VLE became so embedded in institutional systems it became almost impossible to overthrow once it was in place.
2. Tenure, assessment and publications - as I've mentioned in an earlier post, the complexity of measuring excellence in different fields was outsourced to the peer-review process. This placed publishers in a central position in academia, since they controlled the routes to career progression. Related to this was the manner in which scholars bowed to governmental pressures for assessment exercises which sought to quantify the quality of research. This reinforced the publishers' position since their journals were linked directly to institutional funding.
3. Publication - many professional societies and university presses handed over their publications to for-profit publishing firms, effectively outsourcing the process, the proceeds of which they would then have to buy back. As Edwards and Shulenberger suggest the relationship with publishers operated successfully when it was seen as a fair exchange, a ‘gift economy’, but, they claim “beginning in the late 1960s and early '70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity.” In Clarke's analysis of publishing costs he reports that an ejournal article published by a for-profit costs around $3400 whereas one published by a non-profit professional society costs around $730. The difference is largely because of the expensive software the commercial publisher has developed to maintain their competitive advantage and "their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection." None of these seem to me to be related to scholarship.

George Siemens has argued that we should take ownership of the open education debate before it is too late, and given the above history, I would say he is right. The message I take away from the above is that we allowed this to happen because we failed to engage with the required technology. Large scale open source projects could have (and in cases such as OJS and Moodle have been successful) solved many of these problems and the overall cost to universities would have been much less than being at the mercy of commercial companies for whom scholarship is not their primary interest. The type of resistance we saw, for example, to the very concept of elearning, often on the grounds of commercialisation of education, did not prevent it, and in many ways played directly into their hands. Far better is to take the attitude of inventing your own future.

I'm not against commercial partnerships in education, for instance many of the free services I like to promote seem to me better for being not developed in education (eg Flickr), but we should be aware of what it is we are handing over. As we face the question of 'what do we do about web 2.0/cloud computing/social media?' then a full understanding of what it can do is essential, and simply handing over the problem to someone else will not serve us well.

The way I'm working is (kinda) working

I read Tony Schwartz's The Way We're Working Isn't Working recently (and after my last post, yes it was on the Kindle). Some of it irritated me and much of it I couldn't relate to (not being a high-powered AMERICAN executive who works 15 hour days), but after Scott blogged about the meditation app he found useful, I thought I'd post some thoughts on what I did take away from it.

The first is that napping is good! I like an afternoon nap, but in an open plan office the sight of someone sprawled across their desk with a small puddle of drool congealing by the keyboard is, for some reason, deemed unacceptable. He advocates a 90 minute full on sleep, which is pretty much impossible to fit in, but I do find when I'm working at home a quick 10 minute nap is enough to revitalise me. I don't suppose in these financially straitened times a campaign for more napping in the workplace will find much support but he has some strong evidence that it is much more productive to do so than to carry on through.

Secondly, he proposes working in 90 minute creative bursts, without distraction (we are nowhere near as good at multi-tasking as we think we are he argues). I tried this recently when I had a week of study leave to work on my digital scholarship book. I parcelled the day out into 90 minute chunks and during these I turned off twitter and email and wrote. At the end of 90 minutes I would make myself stop, go away from the desk for half an hour and do something else (walk the dog, have lunch or nap). It worked very well, I wrote a lot in that week and I maintained a high level of concentration and felt more focused.

The rest of the book has advice on eating, self-esteem, taking holidays, etc which are things I don't worry too much about anyway. But it did make me appreciate that we don't often reflect on our own working practice, it is too often something imposed on us by meetings, physical environments and deadlines.

However, there are times when I don't mind working in the distracted, channel-hopping mode he deplores. For example if I'm doing a task that is tedious (completing a research proposal say), then I like to be dipping in and out of twitter, following links, reading other bits in between - it makes the task more bearable. Whether it makes me more productive is a different matter, but if it means I get the job done with sanity intact, that is good enough for me. And it also helps to mix up something mildly creative (even crafting a jokey tweet) with something laborious, possibly even making the output of the tedious task better as a result. 

So I don't think it's a matter of having one way of working, but rather of having ways that suit different requirements. And with that platitude I shall take my nap...

 

Twitter as interdisciplinary tool & culture

I have been writing a chapter on interdisciplinarity for my book on digital scholarship, and thought I would share this section which explores the idea that social networks (Twitter in this case) can be viewed as interdisciplinary tools. One of the ideas I am particularly interested in is that a barrier to interdisciplinary work has been the existence of different cultures in various disciplines. It may be that tools such as Twitter and blogs have a culture of their own, which can to some degree, compensate for these other differences. Put simply, do bloggers in different disciplines have more in common than non-bloggers and bloggers in the same discipline?

In this post I want to look at both the culture of twitter and how this combined with its features can aid interdisciplinarity.

Three key features of twitter demonstrate how an open approach has allowed community norms to emerge. The first is the convention of putting an @ sign in front of a person’s twitter id to send them a reply (eg @mweller). This was a user convention first of all, so it would designate that a particular tweet was for the attention of a particular user. As Twitter developed it became a standard convention, and then incorporated into the software, so now users can see all replies to them listed separately. The @ reply rule grew out of the email naming convention, but has almost become synonymous with twitter now.

The second convention was the use of hashtags to define a particular comment which could be grouped together. The use of the # was proposed by Chris Messina in a tweet: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”. Hashtags can be seen as metadata, describing the content of a tweet. They became relevant as the use of search on Twitter grew. People could search on a hashtag and thus gather all of the tweets on a particular topic. This was seized on by conferences, so all the delegates at a conference would agree to use a hashtag, and later conference organisers began specifying an official hashtag. Search was originally performed by a third party service, (using the open API), but in July 2008, Twitter bought Summize, the most popular Twitter search tool. Hashtags could now be incorporated into the standard Twitter practice, and ‘trending’ became a relevant term as topics grew on twitter, often denoted by a hashtag. Apparently the Twitter team initially rejected hashtags as ‘too nerdy’, but their simple, and unregulated, creation has allowed them to flourish.

Hashtags can now be used as the means to define a community, particularly around an event, course or topic. The open data approach of Twitter means that these can in turn, be analysed to reveal connections between members, subjects of discussion, locations, and prominent members. As well as a useful means of categorising tweets, hashtags are now so ingrained in practice that they form a part of humour on Twitter, with people often creating ‘mock’ hashtags (although there are no official hashtags) as an ironic counterpoint.

The third norm to emerge is that of the retweet. This is the practice of passing on someone’s tweet. Originally this was achieved by copying and pasting the tweet and adding RT and the user’s id at the start. Boyd, Golder and Lotan identify the following motivations for retweeting:

• To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences
• To entertain or inform a specific audience, or as an act of curation
• To comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content, often to begin a conversation
• To make one’s presence as a listener visible
• To publicly agree with someone
• To validate others’ thoughts
• As an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage by drawing attention, sometimes via a retweet request
• To recognize or refer to less popular people or less visible content
• For self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants
• To save tweets for future personal access

As with the other community behaviours, the retweet became enshrined in code, when in late 2009 Twitter implemented a retweet function on their site. This allowed users to easily retweet a message by simply clicking a button, without the need for copy and paste, but some of the subtlety as to how it appears in timelines was lost (it is shown coming from the originator and not the retweeter).

What these three examples demonstrate is that the community has evolved over time, suggesting, experimenting and then adopting norms of behaviour – the ‘stickiness’ we saw earlier with blog culture. Once it has become established, and proven to add value, Twitter have then moved to implement it in code to make it easier and also to further spread its use. They have not imposed the practice from the start, and sought to define how users will interact, which has often been the case with software development, instead they have allowed the community itself to develop its own norms.

If I analyse my own twitter network (using TwitterAnalyzer.com) then it reveals that the geographic spread of my followers is mainly across the following countries:

• UK
• US
• Australia
• Germany
• Canada
• France
• China

By analysing the biography details people provide the top professions amongst my followers are:

• Consultant
• Technologist
• PhD student
• Lecturer
• Manager
• Teacher
• Librarian
• Author

Amongst these I can identify a number of communities and networks, some of which will intersect. These include:

• Bloggers – many of the people I follow are those I already had an online connection with via blogs, and twitter was an extension of this.
• The Open University – I have acted as an advocate for Twitter in the Open University, and see it as a means of informal knowledge sharing within an organisation
• Cardiff - there is an active twitter community, which often meets face to face.
• >UK Higher Education – As well as bloggers and Open University people there is a large contingent of peers in other universities, funding bodies, libraries, etc
• Journalists and media – a number of journalists and media consultants use twitter regularly
• Tottenham Hotspur – I support Spurs and a number of the people I follow for this reason, but also there is a wider group for whom football is an interest (who are also members of the other networks)

There are a number of sub-groups in this also, for example Canadian bloggers form a coherent network of their own, and many individuals will occupy more than one category. One can view these many different groups and sub-groups as networks that will become more or less active, and distinct, according to external events. For example, during the general election in the

Huberman, Romero and Wu have investigated interactions on Twitter and find that despite many followers the number of people a user interacts with (ie sends replies to) is relatively small. This reflects findings in Facebook and is interpreted as the existence of Dunbar’s number (1998) in social networks. Dunbar’s number suggests that people find it cognitively difficult to maintain meaningful relationships beyond a certain number of friends, usually given as 150, with a smaller core group around 20-30.  While this may well be true for the more stable relationships, the use of tools such as hashtags and retweets allows for a finer grading of online acquaintance. I can read, or retweet, someone else’s posts without ever interacting with them, and they may reciprocate, without engaging in direct conversation, yet these people form part of a valuable network.

As an interdisciplinary tool my twitter network has a number of advantages, and associated issues:

• Geographical diversity – while it is inevitably centred around the UK and North America, it is a global community which brings different perspectives. It is limited by language though, and the immediacy does not allow for translation so there is a danger of English language views dominating.
• Professional diversity – within the different networks a number of professions and experience can be found, which will inevitably bring a degree of interdisciplinarity. One of the benefits of Twitter has been to improve intra-departmental communication within an institution. However, while the table above shows a reasonable range of occupations, it is still largely centred around higher education. There are, for example, very few (or no) priests, builders, make-up artists or senior retail managers in my network (which is not to say they are not present on Twitter). For interdisciplinarity this may not be an issue.
• Size – at the time of writing I follow around 1,100 people and have approximately 2,800 followers. That represents a considerable network and pool of expertise which will share a wide range of knowledge and will also respond to requests for advice on topics outside of my own domain.
• Immediacy – one of the changes Twitter required in my behaviour was a shift from exhaustive reading to regular sampling. As a blog reader I tried to keep up with most posts from those I subscribed to, with subsequent guilt when the unread count on my blog reader mounted. As my Twitter network expanded this behaviour was not possible and so a shift was required, where I ‘dip into’ Twitter, sometimes more intensively and other times I am completely absent. This is the concept of the stream, it is not meant to be consumed in its entirety, but sampled on occasion. Twitterers are responding in real-time and thus it is ideal for capturing diverse reactions and interpretations before they are filtered into disciplines. There is a consequent danger though that this relentless churning of information means useful research will be missed via this route.
• Interdisciplinary bridges – the ease of sharing provides a means to bridge disciplines, in particular the retweet can be viewed as a tool for bridging audiences and disciplines as a twitterer in one domain can rebroadcast to their network, which will have the types of sub-groupings shown above.
• An inherent set of cultural norms – the three features we saw above, as well as other practices indicate that, as with blogs, Twitter has its own set of cultural norms, which provide the required ‘stickiness’ for communities to develop. These may be sufficient to overcome the differences in cultural norms across disciplines, and provide a common framework.
• Professional and personal mix – twitter occupies an intersection between professional and personal, formal and informal, resource and conversation. In many previous tools we have sought to separate out these elements, for instance when we create forums for students in VLEs it is a common practice to have a separate ‘Chat’ or social forum so that this doesn’t interfere with the academic discussion. However, this blend in one place in Twitter both provides motivation to partake (we don’t separate out our thoughts or lives so neatly) and also provides hooks into other areas of interdisciplinarity.

The list above shows a number of benefits in developing a networked approach to interdisciplinarity which may address the issues which have plagued it for many years. Indeed if we had intentionally set out to create a tool for promoting interdisciplinary discourse, then the resultant service may have not looked dissimilar to Twitter.

Bellow's Law

 

In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. 

In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also:

there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. 

It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences, but I think the element of neighbourhood it adds is useful. We are seeing the liberation (that is obviously a term with positive connotations, but let’s go with it for now) of a number of activities that are facilitated by the digital, social network. These include the removal of filters, freedom to publish and broadcast, the ability to share easily, establishing peer networks without the need for travel, creating communities of interest around diverse subjects, etc. It is why attempts by many industries to control what is liberated ultimately fail. You can't simply say we will liberate the music track from the whole album or from its physical format and expect record companies to stay the same. If you liberate one then others will follow.

In digital scholarship an example might be seen with publishing - once we have removed the filter to publish through blogs and other outlets then the neighbouring practices cannot remain unaffected: academic journals as the main source of knowledge sharing; the tenure process and what it recognises; research and dissemination; the granularity of research outputs and activity; course content. All of these begin to change because the pressure on one element in an interconnected system has been removed. It's not entirely unpredictable, but it may be one element in the sort of emergent behaviours Scott is interested in.

If you want to know what practices will be influenced by new technologies, then a good place to start is to consider what elements have been liberated by them, and then map the neighbouring practices, sure enough you'll see an activation across these soon. 

And we don't have enough laws named after great novelists.