The Ed Techie

The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers

Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below:

Research, technology & networks

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.

I talked about why this might be so and suggested the following reasons:

• The stranglehold of publishing - tenure and reward are still linked to publishing in academic journals, so spending time on other forms of communication is not directly encouraged. This is reinforced through research quality assessment exercises which are closely allied to publishing, such as the REF.
• Wasting new blood - related to the above, in other sectors new recruits are seen as the people who bring in new ideas. Yet in education because tenure is linked so closely to traditional outputs, new researchers are positively discouraged from spending time on other endeavours. So the very people who might engage in transforming practice are discouraged from doing so. This leaves it to tenured academics to engage in innovation, but these have mostly been successful through more traditional means so their history tells them to carry on this way. The pool of potential adopters then is decreased by the research context we have in place. I suggested this was quite a harmful environment to create.
• Antithetical to research ethos - I also put forward the suggestion that in science in particular, research is about predicting outcomes, and much of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is about unpredictability - you don't know what will happen with your outputs, or through a network.
• Research is the core practice - despite how much academics might say they value teaching, or public engagement, it is still research that is most highly valued. This means it is the area people are least willing to risk their reputation in and want to control most tightly.

I then suggested some themes that I thought were emerging, but that is for another post.

Of course one might argue it doesn't matter. Researchers will adopt new technologies if they are effective, and there is an underlying assumption in my talk that adoption is a good thing, which isn't necessarily true. This may well be the case, but there are three responses to this which at least bear consideration:

• The impact of the negative context - if research adoption of new technologies (and associated practices eg open publishing) is being impaired by the financial/reward structure we have in place, then we need to address whether that structure is doing research a disservice in the long term
• Powerful tools - I know through personal experience that even when people have been dismissive, or cautious of a particular tool, when it is demonstrated in the right context, or they appreciate its possibilities, then they will find uses for it in their academic work that I had never anticipated. This isn't true for everyone or for all uses, but it is worth chipping away at misconceptions and demonstrating potential.
• The role of the researcher - as higher education seeks to demonstrate its value to society, it strikes me that it is potentially dangerous not to be leading on the use and development of new tools, and particularly on what they mean for knowledge construction and sharing, rather than leaving it to others.

Understanding the attention economy

My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine.

 

The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss.

Bloglines is a similar app (which I found via John Connell), here I add in my favourite blogs to create a nice bookshelf. Again it probably isn't the best way to handle hundreds of feeds, but it provides a nice window on some of them, meaning again I might read things I would otherwise skip.

 

What both of these apps demonstrate is that by adding a nice layer of UI, the way you interact with these sources can be subtly altered. For a start it seems to elevate them somewhat - these are now nice articles to be read with a coffee and a bagel.

But more significantly it highlights the importance of grabbing people's attention. This usually means by adding in some media - a post with a nice image is more likely to make me open it from bloglines (Jim Groom's Bavatuesdays wins here). Or it could be an intriguing title. There are also variables such as posting at an optimal time (weekends are rarely useful, and afternoons in the UK will get some American traffic too).

These may seem like trivial, superficial aspects for academics to be concerned with, and certainly trying too hard to get attention has the opposite effect. But in an information saturated context we can't assume good quality will always be found. As we send our little thoughts into the digital world we need to at least give them every chance to survive. I wonder if understanding the online attention economy will be a digital literacy?

Everyday I write the book

I put together a proposal before the summer, for a book on digital scholarship. It's part-polemic and part academic monograph. I want to explore the changes to academic practice brought about by three key characteristics: digital, networked and open. 

I wanted to find an open access publisher, so I'm pleased to say that it's been accepted by Bloomsbury Academic. Their model is that they give away a free HTML version, you can buy a standard hard and paperback version, or you can buy a version that also gives you access to additional online content. I don't know how much this additional content line will work, but kudos to them for trying a new model.

Before I embark on the writing, a couple of thoughts:

i) Much of the book will be adapted from blog posts here. In this sense I've already been writing the book for four years. Lots of writers do this - Shirky's books always feel as though I have already read them because you know so much of his output. This is one possible downside of writing continually in the open - a book will seem a bit familiar to many readers. As I go along I'll be blogging bits of it as well, for instance the recent pregnant widow post. My apologies in advance then if this means that when you read the book (you will read it won't you?) you have a sense of deja vu.

ii) Why write a book at all? There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that I like to write and a book gives you more space to explore ideas. And the second is that it is a nice way of bundling together content in a way that is both recognised and easily shareable.

iii) Why not just self-publish? I considered this, it would mean I'd get to keep more of the money (but then keeping a small amount or a large amount of not very much still gives you not very much). But there is a sense of legitimacy in having a publisher accept it. They also hopefully provide some services such as copy-editing and have a distribution channel which may help it get out there. And I particularly wanted to explore what it would be like to publish with an open access approach.

I've got some ideas for things I might try out for the book, including getting input from my network, so be prepared to find excuses. In the meantime, here is Elvis Costello with the title of this post:

Living in pregnant widow times

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/janrito/118498874/ black widow by Janrito Karamazov>

For the title of his latest novel, Martin Amis borrows from this Alexander Herzen quote

“The death of contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

Amis is writing about the sexual revolution, but I think the same can be applied to the digital revolution. This is what causes so much angst in the popular press, and amongst society in general. We can see what is passing, but what is forming is still unclear. Clay Shirky, talking about newspapers puts it thus:

"So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

We can think about some general directions of travel, we can make some guesses, and most of all, we can experiment. My interest is what the changes mean for scholarly practice, how will academics perform research, what will education look like twenty years from now, how can we best be engaged in public debates? We have a very well established set of methods for all of these currently, but it is unlikely that any of them will remain untouched by the impact of digital, social networks. And as with other industries, trying to find ways to preserve them as they are, or with a digital veneer, won't be sufficient when other find innovative ways to achieve the same ends using the new tools. If you accept the argument that we are living in such a period of change, then what academic wouldn't be interested in observing this change in any field, let alone that of their own practice.

As Amis puts it in his novel, "it was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you what stays, you see what comes."

What goes, what stays and what comes - each of element of this trio is significant. Often we concentrate on 'what comes', but it's just as interesting to consider what stays. This reveals what is important to us (will journalism stay? Will universities stay?), or at least what is so ingrained culturally or commercially as to be immovable. The QWERTY keyboard has stayed thus far in the digital age, despite being an analogue solution, not through any sense of value, but because it was too entrenched to overthrow. 

What goes is equally revealing, because it demonstrates that practices and values we may have seen as unassailable are suddenly vulnerable because the assumptions they are based upon are no longer valid. The scarcity, rivalrous nature and distribution model of many goods and content is one such example. When they became abundant, non-rivalrous and freely distributed whole industries began to look weak. The 'what goes' element may also reveal to us what was important and not so important after all.

We generally assume that after a peaceful social revolution the resulting practice is an improvement for the majority of people, otherwise it wouldn't occur. Unless the revolution is imposed upon the people, then the general direction will be towards a utilitarian improvement. But this doesn't mean the post-revolutionary world will be better for everyone. There are those whose profession and identity will be strongly allied to the existing practices. There will be practices and values that are lost that we find we did in fact hold dear, but which were too closely attached to the older methods to survive. In short, there will be winner and losers. A revolution may be bloodless, but is rarely painless for all.

Which is why we see scare stories about games damaging kids health, or social networks ruining the nature of friendship, or piracy killing artistic endeavour, or the fabric of society being damaged irrevocably by the addiction to computers. We are learning what role these new tools play in our lives, and there will inevitably be mistakes, misapplication, over-use and correction. For example, many people reported something resembling an addiction to social networks when they first started on them, but these have since settled into a more controlled, regular place in our lives.

We are living in pregnant widow times, and we can see what is going, but we don't yet know what is staying and what is coming. And that's kinda fun isn't it?