Connected Knowledge

I am an enthusiastic advocate of electronic book readers.  I’m seldom parted from my beloved Barnes & Noble Nook and spend far too much money on electronic novels and obscure history books.  But when it comes time to prepare a lecture, write a paper or to just do some basic research, I still find myself returning to pulp-based media.  eReaders are great for getting lost in book, but not so great for finding something specific in that same book or jotting down a note in the margin.  I’ve generally assumed that I’m just too old and stodgy to fully abandon hardcopy, but it turns out even young, tech-savvy folks prefer paper for academic work.

Last year Amazon organized a pilot study of using their Kindle DX Wireless Reading Device in place of traditional textbooks.  Oregon’s Reed College was among the seven institutions selected to participate.  This morning I received a copy of the final report of  The Reed College Kindle Study.  Reed’s study took place during the fall semester of 2009 and involved 43 students enrolled in three upper-level undergraduate courses. Participants agreed to use the Kindle DX for these classes, evaluate the features of the device and its impact on the learning experience and to assess the overall prospects of eReaders in higher education.  Reed expected about half of the eligible students would sign up.  They ended up with nearly 95%.  I suspect the fact that participants got to keep the Kindle at the end of the study may have had something to do with the high participation rate.

The students loved the reading experience on the Kindle DX and the fact that it fit so handily in a backpack. These and other perceived benefits, like paper savings and “over-the-air” distribution of course materials, weren’t surprising. What was surprising was that the single-function design of the eReader was perceived as an advantage rather than a drawback.   A multi-function netbook, or a tablet like the recently announced, much-hyped and unfortunately named iPad, apparently offer too many temptations for an easily distracted student.

Faculty in the pilot study noted, however, that use of the Kindle DX in class didn’t lead to the distractions that are typical of laptop use. Students were not tempted to check their email, browse the web, or use the Kindle in class for anything except to refer to course materials. The functional limitations of the platform, generally viewed as a shortcoming, proved to be a real benefit to class discussion dynamics.

So is this a death knell for traditional print textbooks?  Probably not.  At least not yet. In fact both students and faculty involved in the study unanimously concluded that the Kindle DX, at least in its current incarnation, was unable to meet their academic needs.  Many of the challenges reported by participants amounted to little more than annoyances that will likely be overcome as the technology matures. More troubling was the impact on discussion and comprehension of the course material.

All three courses in the study were upper-division seminars centered around careful reading and discussion of assigned texts.  Students are expected to back up their assertions and opinions with supporting evidence from the readings.  During the course of discussion the entire class needs to be able to locate references quickly in order to keep the conversation moving.  The cumbersome navigation in the Kindle and the slow page refresh rate made this impossible.  (To be fair, I have yet to see an eReader, the nook included, that does facilitate this). As a result, students reported that their in-class conversations were “more superficial and less supported by texts” than was normally the case.  After a month, many students abandoned the Kindle in favor of traditional textbooks, even though this meant forfeiting the gadget. The ultimate result of this frustration, along with the difficulty of jotting down notes on an electronic text, was that student’s comprehension of the material plummeted.

By far the most troublesome feedback we received during the study was from a faculty member who felt that his students’ comprehension of the reading materials suffered from use of the Kindle DX. He speculated that the difficulty students encountered with highlighting and taking notes on the device eventually caused them to read passively, thereby reducing their ability to reflect on and retain complex information. He saw evidence of this in assignments as well as in class discussion.

In order for eReaders to truly replace traditional hardcopy textbooks, they need to emulate some of the most basic features currently only available from dead trees.  Namely “the flexibility and ease of jotting notes on paper, flipping from page to page, and spreading multiple texts across a desk.“  Tablet PC’s may be able to take on this role as they mature and students will just have to control their urge to Tweet in class.  The Reed Kindle study does end on a hopeful note for the future of eReaders in academia, concluding that “once technical and other issues have been addressed, eReaders will play a significant, possibly a transformative, role in higher education.”

Early morning conference calls are rarely a cause for excitement,  but my call this morning with the Collexis users group was a nice change of pace. Oregon Health & Science University (my primary employer) was a relatively early adopter of the Collexis Research Profiling System.  We use it as our public facing Research Expertise Locator and have been more or less happy with the tool, but have had a long wish list of enhancements.  With version 3.5 of Research Profiling, which will be rolled out over the next couple of weeks, Collexis chips away at that wish list and seems to finally be realizing into the potential of their platform.

Collexis creates a professional profile of a scientist by mining public information sources, such as PubMed and NIH RePORTER, for the concepts with which each researcher is most strongly associated. For example, here is a profile of OHSU’s Vice President for Research, Dan Dorsa . In addition to the basics, contact information, research interests, funding, publications, and the like, the profile shows Dr. Dorsa’s collaboration network,  trends in his activities and identifies similar experts at our institution.  Version 3.5 adds some incremental improvements in the functionality.  A few of the highlights are CV integration with the profile (bye bye InfoEd GENIUS), self-serve bulk data export  and bibliographic export to Endnote. (They also finally explain why the nodes in the collaboration network map keep moving in that weird psuedo-brownian way.)

This is all welcome news, but what got me all atwitter this morning was the announcement that Collexis will be working with Mike Conlon to develop a connector between Collexis and VIVO.  Dr. Conlon is Associate CIO for IT Architecture for the University of Florida and Principal Investigator on the VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists project.  VIVO is “an NIH funded study to develop and implement a semantic web-based platform for representing faculty interests, activities and accomplishments, and make that data available to search, social networking and a new generation of interoperable collaborative applications.”  In short, VIVO aims to create a national system of federated research expertise directories. 

The project received a significant vote of confidence from the National Institutes of Health last October in the form of a $12.2 million NCRR grant. The planned Collexis / VIVO connector will publish information from a Collexis application, like OHSU’s Research Expertise Locator, to VIVO and will present VIVO search results within any Collexis-powered portal. Collexis will also offer hosted VIVO implementations to their customers.  No timeframe has been given for the availability of the connector.  This is understandable since the VIVO consortium hasn’t finalized their implementation and spec.

The new version of Research Profiling also marks a significant expansion of the scope of the Collexis platform by incorporating information beyond the life sciences in the form of Elsevier’s SCOPUS.  The first implementation of this new range of subjects (based on release 7.2 of the Collexis engine) will be for the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State, eventually expanding to 18 institutions for a statewide deployment.

The User Group call wrapped up with an overview of two forthcoming features that won’t be included in the 3.5 release, but that are pretty exciting.  First is “community functionality” which will allow users to search for expertise across institutions with Collexis implementations.  According to Christian Herzog, Managing Director of Science, Technical and Medical Markets for Collexis, this functionality is ready to go.  A demonstration implementation has been deployed at the University of Michigan Medical School.  But rather than simply opening up cross institution search, Collexis has wisely decided to consult its customers first to determine how (and if) this could best serve them.  Conversations around this topic will happen over the next couple of weeks, but all of us on the call were enthusiastic.

The second “coming soon” feature demonstrated on the call was a new Metrics Module (shown below).  This module incorporates data visualization tools into the Research Profiling toolset allowing you to compare departmental (or even individual) research performance over time and according to whatever rubric is meaningful to your institution.  This will provide capabilities similar to another Elsevier offering, SciVal, but will be a lot cheaper. This functionality will not be part of the public portal, but will be available to authorized users within each institution.

It will be interesting to see how the partnership between Collexis and VIVO plays out.  Prior to VIVO receiving the NCRR grant, Collexis had been in discussions with the University of Pittsburgh (my alma mater) to form a similar alliance with the Digital|Vita project under Titus Schuyler.  If nothing else, it demonstrates that Collexis is in tune with developments in research networking and rather than trying to dominate is more interested in integrating and collaborating.  I think this is a good sign.  After all, isn’t that the whole point?

This morning, the Open Knowledge Foundation published a declaration of principles intended to inform and encourage the publication of Open Data within the scientific arena. The OKF defines open data as “data that can used, reused and redistributed without restriction other than (perhaps) the requirement to attribution or share-alike.” The Panton Principles for Open Data in Science is not a manifesto on Open Access or Open Science (though such manifestos are available such as Willinsky’s The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship or Hope’s excellent Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology). Rather they are simply four fundamental, guiding principles to make data available  “without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”  Here are the Panton Principles in their entirety as published by the Working Group on Open Data in Science.

• Where data or collections of data are published it is critical that they be published with a clear and explicit statement of the wishes and expectations of the publishers with respect to re-use and re-purposing of individual data elements, the whole data collection, and subsets of the collection. This statement should be precise, irrevocable, and based on an appropriate and recognized legal statement in the form of a waiver or license.

  When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes.

• Many widely recognized licenses are not intended for, and are not appropriate for, data or collections of data. A variety of waivers and licenses that are designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data are described here. Creative Commons licenses (apart from CCZero), GFDL, GPL, BSD, etc are NOT appropriate for data and their use is STRONGLY discouraged.

  Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.

• The use of licenses which limit commercial re-use or limit the production of derivative works by excluding use for particular purposes or by specific persons or organizations is STRONGLY discouraged. These licenses make it impossible to effectively integrate and re-purpose datasets and prevent commercial activities that could be used to support data preservation.

  If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Knowledge/Data Definition – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.

• Furthermore, in science it is STRONGLY recommended that data, especially where publicly funded, be explicitly placed in the public domain via the use of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence or Creative Commons Zero Waiver. This is in keeping with the public funding of much scientific research and the general ethos of sharing and re-use within the scientific community.

  Explicit dedication of data underlying published science into the public domain via PDDL or CCZero is strongly recommended and ensures compliance with both the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data and the Open Knowledge/Data Definition.

The Panton Principles website features an quickly growing list of endorsees of the principles who have signed a petition for adoption, along with a form for adding your own endorsement.

Beyond this declaration of principles, the working group is trying to make putting them into practice as simple as possible.  One tool they have recently launched is the “Is It Open Data?” service.  The idea behind the service is to provide a brokerage for data use enquiries. The mechanism is simple, basically a web form with some boilerplate text seeking clarification of the “openness” of any given dataset. Once your enquiry has been submitted, the service helps to identify the body that can authoritatively answer permissions and usage questions.  The responses are publicly available on the “Is It Open Data?” website.  Since the service is new, there isn’t much there in terms of existing enquiries or responses, but hopefully people will avail themselves of the idea and the network effect will kick in, making this a central point of information sharing about open data.  As awareness of the Panton Principles grows and hopefully they are adopted, data owners will proactively indicate the openness of their data.  The Open Knowledge Foundation has provided some handy icons that can be added to your website to make it obvious.

 open data web buttons

Within an hour of its announcement, Google Buzz the new social sharing features of Gmail became the top trending topic on Twitter. (That alliteration was not intentional). Google is trying to leverage its 176 Million users as a launchpad into the theoretically lucrative social computing market. "There has always been a giant social network beneath Gmail," said Google product manager Todd Jackson, when he formally unveiled Buzz. Google is betting that Buzz will become integral to their users’ lives, like Facebook and Twitter have. Also within that first hour, both Microsoft and Yahoo! launched counter attacks belittling Google’s new offering.

"Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008." – Microsoft statement on Google Buzz.

Microsoft is absolutely correct that people want aggregation rather than yet another social media platform, but this may actually be making an argument for adopting Buzz. There are two fundamental obstacles facing wholesale adoption of social media. First, most of the current tools and services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others still lie "above-the-flow" where people have to, as Michael Idinopulos puts it, "step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do" rather than integrating these tools in the normal process of their day to day work. Buzz, is attempting to move social computing "in-flow" (but then so did Microsoft and Yahoo! with underwhelming results) and according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, to further "bridge the gap between work and leisure." Microsoft might actually have a better shot at accomplishing this if they integrated social media (both inside and outside of the firewall) within Outlook and have taken some tentative steps in this direction. (I’m writing this blog post within MS-Word which will then publish it directly to connected-knowledge). However, most enterprise IT shops would likely disable these features in their Office installations anyway, at least until they drink the Enterprise 2.0 kool-aid. In the meantime, Google’s user-base may or may not start to migrate their status updates from Twitter to Buzz. Facebook, with half a billion users, isn’t going anywhere.

The real opportunity Google should be focused on is intelligent aggregation. Staying current across the proliferation of social media platforms is becoming overwhelming and introducing yet another tool suite isn’t going to help. Google has built its reputation on helping people find relevant information from the internet as a whole. Buzz should focus on helping us find what we want to see out of our increasingly complex social networks. There is at least some thought in this direction within Google. In a New York Times interview, Google vice president for product development Bradley Horowitz said "The stream of messages has become a torrent. We think this has become a Google-scale problem." He is correct in his assessment, but just adding Facebook feeds to your Gmail inbox isn’t going to solve the problem. There needs to be true integration of all social computing profiles and activities at a semantic level. To date Buzz, as well as the social media aggregation and integration efforts of Microsoft and Yahoo!, have focused on "Social Sharing" rather than actual "Social Networking." Being able to post and retrieve content to multiple social sites from a central portal is convenient but not particularly meaningful. I still must maintain a Linked-In profile, a Visual CV profile, a Facebook profile, a Good Reads profile and on and on and on. Each of these profiles has its own attendant social network which remains effectively isolated from the others despite the rich potential for meaningful connections among them. If these disparate networks could all be integrated in a semantically rich manner, we might finally see true social networking emerge.

The groundwork for ubiquitous social computing integration is quietly forming in the work of the "Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities" initiative. SIOC (pronounced "shock") is creating an ontology to "fully describe the content and structure of most online community sites" and to "create new connections between discussion channels and posts." SIOC leverages existing semantic web technologies and schemas such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) in order to represent online resources such as people and vocabularies. Ultimately, the specification’s authors, John G. Breslin, Uldis Bojārs hope to align SIOC with other semantic vocabularies such as the Online Presence Ontology in order to foster "Social Semantic Information Spaces" where information is socially created and maintained as well as being interlinked and machine-understandable, leading to new ways to discover information on the Web." In short, Web 3.0 will be the Social Semantic Web.This work is coming primarily out of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, at the National University of Ireland, Galway and has to this point remained a largely academic exercise. SIOC is beginning to make forays out of the ivory tower. SIOC exporters have been written for a number of blog, forum and content management system (CMS) platforms and several commercial applications have adopted the specification. The SIOC ontology has also been published as a W3C Member Submission.  

 Hopefully Google (or Microsoft, or Yahoo! … or Apple?) will recognize the opportunity to not only bring social computing "into the flow" but to move beyond just making social sharing more convenient into creating a meaningfully integrated social networking space. Combining social search, with semantic tagging and some Google secret sauce could be a truly revolutionary offering and increase the social signal within the current deluge of social noise.

I received an email over the weekend from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator for The Open Knowledge Foundation, announcing the formation of a new task group on Open Data in Science.

The Task Group will:

• Act as a central point of reference and support for individual scientists and research institutions interested in open data in science.
• Identify practices of early adopters and document existing open scientific datasets.
• Develop principles for open data in science, and legal and technical guidance for opening up scientific data.
• Conduct and disseminate research into incentives and obstacles to opening up scientific data.

The group will strive to strengthen the international network of individuals and organizations who support open data in science – bringing together leading figures in this field as well as young researchers from a diverse range of scientific disciplines.

The final proposal is still forthcoming, but this could prove to be an extremely valuable resource to Open Science.