Science 2.0, is it a new practice or the leveraged version of an old one?

Retrieved from a post of  Nicolas Balacheff on the SOA scientific portal on September the 25th, 2009

Since the beginning of its history, Scientific research has been a social activity with a large place given to communication, debates and collaborations. There are many evidences of this social dimension of the scientific activity, including famous and extensive exchanges of letters. The development of the publishing industry and business has leveraged the capacity of disseminating research results, questions and debates. The impact of IT-based tools has accelerated the phenomena, but has not changed its meaning and scientific raison d'être. The main revolution is in the capacity nowadays to not only share theories and results, but also instruments and data at a point never experienced before. This is the core of Science 2.0, as emphasised by Barbara Kieslinger and  Stefanie Lindstaedt in an analysis of Science 2.0 practices, it means in our field "the possibility for researchers to share lab results, protocols, class activities, etc." (p.2). We fully agree.

But there is one point worth to discuss. The authors mention (p.1) the effort invested in "publishing one's ideas". The word "idea" deserves some attention. The scientific activity, in my opinion, is less about sharing ideas than agreeing on results which could be turned into shareable knowledge shareable. What means that the issue is to discuss the rational and the argumentation (if not proof) supporting the claimed results. Sharing ideas leads to an over emphasis on social interactions and concern about ownership, sharing results would call for paying more attention to the data, the theories and the methods we use and down play the issue of ownership (which actually can never be avoided, e.g. polemics about anteriority). If sharing and publishing ideas is our core business, then I understand those who fear theft (plagiarism) and vandalism. If we privilege the sharing of results then the risk is less important, but the challenge more difficult to take up because it means some consensus on the theoretical frameworks and the related methods. Indeed, I mean results coming from work advanced enough so that it makes sense to share it (and not unfinished work, see p.2 sec. 3.).

The discussion on TEL Science 2.0 is actually a discussion about our scientific practice (whatever is the technology): What do we publish? What does it mean to publish "ideas" and "unfinished" (and sometimes not started) projects? Data cannot be published without being documented, here what can we say, then what are the conditions for sharing data in our domain?

In the end the problem is less to open up our research, than demonstrating by reaching reasonable theoretical and technological consensus that it produces something tangible, and not only discourse. The risk of Science 2.0 is exactly that: increasing and accelerating the production of discourses at the price of forgetting the production of high quality results and developing the TEL knowledge base.

A note after the reading of: Kieslinger B., Stefanie N. Lindstaedt S. N. (2009) Science 2.0 Practices in the Field of Technology Enhanced Learning. In: Science2.0 for TEL Workshop. ECTEL, Nice, France

The TEL Dictionary initiative at the MEI spring school

Jointly held with the first Medical Education Informatics (MEI2012) conference, the Medical Education Content Sharing Technologies Spring School included in its programme a presentation of the TEL Dictionary initiative. The following slide-show introduced the project, then participants were invited to react and comment (see the report here).

Questions from the MEI2012 Spring school about the TEL Dictionary initiative

About 20 PhDs and senior researchers from different disciplines participed in the TEL Dictionary session of the Medical Education Content Sharing Technologies Spring School held  Thessaloniki on April 5th. After a short presentation of the TEL dictionary initiative, participants were invited to scan the current lists of terms and expressions included in the TEL Thesaurus, in order to make remarks and suggestions and express their own priority. Here are the results and some comments.

Participants express their wish to see in the list terms and expressions from disciplines which provide TEL research with important concepts. Here they are: Connectionism, Connectivism, Case based learning, Community of practice, Active learning, Interactive learning, Worked examples, Digital literacy. They are from the learning science. Only one term from computer science was suggested: Intelligent agents. What may be emphasized is that there are no terms specific to TEL research, but terms pointing to concepts and theories from education and psychology that researchers need. So here is the needed extension for the next release of the thesaurus.

Four expressions from the thesaurus were pointed as deserving priority: Distributed learning, Game-based learning, Ubiquitous learning, Collaborative learning. This corresponds well to one of the prominent stream of communication of the MEI 2012 conference: internet as the place were to content is shared and learning communities are emerging.

Then, three questions:

Why is "constructionism" in the thesaurus and not "constructivism"?
Both terms are used as keywords to tag paper in the TeLearn open archive, hence both could have been in the first version of the thesaurus. However, "constructivism" is one of the big concepts in psychology,  for which it is rather easy to find well documented definitions. Since the strategy is to develop the thesaurus in an incremental way, this term has not been included at the first stage. "Constructionism" is a term which has been coined by S. Papert as a response within the Logo framework to the limitation found in referring only to "Constructivism" (one of the foundational reference of Logo). This is then a term specifically introduced in TEL research, and hence we took it (see the definition prepared by Richard Noss).

Why is "Virtual campus" in the thesaurus? It seems to be a direct translation of a French expression (campus virtuel) and not a genuine English keyword.  
It is right that "campus virtuel" is a keyword in the French TEL research area. However, "virtual campus" is an entry of wikipedia where it is defined as "the online offerings of a college or university where college work is completed either partially or wholly online, often with the assistance of the teacher, professor, or teaching assistant." A quick look at Scholar shows that this expression is rather popular internationally and for quite a long while. As suggested by the participant, there is also the expression "Digital campus", which looks rather close and possibly more English. But may be we have to be cautious with such feelings and to take the time to come back to the literature to check the claim against evidences. 

One should notice that "teaching" is not in the thesaurus, why?
To some extend we can consider as a curious fact that the word "teaching" is not present. There is the word "tutor", what suggest that teaching is not completely foreign to the TEL research area, as it were. But it is right that the word is not in the set of keywords from which we started -- those of TeLearn repository and also a questionnaire to the community. One reason may be that the focus on learning and the learned tended to push aside teaching if not the teacher. And this is reflected in the keywords chosen by researchers, even if they use the word in their writings. Another reason  may be that in English there is some "teaching" in the meaning of learning (as it is the case in French where you can say "les élèves apprennent l'anglais", but also "j'apprends l'anglais à mes élèves"...

What would make a social software a science 2.0 tool?

Retrieved from a post of  Nicolas Balacheff on the SOA scientific portal on September the 25th, 2009

Moving "away from managing generic individual networks to managing contextual shared spaces", Graaasp seems to be a smart tool to shape a learning community, be it in TEL or in an other domain. If I understand well, its key characteristic is the richness of the support to social interactions on top of content, the proactive support to establishing links and the dynamic of the roles within the community.

Reading a scenario of use of Graaasp, I wondered what would be the specific added value of this environment for a researcher in TEL. I came to thinking that it is not its versatility in resonance with a young domain which rapidly change, move, evolve. It is not its openness to the variety of disciplines and competences in a multidisciplinary domain. It might be its capacity to dynamically create a common knowledge base as a side effect, if I may say so, of the creation of trusted community and working groups. Indeed, there are other domains which are young, not well established and multidisciplinary. But I wonder whether there are other domains in which there is so little agreement on the theoretical and methodological frameworks, uncertainty on what is known and accepted, reluctance to build a common knowledge base -- if not sometimes a serious doubt about he fact that there can be "results" in a scientific sense in TEL.

We know how to build FAQ from the analysis of a flow of questions and answers, can we build a knowledge base from the analysis of the queries of the students and the feedback and support from knowledgeable others -- supervisors, senior researchers or peers? Would Graaasp be instrumental in doing that? If so, I would see it as a fully Science 2.0 infrastructure, what is more than being a software supporting the construction and shaping a community from a social perspective.

A note after the reading of: Gillet D., El Helou S., Joubert M., Sutherland R. (2009) Science 2.0: Supporting a Doctoral Community of Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning using Social Software. Science2.0 for TEL Workshop. EC-TEL