Nov

19

Baroque intricacies in British Library

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, Publishing, STM, Workflow | Leave a Comment

I went to the launch party on Wednesday for a joint report by RIN (the Research Information Network) and the British Library called “Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences“. Sounds riveting , doesn’t it? And actually … it is. One of the speakers waxed lyrical about the “baroque intricacies of information exchange”, and I ended, after looking at  the report, by seeing what he meant .

We are still so young in workflow analysis that looking at the ways that researchers in life sciences, for example, pursue their business on the network contains surprises. Patterns are strongly differentiated by niche and subject, there is great individuality, patterns are really complex etc . But did we expect anything else?  Look in this report at the models for epidemiology of zoonotic diseases and for neuroscience in particular, and see the nodal role of analysis, the mapping elements, definitional processes, and the positioning of evidential data . There is never going to be a universal researcher workflow model, but the eight elegant flow diagrams created from this report by Ann Bruce of the research team should be on the desk of every STM publisher who wishes to move up the value chain from the article publishing world into a safer future. Not that articles are unimportant in these workflows – they just take up less time and value than publishers like to think .

Visiting the British Libray is good too. With the huge BioMedical Research Insitute growing up in its back yard, and its recent announcement of the launch of Datacite, a DOI style identifier system for evidential data, it appears to be keeping its focus on its vital  STM customers. Yet there was not a single commercial publisher (unless you count PLoS!) in the room at the launch of this report. Very sad indeed.  There may be valid reasons for publishers to want to change the Library’s view on a great number of topics, but it has to be reckoned with and will not go away.

Nov

19

Two in a day…part 2

Filed Under Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

And the other thing also concerned education, which is rapidly becoming the Last Digital Frontier.  I have been told for years that teachers will never become effective users of online resources, that teachers will not create digital lesson plans, that nothing will move until the hyper-conservative US K-12 market moves, that there is no point in going beyond digital textbooks since teachers will not create learning journeys/pathways, or encourage students to do so etc. etc.

Imagine then my surprise at reading an article in the New York Times on 15 November entitled “Selling Lesson Plans Online Raises Cash and Questions“.  There you can discover that www.TeachersPayTeachers.com has 200,000 teacher users who pay each other for lesson planning, and that site revenues have just topped $600,000.  Further, www.WeAreTeachers.com has a knowledge marketplace which includes lesson plans and online tutoring.  The big question asked by the NYT is whether the teachers own the intellectual property they are selling .

These sites are interesting, and not because of their volume or where they are.  They are really interesting because they demonstrate that even in the tough education space, change comes as professionals begin to see themselves as part of a community of the like-minded, begin to exchange useful things for peer recognition (which is what the cash really represents), and then begin to move forward not as a group of innovators but en masse as a networked society.  Who knows, they may even begin to recognize that their own pupils are moving alongside them (albeit with a superior skills base) and begin to use the network for real learning and real assessment.  For publishers there is a serious message here: find or buy software which will allow you now to build a community environment into courseware which allows teachers to innovate around your courses and use you as the platform upon which resource discovery and course development takes place, or prepare to bow out of networked learning.  And if you do not know where to get good learning journeys software, then ask people like www.t-learning.net. They have been presenting this stuff to the “ it will never happen here” brigade for the past three years.

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