Citizen Scientists?

The web is increasing the opportunities for more people to become involved in science and to participate in data collection, data analysis, etc.  This New York Times article highlights a number of efforts to engage people in scientific work.  In addition to the examples in the article there are additional links and examples in the comments section.

Almost all these examples are from physical sciences, where are the social and behavioral science examples?  We are missing something here? 

Blogging for Huffington Post on Divorce

For the past month or so I have been writing for the Huffington Post Divorce page. This work gives a chance to return to my primary professional work which is as a educator regarding issues related to families.

For several years I have admonished and cajoled colleagues about the need for scientists and teachers to use the web as a platform for teaching. (See my comments about the importance of scientists and professionals blogging about the link between autism and vaccines.) When I was approached by the editors at the Huffington Post about being a blogger for their newly launching web page on divorce , I knew I had to do this. I have now posted four posts (about one per week). (See my Huffington Posts work here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-hughes )

My first post on the role of religion in shaping attitudes about divorce got the most (151) comments (both thoughtful and odd). My most recent post on the role of conflict in preventing divorce got the smallest number of comments (2). It is hard to know why one post gets more comments than others.

I will continue to try this medium. Here I will describe my various reactions to "teaching" in the Huffington Post.

Transforming Scholarly Communication -- the next step

The distribution of scientific information is changing... everything from how data are collected, analyzed, reported and archived so says, Lee Dirk, in a fascinating talk about Transforming Scholarly Communication.

In this talk he describes new tools that allow scientists to discover and share data and scientific outcomes in ways that look more like social networking and Amazon book recommendations than scientific meetings and scholarly journals.

I am struck that the behavioral and social sciences would benefit the most from this level of transformation, yet our work seems the least influenced by these trends.

I also find myself asking questions about how educating students and the general public will change with these new methods of science communication. How do we build these science communication tools into our educational platforms?

Measuring Scientific Contributions on the Web

Michael Nielson (The Future of Science) has been writing some very interesting ideas about why scientists have been slow to adopt the use of information-technology as a means to distribute their work and to invite collaboration.

He cites the failures of significant efforts to foster online collaboration and communication. For example, the journal, Nature, launched an open commentary section on their website to foster discussion among scientists about papers published. Nature terminated the effort when the site failed to get many comments. The final report on the site stated, “…there is a marked reluctance among scientists to offer open comments.”

Neilson suggests that there are two major problems that prevent web-based scientific publishing and collaboration—a lack of software and cultural practices within the scientific community that prevent open sharing. He suggests that the second problem is the biggest problem.

He also notes that we don’t have good metrics for how to judge the value of online contributions:

1. What is the value of a blog post?
2. What is the value of a blog?
3. What is the value of a contribution to Wikipedia?
4. What is the meaning of having a webpage at the top of Google’s Page Rank?
5. What is the value of your lecture on YouTube?

These are tough questions to answer, but it seems to me that we have to begin to provide some best guesses and take this type of work into account in making judgments about the quality and quantity of scientific work. Failing to do this will only harm science and education because our best work will not be available in easily accessible ways.

Open Peer-Review of Scientific Work on the Web

There is no particular reason that scientific articles cannot be openly reviewed on the web. If we are true to the scientific ideal that feedback from peers is valuable and advances both the scientific work and the presentation of the scientific work, then it would seem that the reviews of scientific papers should be available publicly. (Not just to scientists, but to all.)

Linking Laboratories, classrooms and the public

The web and all the various tools that are increasingly part of the web provide an opportunity for higher education to build seamless bridges from laboratories to classrooms to the public.

In the face-to-face world it is mostly impossible to effectively bridge all these domains of higher education, but the Web provides us with a means to knit these activities together. In earlier posts, I have talked about open science, open education and engaging the public, but no w I want to focus on building an infrastructure that puts these all together.

At the moment I can only illustrate what I have in mind by giving an example:

I. Public Level

The public seeking information about the effects of divorce on children and engaging in discussions, sharing examples, and exploring ideas about the topic.

II. Classroom Level

Teachers and students working with texts, discussions, analysis, activities, tests, etc. about the scientific knowledge about the effects of divorce on children.

III. Laboratory Level

Scientists working with advanced students to discover new information about the effects of divorce on children.

I have used the word level because my thinking about this is that knowledge would be organized from the most simple level to the most complex. I have illustrated this with three levels, but there would be many sub-levels within each of these major levels. For example, within the classroom level there would be introductory material, advanced material, and so forth. I have also illustrated this as one narrow topic when, in fact, there are many streams of knowledge that would get integrated together at each level. Even in this example, there would be knowledge about child development, parenting, marriage, divorce and then there would be scientific methods, critical thinking and other tools of synthesis.

So why does all this matter. I want to create intellectual communities that bridge people across all these levels. I want someone to be able to find the public level of information and be able to explore issues at more complex levels. I want scientists and teachers to create windows in their classrooms and laboratories so that others can observe their thinking and their creation of knowledge.

Is the Expert Making a Comeback?

A recent article in Newsweek suggests that the days of user-generated content are fading:

By any name, the current incarnation of the Internet is known for giving power to the people. Sites like YouTube and Wikipedia collect the creations of unpaid amateurs while kicking pros to the curb—or at least deflating their stature to that of the ordinary Netizen. But now some of the same entrepreneurs that funded the user-generated revolution are paying professionals to edit and produce online content.

In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. "People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information," says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a "perfect storm of demand for expert information."

Perhaps there is a growing awareness that there is some need to pay attention to the credibility of sources. There are new software tools that sort on credibility and other factors, but I am not sure that we want software deciding what is credible.

The article goes on to suggest that the credibility of user-generated content has increasingly been criticized:

"The timing could be right for a new era in Silicon Valley, a Web 3.0. It comes, after all, during dark days for the ideal of a democratic Web. User-generated sites like Wikipedia, for all the stuff they get right, still find themselves in frequent dust-ups over inaccuracies...."

This section set the blogging world buzzing because there are plenty of examples of bloggers who have exposed inaccuracies in mainstream media and in the government and business, so it is not completely clear whose work is better. Bloggers and user-generated content proponents suggest that their work is open to review and correction where other work is less open and often less easily correctable. The real debate may be more about the openness of the process.

Applying the OpenWetWare approach to behavioral research

OpenWetWare is a good example of how to begin creating a shared interactive space to begin exchanging information and ideas about science.

The focus of this work is on biology, but the principles and structure that have been created are applicable to other science areas.

In OpenWetWare they have three main sections related to the research: materials (things that get used in biological research), protocols (procedures for different research activities) and resources (everything from biological material to journals).

For behavioral scientists, these sections would translate as follows:

1. Materials (research instruments, questionnaires, databases, etc.)
2. Protocols (procedures for collecting and analyzing data)
3. Resources (data sources, funding sources, journals, etc.)

Another dimension of the website includes: Labs, Groups, courses, blogs. In short, scientists and use this platform to manage their laboratory group or to create a new group of scientists to work on a common project. The courses section seems to be a wiki-based course platform. The blogs section provides a platform to create blogs related to biology. Again all of these would have easy parallels in the behavioral sciences.

Some useful ideas about Science or Discovery 2.0

Scientific American has begun a discussion of Science 2.0 (I have referred to this as "Discovery 2.0."). Interesting they not only posted a discussion of ideas about open science and laboratories, but they the article itself is posted prior to publication with the invitation to readers to provide comments and feedback.

The article doesn't provide a provide a definition of Science 2.0, but roughly the suggestion is that scientists will begin to do their work with open data, lab notes, results, etc. in ways that allows for this work to be viewed and commented on by others.

The most discussed example is MIT's OpenWetWare, which is a wiki designed for biologists to open their laboratories to others and share information.

There are a lot of issues to work through, but this quote sums up my feelings about this effort:

"the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place."

Open Science among plant science

Here is a good example of where we need to be heading in terms of creating open systems of scientific development. There has been alot of talk about Learning 2.0, perhaps we need to begin talking about Discovery 2.0. (or maybe we are still at 1.0). The point is that there are many new tools and strategies that can be employed by scientists, science educators and the interested public around research and discovery.

NSF just funded a major effort to bring together plant scientists to share data, work on common problems, etc. Here is a quote from iPlant about its mission:

"This is an exciting time for science education! A user-friendly cyberinfrastructure will mean that for the first time in history everyone can work with the same data using the same tools in the same timeframe as high-level researchers. The goal of our Education Outreach and Training (EOT) is to ensure that everyone – students, teachers and faculty, from middle school to graduate school – will have the access and training to use these data and participate in research in real time."

They note that there is even room for social and behavioral scientists in terms of their willingness to create opportunities for social and behavioral scientists who are interested in collaborative processes and other other aspects of people working with each other across time and distance. As we know from some limited work in this area, there are substantial questions in this area. Well here is a chance for others to take a first-hand look.

More thoughts about data and extending science

Some of the most expensive data that we collect is qualitative and/or observational data. Making these data available to other researchers so that they can ask other types of questions or re-analyze data seems like an especially good idea.

There is one good example of this at the U of Illinois that begins to open up these data. This project is called the "Ethnography of the University." Faculty and students have agreed to share their data, publications, etc. in a common space. This allows more students to have access to the data, extend the questions, develop new ideas and exchange information.

Students who are interested in various topics about student life among university students have the opportunity to view multiple perspectives on this topic. Students interested in learning more about how scientists create ethnographies can see science in action.