Breakout Session 5: Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools
Martin Fenner
Thursday, 24 July 2008 21:27 UTC
Martin Fenner, Oliver Obst and Jeff Marlow
We will discuss the role that science blogs and online forums are having in teaching science today. In a panel discussion we will look at practical examples and examine their potential as well as their shortcomings. To foster the use of these online tools in teaching, we hope to come up with a list of suggestions for both educators and software developers at the end of the session.
I would like to use this forum topic to prepare for the session at the conference. We will have only 45 minutes, so it would be great if we could get an interesting discussion going before the meeting.
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As a medical librarian I’m mostly interested in outreaching to our doctors and researchers. The gap between us and them is widening as more and more resources become accessible on the Internet. In no way you could get them to attend courses in the library. So we try to bridge that gap with weblogs, feeds, newsletters and other marketing activities. Recently we started a “house call” service and a kind of liasion librarianship. I don’t know what this will bring but I know that we have to do something.
Following Anna’s Comment on PubMed there was a lively discussion among librarians how to make sure that every medical researcher is an PubMed expert. But maybe that’s not the point anymore and we need Google experts instead?
What is the role of the library when every user is an expert by himself? -
Oliver, I agree with your observation that the gap between medical (or science) libraries and users has widened. But that is probably also true for many other services that were deeply changed by the internet (take for example travel agents).
And I also agree that libraries have to reach out to their users via the internet (or intranet). In my personal opinion there are two groups of users. 1) users that know little about the tools available for them (e.g. customized PubMed searches via email or RSS) and 2) sophisticated users that have learned about many of the available resources by themselves. A regular blog with tips or new library services should be an attractive and cost-effective tool to teach students and researchers new tricks in finding literature or other services that the library offers (e.g. institutional repositories). Group 2) could jump in with comments or help in writing blog posts.
I also have the hope that the science library is a good place to start “official” university blogging, i.e. not done in the spare time of the blogger and hosted on servers outside the university.
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Yes, the library could be a starting point. As a central (and neutral) service point we’re naturally interested in building a local community for sharing ideas, infrastructure, knowledge. We try to encourage people, but there’s too little feedback. So I don’t know if a) people are already satisfied with the resources at hand (plain mailing list), b) we use the wrong (or too modern) tools or c) we don’t provide services for the info/social needs of our customers.
Personally I think there’s a mixture from all the above. Our doctors and researchers seem to be driven by a) shortage of time, b) looking for tenure/career, c) looking for patients. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: Which services the’re really in need of? And which a library could realistically provide?
We recently started with a House call service but there’s was not a single request for courses until now so at the moment I’m a little bit frustrated.
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Interesting discussion.
Re. Library blogs
I agree the Library blog is a good pilot for internal blogging. Our biggest problem is a) getting people to read our Library blog and b) knowing whether they read it. When the blog host had a problem a while back we did get some complaints so that was reassuring!One sign of a healthy blog is a good crop of comments. Sadly ours has almost none. I hope that an Intranet redesign will make the Library blog a little more prominent. We’ve also just started a monthly round-up of the more interesting posts, which is then published in the Institute’s online newsletter.
Re. getting users to listen
I love the House call idea. We have tried:- talks at Lab meetings (effective but hard work)
- having a mini-exhibition stand in the main foyer (quite good esp for instant demos)
- offering short (30min) talks (poorly attended)
I think as much as anything it’s important to do something – even if people don’t come to a talk they do at least see posters associating “RSS”, “science blogs” and other topics with “Library”.
A recent article on perceptions of librarians
made the interesting point that people don’t ask librarians for help because they don’t really know that we have these kind of skills. Hence maybe we just need to tell them more often and more loudly. -
I would guess that blogs on the intranet are still rarely used in research institutions, and that this is not a specific problem of science libraries. We need good blog posts with lots of practical information – and patience… One area where a library blog could be useful is the republishing and commenting of interesting science blog posts, especially those relating to accessing and publishing papers. The typical library user will not follow too many science blogs and would appreciate some aggregating and filtering.
The PubMed discussion was a good example that we also need blog posts by library users. This will give feedback of what people are struggling with and also highlight some of the innovative approaches taken by students and other library users.
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Learning 2.0 is a learning program to educate library staff in Web 2.0 technologies including blogging. Originally started at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County by Helen Blowers, the program has been adapted my many libraries worldwide, including McMaster University, Murdoch University and Imperial College London. A German language version is available here.
This looks like a very useful program for library staff as well as students and faculty.
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I would hesitate to determine the success of my blog solely by counting comments. For a blog owner, comments are always a nice recognition. But sometimes people like to lurk (a well known phenomen in mailing lists is, that only 3% contribute and 97% lurk). Or maybe they simply have no time to comment or they’re to shy. One solution is to start with low level interactivity offers like polls or rating, where people don’t have to expose their identify.
We had the most comments (56) at our library blog when we discussed the quality of our coffee machine. So now I know what students are really interested in. But I’m yet struggling to learn what the needs and interests of scientists are. How I could get their attention.
That’s one of the main reasons to be on Nature Network and at the conference (and thereby, Frank, change the perception of the librarian on the fly :-) )
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Oliver – sure comments are not the only sign of a healthy blog, but I think when there are no comments at all it is a bit sad!
struggling to learn what the needs and interests of scientists are.
Well, of course they want access immediately to all relevant literature but that is just assumed!
Probably our most popular service is providing help with Endnote. That is valuable as they rely on it (or similar programs) so much now.
They are also interested in funding – but they want a highly customised service so that they only see relevant grants that they are eligible to apply for.
Though most researchers hate bibliometrics, they also have an interest in this as they recognise such measures are a fact of life today. (See the Talkscience topic on this).
And they do have some interest in the policy area around science and research. I produce an RSS feed of with such news items in and it seems to go down well.
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Oops, in my haste I forgot to mention a new report from the UK’s Research Information network (RIN):
Mind the skills gap – an RIN report on information-handling training for researchers. The report reviews the extent, quality and impact of training in research information methodologies and tools provided for academic researchers, particularly through university libraries. Actually it only looks at Univ and other HE libraries – no mention of research institutes at all. -
Frank, very interesting study, there seems to be a great need for education and training:
“… research information skills and competencies have not kept pace with rapid change in this area. … even when researchers regard themselves as competent, they often show alarming deficits in their skills. This raises important questions about how researchers acquire the appropriate skills in discovering and handling research information resources and services, the training opportunities provided for them, and the take-up of those opportunities.”
But how this training could be done, how the information competence achieved? Obviously, in this context, sophisticated e-learning tools work not quite well or are far beyond our capacity.
“Only a minority of users will find an ‘e-learning-only’ approach effective, because such programmes may not appeal to the preferred learning styles of particular researchers.”
So what about blogs? They lack the benefits of an individual, customized face-to-face training, which is obviously the “preferred learning style” in need for addressing the information needs of the scientist.
And that’s the way I use our blogs: Mainly for raising interest in policy things like open access, library budget, impact factors – and the need for lifelong learning. The training itself is done face to face e.g. by house calls. Other interaction tool such as Skype, chat, phone, email are used only for ad-hoc counselling at the moment.
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