I have recently been working through my organisation’s new VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) and trying to understand how I can use this pedagogic tool in my teaching activities. This is a pretty important development for us (and dare I say it, not just “us” who work here, but “us” in the sense that this is surely the way all education will be delivered in the future). I’ll not say any more about it here except to say that, notwithstanding the fact that some are bound to like it whilst some won’t, I’m fairly sure that eventually we’ll all wonder how we ever existed without such things. At the same time I’m reading We-Think by Charles Leadbeater which is all about the new opportunities that present themselves with a globally internet-connected community all working together selflessly to solve problems and develop content (Wikipedia being an example of what can be achieved; that will be seen as either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective). As an aside, note that I am reading the paperback book version (haha, what a luddite) because I don’t like getting sun cream on my laptop and my eyes aren’t good enough to read from a post-it sized screen. Anyway, it’s all delightfully optimistic and I want to believe it. So this, along with the potential of a fully functioning VLE has got me thinking about how we in the scientific research community, are going to use the power of we-think, beyond mere micro-blogging, rate my professors and shite gifts for academics (or the new variant that I want to introduce, gifts for shite academics).

First of all there’s blogs. Ah yes, I imagine a world in the future when there are 9 billion active blogs. That’s a lot of procrastination. So, here’s a typical entry for a day in the life of a scientist. Late for work on account of the wrong kind of rain. Spent the morning cleaning glassware and making up solutions before attending to a pile of risk assessments and COSHH forms. After a woeful lunch in the canteen tried to make headway with the 261 unread e-mails. Returned to the lab to find that the nitrogen gas supply had run out (again!) and any vestige of a research student was completely absent, so had to sort it out on my own (again!). Afternoon spent running standards. There’s something not quite right with the instrument; can’t put my finger on it. etc. etc. You get the picture. A large part of scientific endeavor is pretty tedious and not without personal sacrifice (see Darwin, C. for instance). We do it because we are driven to do it, and the fact that we don’t look good in a suit and tie.

Now, in our spare time, we might want to speculate on a few “big ideas” (most enjoyably something that is outside the field of our own specialisation) but anything of any consequence we’re going to keep to ourselves because (a) we’re bound by institutional/funding IPR restrictions and (b) we need the publications, otherwise no job, promotion, salary increment etc. I can see, however, instances where we-think works (and works well); for instance, images form NASA space missions being put directly onto the web (even principal investigators have to retrieve them from there, i.e. at the same time as anyone else). All and sundry can then download the images and with the empowerment of post-modern thinking, speculate on what the squiggly bits mean. But you couldn’t do this with, say, raw spectroscopic data acquired from the same mission; this arcane stuff has to be corrected, the instrument may have to be re-calibrated, there may need to be some lab tests run on the ground reference model, and so on. Without this lot, the output is just noise.

So, I’m still trying to see how this brave new world will work (for me at least, in my subject area). At the same time I think of the idealists who imagine that we somehow create a wiki on cancer-cured-here.com and then, by the magic of the internet, the cure appears. But there’s another aspect that bothers me: and that is, when the sum of all knowledge is recorded on a big server somewhere (Deep Thought, for instance) what will be the point of humans?