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Welcome to my blog which is endeavouring to map my journey through a Professional Doctorate in Education. The learning curve is steep and all climbing aids are welcome!

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Digital researchers

Attending a conference for 'digital researchers' yesterday at the British Library and came away wondering why some people had attended at all. On one hand, the Twitter feed was going bonkers throughout and it was hard to keep up with the flow of thoughts, and on the other hand there were people seemingly reluctant to sign up for a Google or Twitter account.

Interesting part of the process was to group everyone even before the opening speech , in order that group members could spread themselves over the range of workshops and then communicate with each other through Tweets, wiki's etc as the conference progressed. Interesting way of capturing thoughts but didn't really work for us because of those who needed a social media induction course rather than an invitation to contribute as a digital researcher.

It did make me wonder how I ever researched anything before the internet. Even though my research focus is the digital world, how would I ever prepare lectures, workshops let alone tackle the writing that I'm trying to do currently? How would I ever have sourced the pile of second hand books that now sit on my shelves if it wasn't for Amazon, and come to think of it, how would I afford it as I do a pretty brisk trade in reselling books through Amazon as well?

I've got files upon file of links sent through to me on Twitter, and I hope that I've been able to do the same for others....PDF's, bookmarks, RSS feeds. How would I have booked the plane fare today for the August conference where I hope to deliver a paper about my research?

These are all things that are related to the digital researcher. I suppose part of my disappointment with yesterday was the focus on the negative, the what if's, rather than people just using common sense about how their information and data is stored. Huge discussion about whether journal articles should be put out there for reviewers to find them rather than the more traditional way of an article having to get past the gate-keepers like the editor and chosen reviewers.

At the heart of it is really the thought of collaboration or of open source material. In the last few weeks I've heard 3 'eminent' professors talking about how they put all their current materials online as open source material under a creative commons license. It did occur to me that maybe these are the people that have least to lose since they've already made their mark in some way. Perhaps of more interest is thinking about how those of us trying to carve out some kind of niche can use the digital world in that quest. How do we get our thoughts out there in a way that doesn't involve the gate-keepers but is still part of a robust process?