Born Digital: From Digital Natives to e-Researchers?

Mike Fraser, Paul Jeffreys, Andrew Warr

Oxford e-Research Centre

Ralph Schroeder

Oxford Internet Institute

Overview

Changing social - online – practices New forms of Online Collaboration Types of Online Collaboration

Social and Work Practices Online Distributed Working

The Varieties of e-Research Two e-Research Projects

e-Research in the Classroom Conclusions and Outlook

New forms of Online Collaboration

Collaboration is moving beyond the walls of the educational institutions

Information is no longer only contained within the covers of a book or periodical

Search engines have become an important gateway

Types of Online Collaboration

Tools for… Sharing resources (Wikis) Distributing content (Blogs) Creating a web presence (Personal

web pages) Online collaboration (Multi-player

games)

Social and Work Practices Online

Closest friends are often online first (Mesch et al.)

Online gaming leads to offline relationships (Axelsson and Regan)

New spaces of socializing and research are emerging

Don’t assume online is ’inferior’ to face-to-face

Distributed Working

As good as being there together – some tasks can be done as well as in shared virtual environments as face-to-face (Schroeder et al.)

Visualization and the manipulation of objects is as effective in a shared environment, other forms of co-presence technologies (videoconferencing) are proliferating…

Cave-type Virtual Environments

Doing the Rubik’s cube

Task: The Rubik puzzle

Face-to-Face

The Varieties of e-Research

Large-scale projects to share computing resources and data

‘Virtual [temporary distributed collaboration] Organizations’

Tools for project management Temporary and long-term repositories of

data and other material Fixed versus dynamic online resources Combined with distributed working and

search…

Annotation for 1085 pages after 5 months, ongoing refinement by means of indexing, corrections and added depth

First stage processed LHC data, now second stage of European project with a world-wide user community

Current State

500+ volunteers1000s of researchers, 100+ projectsParticipants

Practically noneMillions of EurosResources

Off-the-shelf Wiki toolsMiddleware, other tools for accessing and processing data

Tools

Page annotationsShared ‘Grid’ processing for petabytes of data

Resource created

Literature, annotation for Pynchon novel

High-Energy Physics, many other disciplines

Type of Research

Against the Day Wiki http://pynchonwiki.com/

Enabling Grids for E-Sciencehttp://www.eu-egee.org/

Two e-Research Projects

E-Research in the Classroom

E-Science for Schools Blog Schools e-Science Network for the Study of

Environmental Science (SENSE) Oxford CyberSEM E-Malaria Others include climateprediction.net with

BBC…

http://e-science4schools.blogspot.com/One blog amongst others tracking e-science in schools and public arena

SENSE: Bringing e-Science to School

Schools EScience Network for the Study of Environmental Science (SENSE) http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/hilarys/esci/ 2003-2004, Sussex University and primary schools, to

promote an understanding of science for children and teachers

children used PDAs & remote sensors to collect environmental data

data visualisation tools emphasis on collaborative activity

results shared between children in Nottingham and Sussex

discussed with a pollution expert remotely

See further, Woodgate, D. and Stanton Fraser, D. (2005) Science and Education 2005: A review. Report produced for JISC (2005). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/ACF2B4.pdf

http://www.equator.ac.uk/index.php/articles/1207

“Equator is a six-year Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) supported by EPSRC that focuses on the integration of physical and digital interaction.”

Oxford CyberSEM

Controlling a remote scanning electron microscope over the web Supports biology learning in 14-18 age group Choice of samples (e.g. rat skin, E.Coli,

sperm) Remote user can focus, pan, capture images

including 'shared' experience by other logged-in users

Led by Prof. David Cockayne, Materials, Oxford

http://websemserver.materials.ox.ac.uk/cybersem/

E-Malaria

A'Level students, led by Southampton Students have an opportunity to manipulate

authentic data in search for anti-malarial drugs Task is to design a compound which can

suppress an enzyme present in malaria parasite

Expert software with user-friendly interfaces Guided through real drug design tools Compare with others, 'league table', discuss

with experts and fellow students

http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/emalaria/

climateprediction.net

Climate Prediction.net has public education via the website, media, and schools as an important facet of the project

Website has much information on climate change and related topics to the CPDN program.

Open University (UK) offers a short course (S199) utilizing the climateprediction.net experiment (MS Windows client)

Students hosted a debate on climate change issues, compared and contrasted their results, etc.

Currently focused on UK schools but plan to expand to other European schools and US schools

With thanks to Myles Allen for CPDN slides

Advanced Student Visualisation Interface together with students at Gosford Hill School, Oxon viewing their CPDN model

Conclusions E-Science can increase public interest in

science - and awareness of - science Using tools and techniques from science,

mediated through web-based tools

Connects digital natives with e-scientists Helps to dissolve barriers between school

and university (for teachers & parents too) e.g. Climate Prediction & BBC

Broadens environment in which learning takes place (e.g. museums, walk in the woods)

Open Source Science – the next generation scientist?

http://www.thesynapticleap.org/

Outlook

The skills of digital natives as e-researchers are increasingly sought after in industry, academia and elsewhere

Collaboration models vary – as do goals, and strengths and weaknesses of different types of online collaboration and e-Research

New ways of collaborating online are proliferating – among natives, researchers and others…

Some sources

Oxford e-Research Centrehttp://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/

Oxford Internet Institutehttp://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/

Oxfore e-Social Science Project: Ethical, Legal and Institutional Dynamics of Grid-Enabled e-Sciences http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oess/

E-Horizons Institutehttp://www.e-horizons.ox.ac.uk/