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Secondary Students’ Perceptions of Open Science Textbooks

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors: Rebecca Morales, Alesha Baker

In an attempt to align instructional resources with new state standards and to increase teacher awareness of these standards, one large suburban public school district piloted the development and adoption of open secondary science textbooks.

Open textbooks created by teachers in grades six through nine replaced conventional science textbooks provided by mainstream publishing companies. Therefore, grade nine students were not included in this study.

At the end of the first quarter, middle school students (grades six through eight) who used the open textbooks were surveyed. Survey responses required respondents to consider their learning before and during the use of the open textbook. The survey included quality and presentation of content questions, as well as an opportunity for students to explain their responses.

There were qualitative and quantitative indications that students’ perceptions of an open textbook in place of a standard textbook are improving students’ attitudes and behaviors toward learning.

URL : Secondary Students’ Perceptions of Open Science Textbooks

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.455

 

 

EN

Utilisation of open access institutional repositories in Zimbabwe’s public universities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Mass Masona Tapfuma

Despite the establishment of institutional repositories (IRS) in Zimbabwe’s public universities, content for these repositories remains untangible. The purpose of this study was to explore the utilisation of IRs in the universities.

The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology (UTAUT) model was used to understand individuals behaviours’ towards acceptance of technologies. The pragmatist paradigm guided the study employing the mixed methods research (MMR) approach combining quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Triangulation was used to obtain a deeper understanding of the research problem. Eight public universities were surveyed including all levels of academics, research directors, library directors and IR/faculty librarians. A census, stratified and systematic sampling techniques were adopted to constitute the sample of the study.

A survey was carried out aided by questionnaires and interviews. Document analysis (policies and so forth) and bibliometric analysis were also employed including attending a Zimbabwe University Libraries Consortium (ZULC) workshop.

The findings of the study revealed a high awareness of OA/IRs by the academic community but content deposits were very low despite the existence of research and OA/IR policies (in some of the universities) which mandated deposit of research funded by the universities. A national repository was also established by the Research Council of Zimbabwe to link all repositories in the country while ZULC was lobbying for the development of a national OA policy. T

he study concluded that Zimbabwe’s university libraries faced numerous challenges in marketing and promoting of repositories, therefore, the concept of IRs remains in the infancy stage. It was recommended that: the libraries should intensify OA/IR education efforts; incentivise scholars/academics and library staff; resolve IPR issues and strengthen deposit mandates.

The study would contribute to practice in the establishment, running, management and promotion of repositories and policy makers will be informed and guided in the development and implementation of OA policies and regulatory frameworks leading to the establishment of the requisite infrastructure for OA/IR establishment in all academic institutions in the country, the national repository and the national content harvesting systems. Further research to probe the causes of low deposit rates and why scholars prefer depositing elsewhere is recommended.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10413/14893

EN

Higher Education as a Gift and as a Commons

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Andreas Wittel

This paper takes as a starting point Lewis Hyde’s (2007, xvi) assertion that art is a gift and not a commodity: “Works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies’, a market economy and a gift economy.

Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without a market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” I want to argue that the same claim should be made for those aspects of academic labour that refer to teaching and education. Education can survive without a market, but where there is no gift there is no education.

However the gift that is part of all educational processes gets rather obscured in regimes where higher education is either a public good or a private good. In regimes of higher education as public good the gift gets obscured by the provision of a service by the state. In regimes of higher education as a private good (e.g. higher education in the UK) the gift gets even more obscured, obviously so.

It is only in a third educational regime, where education is a common good (e.g. the recent rise of the free universities), that the gift character of education can properly shine. Whilst this should be celebrated, the notion of a higher education commons poses some severe challenges.

The paper ends with an examination of possibilities of academic activists to rescue or even strengthen the gift-like character of education.

URL : Higher Education as a Gift and as a Commons

Alternative location : http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/892

EN

The counting house: measuring those who count. Presence of Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics and Altmetrics in the Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley & Twitter

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Alberto Martin-Martin, Enrique Orduna-Malea, Juan M. Ayllon, Emilio Delgado Lopez-Cozar

Following in the footsteps of the model of scientific communication, which has recently gone through a metamorphosis (from the Gutenberg galaxy to the Web galaxy), a change in the model and methods of scientific evaluation is also taking place.

A set of new scientific tools are now providing a variety of indicators which measure all actions and interactions among scientists in the digital space, making new aspects of scientific communication emerge.

In this work we present a method for capturing the structure of an entire scientific community (the Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics, and Altmetrics community) and the main agents that are part of it (scientists, documents, and sources) through the lens of Google Scholar Citations.

Additionally, we compare these author portraits to the ones offered by other profile or social platforms currently used by academics (ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and Twitter), in order to test their degree of use, completeness, reliability, and the validity of the information they provide.

A sample of 814 authors (researchers in Bibliometrics with a public profile created in Google Scholar Citations was subsequently searched in the other platforms, collecting the main indicators computed by each of them.

The data collection was carried out on September, 2015. The Spearman correlation was applied to these indicators (a total of 31) , and a Principal Component Analysis was carried out in order to reveal the relationships among metrics and platforms as well as the possible existence of metric cluster.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02412

FR

Les sources nativement numériques pour les sciences humaines et sociales

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Camille Paloque-Berges

Cet article vient proposer une synthèse et une extension d’une journée d’étude prenant pour problématique les questions méthodologiques et épistémologiques associées aux sources numériques natives (SNN), c’est-à-dire produites originellement dans le contexte d’usage des outils et environnements numériques.

On s’attache d’abord à décrire le type de sources dont il s’agit du point de vue de leur matérialité, afin de les faire apparaître derrière le mille-feuille des artefacts informatiques. Données, code, documents, équipement : autant de niveaux allant du logiciel au matériel informatique dans lesquels s’inscrivent les gestes et mots du présent.

Ces sources sont ensuite considérées à travers le processus de mise en archive, censée leur donner une valeur patrimoniale stable – et soulevant les problématiques de l’originalité, de l’intégrité et de l’authenticité de ces sources.

Enfin, un échantillon de méthodologies associées à l’analyse des SNN est présenté à travers une observation à plusieurs échelles, avant de conclure ce tour d’horizon par les questionnements épistémologiques entraînés par la réflexivité du chercheur qui les manipule.

URL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-histoire-politique-2016-3-page-221.htm

EN

Science Metadata Management, Interoperability and Data Citations of the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : M. Kanao, M. Okada, J. Friddel, A. Kadokura

The Polar Data Centre (PDC) of the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) has a responsibility to manage polar science data as part of the National Antarctic Data Centre and the Science Committee on Antarctic Research. During the International Polar Year (IPY 2007–2008), a remarkable number of data/metadata involving multi-disciplinary science activities were compiled.

Although the long-term stewardship of the accumulation of metadata falls to the data center of NIPR, the work has been in collaboration with the Global Change Master Directory, the Polar Information Commons, the World Data System and other data science bodies/communities under the International Council for Science.

In addition, links with other data centers, such as the Data Integration and Analysis System Program of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and the Polar Data Catalogue of Canada were initiated in 2014 using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The metadata compiled by the PDC were recently modified using an automatic attributing system and DataCite through the Japan Link Center.

URL : Science Metadata Management, Interoperability and Data Citations of the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-001

EN

Recommendations to Improve Downloads of Large Earth Observation Data

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Rahul Ramachandran, Christopher Lynnes, Kathleen Baynes, Kevin Murphy, Jamie Baker, Jamie Kinney, Ariel Gold, Jed Sundwall, Mark Korver, Allison Lieber, William Vambenepe, Matthew Hancher,  Rebecca Moore, Tyler Erickson, Josh Henretig,
Brant Zwiefel, Heather Patrick-Ahlstrom, Matthew J. Smith

With the volume of Earth observation data expanding rapidly, cloud computing is quickly changing the way these data are processed, analyzed, and visualized. Collocating freely available Earth observation data on a cloud computing infrastructure may create opportunities unforeseen by the original data provider for innovation and value-added data re-use, but existing systems at data centers are not designed for supporting requests for large data transfers.

A lack of common methodology necessitates that each data center handle such requests from different cloud vendors differently. Guidelines are needed to support enabling all cloud vendors to utilize a common methodology for bulk-downloading data from data centers, thus preventing the providers from building custom capabilities to meet the needs of individual vendors.

This paper presents recommendations distilled from use cases provided by three cloud vendors (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) and are based on the vendors’ interactions with data systems at different Federal agencies and organizations.

These specific recommendations range from obvious steps for improving data usability (such as ensuring the use of standard data formats and commonly supported projections) to non-obvious undertakings important for enabling bulk data downloads at scale.

These recommendations can be used to evaluate and improve existing data systems for high-volume data transfers, and their adoption can lead to cloud vendors utilizing a common methodology.

URL : Recommendations to Improve Downloads of Large Earth Observation Data

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-002