Social Sciences Online

How has the Internet changed the practice of social science? Eight years ago, when the Internet was still relatively new for the academic community, SOSIG staff were asked to predict how IT might change the working practices of social scientists [Ferguson, N, Hiom, D & Worsfold, E. IT and the Social Sciences, Information UK Outlooks, 30, 1997]. At that time the Internet was not widely used, but social scientists have been quick to realise its potential, seeing the Internet as both a research tool: enabling new research methods for data collection, analysis and dissemination); and a research topic: being a social phenomenon in itself, and an agent for political, economic and social change.

The SOSIG blog offered thoughts and reflections from practitioners on the way that the Internet had changed their working practices, and invited comment from the community. You need only look at the papers and discussion to realise quite how much impact the Internet has had on social science learning and research in a relatively short period of time:

As Christine Hine indicates, the Internet has become embedded into everyday life for many parts of the population and therefore offers a valuable research medium for social scientists. Take a look at Jacqui Taylor’s papers and subsequent discussion for an interesting overview of some of the pros and cons of Internet mediated research.

Academics now have to deal with the Google generation of students who are already Internet savvy when they arrive at university but at the same time still lack any real information literacy skills. David Dolowitz argues that the academic and information professions need to engage more fully with the e-learning process in order to be able to help guide their students to appropriate uses of the Internet in their studies.

In terms of information sources, we are now doing far more than recreating the past in electronic form; instead we are generating completely new types of resources (see Andrew Ashwin’s and Kieren Pitt’s article on interactive learning resources). In addition, new ways of collaborating and sharing data are being used to support the research process (take a look at the e-Social Science papers: Borgman, Fraser and Procter).

Of course these new forms of information don’t always necessarily make life easier (as Melanie Wright argue, the Internet has opened up access to data and the subsequent potential for enabling high quality research, at a speed and extent that we certainly didn’t fully envisage eight years ago when writing our original article.

I would like to thank all the authors for their interesting and thought provoking articles and to everyone who participated in this virtual event by reading and commenting on the papers. The ability to post comments will be switched off from 5pm today but an archive of all the papers and discussion will be made available on the SOSIG site.

INTERNET access to vast number of users globally in their sitting place. it helps in the access to social science journals articles in fulltext in printed format, so it’s very helpfull to the users in research activities in finding their related subject…….s.sipriya

e-Research is a collective term for the various initiatives on e-Science, e-Social Science, e-Humanities, and cyberinfrastructure. e-Research refers to distributed, collaborative, information-intensive forms of inquiry. The overall aim is “to do faster, better, and different interdisciplinary research (and scholarship) across the university,” as summed up by Tony Hey, head of the U.K. e-Science programs. e-Social Science research currently is organized into two themes: (1) research and development of technology, tools, and data sources to support collaborative social science research, and (2) social study of e-Research. e-Research in all disciplines will depend upon the generation, analysis, visualization, management, and curation of data and documents, and upon access to those resources. Interdisciplinary research will depend upon sharing data within and between communities. Decades of research in information studies and in socio-technical systems has shown that disciplines vary greatly in their use of data and documents, in their local or distributed access to information resources, and in their degree of collaboration. Understanding more about the use of information is essential to the construction of an information infrastructure to facilitate research.

Christine Borgman
Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies

University of California

Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a co-principal investigator for the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and for the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) project, both funded by the National Science Foundation. She is the author of more than 150 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. She won the Best Information Science Book of the Year Award (American Society for Information Science & Technology) for From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000). She is writing a book on Scholarship in the Digital Age while on sabbatical at the Oxford Internet Institute. Prof. Borgman is a member of the U.S. National Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), and the Advisory Board to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She is Retiring Chair of the Information, Computing, and Communication Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and is a Fellow of the AAAS.

As part of the MixedMediaGrid node of the National Centre for e-Social Science, myself and colleagues at the University of Bristol and Kings College London have been designing and developing applications to support the distributed qualitative analysis of multimedia data. Inter alia, the software supports ‘data sessions’: periods of time in which researchers collaboratively analyse particular sequences of video data and related materials in order to gain analytic insights and perspectives from one another. Due to the research group-oriented nature of data sessions, application clients are targeted at supporting group-to-group, rather than analyst-to-analyst, collaboration. Given this goal, we have been highly sensitive to the ethical and legal issues of transmitting video. An important consideration of the system is that each user has a local copy of the digital video corpus for that data session, which is distributed via the existing external trusted channels already employed by the community, rather than over the network. For us, this approach addresses major technical and ethical issues alike. Firstly, the real-time transmission of video would significantly increase the bandwidth requirements of the infrastructure. It is likely that, even with continuous high-quality networking between all sites, real-time transmission of video data would be at best unpredictable. Such latencies would affect the causality and/or quality of video playback, and would most likely vary these between multiple sites. Such problems would disrupt the causality and relevance of events during analysis. More importantly, it would make references between researchers to those events - conveyed between sites through talk about them over audio links and/or annotations over them using electronic whiteboard markers – more difficult. Secondly, our decision to use existing channels of video data distribution means that we can rely on existing ethical and legal practice to form part of distributed data sessions. In addition to avoiding the need for complex on-line access control and secure channels, data distribution can be controlled in ways which allow researchers to understand and decide when, how and where video data is distributed based on their detailed knowledge of the consents and agreements associated with particular items of data, as well as continuing to rely on existing consent procedures and ethics committees.

Across the e-Science programme proclamations about changes in ways of working for the natural sciences have been made. Grid middleware and interfaces have been produced which embody scientific methodologies, yet enable calculations to be performed over very large data sets very quickly. The natural sciences have yet to uptake the technology in droves, primarily due to issues of usability and stability of the software. Parallel technologies are even further in their infancy. Nonetheless it has been recognised that the social sciences might benefit from similar approaches. However, the diversity of methods and methodologies across the social sciences presents particular challenges to computer science developers in terms of supporting large numbers of users with varying approaches.

In the particular case of the MixedMediaGrid domain, qualitative methodologies and techniques are supported in individual bespoke packages, yet collaboration support between researchers over data is sparse, particularly in real time. It remains an open question whether qualitative social scientists as a whole wish to share their data with others – perhaps it represents too much effort in fieldwork to risk sharing; perhaps because many researchers plan to primarily derive new methods and methodologies rather than empirical results from their analyses. We are lucky enough to be currently working in specific fields in which real-time collaborative analysis of data occurs between different international research groups as a matter of course. When we arrive at a position that software can be released into broader communities alongside development effort, the challenge for us will be to provide adequate mechanisms for communication, ensuring consent and ethical constraints are not breached and so on. In turn, the challenge for the social science researchers who currently retain individual analysis, control and storage of their data is this: will the potential benefits of additional expert perspectives on your data – whilst still retaining ultimate control and ownership – change your working practice of individual analysis? We do not expect such changes to happen overnight, or in some cases at all, in fields where such practices are currently uncommon. Nonetheless, as technologies develop and the opportunities present themselves, accountabilities for not sharing data will become increasingly personal, political and organisational rather than practical.

Dr. Mike Fraser is a member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. His research is concerned with the social aspects of collaborative technologies. Dr. Fraser is currently director and principal investigator of the MixedMediaGrid e-Social Science node, and principal investigator of the VidGrid pilot project, also funded under the e-Social Science programme. He is a member of the Research Board of the National Centre for e-Social Science and of the e-Science programme’s Usability Task Force.

Over the past five years, researchers around the world have been talking about a revolutionary vision for science. This vision has various names: in the UK, it is referred to as ‘e-Science’ or – and evidence of a growing appreciation of its broader relevance – ‘e-Research’. The vision is inspired by two increasingly strongly inter-related developments. The first of these is to do with research methods and the second concerns research infrastructure and tools:

“e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.” John Taylor, Director General of Research Councils, UK Office of Science and Technology.

To understand the rationale behind e-Science, we need to look more closely at the key developments in research methods and infrastructure that are driving the vision forward. Taking research methods first, the realisation is growing that many of today’s research challenges do not fit comfortably within the boundaries defined by established disciplinary and organisational structures. According to this viewpoint, researchers will have to adopt more large scale, collaborative and multidisciplinary methods. To take but one example, systems biology – whose aim is to model the interactions between genes, proteins and cells – requires contributions from biology, the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics and computation. Moreover, progress depends on ease of access to the vast repositories of genomic and other data that now exist around the world, and on collaboration between the researchers who have created them.

Initially largely independent of – but now increasingly driven by (and, it has to be acknowledged, driving) developments in – research methods, a blueprint for a new and more powerful distributed computing infrastructure, known variously as the ‘Grid’ or cyberinfrastructure, has been evolving. The internet (and the World Wide Web, in particular) has helped make access to distributed resources such as data routine. However, though the Web provides a simple, easy-to-use interface to distributed resources, it is unlikely to meet the needs of large scale, collaborative and multidisciplinary research. Despite the metaphor, the Web is far from the seamless place it appears to be: it is a fragmented, heterogeneous world, with few standards and limited interoperability. This soon becomes apparent when researchers in different organisations try to share their data. Lack of uniformity in databases and data formats, and absence of mechanisms for managing access across multiple sites can make this very tedious and very often impractical. The Grid will address such problems and enable researchers to access computers, databases and other resources simply and transparently, without having to consider where those facilities are located and regardless of their underlying heterogeneity.

As the e-Science vision has been refined and elaborated, its wider potential has begun to be understood. In July of 2004, the ESRC created the National Centre for e-Social Science with a remit to explore and develop ways in which e-Science research methods and infrastructure can be applied in the social sciences. The Centre is made up of a co-ordinating hub, based at the universities of Manchester and Essex, plus a series of research nodes located at institutions throughout the UK. As part of its programme, the Centre has organised and is hosting the first international conference on e-Social Science, which is taking place between 22-24 June in Manchester.

Some of the benefits of e-Social Science are easy to grasp. Computer-based modelling and simulation, for example, is a well established social science research tool. As models get more complex, they need computing power. The Grid will make it much easier for researchers to access this computing power on demand. There are similar benefits to be had from the Grid for statistics-based research generally. These areas are being investigated by NCeSS nodes at Leeds and Lancaster Universities. For example, the former is building a simulation of the entire UK population at the level of individuals and households, and the general ambition is to enable more realistic and interdisciplinary approaches to modelling complex social phenomena.

The benefits of the Grid for the sharing of data may appear more modest. After all, practices and infrastructure for sharing and re-using data are already well established in the social sciences. Data centres such as the UK Data Archive, MIMAS and EDINA host a wide range of datasets – the Census, British Household Panel Survey to name but two. This makes it easy for researchers to access individual datasets, but heterogeneity in databases and data formats means that linking different datasets together – as will be essential for answering increasingly complex research questions – can still prove very difficult. The Grid can provide solutions to these problems and its impact is likely to be considerable. In partnership with data centres, NCeSS has begun pilot studies of ‘grid enabling’ selected datasets.

There are vast amounts of data generated as people go about their daily activities which are, as yet, barely exploited for research purposes. For example, use of public services is captured in administrative records; in the private sector, patterns of consumption of goods and services are captured in credit and debit card records; patterns of movement are logged by sensors, such as traffic cameras and satellites, and in mobile phone records; public spaces are monitored by CCTV; the movement of goods is increasingly tracked by devices such as RFID tags. Exploiting these data sources to their full research potential requires new mechanisms for ensuring secure and confidential access to sensitive data, and new tools for integrating, structuring, visualisation and analysis. Here, again, the Grid has the potential to provide solutions and the Nottingham NCeSS node is investigating a number of these.

Collaborative research, especially where participants are widely distributed and so have limited opportunities to meet face-to-face, requires communication tools that are easy to use, flexible and scaleable. Such tools are not sufficient in themselves to ensure that researchers will collaborate but they may help reduce some of the obstacles. The Grid community has developed the Access Grid, a suite of advanced, large scale video conferencing tools but much yet remains to be done to identify and develop the full rang of tools necessary to support collaborative research. The Bristol NCeSS node is investigating a number of issues in the design and use of collaborative research tools.

Inevitably, much of what is presently understood about e-Social Science is an extrapolation of existing practice and is focused around areas where it is believed the Grid can address known limitations of research methods. How e-Social Science will develop – in particular, what kinds of new research methods and communities will emerge – will only become clear if researchers are prepared to explore and experiment with the opportunities the Grid provides. To learn more about e-Social Science and the NCeSS programme, visit www.ncess.ac.uk

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Rob Procter is Professor and Research Director of the ESRC-funded National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS). His work within NCeSS is mainly devoted to coordinating and developing the NCeSS research programme. His broader research interests lie within the field of socio-technical issues in the design, implementation, evaluation and use of interactive computer systems, with a particular emphasis on ethnomethodologically-informed ethnographic studies of work practices and of technologies-in-use. Rob is a member of the JISC Virtual Research Environments Programme Advisory Board, the e-Science Usability Task Force, the e-Science User Group and the Arts and Humanities Research Council ICT Programme Steering Committee.

Alastair J. Allan
University of Sheffield

The migration of government to web-based format away from traditional paper-based versions has been rapid since 1997. In some cases, the eight year gap has been long enough for a complete move to e-only. For a host of reasons, digitized information has become the format of choice within government. The assumption has always been that if something has been computerized, then it must have been improved and it will have become better. The purpose of this paper is to explore that assumption.

History
The methods of publishing government information have not remained constant. In the 1940s and 1950s, there were still a few documents recorded in manuscript. The significant changes of that era were firstly, the growing involvement of government in publishing the results of its R&D work. Secondly, this in particular, was a reason for the extended use of microformats at this time – a trend that grew from nothing into a large output. Thirdly, an expansion of government was seen and, in particular, the growth of the number, nature and function of inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) with the obvious grouping being that of the United Nations. The 1960s was the period in which was seen the emergence of consensus government and with it, the growing belief within government that it needed to produce more information and more documents. At the same time, a further expansion of government was witnessed with the accelerating growth in the number of government agencies (or quangos) all of which were producing information. The 1970s not only saw a period where academic research into government intensified but also marked the start of government beginning to use computers and computer-based formats for information dissemination. Probably the most significant factor of the decade, though, was the rapid development of new reprographic and publishing technologies that enabled less formal and more immediate dissemination of government information.

The 1980s was an era both of expansion and of contraction. There was marked boom in informal government publication partly arising from the developments in reprography and also from the new emergence of desk-top publishing that was enabled by developing computerization. On the other hand, this period saw the first steps in several countries towards the privatization of government publishing. One of several such moves in the direction of contraction was the development of the ’mosaic theory’; the idea was that a tiny snippet of information could be used by an enemy to build a whole picture along with thousands of other shards. This belief was behind moves to restrict the flow of information to the public. The 1990s, of course, saw the birth and development of the World Wide Web.

Comparison
The starting point for this comparison of pre and post-web government publishing is a paper that delivered by this author in March 1984:

Allan, Alastair J. (1985): ‘Access to official publications: the user’s view’ in Whitehall and Westminster: proceedings of the Seminar on Official Publishing; London; 21 March 1984; ed. V.J.Nurcombe.
London. LA, RSIS; pp 22-32. (0946347050)

Two separate strands were identified at that time as being symptomatic of the barriers that faced users when trying to exploit official information. The first set was grouped as ‘Access’ and the second was headed ‘Availability’.

• Access
  • Diverse publishers;
  • Barriers with jargon and conventions.
  • Info’ Rich : Info’ Poor
• Availability
  • Bibliographical control.
  • Archiving.
  • Hostile formats.

Access: Diverse publishers

• Rapidly growing number of publishers;
• No main sales point;
• Expanding desk-top publishing;
• Privatization;
• No High St. bookshop access.

These features identified in 1984 still exist 20 years later. The growth in numbers has been even greater with web publishing; the lack of a main sales point is now different in that many government agencies do not have a main web page through which all documents can be traced. The last feature may seem too obvious but ‘pdf’ format documents can not be bought through the booktrade – they can only be acquired through the web.

Look at this website:
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/gov/fedgov.html

This is a page from the LSU libraries: the Louisiana State University. This page lists all the US Federal websites. Each one is a publisher. There are over 1 100.

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Look at this website:
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/azindex/atoz/s.shtml

This is a page from the British Department for Education and Skills and is part of the department’s alphabetical index of websites. Each one of these contains government information on education. Some are part of the main site but many others are part of the nest of sites run by the DfES. There is no central reference point and navigation for anyone, not just the inexperienced, becomes very difficult.
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Access: Barriers from jargon & conventions

• Organization of legislative documents;
• Lawyers’ citation systems.

These two aspects of complication for users have now grown mainly because of the intrusion of inconsiderate web design.

• Organization of legislative documents;
• Lawyers’ citation systems;
• Meaningless URLs;
• Listings using definite article “The …”;
• Listings omitting the author names.

The first two features are long-lasting difficulties that users have always had in disentangling the shorthand used by lawyers and legislators. These have not diminished over the years. New barriers that have resulted from web design obviously include the long and complicated URLs but less obviously the seeming inability of many government websites to deal effectively with either personal or corporate authors. Far more avoidable is the inability of web designers either to produce an alphabetical order that is correct or the tendency to list documents under the definite (‘the’) or indefinite (a’) article.

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Look at this website:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/Search
This is the publications page from the Scottish Executive. Select the topic “Arts, Heritage and Recreation” and then sort by A-Z and then click “Show”. You will see that the first letter in the alphabet is not “A” but the inverted comma (“). The second letter is A !! But notice that the next six documents are all filed under the indefinite article, which, as all librarians know, you never do.

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Access: Info’ Rich: Info’ Poor

• Commercial private sector interests given a higher priority than citizen access;
• Privatization;
• Access charges;
• Technological illiteracy;
• Information gap.

The debate about the gap between the information rich and the information poor raged widely in the 1980s and was, in Britain, fuelled by increasing access charges to government information with the argument being that the information was already the property of the citizens of the country and should not be sold to them again. Twenty years later, the web has blown away the debate about access charges but, in truth, this is the only aspect that has changed. These are the current issues:-

• Commercial private sector interests given a higher priority than citizen access;
• Privatization.
• Few access charges;
• Technological illiteracy;
• Digital divide.

Now, the ‘information gap’ is known as the ‘digital divide’ and is possibly an even more critical issue than it was. Although twenty years ago technological illiteracy was an acknowledged barrier, the scale of this problem has grown massively. The need to be able to access and navigate the web has become critical and the barrier of cost (to afford the equipment and network charges) has become one that is becoming extremely serious.

Availability: Bibliographical control
In the 1980s, it was commonly acknowledged that a substantial proportion of government documents were ‘fugitive’ and had escaped legal deposit and were missing from the national bibliography and the national collection:

• No complete national listing;
• Gaps in national library’s archive.

Twenty years later, more problems have accumulated:

• No complete national listing;
• Gaps in national library’s archive;
• Partial paper holdings;
• Deposited ‘pdf’

The problems of an incomplete national bibliography are even more extreme because the documents that are only published on the web in ‘pdf’ format escape listing and are not deposited with the national libraries. There is, indeed, another problem in that some publishers are sending ‘pdf’ documents to the national libraries but they are unable to exploit these resources. A related issue is the fact that some series are partly published in paper and partly digitized which leads to confused and confusing holdings.

Availability: Hostile formats
If, in the 1980s, the profession believed that with illegible photocopies, microforms and a very few sets of machine readable data files that it had a full set of hostile formats, then it had no conception of what was to come …. !

• Microformats;
• MRDF;
• Illegible photocopies

Now there is a larger set:

• General website inaccessibility issues;
• JAVAscript
• ‘pdf’;
• Spreadsheets;
• Search boxes.

The general inaccessibility issues also include issues that are more properly termed navigation difficulties and usability failures. All of them together represent the problems that inexperienced users face when looking for information on a strange and complex government website. The JAVA issues are part of this set of difficulties as are the block to fluid navigation posed by ‘pdf’ files. Spreadsheets and search boxes are web tools that experienced users take in their stride but both can make access to information troublesome.

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Look at this website:
http://www.swansea.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=13

This is the on-line services page from Swansea City Council. There are 17 topics listed under ‘Apply’ and 15 of them are in ‘pdf’ format. This is definite barrier to the users and certainly a block to fluid navigation. Additionally, they are all dead ends because ‘pdf’ files never have hyperlinks.
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Availability: Archives
The need to maintain full and accessible archives is becoming even more of a problem than it was twenty years ago. Once the archiving function was taken care of by the large national and university libraries but now the individual sites have to ensure that the archives are maintained and, frankly, many sites lack both the ability and ambition to do so. The list below represents the issues for 2005 and the only recent addition is the unpredictability of technological support.

• No reliable archives;
• Irregular deposit;
• Broken holdings;
• Variety of solutions;
• Little motivation to improve;
• Unpredictable technological support.

In many ways this is the most frustrating of all the problems that government information is throwing up because the masses of the information make it so difficult for the researcher or citizen to be tuned to current publishing. The fact that expensively produced and important information can be simply etherized because no-one cares sufficiently to retain it is a damning statement on government’s attitude to citizen empowerment; government accountability and research.

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Look at this website:
http://www.official-documents.co.uk/menu/com2005.htm

This is the “Official Documents” page for the UK parliament that is run by TSO, the government publisher. This page is a list of all the House of Commons papers that have been digitized. Wrong !! On this page, there are only 13 paper linked and over 700 were published.
If you go to:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmselect.htm

you will find dozens, if not hundreds of other papers not listed on the “Official Documents” archive page.
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Summary
In the 1980s, concerns were regularly expressed about the fugitive nature of government information and the difficulties that were faced by users when they needed to find and use it.

• Poor access;
• Difficult availability;
• Confusing systems;
• Complex organization;
• Fugitive publications.

All these issues mainly relate to paper publications and occurred because documents could not be traced, purchased or found in libraries. In 2005, we have a whole host of new issues that relate to web-based digitized publication and the implication is that ‘government’ (in whatever form and in whatever country) doesn’t care sufficiently to put its house in order:

• Info’ overload;
• Publication dumps;
• Confusing navigation;
• Illogical organization;
• Invisible sites.

Whilst these points are a summary of the arguments above, in some ways they are arguments in themselves. Information overload represents the mass of government information that is largely uncontrolled and archived and for which there is often no adequate pathway. The publication dumps are those sites with masses of unrelated documents that are unindexed and for which there are no easy access routes but which are added to websites in a thoughtless way. The confusing navigation is the way in which sites are composed for those inside government and their web designers and the illogical organization is a feature of sites being built to reflect governmental organization rather than user need. The invisible sites, rather like the publication dumps, are those websites that are full but which cannot be traced through normal search engines because no care has been taken to ensure that they can be found.

Summary – the user’s predicament.
Technology should make things more simple. The user has four needs and regularly these are thwarted by over complex sites or those constructed for government rather than public usage:-

• Where can I find it ?
• How do I know it’s what I want ?
• Is it the latest version?
• Will I be able to find it again?

Re-intermediation.
The answer is re-intermediation. That is the process whereby the librarian moves in-between their users and the websites and guides them to the information they need.
But part of the ”same old problem” is that, in the UK, librarians often do not understand government information and find it too much of a challenge to navigate through it for their users.
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e-Government Information:
the same old problem —–(newly digitized !)

prepared by

Alastair Allan
University of Sheffield Library / Dept. of Information Studies.
Sheffield. S10 2TN. Great Britain

a.allan@sheffield.ac.uk

June 2005.

In Marge Piercy’s feminist utopian novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, the heroine from the future–Connie, has a wristwatch which she can speak questions to and receive back facts. Written in 1976 before wap phones or other ‘wearable chip’ technology was invented, or even the PC, this and other prescient aspects of the book seemed like science fiction indeed.

Now the use of the Internet for fact-checking has become common-place, a modern day luxury. Information has gone from being a scarce commodity leading to ‘power’ to something we are overloaded by, even need to defend ourselves against. Tools such as Google help us sift the false information from the true through a democratic system of hyper-link voting (the web page which matches the keywords entered AND has the most links pointing to it wins). Wikipedia, a collective reference work to which anyone is entitled to contribute, though there are a core of moderators to keep its excesses in control, may – like the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy within Douglas Adam’s 1979 tale of the same name—surpass the dominant publisher’s authoritative but dry and dusty encyclopedia, just as weblogs may replace textbooks as the learning objects from which students learn.

The Internet has been used for sharing of social science data since its inception, or at least from the time it was available to academics. Even before the days of the Web, if a file could be transferred across a network it was a lot better than posting heavy half-inch tapes in boxes through ’snailmail’. Before the Web there was still email, and subject specific newsgroups, usually accessed via Telnet over command-driven monochrome terminals. And FTP (file transfer protocol) servers, with Archie search engines (searching on filenames and paths only). Gopher seemed like the answer to all our problems with its vast hierarchical menus getting us beyond the limitations of filenames. It was no wonder at all that no one but geeks, wonks, and a few scholars and librarians bothered to enter cyber-space. But it was the World Wide Web, invented only in 1993 and slowly, painstakingly, populated with useful pages of text, pictures, audio and video, that became the ‘killer app’ that would democratise access to information on the Internet most radically.

It seems that the social sciences have been simply evolving steadily since the advent of computers and networking, compared to other disciplines which have been revolutionised (think of biology—human genetics, particle physics, or astronomy). Even our largest quantitative datasets remain small compared to these other fields, if more complex in structure and meaning. Have social science methods changed much, with the exponential increase in computing power? Data collection has arguably been changed more by computers than analysis itself, which has been dominated for decades by a few well-known statistical, and qualitative, analysis packages. Coming to grips with the complexities of secondary datasets—how they were collected, whether a particular variable is a fair proxy for an abstract concept of interest (such as poverty or privilege, for example), whether weights can overcome problems of non-response and whether other errors or biases in the data can be interpreted correctly—these remain the difficult part of secondary analysis, compared to the computation itself. Likewise with qualitative analysis—most researchers would rather analyse data they collected themselves than traverse the minefield of interpretation involved in using secondary datasets such as interviews or transcripts collected by others. So the problem of access for research data is more than discovery; the user requires tools to make the data usable, and fairly intimate knowledge of how the dataset was collected, variables derived, etc. There is also a tension between protecting the subjects’ confidentiality, and releasing as much demographic background on the respondents as possible to maximise the re-usability of the data.

Have the national services such as the UK Data Archive and SOSIG largely solved the access problem? Certainly they have proven to be part of the solution, through value-added metadata and preservation work, and narrowing down the extent of Internet searching to relevant, scholarly materials. We have benefited from their long-term presence, along with the Census Programme and newer services from academic data providers such as MIMAS and EDINA. Online access tools such as Nesstar and Neighbourhood Statistics may lead the way in exposing students to rich online data sources and enriching researchers’ ability to quickly conduct exploratory data analysis and data mining of large-scale social datasets.

So, what new areas on the horizon will herald fundamental changes affecting the practice of social science researchers?

The world of open access publishing and digital repositories seems to be the most important new trend in democratising access to data. A number of international initiatives, from the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities to the OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding, have put the spotlight on open access and its importance for the future of scholarship, as well as access to scholarship by developing countries. (See http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html and http://www.oecd.org/document/0,2340,en_2649_34487_25998799_1_1_1_1,00.html .)

Is there a UK broad-based commitment to open access publishing? The Wellcome Trust has most recently made a commitment to require researchers funded by them to deposit their articles in an open access repository (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX025191.html). On the other hand, the government’s response to the UK Science and Technology Select Committee report last year which supported the establishment of institutional repositories and the value of a comprehensive network of such repositories, failed to back the Report’s recommendations for funding to support the national collaborative work that will be required and of mandating that research material should be mounted within the repositories. (See http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf or http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm)

Recent funding by JISC toward the development of institutional repositories does reflect some level of national commitment to open access and institutional repositories. (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=repos_announcement) Although it is early days, this could be the beginning of a thousand flowers blooming, and a sea-change in the work of social science researchers, librarians and archivists, as universities rise to the challenge of ‘curating’ their own scholarly assets, including perhaps, the actual or derived datasets upon which published research papers are based. Is there any chance of this becoming a widespread trend with only a smattering of project-based funding? Is it even desirable, compared to providing additional funds for centralised, domain-specific trusted repositories such as the UK Data Archive?

Please feel free to share your own ideas and comments.

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Robin Rice (R.Rice@ed.ac.uk) is Data Librarian to the University of
Edinburgh. She has a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she worked as a data librarian through the 1990’s. She was recently seconded to be Phase One Project Coordinator to help set up the Digital Curation Centre (www.dcc.ac.uk) based at Edinburgh and three other institutions.

How has the internet changed the way we access data? Well, in every way imaginable is perhaps the most complete, if flippant answer. I only need look back on my own decade at the UK Data Archive to begin to flesh this out.

When I arrived at the UKDA in 1996, we were re-launching our webpages after having had a web presence for 2 years to include downloadable data access application forms (which still had to be filled out and posted back to us offline). Our immensely powerful but unix-command-line-based catalogue, BIRON, was in the process of being ported to a web interface. We had been disseminating data on CD-ROMs for a little while, but most users still wanted DAT tapes, cartridges, or magnetic reels. (We had to ask users whether their computers could read “high density” floppy disks.) We had just begun allowing “guestftp” where data users could come to an ftp site and with a special username and password, download the files which had been placed there through a unix ftp command line interface. Users could email us for assistance, but an equal number tended to pick up the phone, and a number even still wrote us snailmail. Datasets were usually delivered within a month of receiving a request, but large orders might well take longer. And we had just received some funding from the EU to investigate, with some of our sister archives in Europe, the possibility of using the internet for processing and disseminating data (the first Nesstar pilot project).

Look at the UKDA today - as the managing service provider of the Economic and Social Data Service, users register, order, and receive their data almost entirely downloaded via the internet (users can still order CD-ROMs or DVDs, at a price). Users can browse, analyse, and visualise data online via a number of different interfaces (Nesstar, Beyond 20/20, Common GIS). Most users receive their data instantaneously upon ordering; for those back-catalogue datasets requiring publishing they may wait up to 3 or 4 days. There has been an explosion of users and usage - from about 3,500 datasets delivered in 1996 to around 20,000 in the last year. Not just data, but a wealth of supporting materials can be downloaded in a click, and integrated online help desks ensure queries are answered as quickly and thoroughly as possible. One Stop Shop registration means there is a single port of call for accessing government social surveys, academic-created longitudinal data, modern and historical censuses, international macroeconomic time series data, digitised historical data, and data from other archives internationally.

Calling it a revolution is cliche, but there is hardly a better word for it. And as in radical political change, alongside structural, organisational changes come attitudinal changes. User expectations are light years from where they were in 1996. In data services, there are in my mind, three major influences which have caused a paradigm shift in user expectations and therefore in the way data services do their business. These three influences neatly fall into the three fundamental services provided by data centres such as the UKDA: finding data, accessing data, and using data. And they are: Google, Amazon, and GUI menu-driven analysis software (SPSS for Windows).

Google has completely changed the way that people expect to locate resources on the internet. Whereas the old BIRON catalogue focused on precision and flexibility, being able to very closely define and limit searches to produce only completely relevant results, Google has created a generation of users who are used to a simple interface returning a mountain of chaff to be picked through for kernels of worth. Our early experience with the move of BIRON to an online interface was that users simply didn’t use the advanced search features, and indeed then, as now, most users search on specific dataset titles, using the catalogue purely as a means for getting something they already know they want, rather than as a true resource discovery tool. Rather than using the catalogue search engine to identify new resources which might assist them, users will more likely use the “subject browsing” approach, which has been strongly influenced by my second identified trend setter, Amazon.

There is no doubt that Amazon has set the standard for e-commerce. The processes for locating and acquiring books has become a direct metaphor for all online shopping, and data services are not exempt from this. The expectation of ease and speed of the ordering process, as well as the willingness of users to entrust services with intimate details (like credit card numbers) has been strongly influenced by the Amazon model. Even now, some of our future plans for development of the service are following Amazon’s lead, employing user profiling to make data recommendations, for example (users who liked the British Social Attitudes study also enjoyed the Eurobarometers). Amazon has also influenced user perceptions of how quickly the process should operate and how integrated finding and ordering should be.

The final influence is on user perceptions of how straightforward and easy data should be to use. Back in the days of mag tapes, only a few data specialists really had the skills to manage and analyse the largescale surveys. Users had to know how to read data into statistical software packages and how to write command-line syntax to analyse it. Now point-and-click is the norm, and users expect to be able to load up, analyse, and visualise data without having any clear vision or understanding of the underlying file structure at all. Taking this to its logical conclusion is the development of online analysis services such as Nesstar and Beyond 20/20 where users never need to be in possession of the underlying data at all, but use the online interface to analyse and visualise data, downloading tabulations or graphs and charts rather than underlying data.

What does the future hold for data services? The real challenges in many ways are in my view caused by the major successes of the internet. Easy to access, easy to use, voluminous data about individual people only heightens the risk that linking these data together will enable individual confidentiality to be breached. The analysis possibilities afforded by Grid technologies explodes this risk (and this potential) a thousandfold. Democritisation of access means that acadaemia will need to re-establish its claim to special trustworthy status in relation to potentially sensitive or disclosive data. Allowing access to potentially disclosive data under special license is one way forward which we are strongly pursuing.

As users become less and less technically specialist, and the interfaces become easier and easier to use, the risk of incorrect or methodologically flawed analyses increases dramatically. To counteract this, more and more work will need to go into training and support of the use of data. The creation of teaching datasets and online tutorials at many different levels of sophistication will be a growth area. With usage exploding and more and more “naive” users, support demands will grow, and we must become inventive in discovering ways to harness user expertise for other users. Capturing more information about publications, websites, and grey literature outputs arising from data analysis is one way; enabling users to find other users who share their research interests is another, and ESDS is actively pursuing both of these.

Some might view these three influences and say, this is how the internet has destroyed data services — dumbing down our search tools, pandering to the lowest-common-denominator naive user, enabling far too many people to conduct far too many risky and suspect analyses on data they aren’t trained to understand, and increasing the risk of confidentiality breaks and disclosure logarithmically. Others might say, the internet has been the greatest boon imaginable, allowing more socially relevant data and information be disseminated to more people, enabling more 5-star research to be conducted, upon which more evidence-based policy is evolved, allowing for a more enlightened and better world.

What’s your view?

In this piece I describe the route that brought me to use the Internet in my research, in order to raise some questions about the relationship between Internet research and the social science endeavour. Specifically, I want to ask whether the Internet might mean more to social science than just a niche area inhabited by trendy and/or lazy researchers. Is the Internet, instead, something that social researchers across the board need to take seriously? How might use of the Internet become a part of the standard research tool kit?

My own introduction to the Internet as a research field happened in classic ethnographic style, when the people that I was studying went online and I followed them. I was studying genetics researchers in the mid-1990s, and increasingly I found that the people I met in the laboratory were communicating by email, sharing data online, and getting information and advice from discussion forums. Wanting to know more about what was happening on the Internet, and wanting to know what it meant for the people involved, I followed them online. I found discussion groups forming on the Internet around diverse aspects of scientific practice. Like my original field site in the laboratory, these online settings also seemed to have a distinctive culture that seemed ripe for participant observation. At the same time, I was aware that the scientists I met in the laboratory had quite different expectations about the Internet: some were net connoisseurs who routinely turned to online groups for their work, while other were suspicious about its abilities to provide reliable advice, or simply lacked the background to make sense of its possibilities. Later on I came to think of this as the Internet as culture/Internet as cultural artefact duality: whilst the Internet had become a space for cultural formations to emerge, the experience and use of that space was very much shaped by people’s cultural expectations about the Internet.

My first excursions onto the Internet with scientists were followed by many more, as I found that I could do new forms of research (and I chose still to call them ethnography), no longer tied to the laboratory where I started. I could explore the way that researchers were finding new ways of communicating and doing science across wide geographical distances. That initial interest in the Internet as a space for rich and diverse social interactions has stayed with me across several shifts of subject matter, and I have increasingly relied on multi-sited approaches to ethnography that allow me to combine online and offline and explore the connections between them.

At the stage that I started doing Internet research the field was in an infancy characterised by immense enthusiasm for the radical potential of the technology to reshape the very fabric of social life. There was considerable excitement about the possibilities for new forms of social interaction and fluid notions of identity that the Internet seemed to offer. Latterly, the emphasis on the Internet as something radically new has faded somewhat, and the focus has turned to the embedding of Internet in everyday life. Just as with other media, we can look at the ways in which the Internet is domesticated, becoming a meaningful aspect of lives lived in complex domains comprised of diverse forms of communication. The Internet has become an important space to study social formations and identity, but we don’t expect the medium to lead automatically to particular outcomes. This transformation in thinking about the Internet doesn’t, however, seem to have had as much impact as I would expect upon the mainstream of social research.

Just as research into the mass media is so often marginalised as a separate specialism of the discipline, so too does Internet research risk being framed as an intriguing tangent that has little to say to the rest of the discipline. I think this sells short the potential of the Internet as a research medium and as a component of the social fabric. I would hypothesise that whatever substantive interest you might have as a social researcher, you will be able to find a place on the Internet where it is being discussed. Whatever your field of research, I would guess that some of the people you may be interviewing face-to-face, observing or conducting surveys with will be taking part in some form of online interaction. The Internet, then, provides at the very least an opportunity for social research. Pushing the point a little further, though, we might ask whether our accounts of social life can continue to be credible if they exclude the Internet. It seems to me that the mainstream needs to take on board the significance of the Internet and other kinds of mediated communication as important facets of everyday life. Social research needs to take account of the fact that people conduct their social existence through a wide range of communication media, and that we can’t any longer assume that face-to-face research gives us a truer picture than mediated research methods and field sites.

Coming back to the question of Internet as culture/Internet as cultural artefact, one problem with using the Internet in social research is that research questions can often not be addressed solely with online observations. Answering questions about what Internet use means in the context of everyday life often means we need to move the research offline. Analysing web sites is a fascinating route into exploring the cultural constructions of an issue, but often we will want to find out more about the sites of production of those web sites. Sometimes an online interview, conducted via email, will suffice to give a picture of the facet of life that we are interested in, but often face-to-face interviews will serve to triangulate the picture that the online interviews give. The curiosity of social researchers should almost automatically take them across the online/offline boundary, since the things we want to know do not confine themselves easily to particular communication media. In the process we can learn something about research methods too, not only reflecting on whether the online experience was adequate to count as an interview, but also examining our assumptions about face to face encounters.

I have tried to argue that the Internet provides an opportunity for new approaches to social research and for a social research that respects the role of mediated communications in everyday life. It also, I suggest, provides an occasion for methodological reflection. Some initial questions for discussion are:

• How far are Internet research methods accepted in mainstream social research?
• What situations remain inaccessible to online research?
• What new situations could online methods make accessible?
• Is face-to-face research still the gold standard, and why?
• Can online interviews live up to the face-to-face model?

__________________________________________________________________

Christine Hine is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Her main research centres on the sociology of science and technology, including ethnographic studies of scientific culture, information technology and the Internet. Her published work on research methods and the Internet includes Virtual Ethnography (Sage, 2000) and the edited collection Virtual Methods (Berg, 2005). She is currently exploring the sociology of cyberscience, as recipient of an ESRC research fellowship. A book on the deployment of information and communications technologies in biological systematics, and an edited collection on the social shaping of new infrastructures for knowledge production are in preparation in connection with that project. Christine has recently been elected President of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (http://www.easst.net).

Christine Hine
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/christine_hine.htm

Internet-mediated research (IMR) is the term given to cover experiments conducted via the Internet, rather than in the traditional laboratory or in the field (e.g. home, school or workplace). It is different from the research involved when conducting a review of the literature, as IMR involves the primary collection of data from participants. IMR covers a variety of research techniques including, for example, online surveys, online discussion room transcript analysis and participants responding to experimental stimuli presented via web-pages.

Advantages and disadvantages of IMR, compared to traditional research methods

Some of the problems with traditional social science research (i.e. conducted face-to-face) include:

• the sample size is often very small due to practical reasons relating to time, money and laboratory space
• samples may not be representative of the general population, e.g. participants tend to be University students, young, mobile and of the local nationality
• research is limited to laboratory and researcher and participant time, which may lead to ecologically invalid situations in the laboratory (e.g. research taking place 9-5pm Monday to Friday only) or may preclude some research from happening (e.g. weekend research is rare!)
• experimenter bias can be high due to the experimenter being physically present and potentially influential
• it is hard to know whether the results are specific for the culture where the experiment was conducted

IMR has many advantages over traditional research and is able to overcome or alleviate some of the problems highlighted above, some of the advantages of IMR include:

• large samples are easy to gather as the online laboratory can potentially be open 24/7
• a very high response rate from a diverse sample of people
• researchers can gain access to special populations of people (e.g. those unable to participate in face-to-face research due to mobility or health problems)
• low cost (no printing or data input or lab space)
• high speed - responses back in hours/days not weeks/months
• the sample can potentially be balanced cross-culturally

However, critics of IMR argue that there are factors which are problematic for internet-mediated social science research, some of these include:

• difficulty in controlling the study environment - although most types of research translate well to the Internet, some may not, e.g. people on the Internet use different hardware and software with variable connection speeds so there is no way to ensure that all participants receive exactly the same stimuli
• participants are largely unmonitored, so there may be dishonesty regarding age or gender, participants may receive help from others, they may cheat or they may respond more than once
• participants are self-selected (therefore they may not be random or representative of the general population)

However, there are solutions to these factors, respectively:

• research requiring highly accurate timings may be better suited to non-networked PCs
• multiple participation can be identified by analysing the IP address
• there are ways to invite participants of the required age or gender make up and give them authorised access to online research sites
• large samples allow enough statistical power to wipe out anomalous data

Past, present and future of IMR

The remainder of this discussion will focus on the past, present and future of conducting social science research via the Internet. I have dated the past as from the mid-late 1980s when I first conducted online research and when the Internet started to be used regularly by social scientists. Twenty years on from here, I will consider the current use of IMR, specifically looking at some areas of IMR in my own discipline of Psychology. I would like to address the future part of the discussion by asking you some questions!

The past

In 1989, I began my PhD research on ‘A Social Psychological Analysis of Online Communication’ as I was interested in how the Internet was changing the content of communication and the way people viewed themselves and other group members when communicating online. In this way then, I was investigating the impact of the Internet itself and this tended to be the focus of the early IMR. This early research environment was quite different from current environments, as participants tended to be novice computer users, the technology was slow and often unreliable and the software difficult to use.

Current use of IMR

Much of the current IMR replicates traditional experiments, to avoid some of the problems experienced when experiments are conducted face-to-face in laboratories or in real world environments. IMR continues to study the way the Internet affects our behaviour (e.g. are individuals becoming more isolated? is the concept of community changing?). However, now participants are experienced computer users, the Internet is more pervasive in everyday life and accessibility is ever-increasing. The number of studies on the Internet is more than doubling each year, for example, the APS now lists more than 100 links to online psychology experiments. The breadth of topics and methods in IMR is ever-increasing and now includes areas from all areas of psychology, for example:

• individual differences, e.g. online personality assessment
• communication and psycholinguistic research, e.g. detailed analysis of conversations
• educational psychology, e.g. pedagogical studies of e-learning
• counselling and clinical psychology, e.g. online therapy and support groups
• psychophysics, e.g. studies of perception
• social psychology, e.g. experiments on group decision making
• cognitive psychology, e.g. knowledge acquisition with online vs traditional text

The future for IMR?

As technology progresses the design of social science research is likely to become more creative and the data analysis is likely to get quicker and easier. There is also great potential for cross-cultural research to validate many social scientific findings, so far obtained from one culture. Some issues for discussion will be proposed here.

• with the cost of webcams falling rapidly and their availability and use increasing, many ethical questions need to be asked of social scientists, for example ‘Can we use video-cams to observe people in their group settings or their natural environments?’.
• similarly, it is becoming easier to record interaction over the Internet. Studies of user behaviour on the Internet may involve logging users’ conversations, should users be told that this is happening? Should you be able to keep a copy of users’ conversations with others from a chat room and analyse the transcripts?
• it has been proposed that IMR can be used in lieu of traditional studies in undergraduate curricula, thus enabling Universities to eliminate many of the expenses associated with providing the lab space and equipment needed to conduct ‘traditional’ experiments, is this a good idea? Will students still learn the same research skills?
• are the characteristics of the online participant population similar or different from the face-to-face population?

What are your views? Have a go (see listing of websites at the end) – be a participant in internet-mediated social science research! Then send me your comments…

Conclusion

IMR can potentially be used in nearly all social science research areas. Some of the possible disadvantages of this new method can be avoided by taking appropriate measures. The advantages of having a large world-wide pool of participants at the click of a mouse are very attractive. As Reips (2001) concluded,

“For the first time in the history of social science it seems possible to overcome some of the essential objections against the traditional experiment. Data from the emerging field of Web Experimentation might help us to be able to generalize much better than ever across demographic, cultural and numerical boundaries - and this while saving money.”

Have a go – be a participant in internet-mediated social science research!

Here are 3 websites which will give you an idea of the types of study now taking place:
(1) http://www.psych.uni.edu/psychexperiments/Default.htm
Kenneth McGraw at the University of Mississippi runs PsychExperiments Website
PsychExperiments is an on-line cognitive and social psychology laboratory site.
(2) http://www.psychologie.unizh.ch/genpsy/Ulf/Lab/WebExpPsyLab.html
Ulf-Dietrich Reips at the University of Zürich, founded the Web Experimental Psychology Lab in 1995. Since then many studies have been conducted and these are all available to view and you can still participate in some of these.
(3) http://psych.hanover.edu/Research/exponnet.html
A listing sponsored by the APA from Krantz which provides links to experiments on the internet that are psychologically related. This site is really well organized, expts are listed by both by general topic area and also chronologically ordered.

_____________________________________________________________

Dr Jacqui Taylor (University Lecturer, Researcher and Chartered Psychologist)

Jacqui Taylor’s research area is human computer interaction (HCI) and in particular computer mediated communication. She has been conducting research in this area and lecturing on the Applied Psychology & Computing degree at Bournemouth University for 13 years.

Introduction and background

E-learning Global Welfare is a teaching and learning project developed by the convenors of the International and Comparative Social Policy Group of the UK Social Policy Association (ICSP http://www.globalwelfare.net). The idea for the project emerged as a result of disciplinary developments, the impact of general advances in the availability of web-accessed welfare-related material on student learning, and discussions held at the inaugural meeting of the ICSP in July 2003. The project is funded for one year by C-SAP with support from SWAPltsn and the Universities of Sheffield and Queens, Belfast.

The academic study of global welfare is of multi-disciplinary concern and is increasingly important as a curriculum area in a number of disciplines where academic and practice-related enquiry has moved beyond the national horizon. This shift from a domestic focus has occurred for example in fields such as Social Policy, Social Work and Management Studies where teaching now refers more widely to the international and global context. In the field of global welfare studies, web-based information such as that made available by governmental and non-governmental organisations has significantly improved potential accessibility to policy documents and welfare indicators by students and researchers. However, the vast range of information and the number of sites with varying quality of content and ease of searchability, can act as a real barrier to the effective use of e-resources. These disciplinary developments and issues signaled the need for a pedagogic resource which assisted in identifying, locating, navigating and making effective use of information available on the web.

Teaching and Learning Activities

Through the E-Learning Global Welfare project, the ICSP group aim to facilitate and enhance teaching and learning in the area of global welfare studies through the development of the ICSP website into a unique on-line pedagogic and research resource for students and teachers to facilitate the identification, navigation and practical use of a range of sources and types of information in global welfare studies.

Specific activities include:

1) The development of subject related web links and networks (http://www.globalwelfare.net/links.htm).

2) The provision of links to a range of educational materials and resources for use in teaching and in the study of global welfare

3) The design and uploading of a range of on-line tests, activities and policy exercises (http://www.globalwelfare.net/teachingentrancepage.html)

4) The manipulation of relevant international datasets to render them accessible and useful for lecturers and students.

This element is intended to capitalize on the resources offered by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) International. We have negotiated the linking of our website to theirs and following recent on-line discussions (June 2005), we have established a dialogue around further collaboration.

5) Linking and collaborating with other projects.

The E-learning Global Welfare project is also linked to a collaborative E-Library project http://www.globalwelfarelibrary.org with GASPP (Globalism and Social Policy Programme http://www.gaspp.org) and Dr. Theo Papadopoulos (Social Policy Virtual Library, University of Bath http://www.social-policy.org). All partners are active participants in the creation and development of this educational tool, contributing respectively to three areas of development:

1) specific on-line learning resources for teachers and students
2) an international e-library
3) an international policy digest

Future impact of on-line resources

We anticipate that the resources produced through this project will impact positively on the work of teachers, students and researchers who choose to access our website. The materials and resources developed through this project will perform an important function in expanding knowledge and understanding of global welfare studies. However, one of the key questions generated by ICSP experiences of the production of on-line teaching and learning resources, is how and to what extent is it possible to increase incentives to facilitate and encourage academics to share pedagogic ideas and experience?
ICSP 2005

Since the rise of windows based software and interactive Internet technology professors have integrated e-learning into their teaching practices. This is true whether they have involved the use of web-based virtual learning environments (VLE’s), such as Blackboard and Web CT, or the placement of specific website information in course syllabi and handouts. Simultaneously, students (particularly those seeing themselves as information literate) have responded by relying on e-technologies for an increasing amount of information. However, as many of us can attest to, this information is often of the ‘lowest common denominator’, is poorly used, often involves some degree of plagiarism, and when not plagiarised electronic information is seldom evaluated for quality, accuracy or relevance. This is starting to leave the impression amongst many professors that while students can access e-technology many are in the dark when it comes to knowing when and how to use these technologies to enhance their learning experiences.

I suggest that if students are going to maximise the opportunities presented by e-technologies they are going to need guidance. For this to happen, two sub-processes will need to take place. First, students are going to have to be convinced that they do not enter higher education knowing everything there is to know about e-learning, its web-based processes, and how these can best be used in conjunction with traditional research tools and techniques. Second, as a profession we are going to have to develop our own teaching and learning strategies (and expectations) in order to guide students through an active and appropriate engagement with the academic side of the e-learning, including making the appropriate and accurate use of electronically gathered information part of the overall assessment process.

To be precise, the effective use of the e-learning environment will require more than the use of VLE software. While these packages can be useful tools, when used in unreflective ways (by either the professor or the student) signs are emerging that they tend to undermine the reflective learning processes involved in the higher learning and thinking processes, especially those expected of third and fourth year students. For instance, a small scale study at the University of Liverpool found that when Blackboard was used to make syllabuses, lecture notes and handouts available to students at any time, not only did attendance at lectures and classes fall but it was also discovered that an increasing amount of class discussion, essay material, and exam information was drawn directly from the resources placed into the VLE. Thus, instead of using the VLE to supplement their own research (as intended); students were using the information to replace independent initiatives. On the other hand, evidence also emerged to suggest that when the VLE was used to supplement lecture material though: weekly assignments and practice exercises, and the creation of informal discussion groups; the quality of submitted work, attendance, and the quality of class contributions tended to improve.

While many lecturers consider e-learning in the context of VLE packages in actuality the largest standalone tool within the e-learning environment is the Internet. As with VLE’s instructors wanting their students to use the Net wisely should consider how they can encourage their students to view the Net: first, as a toolkit containing a number of different tools, each capable of a different task (more or less appropriate for the job at hand); and second, a toolkit which should primarily be used in conjunction with more traditional resource, not as a replacement tool (particularly for those institutions with exceptional research facilities and resources).

This will likely require a serious consideration of how and why any given instructor (or department) wants students to use the Net, the academic level of the course involved, and which online resource/s will be best suited to the learning tasks being undertaken. In this, a minimum of three issues should be considered: 1) how, given the level (first year vs. senior level), needs (quantitative data vs. qualitative, writing vs. oral, project vs. paper, individual vs. group, etc.), course material and structure, can online resources be most effectively combined with more traditional offline resources to maximise student understanding and performance while undertaking the learning task being assessed; 2) given the learning task and the level of academic competence students are expected demonstrate, which online tools and resources will be appropriate; 3) how can the resources available via the Net be used to improve the overall quality of the student learning experience – particularly in light of available offline resources.

In addition, many of our students are also going to have to receive some form of guidance as to the appropriate ways of mixing traditional and non-traditional resources in the completion of their research assignments. At its most basic instructors should consider how they can help their students know 1) when it is more or less appropriate to use the Internet 2) which online tools are most likely to provide the best returns in light of the task involved 3) how to evaluate the validity, reliability, and accuracy of information 4) and how to deal with the ethical issues that will emerge in relation to the information accessed, how it is used, what is stored, and how much (or how many copies) is stored.

Overall, the key will be to help students know how, when and why they should use the Net in light of course requirements, the stage of academic development expected of the student, and the type of skills they are expected to have acquired and demonstrated by the end of their module. In parting it is best to see the Net as having tools linked to advanced and introductory texts. Thus just as advanced research texts are almost useless to students just beginning to explore a subject, search engines are next to useless for students who don’t know anything about the topic they are investigating. However, just as introductory texts have been written to guide students through the basics of a topic, many subject directories have been develop so as to introduce individuals to a subject area, and are thus better suited to first year students than to final year students who have already attained an advanced understanding of a topic.

_________________________________________________________________

Dr. Dolowitz is a Reader in the School of Politics and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool. In addition to his research into policy transfer and the ideological underpinnings of New Labour he is actively involved in researching and writing about the different ways the Internet can be utilised in the teaching and learning process.

I intend to answer this question through mulling over some aspects of blogs and encourage you the community, to collectively answer the question. So I’m hoping that we all engage with the discussion.

The first step is to outline the background to the discussion. I’m not going to address “what is a blog?” as this is well documented on the web. Instead I’ll discuss the rapid emergence of the blogosphere – the collective term covering all weblogs - and the increased interest in educational circles of the educational potential of blogs.

A Blog as a potential learning technology is both a relatively recent phenomenon and very dynamic. Blogs emerged in the late 1990’s and the activity of blogging – keeping a blog - has grown rapidly since. For instance, at the start of 1999 there where only 23 known web logs (Blood (2000), http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html). However, by the end of 2005 it is estimated that there will be 53.4 million blogs (Perseus Blog Survey (2005) http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/geyser.html). We must all agree, an incredible growth in use over 6 years.

This rapid growth in the blogosphere, has transferred to the educational sector. An indicator of this is the emergence of academic research on the use of Blogs within the literature (see Williams J. B. and Jacobs J (2004), http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html), and the establishment of blogs on how to use blogs in education (for example, Weblogs in Higher Education http://www.mchron.net/site/edublog.php)

Most authors refer to the following key drivers for the use of Blogs as a learning technology.

• Ease of use where the author can publish to the web without using any programming code
• No need for installing any server software on the users machine
• The user has extensive control over how their blog looks and operates
• Whenever the user edits his or her blog the results are instantly updated and available to others
• Like any other website, blogs can be simply linked and navigated

- Lamshed, Berry & Armstrong (2002) http://www.binaryblue.com/au/docs/blogs.pdf

In others words, they are

• simple to use
• offer instant gratification
• are customisable.

So how can blogs be used in teaching and learning? This can be addressed by discussing in terms of learning models, and through some practical examples.

The educational value of blogs is discussed by Ferdig & Trammel (2004) (http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/articleprintversion.cfm?aid=4677) and nicely summed up by William and Jacobs (2004) as “the discursive nature of knowledge construction is best addressed by the immediacy and commentary based system of blogging … there will be a natural tendency for refection and analysis on the part of the student, given feedback systems are integral to the blogging interface, but also … the contextualisation of learning through hypertext links … encourages revisiting and revising of learned concepts, enriching the learning experience”

This chain of thought is strongly associated with constructivist learning theories of Vygotsky (social) and Piaget (cognitive). Where the characteristics of this social software – the low threshold for publishing – encourages a collaborative, student centred approach which is both “involving and evolving” for the participants (I’d like to credit to Dan Sutch, Futurelab, for this term).

However, the constructivist model is not the only one which can be effectively employed by Blogging. When and where appropriate there is the potential for the behaviourist model. Again the low threshold for publishing means that lecturers can easily filter and publish information. The filter style of blogging is where “the author filters a mass of information available online and makes available on their site what they consider to be the most useful, interesting or important for their audience” Lamshed, Berry & Armstrong (2002)
http://www.binaryblue.com/au/docs/blogs.pdf

In moving from the learning model (abstract) to potential practical uses a good starting point is Scott’s (2003) (http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix2.gif) “Blogs in Education” matrix.

The matrix is based upon who reads and who writes the blog, in terms of the student or the instructor, and incorporates the idea of the intended audience. Scott’s (2003) matrix suggests that the potential use for academics tends to be narrowly focused on the course blog of administration and links or maintaining a blog for their own professional practice, networking and personal knowledge sharing. The uses by students in terms of writing are more innovative, incorporating a personal reflection tool and knowledge management, to a group collaboration tool. The practical applications for students are much broader and cover all aspects of learning and assessment.

I’d suggest a limitation is the matrix doesn’t capture the dynamic nature associated with blogs as learning technology. In particular, the conversational nature of blogs, with integral feedback mechanisms that foster communication and social networks. As Scott admits it was developed with a formal educational structure in mind (http://www.edtechpost.ca/mt/archive/000393.html). That said it is still a very useful way of mapping educational uses to tasks.

Given the exponential growth of blogs, and the wide range of potential uses, I’d like to discuss one blog in particular, and then raise some questions that can be used to facilitate further discussion.

The blog of interest is Dr Tufte’s Economics Classes Blog (http://econtufte.blogspot.com/). I’ve chosen this blog not because it is an exemplar in all areas, but because I think it does demonstrate some of the issues of using this technology.

The blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte’s economics classes at Southern Utah University. The most recent posts is concerned with the price of gas. There were 7 comments which included contributions by Dr Tufte. Admittedly, the context of use is unknown, in terms of the aims of the blog, student numbers and motivation. However, some observations can be made;

1. It is a collaborative blog, where students author on one blog. This should enhance critical thinking skills, as the students need to carefully formulate and articulate opinions with the awareness that they are read by their peers.

2. There seems to be regular contributions and comments by students, and the inclusion of links within contributions. This should be facilitating the social construction of knowledge.

3. It is easy to set up and should be relatively well embedded within the teaching. The link between the curriculum and the “real world” has the potential for enhancing student motivation (see
http://www.mobile-learning.blog-city.com/a_theoretical_basis_for_why_lecturers_should_podcast.htm which develops this chain of thought for podcasting).

4. However, when you start to analyse the contributions then questions are raised about the role of the moderator. What role should the instructor play? Are some of the moderators’ comments inhibiting further discussion? What strategies need to be adopted to enhance interactivity?

My concluding remarks are that blogs offer considerable potential as a learning technology. However, this technology is still relatively new. So some questions, which I’d like to raise for you, the reader, are;

1. Have you used Blogs in your teaching or learning? If so, how would you summarise the experience?

2. Do you have any anxieties about using Blogs within teaching and learning?

3. How do you think blogs can be effectively used in teaching and learning? Are they suited to specific tasks/disciplines, or are they transferable across all areas?

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Andy Ramsden is a Learning Technology Adviser, with the Learning Technology Support Service (http://www.ltss.bris.ac.uk) at the University of Bristol. He also lecturers on a masters programme in the Graduate School of Education. His particular research interests include blogs, podcasts and mobile learning (http://www.mobile-learning.blog-city.com).

The subject matter of business and economics changes rapidly and those engaged in the teaching and learning process require up to date and relevant materials that are both challenging accurate and interactive. There is an increasing emphasis in the 16 - 19 age bracket on vocational learning and at higher education on the flexible design of learning materials. Biz/ed is a unique online learning resource for students and lecturers in further and higher education in business and economics and related subjects. Biz/ed is a JISC service and is working towards developing resources that meet these different needs as well as providing resources for traditional ‘academic’ courses.

A key aspect of this work is how learners access and use the resources available. In some cases, the student will be using an interactive model or simulation such as the Virtual Economy not only to access information but to explore the impact on economic and non-economic objectives of the learners’ changes to government fiscal policy. In other cases the learner might be presented with a series of Macromedia Flash based animations illustrating a particular concept or set of relationships and the opportunity is presented for the student to explore some of these relationships in a non-threatening environment to build understanding.

The requirement for almost real time resources does mean that the possibilities for online interactive learning resources are likely to expand. Resources are capable of being used not only for traditional classroom-based learning environments but also increasingly for distance learning and e-learning courses and for use within virtual learning environments.

In the future, a far greater degree of interaction and sophistication in the design and development of online resources will be necessary. Such developments will involve a variety of different media types including streamed video and the level of interaction will be likely to increase from the simple ‘drag and drop’ scenario that characterises some ‘interactive’ resources to a more experimental approach which involves the user making decisions that have different outcomes and which provide the basis for further decision making.

The challenge for educators and resource providers is to identify and explore different ways of encouraging deep approaches to learning. We believe that deep learning can be encouraged through the appropriate design of resources that encourage students to become involved in the subject. Resource design should be based on the principle that students come to the subject having some existing knowledge and awareness. Resources should attempts to tap into that existing knowledge, present new challenges and perspectives to internalise new concepts that help the student to come to a better understanding of what it means to ‘think in the subject’. By this we mean the skills, attitudes, knowledge, approach and methods that are adopted by economists and business students to tackle problems and issues. Those who exhibit deep learning are able to take the concepts and methods of the subject therefore and apply these to new situations and problems and be able to demonstrate an understanding of the whole, yet see the relationship and relevance of the parts, in contributing to that understanding.

Deep learning also helps students see issues from a new changed perspective; they have, to all intents and purposes broken through a portal that provides a new understanding of the subject. This new understanding involves changed assumptions and a belief in the nature of reality as it applies to that subject.

To develop resources that meet such lofty ideals presents a massive challenge. There are numerous constraints relating to such resource development – inertia on the part of education, technological constraints, time and financial constraints, resource access and the limitations of an online medium in delivering the varied and challenging resources that are necessary to help build deep learning.

Online mediums however also present huge possibilities. The potential to access a range of information and data and to share that data has never been greater; the technologies for providing high quality graphics, animations and video content is improving both in quality and access and the challenge for Biz/ed is to take the technology and work with the limitations to achieve an improvement in the quality of resources that lead to improvements in the quality of learning outcome for end users.
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Questions
Is simplicity or sophistication the way forward for interactive learning resources?

Do learning objects form the basis of what lecturers are looking for in developing learning resources or should providers such as Biz/ed focus on producing complete games/simulations?

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Andrew Ashwin - Content Developer
Andrew joined Biz/ed in May 2003 as a content developer with responsibility for the overall academic direction of the site. Since joining, Andrew has produced a wide range of resources and been instrumental in changing the look and feel of the site and in helping to further its relevance and dynamism.

Andrew has a BEd in History and a Diploma in Economics from the University of London and followed this with a preliminary year of an MSc in Economics at Birkbeck College and an MBA in International Educational Leadership at the University of Hull, gained in 2002. He also holds a Diploma in Performance Coaching. He has taught economics and business studies, as well as history, in schools and colleges to all ages since 1979.

Andrew is an experienced examiner and moderator in both A level economics and economics and business courses and was Principal Examiner for the new Business and Economics (Nuffield) GCSE course launched in 1994. Andrew is now Chief Examiner for this course and is involved in further curriculum development in this area.

Andrew has an interest in learning styles and concept acquisition and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Birmingham in this area. He has used his experience and knowledge in education and in pedagogy to provide a coherent and clear philosophy behind the academic direction of the resources produced by Biz/ed. In particular, Andrew believes in the importance of providing resources that add value to the educator and student and to this end is keen to ensure that the student is able to engage in the resources produced.

Andrew has presented papers at a number of conferences on the pedagogy behind Biz/ed’s work and has written articles for the Journal of the Economics and Business Education Association. Andrew also wrote a chapter on e-Learning for the publication ‘Teaching and Learning in Business Education 14 – 19’ (David Fulton publishers, 2005).

Dr Kieren Pitts – Senior Technical Researcher
Kieren joined Biz/ed during June 2001, having freelanced for the ILRT at various times since 1999. He is currently employed as a senior technical researcher for Biz/ed. His principal responsibility is undertaking or co-ordinating technical developments for Biz/ed.

Kieren has a BSc in Biological Sciences and an MSc in Biological Research Methods, both from the University of Exeter, and a PhD in insect ecology from the University of Bristol.

As principal technical innovator for Biz/ed, Kieren has continued to work on technical innovations that improve and develop the service. Kieren’s work has led to some interesting developments, for example a series of six interactive simulations exploring the principles of supply and demand. Kieren had the opportunity to present the metadata aggregation tool at the Australasian Society for Computers In Learning In Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) conference in December 2003 and co-presented a paper (on online interactive simulations) at the Educational Innovation in Economics and Business (EDiNEB) conference during June 2004.

Kieren’s principal research interest concerns the use of interactive media in education. Kieren is responsible for coordinating games and interactive media research within the ILRT’s e-Learning group. Through his activities as part of the e-Learning group Kieren has developed links with other parts of the University (including the Graduate School of Education) and other organisations within the UK.