Session for Interaction and Engagement: Personal Infrastructures of Distributed Scientific Collaboration (original) (raw)
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Open Science Gallery (OSG) is an interaction method which has emerged from our experience in supporting teambuilding processes among transdisciplinary and geographically distributed researchers at our higher education institution. The OSG is intended to be applied in f2fmeetings, aiming to overcome discipline-related and physical boundaries and to initiate collaboration. To this end, the OSG presents an introductory question (OPEN) which serves participants as a starting point for sharing their personal expertise (SCIENCE) within a safe environment (GALLERY). The OSG is self-organising and spontaneous which means that no advance preparation for participants and little facilitation is required. In the first part of this paper, we will describe the need for an approach which focuses on the specific challenge of todays organisations: if they want to gain a competitive edge on the market, organisations need to find ways to actively connect and incorporate the tacit knowledge of employees and unique expertise into the business. In the second part, we will introduce the theoretical framework of the OSG, its core elements and some single implementation steps. Furthermore, we present the pilot and its evaluation results, critically discussing the risks and benefits of our approach. We will close with some of the lessons learned and an outlook for a future redesign.
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Paper 1 : Science Hub : A digital medium for supporting collective science inquiry in hybrid spaces
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Hybrid spaces for science learning" refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. Learning science within hybrid spaces can be a fun, engaging, and reflective experience. Further, hybrid spaces are inherently social, facilitating dialogue and social exchange, as well as the construction of knowledge, paralleling the nature of contemporary science. This symposium brings together several research programs that address learning "across contexts," that span classroom activities, museum visits, and engaging, embodied experience of science phenomena. We include an international set of presenters from Canada, USA and Norway, each engaged in design and empirical investigations of designs that blends conceptual learning with the development of inquiry skills and epistemological knowledge. Each paper presents the research context, method of design and evaluation, research progress, and science learning outcomes.
Making Science: New Generations of Collaborative Knowledge Production
American Behavioral Scientist, 2014
Research scientists have become increasingly dependent on collaborations across laboratories and organizations to maintain their productivity. However, the increased specialization of individual laboratories works against the current drive toward understanding systems in the sciences. Consequently, there is a tension between the rising importance of collaborative efforts and the practical and structural challenges in establishing and managing such collaborations. Combining ethnographic case studies of three biology research labs with network data of their larger scientific community, we explore the changing process of scientific knowledge production in the age of Big Science. We find that virtual technologies open up the knowledge process as scientists have easier access to data, publications, and each other. At the same time, we find that these technologies-specifically scientific databases-do not eradicate the social aspects of scientific knowledge production as collaborative structures in science remain relatively unchanged. We discuss the implications for theory and practice of this seemingly contradictory character of scientific knowledge production.