Shared bibliography for research on peer-learning

[Stian Håklev]

Hey all,

It's been a while since I got back from the workshop, but I haven't really gotten around to following up on it before now. We did an interesting research page workshop in Berlin (http://pad.p2pu.org/Research-Page), and one of the ideas was to have a place where we can collaboratively build a list of papers with research on open or peer-learning. I am quite interested in this, since it would also help in my personal research :) and also I think it would be great if P2PU would be the "go to place" to find out more about the cutting edge research on collaborative learning... (I think OLNet kind of wanted to become that, but I don't think they've really succeeded - at least not in this specific task).

The first task is to find the right platform for this. I think it would be more useful with a platform that supports semantic publication data, rather than just making a long list on the wiki etc. There are of course a ton of these - Mendeley, CiteULike, etc etc. For me, the ideal criteria would be:

- easy to add new publications by many people

- possible to import list of publications from some standard formats (if we already have lot's of relevant publications in our reference management, shouldn't have to retype it)

- tagging

- ability to export in a machine readable format (BibTex or similar) so we can download a bunch of references, and import to our local reference manager

- ability to "embed" list of publications in nice format on for example the P2PU wiki 

I am going to have a look around at the various tools in the next few days, to see which one I think fits the best. I set up a pad which we could use if anyone else wants to help out. I put the criteria there as well, maybe you disagree with them. http://pad.p2pu.org/Research-tool

Once we've identified a tool, we can set up a group and start collaborating. Of course, we'll have to ask ourselves what exactly we are looking for... I would exclude research purely on OER first - there's a ton of it, and it's not that relevant to us (although I'd love to see a detailed bibliography on research on OER as well)... things like research on P2PU courses and MOOCs is obviously relevant... How about Khan Academy, Open Learning Initiative, or even teachers using a wiki or a blog inside a classroom? 

It would also be neat if we could not only assemble a list of the articles with metadata, but also do short writeups on the articles we've read - that would make it a lot easier for other people to navigate... Not sure what the best platform for this would be. I could probably hack together a collaborative web with built-in reference management, which automatically syncs with any of the systems that have an API, based on my individual research wiki (http://reganmian.net/wiki/researchr:start). Or maybe we should look at Acawiki, etc... We'll see.

In the end, I think it would be pretty cool if we actually wrote a review article on the "state of the art of research in open learning" and tried to get it published. I think a lot of people would find that very useful! 

But let's take one step at a time :)

Stian

--
http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters

[Maria Droujkova]

Stian,

Thank you for taking the lead on it. I have some bibliographies to contribute. Mine are in Zotero and I like the tool. I know it satisfies all your criteria other than embedding (which I don't know if it does or not). This can be implemented as a group on Zotero. If I remember correctly, you had some arguments against the tool, though, and I am open to using other things.

Do you want to frame with effort as a seminar on P2PU? 

Here is the MOOC article I created on Wikipedia as a part of a edu-MOOC (I think) and lots of people contributed references, some of them with good lists of references in turn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course#References

We can also chase them through Google Scholar's "who cites whom" option. We just need a container with good meta-data to start. It's not about making a link farm, but about our comments and curation. If we are clever about it, that article you mention will be "almost contained" in our comments on references, which we will write one paragraph at a time as we add each reference. 

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
919-388-1721

Make math your own, to make your own math

[Stian Håklev]

Hi Maria,

I really like the idea of Zotero, but so far their online libraries leave a lot to be desired:
 - there is very poor discoverability - going to their site, you just see links to recent groups which are typically empty etc.
 - you need Zotero to publish into these groups (even though Zotero is OSS, I don't want to force people to use one specific tool - I don't use Zotero for example)
 - you cannot get machine-readable metadata from the webpage, which can be imported into any citation management system (ie. you only get the human-readable citation, not BibTeX etc)
 - there is no facility for commenting or discussing the article

I looked at a few other contenders - like Mendeley, CiteULike and Connotea, and while some of them provide some of the first things I wanted - like ability to import and export data, greater discoverability etc, they seem to all lack a robust function for commenting on individual articles, as well as organizing them systematically etc (apart from tags)... It would of course be useful to have a list of articles about peer-learning, but it would be far more useful if we could have short abstracts below them, begin to co-author "living" lit-reviews about different sub-topics etc. We'd almost need a citation reference tools, connected with a wiki which understands citations... This is kind of what I am doing locally... I could probably release a version of DokuWiki which was open for semi-public editing, and which pulled in bibtex records from a public citation management tool. It would be some work - and I fear it would still be a bit clunky and off-putting to people. Not sure if others have any better ideas?

Stian
(This is something that acawiki should have been perfect for, but I feel that currently it's technology doesn't really support dealing with citations etc well enough)

[Maria Droujkova]

Stian,

This is a good review. And yet, all of us use SOME tools for the purpose of writing papers. I liked your tool, but I am not a beta user in general, in that I don't like "clunky" for anything I have to do repeatedly. I am happy to test and debug, though. 

Is there anything good enough for Plan B or Plan C?

[Stian Håklev]

I agree that I don't really think my tool is ready for something like this, I just threw it in there. I would love to find something that would more or less serve our purposes, but if it cannot import/export from other tools, I would be much less likely to put a lot of effort into this, as it wouldn't really be very useful for my own research goals, and the data wouldn't be as useful for others. And if we cannot comment on the articles, that seems to loose an important part of the purpose. But I guess anything would be better than nothing.

Stian

[Maria Droujkova]

Maybe we can try your tool and see how it goes?

Zotero imports and exports fine for me. You can comment within each entry, in the Comments section, then synch for everybody (I think comments get synched - I need to double-check).

Happy New Year!

[Jessy Kate Schingler]

i think it's a great idea and would caution against getting *too* hung up on a specific tool. maybe i can ask what the goal would be - so that others can refer to the reading list and read it at their leisure? or to have a shared reading group where people are reading the same papers at the same time? (i'm assuming the latter). 

i agree commenting on them is a problem, but again would think it's better to keep it simple... what about a google doc for comments on specific papers, or a p2pu study group with specific tasks around each paper and people can add comments when they read a specific paper?

jessy

--

Jessy

http://jessykate.com