Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Cyberscience

"Cyberscience - it is already taking place - will be different from traditional science. "

Michael Nentwich, director of the Institute of Technology Assessment at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, describes and analyses in his book the usage of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in science.

This book not only draws a portrait of "Research in the Age of the Internet", but also assesses the various impacts of the New Media on academic activity and discusses the impacts for future research policies.

So we`ve already got some answers to the questions I posed in my previous article.
But the digital world is a rapidly changing one. Isn`t it? ;-)

Monday, August 20, 2007

Science in a Digital World

In this respect the following questions arise:

  • In which ways are scientists influenced by the so-called digital world?
  • How do they respond to this digital world in general? Fears and expectations?
  • Do they change their modes of communication with other scientists? If so, for what reasons and how?
  • Which digital techniques of communication have already become part of their daily routine? Why?
  • What do they consider benefits derived from the digital world?
  • Do online tools meet their expectations?

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Weblogs


Jan Schmidt, a German scientist on communication, analyses and discusses various practices of blogging in different areas.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Web 2.0

Today I came across the following video as a response to Web 2.0 on YouTube.

It is really worth watching.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a service provided by Google.

It offers a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources. One can identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Concerning the ranking of articles Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do.

Features for ranking articles:

  • weighing full text of each article
  • author
  • publication of appearance of article
  • number of citations

The most relevant results will appear on the first page.
More on Google Scholar.

I consider Google Scholar as a highly effective searching tool for scientists. But what about scientists who are still prioritizing on non-digital forms of publication? Which "page" will they appear on? Do they have to turn into what I'd call "digital natives" rather than "digital immigrants" in order to keep or gain reputation in the scholarly world?

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Google Society

Literature Tip:

This book discusses various aspects on the digital change of knowledge.