#solo13lego: Research Roles Through Lego

Ah, it’s been a busy week. Already several days have passed since the end of SpotOn 2013, so it’s about time I blogged my session from the Saturday, #solo13lego. I’m not able to deliver the kind of prolific blogging which some of my fellow attendees at the #solo13blogs session are capable of.

My workshop did admittedly have its own title, “Making Research Useful: The Consequences of (Bad) Communication“, but that didn’t prove as catchy as referring to it as “The One With Lego“, which was perhaps a better indicator of the main aspect of its appeal. Peter Murray Rust has already blogged about his experience of the session, so you can also head over there to hear an attendee’s perspective.

We were also highly fortunate in that SpotOn keynote, Salvatore Mela, inadvertently kicked off the Lego vibe on Day One of the conference when he showed us pictures of a gloriously Lego-fied particle collider. Couldn’t have asked for a better theme-setting ahead of our workshop!

The Main Premise

Participants deep in thought and Lego at Solo13. Photo by Neil Chue Hong (@npch). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, CC-BY-3.0.

There’s been a lot said about reproducibility of late (indeed, the result of much work and discussion in the scientific community over many years – see discussion here), whether that’s to do with working culture, tools, infrastructure or incentives – all highly relevant factors and issues that need to be dealt with. Ultimately though, the reproducibility issue boils down to a failure on the part of the research producer to anticipate or account for the needs of the research user (that may sound an oversimplification, but it’ll do for now – I’ll go into details in a future blog post, otherwise I’ll ramble on for ages here).

A microscope from one of our Group B teams. Photo by Suzi Gage (@soozaphone).

#solo13lego aimed to redress the balance and get participants thinking about how to identify the needs of the end user. By dealing with the frustrations of poorly communicated instructions, could they pinpoint where the problems lay, how the original writer had failed in their communication, and how the situation might be improved?

Optical Microscopes in Lego

Split into groups of ten, the participants had to download a set of Lego instructions to build an optical microscope, complete with “mirror”, stage, objective lenses and eyepieces. We had three sets of instructions, each describing the same item in a slightly different way.

The results of (I think) one of the Group B efforts. Here the faulty instructions for the middle section have caused problems in constructing the microscope stage. Photo by Sarah Cosgriff (@Sarah_Cosgriff).

And now for the catch: these were faulty instructions, deliberately written to confuse, confound and completely obstruct the user, and devoid of diagrams, schematics, images or any other visual aid. Although the participants were aware of this from the beginning, it didn’t prevent them from becoming highly frustrated with the situation!

In addition to dealing with the pecularities of the instructions, our Lego builders had to identify precisely what made these instructions bad instructions, how they had failed to address the user’s needs, and how they should be improved.

And the rules: no discussion between groups, no sneaky peeks at each other’s models, no looking at other group’s instructions. So, how far did they get in 35 minutes?

The End Result…

Given that they’d only had just over half an hour to interpret the instructions and build their microscopes, the groups made some good attempts. Notably though (and as one would expect) none of the groups managed to reproduce the original microscope model: hardly surprising, given the flaws in the instructions.

Finished microscope by Group A – note how the alignment of the eyepieces differs from the other models shown above. Photo by Jonathan Pritchard, @jr_pritchard.

In fact, if you take a look at the photos in this blog, what may at first glance seem to be identical models clearly have quite obvious differences.

Some models completely missed out the band of dark green bricks in the middle of the microscope. Some didn’t manage to include the microscope stage. Others misplaced the focus dial or missed it out altogether; the alignment and position of the objective lenses and eyepieces varied wildly between models. And this really wasn’t the fault of our participants: they were doing their best with the instructions they had!

The discussion that followed identified various “improvements” required:

• Use of a coordinate system to describe the position and orientation of blocks;
• Corrections to the number and types of bricks listed for use;
• Adequate description of where each level of bricks should be positioned in relation to the levels above and below;
• Use of visual aids, such as photos, diagrams and schematics, to demonstrate how the sections of the model should fit together;
• Inclusion of images for the end result…
• …and lots more (full discussion can be viewed on the livestream footage).

Microscope base in progress. Photo by Sophie Kay (@StilettoFiend), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, CC-BY-3.0.

Group work in full flight at #solo13lego. Photo by Sophie Kay (@StilettoFiend), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, CC-BY-3.0.

Even this short exercise demonstrates how a supposedly simple set of instructions can produce wildly different results if ambiguities leave them open to misinterpretation. It really got us thinking about what the needs of the end user are – something which we’re not taught to think about (or indeed encouraged to do so) at any stage of our education. Could this kind of exercise, whether with Lego or with hands-on science, be used to promote better communication amongst our scientists?

The extended session at the upcoming hackday (see below) is going to take this idea further and train participants to produce instructions that account for this user perspective.

All five microscopes at the end of the session, alongside Sophie’s slide of how the models should have looked. Photo by Peter Murray Rust (@petermurrayrust).

Upcoming Hackday

Now, dates are yet TBC, but I’ll be running an extended session of Lego-Based Learning at the upcoming SpotOn Hackday, which will probably happen sometime early 2014. I’m hoping this longer workshop will last around 3 hours. It’ll give us time to explore both the user and producer roles and I’ll be implementing the rotation-based learning approach of OSTI, so there’ll be an even stronger incentive for good communication skills. I’ll be posting the details on the OSTI News page once the time and place are confirmed, as well as tweeting the details, so keep an eye on all that and let me know if you’d like to join: I’m looking forward to seeing some returning faces as well as new ones! And there are worse ways to spend a Saturday than playing with Lego…

And What Next?

Although the instruction sheets are still available via my previous blogpost, I’ve posted the slide deck and the instructions up on the GitHub repository for the Open Science Training Initiative. If you’re interested in running a similar session, you can download those now – of course, you’ll need to buy your own stash of Lego (or get someone else to buy it for you) but at least that’s quite a fun task. Good Luck! 🙂

Panton Fellowship: End of Year Report

PLEASE NOTE: This article is just the advert for my Panton report, NOT the report itself! You can download a PDF of my 12-page end of year report here, all in glorious technicolour…

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Twelve months on from the start of mine and Ross Mounce‘s Panton Fellowships with the Open Knowledge Foundation, it’s time to take stock of where we’ve got to in that time. And how quickly the time has gone!

The Contents of a Year

Yes, the time might have flown by, but it’s time for the concluding Panton report. At the request of the OKFN, I’ve produced a full report on my work in Open Science and Open Education over the past year – you can download a copy here. I’ve tried to provide a fairly all-round picture of the major meetings, trips and of course an overview of the Open Science Training Initiative. Alas though, there wasn’t space to fit every last bit of news in, so feel free to leave me a comment/message on this blog or on my Twitter account if you’d like to know more about my Panton experiences!

Just to clear up any confusion though: I know some of you are also awaiting my post-pilot report on the inaugural OSTI scheme. It should be released in the next fortnight , and is a completely separate report to the one I’ve listed above. So don’t worry – those details, and indeed all the OSTI course materials, will be appearing very soon. I’ll be publicising it on Twitter and here on my blog once that happens, although I can add you to the direct mailing list for OSTI releases if you send an email to enquiries(at)opensciencetraining.com 🙂

Much of my focus has been on furthering the integration of open practices within academia, through development and delivery of graduate-level open science education. Meanwhile, my Bath-based counterpart, Ross Mounce, has done a phenomenal amount of work for policy development in open access and open data, including trips to Brussels and appearances on the radio, alongside data mining work inspired by his background in phylogenetics. That’s only the tip of the iceberg though, so I’ll leave it to Ross to tell the story in his own words – I’ll be posting a link to his blog in the next 24 hours, as soon as his review appears online. [EDIT: Ross’ review now up on the OKFN blog – read it here] So definitely take a look! And we’ve both enjoyed some great opportunities to promote the world of Open at conferences, workshops and meet-ups to a diverse range of audiences. We’ve met some fantastic people along the way.

And last but not least…

I also want to reiterate the final message from my end-of-year report: many thanks to the Panton Advisory Board, and indeed to all the folks at the OKFN who have provided sterling support throughout the last year. While I’m keen to avoid the excessive “Gwynnie” approach, there are nonetheless some particular names I’d like to mention. Thanks to Laura Newman, for seeing me through the hectic early days of the fellowship term and to Joris Pekel for stepping in to look after the Fellows since September; to Peter Murray-Rust, for inspirational, ebullient mentorship; to Greg Wilson, for being an absolute guru for educational practice and a bringer of calm; to Puneet Kishor, for his advice and faith in OSTI’s potential; and to Jenny Molloy, for advice, opinions and Oxford-based support!

I’m aiming to put together another blog post in early May, reflecting on what it’s been like to combine the Panton role with my DPhil/PhD commitments. If you’re a prospective Panton applicant for future Fellowship calls, hopefully it’ll prove useful.I should stress though that the end of the Fellowship certainly isn’t spelling the end of my work with OSTI – in fact, it’s more of a beginning. The fellowship year has provided the opportunity to create this wonderful initiative – now we move on to the process of growing it over time. But for today, it’s back to research with me (more specifically, to making my little in silico cells behave in C++). Bye for now!

Bringing Open Science Training to San Francisco

It’s been great visiting the States this week – and California, of all places. For starters, it made for a significant jump in the mercury on leaving the UK on Monday. What to Californians is a bit of an off week weatherwise is way, way better than what I could expect from the British summer!

Funny what travelling abroad does to you though. My friends know I’m a coffee drinker. I’ll take coffee over tea almost any day. Yet, set me down in a coffee house in SF and I find myself saying, “could I have an English Breakfast tea, please?” in what must sound like the most stereotypically English accent. Whether or not this is some subconscious response on my part to those wonderfully relaxed Californian requests for “caw-fee“, I’m not entirely certain. Seen objectively though, it feels a bit fraudulent on my part. Perhaps it’s indicative of some ingrained loyalty to the motherland.

From coffee to (scientific) culture…

National cultural differences and beverage selection aside, it’s time I mentioned what I’m actually doing in California. I’m talking now about scientific culture. Or, more to the point, how we can go about changing the prevailing culture for the better. Following on from the OSTI pilot, we’re now trying to establish the scheme at other institutions in the UK and beyond. Hence my visit to San Francisco this week – I’ve been visiting Puneet Kishor at Creative Commons, and together we’ve been on a promotional drive involving several institutions in the area. And as you know, SF isn’t short of world-class universities. One look at the parking lot in Berkeley campus tells you that much:

Proof of concept for the OSTI approach to training may be complete, but adapting the initiative to diverse course structures in particular institutions is the next challenge. Discussions this week have really helped shape plans for how we can achieve this…Monday to Friday has seen a fair few open science conversations. Jet lag well and truly kicking in, I made it to dinner on the night of my arrival, meeting with Greg Wilson and several others involved with either Software Carpentry, Wikimedia Foundation or open data projects. A great start to my US visit – I can only hope that I wasn’t too incoherent from the 19 hours of travel that preceded it! :S

Tuesday was spent at Creative Commons HQ in Mountain View (plus a trip to a Big Data event at LinkedIn in the evening). The guys and gals at CC are a fantastic group of people and I enjoyed some great discussions with various members of the team over the course of the day. I had the opportunity to present their “Lunch & Learn” seminar to promote my OSTI and gain some feedback from them on how it might be applied elsewhere. If you’d like to read more about that, you might want to take a look at the Creative Commons blog post covering the event. And their generosity even extended to gifting me a Creative Commons T-shirt, which should be making some appearances at Open events in the future 🙂

Since Wednesday, I have become vastly more acquainted with the SF public transport system, as Puneet and I made our way around various institutions, talking to a number of academics who may be able to suggest potential openings for my open science training regime. These have included: Jonathan Eisen of UC-Davis; Roberta Katz, VP for Strategic Planning at Stanford; Sameer Verma of SF State U; Rich Schneider of UCSF; and Michael Eisen at Berkeley. Hopefully this will pave the way for a variety of OSTI applications in the US and indeed other countries too! There’s now massive incentive for me to get to work on curating the slide decks and other course materials into a ready-for-release version.

This week has felt really productive and incredibly exciting. I think we’re on the verge of a whole new era of science education (and in a way, professional development training for academics). The coming months and years will hopefully see this realised across the disciplines, delivering to its full potential the multitude of benefits it can provide. It only remains for me to thank the OKFN and Panton Fellowship funders, without whose financial support this trip would not have come about; and of course a huge debt of gratitude to Puneet for hosting me this week and arranging such a fantastic schedule. Thanks all 🙂

Making the Case for Open Science Training: Panton in Jan/Feb 2013

Without a doubt, I’ve never blogged from a nicer location. This month’s update comes to you from the Creative Commons offices at Mt. View, just outside San Francisco. The California sunshine has put me in a good mood to write about the happenings of the past 2 months of my Panton Fellowship…and a LOT has happened since my last update. Setting aside my wonderment at how the year went by so quickly, it’s time I updated you on the Open Science Training Initiative (OSTI) pilot, the follow-up meetings in the immediate aftermath, and developments at Oxford with potential for further instances of the OSTI.

Culmination of the Panton work: Running the OSTI Pilot

I realise now that I was being seriously optimistic in hoping to blog progress with the OSTI pilot day-by-day. Perhaps inevitably, the demands of running a course for 43 graduates, involving in-person supervisory meetings with all the groups and delivery of the accompanying lecture series, left little time for me to get near a computer. Apologies to those who had anticipated watching the course unfold through my blogging!

The pilot scheme ran from January 10th through to January 18th, at the Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Oxford. Themed on computational biology, the course developed knowledge of programming and mathematical modelling, while mandating students to license their research outputs and deliver a coherent research story. This required them to draw on all elements of the research process (code, data, writing) as an integrated whole, rather than focusing on the written report alone. Lecturing in Open is all very well and good, but it’s first-hand experience of the techniques, approaches and culture that is most effective in breaking down misapprehensions and which provides researchers with the confidence to implement Open approaches in the future.

The first lecture of the course provided one of the biggest wake-up calls to the Open community I’ve yet encountered. Informally, I asked the students to raise their hands if they’d heard of open science, or knew something about it. Of those 43 students, only ONE raised their hand. Now this might be a fairly approximate metric, but it says a great deal about how much work we need to do in educating people about the ways of Open – let’s not forget, these are pretty switched on, well informed students in general. There’s plenty of fantastic work going on in the development of policy and infrastructure to support the transition to an open working culture, but we have a lot of work to do if the transition to openness is to happen effectively and smoothly. Now is the time to ask how we can engage with those who aren’t part of the Open community.

So here’s a challenge for you. If each of us could find even one way to engage with academics at our respective institutions – BEYOND the open community – at some time over the next 2 months, to educate in Open, raise awareness, and dispel the myths and misinformation, then that will represent some small progress in what we’re all trying to achieve.

Students filled in a questionnaire on completion of the course, and I’ve also been able to draw on the opinions and experiences of our course demonstrators and centre directors. Based on this, and on my own impressions of how things went (it was hard work, but I was there full-time for the whole thing, supervising each research team on a daily basis), I’m compiling a post-pilot report on the outcomes. Watch out for that over the coming weeks – as soon as it’s ready, it’ll be made available for download online.

OSTI Online

Yep, I mentioned the post-pilot report being released online just now, didn’t I? More to the point, it’s going to be released via the OSTI website, which is now live at www.opensciencetraining.com and whose content will grow over the coming months as I have the opportunity to extend the copy. There’s a lot more to be done of course, but for now there’s a brief intro to the motivation behind OSTI and an outline of its structure. There are also listings for the Lightning Lecture component of the programme, to provide you with some idea of the topics addressed. I’m in the process of curating and refining the slide decks for the course, based on exit feedback from the pilot participants; these will be released online over the next month once final versions are available. So watch this space!

Open Training at Oxford

I’ve also spent some of the past month engaging with the administrative arm of the University of Oxford, regarding provision for open science training. Basically, MPLS Division (maths, physical & life sciences) have indicated an interest in taking my OSTI and putting it out for use in other departments. Really excited about this! If we can get the training initiative installed in other settings in a variety of forms, it should provide us with a template for adaptable open training across an institution. The OSTI pilot demonstrated proof of concept: now it’s time to diversify its applications and see which forms work for people, and in what form the course can be most beneficial.

And given my current location in SF, California, it’s apparent I’ve spent recent weeks preparing for a trip Stateside, to carry out a promo drive for the OSTI. But more on that another time…there’s going to be lots more to tell in my next posting. See you then!

Open Science Training Initiative – Pilot Scheme Complete!

You could be forgiven for thinking I’d gone very quiet this week. As many of you may remember, the pilot scheme for my Open Science Training Initiative kicked off on January 10th. It’s been a pretty hectic time since then, but we’ve finally reached the closing day – the students are pushing final versions of all their work onto GitHub in the next hour, before presenting their findings from 10:30am onwards.

I’d had this insanely optimistic idea at the outset of blogging progress with the course every other day, or at least at the end of each of the rotation phases. Yep, that turned out to be WAY too optimistic. Once all the lecturing and project supervision meetings were factored in, I barely made it anywhere near my computer each day. Those of you who emailed me may have noticed the, ahem, somewhat tardy replies. All for good reason though – the students have done a fantastic job, produced some really creative work, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the results today – even if it’ll leave me stuck under a stack of marking for a fortnight!

I released a short feedback questionnaire to the students just now, so by the end of today we should have some idea of what they’ve enjoyed in the course, and importantly, how they think we could improve it in the future. I don’t think I’ve ever been subjected to this much judgment in one go before, so let’s hope it all goes ok… Ultimately I’ll be releasing all the findings and analysis in an evaluation report (most probably sometime in February), which will also take account of comments from the course demonstrators, some of whom were with the projects right from the beginning of the course. So keep an eye out for that.

I have to say I was seriously impressed by how they’ve taken to licensing as well. From the general show of hands I asked for in lectures, this area was completely new to all of them. This really shows how much work we need to do in educating our academics in Open practice if we’re going to aid the uptake of these approaches – at the moment, the awareness isn’t there in vast sections of the community. By the end of Phase 1 on the Monday, they’d got the hang of data, code and content licensing to the point where I was fielding some fairly subtle questions in specific cases. Some of you may have noticed me tendering one of these out to the OKFN discussion lists… GitHub for Windows proved really problematic though – more on that in the report and any other blog posts I get around to writing. We’d definitely need to do things differently in that department next time.

Anyway, proper update on the details of both rotation phases will follow, once I get through today and actually get some sleep. For now though, it’s probably time to get ready for the onslaught of the talks. It’s already snowing pretty heavily outside – something tells me I may end up walking home tonight, once the day is done! :S

Promotion, Preparation and Productivity: Open Science Sabbatical, December 2012

This month’s posting comes to you from a train somewhere between Manchester and Oxford – I’m making my most of the work time as I journey home from the seventh wedding I’ve been to in the past eight months. At time of writing, the start of the OSTI pilot is only 5 days away, so as you can imagine it’s been a bit of a nonstop month! The run-up to Christmas brought a combination of a website launch, promotional work, design and brand development for the OSTI, masses of lecture planning and preparation of course materials.

Perhaps the most significant development of December was the supervisors giving the thumbs-up to a “mini-sabbatical” of sorts, allowing me to focus solely on my open science fellowship. It’s really helped shape the course materials into an almost-finished state. I’ll save the finer details for the OSTI blogging phase later in the week, but the rough schedule of lightning lectures looks something like this:

• Thursday 10th – (2 lectures) Reproducibility and Open Science; Open Source Coding & Version Control Using GitHub
• Friday 11th – Licensing Your Data
• Monday 14th – Data Management Plans & Scientific Workflows (incl. guest speaker Jun Zhao)
• Tuesday 15th – The Changing Face of Publication
• Thursday 17th – OKFN Session
• Friday 18th – Presentation Day (assessment requirement for all participants)

Bear in mind that by the start of the course, the students will have already received 2 weeks’ training in Matlab and its applications, including GUI development and parallel implementation. The OSTI phase will span the assessment period for the course, themed around mathematical modelling of cancer and infectious disease.

The NERC Town Meeting (as I mentioned in my post from August 2012) provided considerable motivation for development of a website and other promotional materials for the OSTI, and took place in London on December 11th. Trialling the OSTI in an EPSRC DTC provides an excellent basis for transferring the course to similar DTP teaching models in other disciplines, and so I joined the preliminary meeting to promote the OSTI to prospective contract bidders. Drawing academics from across the UK, the meeting proved to be a reasonably productive day for open science discussion and I enjoyed some really good conversations with representatives and educationalists from, amongst others, Warwick, Oxford, Royal Holloway and the Natural History Museum.

So, what of the new aesthetic for the OSTI brand? In the interests of developing a cohesive identity for the initiative, the design needed to be consistent across all physical handouts and the website. I opted for a green, black and gold colour scheme in the end, and you can see the results in the images below (front and reverse sides of the leaflet are shown). And in keeping with the spirit of OSTI, the striking images in the design are all Creative Commons licensed content – it’s a pleasure to see such high-quality images available for use under CC license and certainly made the design process much easier for me. A CMYK version for printing will be made available via the OSTI website once the content is expanded.

So, what of that website? I should warn you now that the site is live in its basic form, but hasn’t had its official public launch yet (announcement on that will follow when the time comes). You can find it at http://www.opensciencetraining.com – at present there’s just a mission statement on the opening page and a couple of other tabs with contact details. I’ll be adding content over the next month, starting with a description of the course structure and lectures, and extending to downloadable slides and materials once the course is underway. Feel free to drop me a message if you’d like to be emailed once full content and materials downloads start to appear…

Another exciting development in December was a meeting with Will Hutton, author of the bestselling work “The State We’re In” and current Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Organised by Jenny Molloy, the gathering included a variety of faces from the Open community in Oxford, including Chas Bountra of the Structural Genomics Consortium, Simon Benjamin of Quantalk and Sally Rumsey of the Bodleian Library. Will discussed his plans to establish a series of studentships in Open Science at Hertford College, potentially in association with the Big Innovation Centre, and provided us all with a fantastic opportunity to debate the state of open science too. If this project gains the necessary funding and support to come to fruition then it could lead to a considerable hub of open research activity being established in Oxford, with the power to unify the diverse threads of open activity already taking place within the University’s departments, and to inspire novel working practices in young academics. I should stress that it’s early days yet, so keep an eye out for further news as the project develops.

So, what for January 2013? This year involves something of a running start, given the imminent beginning of the OSTI pilot on the 10th. I’m aiming to blog my progress with the course as it happens, or at least every other day if things end up being pretty hectic. Once we hit the 18th (and, moreover, once marking of the assessed work is out of the way) it’ll be onto the evaluation phase and the post-pilot report. I’ll also be following up with a few people from the NERC Town Meeting and meeting with MPLS (the physical and life sciences division) in Oxford to discuss how the OSTI might be applied to other departments outside the DTC. And there may even be a trip to the States in the pipeline…but more on that in a few weeks’ time…

NERC, Young Researchers and the Buildup to OKFest: Panton in August

Firstly, how on earth did the end of August come around so quickly? With OKFest only a couple of weeks away, I think it’s fair to say that everyone within the open science community has had a busy month…and things are likely to continue this way as we head into September. My Panton counterpart in Bath, Ross Mounce, has also had a mightily busy month from the sound of things, so there’s also plenty of #pantonscience news available on his blog.

But before we get to talking about OKFest, I should really provide an update on what’s been going on in recent weeks. It certainly feels like a great deal has happened: news from me this month ranges from significant progress with my open science training initiative, to discussion with NERC regarding their provision for OS training in their forthcoming Doctoral Training Partnerships, to designing some promo literature for the Panton Principles. All exciting stuff!

The second week of August saw Jenny Molloy and me meet with Kirsty Grainger, who is Head of Skills and Careers for the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). NERC are in the process of establishing Doctoral Training Partnerships nationally – for those of you unfamiliar with the DTP/DTC model, these centres typically offer four-year doctorates, in which the three year research phase is preceded by a year of interdisciplinary and skills training. After I had explained the aims and structure of my OSTI scheme, Kirsty suggested that we attend the DTP Town Meetings in November/December of this year, where we’ll be able to meet the leaders of each NERC DTP application and discuss the possibility of them incorporating some or all of my open science training initiative into their own programmes. A massive thumbs-up to NERC for taking the lead with this! I’m hoping to convince many of the Natural Environment bidders later this year, and from there we can try to persuade other research councils to follow suit. The demands on DTPs/DTCs to include specific aspects of training in their skills provision can be high, but often it is entirely possible to enhance the content without overloading the existing syllabus and teaching burden, if one changes how a subject is taught. Let’s hope that this will translate into Open Science becoming an integral part of doctoral training over the next couple of years! And let’s not forget the JISC/British Library Researchers Of Tomorrow report from June of this year, which highlighted the tendency of young research students to adopt the existing practices of their group as regards attitudes to open science and coherent release of data. If we want open science to propagate through the system, we can’t ignore the need to train our researchers before they reach the research environment.

August has also seen significant progress with my Open Science Training Initiative (OSTI), the central focus of my Panton work. As a result of meetings with the DTC directors, we’ve now finalised the dates for the three-week course. Some rearrangement of the schedule from previous years has occurred, so my course will now be running over the penultimate week of December and the first two weeks of January. What better way to see out 2012 and welcome in 2013 than with lots of open science? The early phase of the course will involve training the students in programming skills, before progressing to some interesting applications at the start of the second week. Thursday of Week 2 will see the start of the ‘rotation‘ phase, where the students work in teams on a mini research problem and have to thoroughly document their code, provide a coherent written appraisal of the methods and outcomes, and release their code and data online for a successive group to work on. We also discussed the specifics of this and of how we’ll be assessing the students, but I’ll hold back for now to avoid this post getting too long. Plenty more details of this to come in the near future…

One of the main events of the past month for me was of course the Oxford Open Science session on the 22nd. We welcomed a fantastic line-up of speakers for the evening to discuss the current state of graduate training in data management and open science and to debate how we can take this forward in the future, so many thanks to Juliet Ralph, Oliver Bridle, Jez Cope, Anna Collins and Laura Newman for joining us. The evening saw a good turnout and some interesting outcomes in the discussion. There was a great deal of support for peer-led learning, and there was also the suggestion of establishing graduate-led “open science” advocates within academic departments: these advocates would act as the universal point of contact for open science matters. I don’t know of any universities in the UK already operating such a system – if you know of somewhere that is, let me know! One of the other key points that arose was the issue of students’ confusion as to what constitutes Open Access-this mirrors some of the concerns raised in the Researchers Of Tomorrow report and will require attention over the coming years until all our grads are well-informed as to the publishing options open to them. Those of you who weren’t able to attend will be pleased to hear that the talks and discussion were filmed: I’m currently waiting to receive the transferred movie files back from our tech managers so, all being well, you can expect to view the videos online later on next week. Another favourable outcome was that one of our attendees expressed an interest in establishing similar data and open science initiatives at her university in Saudi Arabia. Hopefully I’ll be meeting with her later this week to see how we might be of assistance in making this happen…

Exciting month ahead: OKFest in Finland! This week I’m planning, filming and cutting together a promo video for the Panton Principles, which I’ll be using to open my Helsinki talk on the 19th September. Expect to see some mock-up story boards and content online in the next few days – I’d love to hear your comments on those ahead of filming. I’ve also been busy designing some promotional postcards for the Principles over the last week. The OKFN team have already seen the provisional designs and I’ll be posting some images very soon once they’re a little further along! This is all part of a wider effort by other members of OKFN to develop promotional materials for open science and the Principles ahead of OKFest. Judging by progress over the last week, we’ll soon have some nice promo pieces at the ready to spread the word about Open Science.

Next week will also get off to a busy start as the Digital Research 2012 conference gets underway at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Tuesday 11th in particular will see a programme of talks and debate on open access and data publication, featuring keynotes from Steven Harnad, Peter Murray-Rust and Neil Chue Hong, concluding with a panel discussion at the end of the morning. I’ll try to tweet updates as the morning progresses, although there’s still time to register for the conference if you haven’t yet had chance to do so.

Well, I think that’s enough from me this time: I daresay there’ll be plenty of news over the coming weeks before, during and after OKFest. Watch out for the OxOpenSci video and slides being released in the next fortnight, and as always, feel free to comment or get in touch with me if you have any questions, suggestions, thoughts or advice on the work I’m doing.

See you in Helsinki!

Adapting to the age of Big Data: Speaker Event 22/08/2012

With the next meeting of the Oxford Open Science group only 2 days away now, it’s time to ink 7:30pm into your diary for this Wednesday (22nd August). The venue (OeRC, 7 Keble Road) is booked, our speakers are confirmed and I’m looking forward to a thought-provoking evening of talks and discussion. And you can even see a PDF of the promo flyer by clicking on the link below – feel free to pass the flyer on to anyone who might be interested:

Click here to see the promotional flyer for this Wednesday’s event

For those of you who live in London, remember that the Oxford-London bus services of the X90 and the Oxford Tube run regularly until around 3am, so it’s reasonably easy to scoot up country to join us for the evening.

I originally posted the speaker list in my Panton blog post for July, but in case you missed it, here it is again:

• Juliet Ralph and Oliver Bridle from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, discussing information seeking amongst students and the current provision of digital/data management tools (including a discussion of the recent JISC/British Library report on the working practices of Generation Y research students);
• Anna Collins from DSpace Cambridge, talking about the “long tail in the shadow of big data”, whose responsibility data management is in these contexts and how this might develop in the future;
• Laura Newman from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), talking about progress and plans for the newly-launched School of Data;
• Jez Cope from the Doctoral Training Centre in Sustainable Chemical Technologies at the University of Bath, talking about his experiences in data management and social media training with DTC students.

Our speakers will be taking questions during from the audience during the evening and we’re hoping to close the session with a group discussion (complete with tea and coffee) before heading off to the pub for those who are interested.

Panic ye not if you can’t join us though: Jenny Molloy and I are hoping to film the event (by which I mean the bit pre-pub 😉 ) so that those who can’t attend can still benefit from the presentations and associated discussion. I’m happy to ask questions to the speakers on your behalf too, so get in touch with me (either here on the blog or by tweeting me at @stilettofiend) if you have a question to pose to a particular speaker, or a more general comment to throw into the discussion at the end. All being well, I’ll try to release the video on YouTube as soon as possible, and hopefully by the end of the week.

Looking forward to seeing many of you on Wednesday!

A month in the life of a Panton Fellow: July 2012

WIth August well and truly underway, it’s about time I updated you on my Panton Fellowship activities of recent weeks. Admittedly July has been a slightly quieter month than usual (mostly because I finally took my first proper holiday in over six years – three weeks in Singapore, of which 11 days was holiday and the rest was work!) but there have been some interesting open science developments nonetheless.

I was actually in the country for the first week of July, and what a busy week it was! In between moving house and flying out to Singapore, I managed to make it over to Cambridge for the day to see several people. Many thanks to Peter Murray-Rust and Laura Newman who made the time for a lovely lunch meeting, despite having come through a hectic week of wall-to-wall meetings with the other members of the OKFN. We had chance to discuss my progress with my Panton Fellowship work and how we might extend the pilot to other schemes afterwards, and Laura also updated me on how the School of Data has been doing since its launch earlier this year.

After meeting with Laura and Peter, I headed over to the current home of DSpace, the digital repository of the University of Cambridge, to meet Anna Collins. It was fantastic to meet Anna in person at last and we had an extended chat about her work in training students in data management and advising them on the use of digital technologies. Elin Stangeland also joined us later in the meeting and provided some useful suggestions as regards possible avenues for releasing information about the outcomes of my pilot study, once it concludes later this year. From my own perspective in developing graduate training suitable for a variety of subject backgrounds, it was great to hear from Anna and Elin about what the typical demographic at voluntary-attendance training sessions tends to be, and which elements of DSpace’s training initiatives have proved the most successful. For example, data beginners seem to sign up to sessions more readily – this echoes what I’ve heard from Bodleian representatives in Oxford and really underlines the need for careful consideration of how we promote digital technologies to scientists, especially those students in the physical sciences who develop their own management approaches as part of their studies (and by this I mean intermediate-to-advanced data users in computational disciplines, where code and high data output are intrinsic to work).Thanks to both Anna and Elin for taking the time to meet with me!

How best can we train graduates for research in the age of ‘Big Data’? This is the question we’ll be addressing in the upcoming August meeting of the Oxford Open Science group, to be held in the Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) at 7.30pm on Wednesday 22nd August. I’ve been busy putting together a varied and exciting programme of speakers in recent weeks and am delighted to be able to announce our official panel of speakers for the evening, providing a range of perspectives on the key issues facing academia in the face of the “rising tide of scientific data”. We’ll be hearing from:

• Juliet Ralph and Oliver Bridle from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, discussing information seeking amongst students and the current provision of digital/data management tools (including a discussion of the recent JISC/British Library report on the working practices of Generation Y research students);
• Anna Collins from DSpace Cambridge, talking about the “long tail in the shadow of big data”, whose responsibility data management is in these contexts and how this might develop in the future;
• Laura Newman from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), talking about progress and plans for the newly-launched School of Data;
• Jez Cope from the Doctoral Training Centre in Sustainable Chemical Technologies at the University of Bath, talking about his experiences in data management and social media training with DTC students.

I hope you’ll agree it’s shaping up to be a highly engaging series of talks on a range of interesting topics. There’ll be plenty of opportunities for discussion and debate as well, so please do come and join us, even if you’re only able to drop in for part of the evening. I’ll be releasing a proper running order for the talks as soon as we have more details. Those of you looking to enjoy the highly social side of open science may also like to join us for a drink in one of the local pubs afterwards. Watch this space for further details – I’ll be posting again nearer to the time with an official reminder and full details of where and when things are happening. Looking forward to seeing you then!

In other news, I’m all signed up to attend OKFest in Helsinki next month: flights and accommodation all booked as well, really looking forward to it 🙂 If you haven’t registered yet, then you might want to snap up a reduced-price Early Bird ticket now before tomorrow (Aug 8th), after which the General Sales ticketing phase starts. My Panton counterpart in Bath, Ross Mounce, and I will be delivering one of the presentation slots in the Open Research and Education session on Wednesday 19th September, so I’ve been putting some ideas together in advance of that (and don’t forget you can also catch Ross’ Panton update for July on his blog). Unfortunately though I didn’t make it to the OKFN Hackathon on July 7th, which was a real shame. I’d been hoping to join Laura and Jenny working on the Research Data Handbook – keeping fingers crossed that I’ll be able to drop in next time though.

And what of the month ahead? Well, I’m meeting again with directors of the Oxford Doctoral Training Centre this Wednesday to discuss developments in planning the training course for this Michaelmas Term. Then on Thursday, Jenny Molloy and I are meeting with Kirsty Grainger of the Natural Environment Research Council, to discuss shared interests and plans for developing open science training for new graduate students across the UK. I’ll also be getting to work on a Panton Principles promo video ahead of the OKFest. And let’s not forget the next meeting of Oxford Open Science on Wednesday 22nd August – put it in your diaries now!

A month in the life of a Panton Fellow: June 2012

Well, June has been another productive month of fellowship work! To start on a positive note, Ross Mounce and I received the good news that our proposal for OKFest has been accepted, so we’ll be in Helsinki this September to tell you about the work we’re doing for our Panton Fellowships, as part of the “Open Research and Education” topic stream on Wednesday 19th September. Looking forward to it! June has also seen several different online meetings with various working groups, in addition to my first official quarterly report for the Fellowship, so there’s been plenty to keep me occupied.

Many of you reading this will already be aware of my focus on developing graduate training schemes for open science, data management and reproducible computation. I’m really conscious of how much our early research years are influenced by the ethos of the first group we join: this emphasises a pressing need to adequately train our graduates while they’re still at a pre-doctoral stage. So you can imagine how interested I was to read the newly released JISC-funded report, entitled,“Researchers of Tomorrow: the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students.” The report outlines the findings of a three-year study on our youngest research generation, the children of the so-called “baby boomers”. Amongst other things, the findings identify the need for enhanced training in digital technologies, data management and collaborative working – so encouraging to hear this while I’m in the process of developing my graduate training initiative. You can download a PDF of the report here – definitely worth a look!

June has also seen further discussion with Greg Wilson and the rest of the team involved in the development of the Software Carpentry initiative. I first mentioned SWC back in my April blog posting – they provide fantastic courses in coding and software development for scientists with a limited experience of programming, combining intense in-person workshops with online learning materials. I initially heard of them as a result of my contact with the Software Sustainability Insititute, and was keen to hear more about their work and how they’ve scaled the initiative up to work in many different countries and locations. After a great Skype call with Greg earlier this month, I remotely joined their conference on 20th June, which gave me the chance to meet (from across the Atlantic, at least!) many other people involved in the project (including OKFN’s own Cameron Neylon). I’m keen on the idea of integrating some of their courses – all available under a Creative Commons Attribution license – into my own training scheme later this year, so I really appreciated getting a chance to hear about how their work is progressing. One further note: the guys at SWC are really keen to get more female scientists into programming too (something which I completely support!), so if your department/organisation might be interested in holding a female-targeted session, then please do get in touch with them ASAP.

On 28th June, Jenny Molloy and I met up with various representatives from Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Alena Ptak-Danchak, Sally Rumsey, Juliet Ralph and Oliver Bridle all took time out of their busy schedules to talk to us, providing a picture of the existing state of data training provision across Oxford and discussing where my course might fit into that framework. Our librarians (and I mean this in a country-wide sense) represent a massive source of expertise in information management that we’re lucky to have. All the Bodleian representatives provided us with valuable insights into what kinds of training the students are most receptive to, and how I might adjust my own approach to course delivery in order to account for this. And I now have plenty of resources to explore and contacts to pursue. All in all, a successful meeting – and many thanks to Jenny for helping to bring this about!

I’ve also started to organise the Oxford Open Science meeting for August 22nd, provisionally entitled, “How best can we train graduates for research in the age of ‘Big Data’?” I’m hoping to:

• generate debate on the evolution of training schemes for open science, data management and/or digital technologies;
• discuss how we as a community can maximise the uptake of training initiatives in these areas;
• think about how we might begin to use such training as a platform to engage those outside the open science community.

The group wiki can be found here and includes details of other upcoming meetings too: we’re a friendly bunch of people, so please do come and join, whether you want to listen to the discussion or to actively add to the debate. I’m in the process of recruiting speakers at the moment – if you, or someone you know, might be interested in speaking at our meeting, then I would love to hear from you. I’d better hold back on full details until names are fully confirmed, so watch this space…

July looks to be an exciting month, with several big meetings planned already. On 5th July I’m heading over to Cambridge for the day to meet with Anna Collins of DSpace, the digital repository for the University of Cambridge, to chat about our shared interests in data management and graduate training. The trip will also provide me with a chance to meet up with OKFN’s Laura Newman, Peter Murray-Rust and Tom Oinn over lunch – we should have plenty to talk about, and I’m really looking forward to hearing about the progress of the newly-launched School of Data. I’ll also be meeting with David Gavaghan and James Osborne of the Oxford DTC this Friday in order to develop plans for the open science training initiative I’ll be piloting this Michaelmas. Despite juggling work with a house move in a couple of days’ time, I’m hoping to join the OKFN hackday over Skype for a couple of hours this Saturday (unpacking chaos permitting!). Furthermore, I should also be meeting with David De Roure, Jenny Molloy and Peter Murray-Rust to discuss the potential for an open science workshop at Digital Research 2012, due to take place in Oxford this September. This month’s going to be a busy one…so if you wait a couple of weeks for my next Panton blog entry, I’ll let you know how it all turns out!