Science in the 21st Century
Monday, July 14th, 2008Here are a few posts that other readers recommend you check out:
(Conference announcement via Gerry McKiernan)
Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology
Waterloo, Ontario, Sep 8-12, 2008.
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important.
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There are several dedicated packages to typeset a curriculum vitæ or a resume in 
Beside some new user-oriented features (e.g. an editable profile and the possibility to create a blog), the most interesting additions are those that extend group functionality.
Taken at the individual level, such metadata (i.e. tags and ratings added by individual users) are hardly of interest, but on a large scale I suspect they will provide information capable of outperforming more traditional evaluation processes in terms of coverage, speed and efficiency. Collaborative metadata cannot offer the same guarantees as standard selection processes (insofar as they do not rely on experts’ reviews and are less immune to biases and manipulations). However, they are an interesting solution for producing evaluative representations of scientific content on a large scale.
I haven’t mentioned yet another major advantage of using social software for managing references: the possibility of using dynamically generated feeds to track things you are interested in.
Learning technologies have been taking an increasing role in almost all learning environments. They are used in a variety of informal and formal educational environments, from early years to university level and throughout adulthood, as well as in many commercial, industrial, and governmental settings. With the greater use of learning technologies it is critical to better understand how they interact with human cognition. Both in terms of how they may facilitate and enhance (as well as hinder) learning, and also in terms of how they affect the way we learn and acquire information, and the nature of cognition.
Some of these articles are targeted at young researchers/grad students starting a career in specific scientific domains, but they contain a lot of useful general-purpose advice.
