Glad I Did Not Miss Dr Berger’s 8am Lecture

Carl and Bryan by cogdogblog
posted 22 Jan ’09, 3.30pm MST PST on flickr

I am long privileged to know and exchange ideas with Carl Berger, and am glad I did not sleep in this morning for his 8am presentation (he joked about the attendance similar to an 8am lecture) on the last day of ELI — “Publish or Perish: Online Reformation to the Rescue?” (it should be posted soon to the CARAT web site http://www.carat.umich.edu/carat/presentations).

Among framing the “future” of publshing, and implications for new scholarship, Carl presented,a s usual in a fresh way, results of research the CARAT group at University of Michigan has done, and mainly in identifying a different set of attitudes towards use fo technology of what he calls “Millenial Instructors” – the combinarion of students who have some teaching roles (as TAs) and faculty who have some roles as learners (by taking classes).

I was a bit curious when his slide where he was describing Zotero had a screen shot of this blog, and thinking about a Skype conversation we had last week, he asked me (without any advance notice) to talk about some of the ways my co-author Bryan Alexander and I tried to raise participation in our EDUCAUSE Review article on Web 2.0 Storytelling, which was at one level, a traditional journal (print) article.

We’ve been a bit surprised because Bryan and I thought we wrote it in a manner to generate some discussion or pushback, but seeing almost 10000 views on the EDUCAUSE site, there are but 3 comments (one from me). But as Bryan noted, we raised several ways to participate- by tagging web sites in delicious with web2storytelling (119 sites taged so far) and by setting up on open wiki with some discussion like questions which has gotten a nice smattering of comments and links to new content we did not see before.

That is a whole other topic; I have bantered with Jim Groom who has been suggesting wikis are best for single authored wikis (using wiki as basic web publishing tool) or the massive level- like WikiPedia. The Reverend suggests everything in between is going to get mild participation at best. I am not sure I agree, but have seen plenty if wiki efforts fizz out.

But that’s not the topic here.

When Carl was talking about the education accepted form of publishing recognition being via Citation Indexes, it got me thinking about the delicious tool to look up any URL to see who has bookmarked to it– for our EDUCAUSE article, 99 people have bookmarked it and for the wiki we see 80 people have bookmarked it.

That is not quite as strong as a published citation, but it does seem to be an interesting metric to look at. I don’t use Zotero much, but am wondering if that as a service is able to track the number of times a URL is cited.

Anyhow, it was an honor to be called on in class, Dr Berger!

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