e-Research was a big focus of the conference. What this means, what don’t we have now, and where is the money coming from.
There was talk of “Digital Natives” as our current student population, sometimes referred to as the “Net Generation”, none of whom were in attendance. Unsurprisingly, they like power points (for laptops), wireless (for laptops), desk space (for laptops), available security cables (for laptops), readily available food, exercise, and they don’t like carrying laptops. Surprisingly, they like their parents as a reference source.
Tony Hey, VP for Technical Computing at Microsoft and former director of the UK’s e-Science Initiative, talked about a few interesting things including a mock up “Contoso” Virtual Science Library, Connotea (del.icio.us for research), lab notebooks as blogs (eg. http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/).
Chuck Severance gave a very frank and honest presentation on Community Source that highlighted the differences from commercial software. And cost was not the issue. One benefit is the quick time to usability. Also separation of code from support and maintenance allows greater choice for those using the product. And the community is very frank and honest about the product.
Brad Wheeler from Indiana University gave a brilliant presentation entitle “Leading Beyond the ICT Conundrums for Scholarship 2.0” which was not as bad as it sounds. Hopefully they videoed the presentation properly, complete with written annotations. A must see for any IT manager working in the higher ed space.
Gavan McCarthy, from the University of Melbourne, also left me thinking on the long term goal of a globally thinking human race. As it turns out this goal is centuries old. It appears we are in a continuous process of reconsidering our “relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge”. Much of the discussion was centred around reference information/knowledge. I think we need to ask what higher education’s role is in the information jungle that is not reference. The “digital natives” are going to google and wikipedia for answers, not the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Hopefully the presentations will appear on the conference website soon.