aha Moments from K* – Wednesday April 25, 2012

By David Phipps (RIR-York)

France. Nigeria. Vanuatu. Kenya. Home to more of the knowledge brokers I met today. Truly a global experience.

Lots of work on tap today. Today wasn’t just listening to talking heads – huge THANK YOU for that.

First up – provocative opening by Derek Brien who said we need to focus on the process of K* and not the outcomes those processes enable. This was contextualized but mostly echoed by John Lavis (Program in Policy Decision Making). I don’t disagree with the need to focus on the process. This is the message of my paper with Daniele Zanotti that illustrates that campus-community collaborations are a journey not a destination. We are also on record as saying the knowledge mobilization is a process that enables social innovation. So the process is important. But if we don’t also focus on the outcome how can we measure our processes and improve upon them? I think Derek Brien and John Lavis are saying that (depending on your audience) the outcome is often a political decision that you as a knowledge broker have no control over so focus on the process (over which you do have control) and leave the outcome to those who are making the decision regardless of whether or not you agree with the decision.

Second aha moment came when we were discussing the principles of collaboration and our table got heavily into a discussion about knowledge brokering using on line tools. The principles of on line collaboration were:

• Provide leadership
• Create incentives
• Assign dedicated staff
• Know the trajectory of your collaboration (have an end in mind)
• Mix formal and informal networking

We reflected that the principles of collaboration are the same on line and in real life. Maybe it’s no surprise that the conditions required for effective on line collaboration are the same as in real life but who knew until you started comparing the two. Likely there are differences. Maybe access and adoption of technology and the fact that trust is earned differently (but is still earned) is different between on line and real life, but these principles are shared.

And after all the rum tasting (yes, we found time to mobilize more than knowledge) one picture summed up the day (thank you Robyn Read from Research Supporting Practice in Education).

2012 York KMb Learning Events / Les activités d’apprentissage offertes par York MdC en 2012

Michael Johnny, RIR, YorkU

York KMb is offering sessions for researchers, staff and graduate students to help make their research relevant to professional practice and policy development.

York MdC offre des séances de formation à l’attention des professeurs, du personnel et des étudiants gradués afin de les aider à accroître la pertinence de leurs recherches sur le plan de la pratique professionnelle et du développement de politiques.

For the past five years, York’s Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit has focused our KMb activities on service and awareness raising for faculty, graduate students and external organizations and leaders who are seeking to engage in KMb.  Since 2006, York KMb has led 186 information sessions for community organizations and has supported 142 graduate students to meaningfully engage in KMb activity.  While we’re proud of our efforts to raise awareness of the opportunity and importance of knowledge mobilization, two recent developments that have supported an expansion of our capacity building initiatives: securing a community-based knowledge broker, and second, a mandate from federal research granting councils to include a knowledge mobilization strategy on funding applications.

The unique role of a community-based knowledge broker supporting York KMb has enabled our unit capacity to address some of the emerging issues in knowledge mobilization that are centred within York University.  With an increasing demand for engaging York researchers in collaborative project opportunities, our service unit saw a need to support learning opportunities here at York to help expand the capacity of university researchers who have interests in collaborative research, or, in mobilizing their existing research to help inform public policy and/or professional practice.

Given this, we’re pleased to announce the release of a series of learning events that help university researchers and administrators learn tools and strategies to engage in KMb within research projects. This series will include sessions on clear language writing and design, social media (specifically twitter, blogging and collaborative technologies) and developing strategies in KMb. Sessions have been developed that provide one hour information sessions or half-day hands-on workshops on several aspects of KMb.

Feedback has been positive and we’re excited to continue to roll out learning sessions throughout the calendar year.  Dr. Christopher Innes, Canada Research Chair and Distinguished Research Professor within the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (English) commented, “This is great.  Sessions like this are important for York researchers to strengthen their research projects with plans for Knowledge Mobilization that are recognized by research funding councils.  The KMb Strategy Building session provided important tools to assist me and my project team”.

Upcoming events include KMb 101 (February 13), Clear Language Writing and Design (February 27), O3 (March 6) and WordPress (April 3). The full calendar of events is available here.

In addition to building capacity on campus, York has been asked to provide a KMb webinar to the Canadian Association of University Research Administrators.  This national webinar will help raise awareness of the emerging role of KMb for university researchers and their research partners.  The webinar will be help on February 14 at 1:00 EST.  Information about registration can be found here.

Upcoming KMb Learning Events at York

The Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit at York will be providing the following learning sessions for York University researchers, staff and graduate students to help make their research relevant to professional practice and policy development throughout 2012:

Social Media 101 – a lunch hour session to provide an overview of social media tools and their relevance to collaborative research projects.

Twitter – a 2.5 hour hands-on session where Twitter is introduced within a research context. Participants can set up an account and learn about practical applications for their research.

O3 – O3 is an online collaborative tool for available free to researchers, which can facilitate effective and efficient collaboration (without flooding your email inbox!)

WordPress – Blogging is emerging as a popular medium to share information and express ideas. Researchers are finding interesting uses for blogs to complement their scholarship. Join us and learn what blogging can do to enhance your KMb efforts.

KMb 101 – Maybe you’re familiar with the term, or maybe you’re not. This lunch hour session will introduce you to knowledge mobilization and how services are delivered here at York.

KMb Strategy Building – Granting councils are asking more and more for research teams to identify their KMb strategy. In this hands on session, learn about strategic elements, create a draft strategy for your project, and tips on how to present your strategy.

KMb Peer to Peer Network – this is an informal network for York staff and researchers who have explicit responsibility for KMb. Come and meet others in similar roles, share and learn from others.

Clear Language Writing and Design – Sessions designed to introduce the principles and practical tips on writing for the reader, including diverse audiences.

For a complete list of dates, please see the poster below. To register for any of the sessions, please visit http://bit.ly/KMbYorkLearning or contact Krista Jensen, KMb Officer, at kejensen@yorku.ca or ext 88847.

Recapping the 2011 Most Viewed Blog- Knowledge Dissemination: Blogging vs Peer Review

With a total of 880 views and 17 comments, this blog story first posted on January 12, 2011 was the most read article on Mobilize This! in 2011.  

In an age of self publishing – including blogs, videos, and other Web-based media – why do we still seek to publish in traditional academic peer-reviewed journals?  Vanity.

ResearchImpact-York published two academic papers in 2009.  In 2010 we had one in press, two submitted, and one just rejected for a second time, from the same journal.  Since our first post on May 30, 2008, ResearchImpact has published 206 blogs on Mobilize This!, an average of 6 or 7 each month.

Here’s a comparison of blogging and peer-reviewed publishing:

TIME: I started drafting our paper on ResearchSnapshot clear language summaries in July 2009.  I submitted with revisions in September.  It just got rejected.  I can write a blog in about one hour and get it posted in 20 minutes.

ACCESS: We published our first paper on York’s KMb Unit in Evidence & Policy [Phipps, D.J. and Shapson, S. 2009. Knowledge mobilisation builds local research collaboration for social innovation. Evidence & Policy. 5(3): 211-227].  I have no idea who, apart from my mother, has read this paper.  Mobilize This! has received 55,171 page views as of December 28, 2010 and has a subscriber list of over 1200.  Blogs are accessible to anyone with an internet connection.  Except for Open Access journals, most journals limit access to those who can afford a subscription.

RESPONSIVENESS: Blogging also has the added feature of allowing readers to respond by leaving comments. Try the comment feature below to leave your thoughts and let everyone know what you’re thinking.  Now, try to do the same with a peer-reviewed paper you’ve printed out.

PAYBACK:  I am not an academic.  Unlike scholars seeing tenure and promotion based on their publications, my publications do not have an impact on how my performance is measured.

If it takes less time to reach more people in a two-way fashion, why do I take the trouble to publish in peer-reviewed journals if it doesn’t benefit me in any way?

Peer review provides a level of quality control; however, so does blogging.  If you don’t find our writing valuable you won’t return to this blog or you’ll tell us so.  And even though I believe peer-reviewed publishing and blogging are complementary, both take time.  So why do we continue to take the time to pursue both forms of dissemination when blogging seems to meet our needs?

In practical terms, publishing in peer-reviewed journals gives us credibility in the eyes of one of our key constituents: faculty.  Faculty’s currency is peer review.  We gain credibility when faculty peers approve our work and find it worthy of publication.  But the real truth is, publishing in peer-reviewed journals provides a sense of personal satisfaction that boarders on vanity.  I enjoy the sense of satisfaction when faculty peers (finally) approve our publications.  At the end of the day my ego is stroked when our work is accepted for peer-reviewed publication as well as when I receive comments on Mobilize This!  Together, these two forms allow you, the KMb stakeholder, to know that our work is not only immediate, accessible and engaging (thank you, blogging!) but it also has the peer reviewed seal of approval (even if the seal is delayed by 12-18 months).

As Web 2.0 and open access move into the academy I predict we will increasingly see a blend of peer-reviewed and online media.  To get to there from here all we need to do is change tenure and promotion, peer review, and the academic publishing industry.  I’ll get right on that….after my next blog…

Getting Back to Basics / Retour aux fondements

By David Phipps (RIR-York)

Inspired by a campfire and a few beers, David Phipps (RIR-York) reflects on Using Evidence and looks back to the future of knowledge mobilization.

Inspiré par un feu de camp et par quelques bières, David Phipps (RIR-York) réfléchit à l’utilisation des données probantes et jette un regard sur l’avenir de la mobilisation des connaissances.

I was camping this weekend. I have been camping with this same group of friends on this same weekend for years so rain or shine we go and have a great time.  We have a great time doing almost nothing for three days.  We sit around a fire.  We play games.  We get caught up with friends we don’t see too often. We read. And we have a couple of beers (okay, more than a couple).  This year it rained. Our tents were damp but nothing could dampen our spirits (thank you Bud Light Lime). Because it was raining, I took some time out to work on a book chapter we have been invited to write for an open access book titled Social Sciences and Humanities – Applications and Theories. Part of the chapter is, of course, a lit review so I have been revisiting some foundational KMb literature.  

After a lovely time with Sarah Morton and Sandra Nutley this summer (thank you Gary Myers, @kmbeing for your blog), I took some time this weekend and returned to Using Evidence that Sandra Nutley published in 2007 with her colleagues Isabel Walter and Huw Davies. I got back to KMb basics while getting back to the basics of living in a tent and cooking over a camp fire.

When I first read Using Evidence in 2007 York’s KMb Unit had been operating for one year.  We had just hired our second full time staff person and we had more KMb enthusiasm than KMb talent. In 2011, York is leading ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche, we have published on our work, spoken internationally and I have met Sandra twice and look forward to seeing her again as we both speak at the CRFR 10^th Anniversary National Conference in Edinburgh in November. It is interesting to revisit foundational literature like Using Evidence and see the literature through a lens of experience. I can now synthesize key messages and see the KMb forest where before I saw only a collection of KMb trees.

There are lots of key messages arising from Sandra’s book.  The three I take home after reflecting on our five years of KMb service are:

• KMb is a social process
• Efforts to enhance KMb need to be interactive and focus on the relationships between researchers and decision makers
• KMb happens at the level of the individual but future efforts will explore KMb at the level of the organization/system

There are two implications of these take home messages for York and RIR:

1. If KMb is a social process then social media tools should be able to contribute to the process of KMb
2. Systems level KMb need to use interactive methods to support individual KMb relationships

York and all the RIR universities are building KMb services at the institutional level to serve a system of researchers and their (primarily) local research receptor organizations. We have also frequently blogged about the role of social media in KMb (search the “social media” tag on Mobilize This!) and most recently on August 25. In our book chapter we will present some evidence we have collected about how we are using twitter to support a KMb community of practice for KMb stakeholders.

In 2007 we were learning the basics.  Four years later we return to the basics so we can look to the future.  Interactive relationships between researchers and decision makers are the foundation of KMb. In the future we will develop system level KMb supported by social media so that we can continue to build on the basics and better foster those interactive relationships.

RIR Connects You – Online and In Real Life / RIR vous met en connexion – en ligne et en personne

By David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York)

A recent blog about community engagement for social innovation allows RIR-York to engage in some self reflection.  We’re doing okay but we have room to grow by better using our online spaces for KMb while reinforcing our commitment to collaboration in real life.

Un récent billet portant sur l’engagement pour l’innovation sociale offre au RIR-York une occasion de se questionner sur ses pratiques. Les choses vont bien pour nous, mais il y a place à l’amélioration en faisant un meilleur usage des espaces en ligne, tout en renforçant notre engagement à collaborer en personne.

“Community engagement and civic participation are key elements of effective social innovation.” That’s how this blog by Tim Glynn Burke starts out.  The blog was written for the Project on Social Innovation at the Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Kennedy School, Harvard (thanks @powerofsocinnov).  The blogreviews a report by Diana Scearce (who previously wrote a wonderful article about social media and social innovation in the Stanford Social Innovation Review – very highly recommend it) so you are reading a blog about a blog about a report… but that’s how good news spreads.

The authors point out five common behaviours of social innovators.  They are reproduced along with a score card measuring the KMb Unit at York University.

Actively listening to online conversations and openly asking for advice	York listens actively online mostly via twitter but also in comments on Mobilize This!. We routinely approach our community and other partners to listen for advice on needs and services. We could do better by listening to our communities online, but few are there.	A-
Creating environments, in person and online, where helpful connections can from	The raison d’être of York’s KMb Unit is to create connections. We do this very well in person.  We are exploring this online but few of our community partners are there.	In person: A+ Online: C-
Deliberately connecting people with different perspectives	The best solutions come from diverse perspectives but solutions derived from diverse perspectives take longer. KM in the AM usually has 10-15 community, municipal and academic voices around the table.	A
Helping people directly help each other	The raison d’être of connections made by York’s KMb Unit is to support the co-creation of solutions. An example of this is the collaboration between the binning community and UVic. Not all of our efforts result in collaborations but all of them result in connections.	B+
Giving enough direction for individuals to take effective and coordinated action	York’s KMb Unit is a resource to collaborations formed with our faculty and students.  We make the connections.  We foster the collaborations. We do not usually get involved in the projects themselves.  We are available for advice and input from our KMb collaborations upon request but don’t presume to give direction unless asked. Should we be more prescriptive in our direction? You let us know.	B+

This is self scored. It is not peer reviewed, so take the scoring with a grain (okay, a pillar) of salt.

It appears that we are on track to deliver services that support the co-production of social innovations but we have space to improve in transacting these services online.  York’s KMb Unit is online and we are exploring these tools. When our community and municipal/Regional partners get online, we will be there to meet them.

Imagining the future, Scearce sees more interconnectedness, more decentralization and more transparency – all of which are enabled by social media. She also warns about making the community too tight knit and resistant to outside perspectives. Especially as we experiment with social media mediated KMb we need to re-commit our efforts to KMb in person, on the ground and in the community. We cannot let the privilege of social media marginalize those living a real life. Indeed, those engaging via social media are skilled at connecting.  Those who aren’t have an even more urgent need for KMb.

The report ends with some advice for those who are supporting community engagement for social innovation:

-  Let go of your expert mindset and embrace the openness of network

• Translated for RIR: faculty aren’t the only experts

-  Expand your existing networks beyond the usual suspects and attract fresh perspectives

• Translated for RIR: new perspectives = new solutions = new scholarship

-  Create spaces where others can connect and collaborate

• Translated for RIR: it’s what we do.  We eat, sleep and breathe collaboration.

-  Measure your work based both on progress on a particular issue area as well as the health of the network itself, which “can be an end in itself.”

• Translated for RIR: measure more than your scholarly outputs. What changed for your partner (new policy, program, service, market) because of your collaboration?

RIR-York and the broader RIR network create places for community (and municipal/Regional/provincial government, labour and private sector) engagement.  We do this online and in real life. See you there.

Social Media: Friend or Foe? / Médias sociaux: Amis ou Ennemis?

Is social media friend or foe of evidence? Social media tools are increasingly used to amplify medical debates and maximize engagement around research and evidence. But where is the evidence that social media works for knowledge mobilization?

Les médias sociaux sont-ils les amis ou les ennemis des données probantes ? Ils sont de plus en plus employés pour amplifier les débats dans le domaine médical ainsi que pour accroitre le recours à la recherche et aux données probantes. Mais où sont les preuves que les médias sociaux sont réellement utiles pour la mobilisation des connaissances.

Is social media friend or foe of evidence?  That was the question posed to a panel at the Canadian Association of Health Services and Policy Research annual meeting in rainy, rainy Halifax on May 11, 2011. David Phipps of ResearchImpact-York shared this panel with David Clements (Canadian Institute of Health Information) and Rob Fraser, Nursing grad student and author of The Nurse’s Social Media Advantage. The panel followed a plenary presentation by Andreas Laupacis, Executive Director, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Andreas used the case studies of Liberation Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis and the Herceptin story of Jill Anzarut to illustrate the emerging role of social media in the evidence dialogue among patients, their advocates and the health care system(s). Andreas’ conclusion was that social media risks privileging anecdote over evidence; therefore, it is incumbent on scientists to participate in social media or risk becoming marginalized. As one audience member put it “social media has burst the scientific research bubble and we no longer have the option to not use it”.

This set up the following panel which explored the role of social media in knowledge translation, “The Changing Landscape of KT: Social Media, Friend or Foe of Expert Knowledge?” David Clements started out by sketching the big picture of social media in research and evidence. Rob Fraser provided his reflections as someone who uses social media and is considering what it means to use social media tools in research: to collect data, share data and ideas, engage with stakeholders and disseminate results. David Phipps presented two case studies from ResearchImpact-York. We have written about Mobilizing Minds: Pathways to Young Adult Mental Health, most recently on November 8, 2010. David presented the new Mobilizing Minds video of young adults presenting the results of Mobilizing Minds research. Young adults expressed interest in receiving information about mental health from a variety of sources including online media.  

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York) was pleased to be invited to guest blog for Science of Blogging, a science blog run by @TravisSaunders, PhD Candidate, Obesity Researcher and Certified Exercise Physiologist. His blog, below, was posted on May 4, 2011. Check out the blog rolls on Mobilize This! and Science of Blogging. Each is following the other but you’ll see a few other great science and knowledge mobilization blogs there as well.

Dear Professor, To blog or not to blog?  This is not a question that you should worry about…for now. You compete successfully in three peer review arenas: publishing, grant seeking and tenure & promotion (T&P).  These three are interdependent with success in one begetting success in another.  The three are built on the same assumption: that your peers are in the best position to critique and thus make awards of publications, of grants and of tenure.  This isn’t going to change dramatically in the near future, so please don’t fret over all this blogging stuff.  Your klout score is not about to sway your T&P committee.

But note that in Canada, at least, times they are a changin’ (♫)

Canadian research funding is dominated by three federal granting councils (SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC) all of whom are rolling out new funding programs with non-academics on the peer review committees.  As I mentioned in a previous blog some (admittedly only a few) peer reviewed journals are including non academics on their editorial boards.  Campus-community collaborations are increasingly recognized by T&P committees (especially when the university based scholar and his/her community partner receives a $1M Community University Research Alliance) and there is even a national alliance to examine academic reward and incentive structures for community engaged scholarship.

But you don’t have to worry about that…for now.  

Tweet a Mobilizer – what is the sound of eighteen tweeters tweeting? / Tweetez un agent de mobilisation – Quel écho produisent dix-huit gazouilleurs qui se rencontrent?

The ResearchImpact tweet chat gave us a chance to explore this new use of twitter. 187 tweets in 60 minutes raised interest and allowed us to commit to another chat.

La séance tweeter organisé  par le Réseau Impact Recherche nous a donné une chance d’expérimenter ce nouvel usage du populaire media. Les 187 gazouillis (tweets) en 60 minutes ont suscité beaucoup d’intérêt et ont mené à la planification d’une nouvelle séance.

On January 26, ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche hosted our first tweet chat. TweetChat happens in a tweet chat room and is identified by a specific hashtag, which for us was #KMbTaM. We posted the tweet chat announcement on January 19 on Mobilize This! and also on the KTE Community of Practice website. We had no idea what to expect. No one could show up and we could be tweeting to ourselves. Too many people could show up and it would be a cacophony of tweets.

As it turned out we had 18 tweeters who identified themselves in the tweet chat. Others might have been lurking and just listening in. If they didn’t tweet we couldn’t see them, but lurkers were welcome.

The 18 of us tweeted 187 tweets in the 60 minutes of the tweet chat. Some of us, like @ResearchImpact were heavy tweeters. Many contributed in a more modest fashion. See the chart below for all of the tweeters and their tweets. We specifically kept this first chat open rather than restrict to a single topic. We also decided that this would be a many-to-many tweet chat rather than the tweeters focusing their questions on one “authority”.

Three of us (@mobilizemichael, @asedoff, @ResearchImpact) were tweeting live in York’s KMb Unit and @KMbeing was skyped into tweet central. What we found strange was that while we were all sitting next to each other and all responding to each others’ tweets the room remained silent. We were so focused on reading and tweeting we forgot we could actually speak to each other. It also took about 20 seconds to respond to a tweet and 5 seconds to get the tweet to appear. After 25 seconds there were usually a couple of tweets appearing in the interim so it was sometimes hard to follow the thread as we would get multiple topics being discussed at once.

We also asked participants to complete a short survey to inform future tweet chats. We got 11/18 (61%) participants responding to the survey. There was 100% agreement that the tweet chat was useful (“Great idea. I love to have the opportunity to participate in more of them”). With respect to future chats, 46% of respondents thought the open forum format would be welcome and 73% (respondents were allowed to chose more than one response) thought a dedicated forum topic would be useful. We also lost one twitter follower over the hour of the chat. But then with such an activity in our twitter feed that’s not unexpected.

So what’s next?

We will hold another tweet chat, probably in March. It will be focused on a single topic and we may invite a KMb expert to serve as an authority.

This was a great experiment that seemed to meet the needs and interest of the participants and reinforces our commitment to expand our use of twitter and other social media to share information about knowledge mobilization.

Knowledge Dissemination: blogging vs peer review

In an age of self publishing – including blogs, videos, and other Web-based media – why do we still seek to publish in traditional academic peer-reviewed journals?  Vanity.

ResearchImpact-York published two academic papers in 2009.  In 2010 we had one in press, two submitted, and one just rejected for a second time, from the same journal.  Since our first post on May 30, 2008, ResearchImpact has published 206 blogs on Mobilize This!, an average of 6 or 7 each month.

Here’s a comparison of blogging and peer-reviewed publishing:

TIME: I started drafting our paper on ResearchSnapshot clear language summaries in July 2009.  I submitted with revisions in September.  It just got rejected.  I can write a blog in about one hour and get it posted in 20 minutes.

ACCESS: We published our first paper on York’s KMb Unit in Evidence & Policy [Phipps, D.J. and Shapson, S. 2009. Knowledge mobilisation builds local research collaboration for social innovation. Evidence & Policy. 5(3): 211-227].  I have no idea who, apart from my mother, has read this paper.  Mobilize This! has received 55,171 page views as of December 28, 2010 and has a subscriber list of over 1200.  Blogs are accessible to anyone with an internet connection.  Except for Open Access journals, most journals limit access to those who can afford a subscription.

RESPONSIVENESS: Blogging also has the added feature of allowing readers to respond by leaving comments. Try the comment feature below to leave your thoughts and let everyone know what you’re thinking.  Now, try to do the same with a peer-reviewed paper you’ve printed out.

PAYBACK:  I am not an academic.  Unlike scholars seeing tenure and promotion based on their publications, my publications do not have an impact on how my performance is measured.

If it takes less time to reach more people in a two-way fashion, why do I take the trouble to publish in peer-reviewed journals if it doesn’t benefit me in any way?

Peer review provides a level of quality control; however, so does blogging.  If you don’t find our writing valuable you won’t return to this blog or you’ll tell us so.  And even though I believe peer-reviewed publishing and blogging are complementary, both take time.  So why do we continue to take the time to pursue both forms of dissemination when blogging seems to meet our needs?

In practical terms, publishing in peer-reviewed journals gives us credibility in the eyes of one of our key constituents: faculty.  Faculty’s currency is peer review.  We gain credibility when faculty peers approve our work and find it worthy of publication.  But the real truth is, publishing in peer-reviewed journals provides a sense of personal satisfaction that boarders on vanity.  I enjoy the sense of satisfaction when faculty peers (finally) approve our publications.  At the end of the day my ego is stroked when our work is accepted for peer-reviewed publication as well as when I receive comments on Mobilize This!  Together, these two forms allow you, the KMb stakeholder, to know that our work is not only immediate, accessible and engaging (thank you, blogging!) but it also has the peer reviewed seal of approval (even if the seal is delayed by 12-18 months).

As Web 2.0 and open access move into the academy I predict we will increasingly see a blend of peer-reviewed and online media.  To get to there from here all we need to do is change tenure and promotion, peer review, and the academic publishing industry.  I’ll get right on that….after my next blog…