Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.Comment: Forthcoming article in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learnin

Open science and the disciplinary culture clash – Why is it so hard to reach a consensus?

When it comes down to the nitty gritty detail of what open science means for an individual researcher, the disciplinary context is key. As clear and straightforward as making research publicly available is, many questions still remain for specific disciplines. Peter Kraker reports back from a session on openness in the humanities where definitions of data, research work and research materials were all contested

The researcher’s guide to literature: Visualising crowd-sourced overviews of knowledge domains.

Given the enormous amount of new knowledge produced every day, keeping up-to-date on all the literature is increasingly difficult. Peter Kraker argues that visualizations could serve as universal guides to knowledge domains. He and colleagues have come up with an interactive way of automating the visualisations of entire fields along with relevant articles. Through similarity measures identified in a Mendeley-powered data-set, a researcher can see the intellectual structure of a field at a glance without performing countless searche

Zenodo in the Spotlight of Traditional and New Metrics

In this case study, we aim to explore the characteristics and the reception of files uploaded to Zenodo, and the role the repository plays itself in generating usage. To this end, we first apply descriptive statistics on Zenodo’s full set of data record metadata with digital object identifiers (DOIs) until and including January 2017 (n = 141,777 records). Second, we estimate the coverage of Zenodo datasets in the Data Citation Index as well as of Zenodo journal articles in the Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Zenodo books and book chapters in the Book Citation Index, and Zenodo conference papers in the Proceedings Citation Index, and analyze their citedness according to the different data record types in Zenodo (e.g., journal article, dataset, book, or conference paper). Third, we provide a bibliometric anal- ysis of Zenodo records by using different metrics for citedness, including citation, usage, and altmetrics. Altmetrics data are gathered from two of the most popular tools for altmetric analyses, PlumX and Altmetric.com, and we compare the results. Moreover, we study how open access and DOIs provided by Zenodo influence the impact of Zenodo data records and we find a tendency toward a positive relationship between permissive access rights and altmetrics in certain data records

Ground-breaking fresh ideas: introduction to the special issue for young researchers

The IJTEL young researcher special issue on ‘Ground-breaking fresh ideas in technology enhanced learning’ is a bit different than other journal special issues. The main idea of IJTEL’s editor in chief Ambjörn Naeve was to have a platform where PhD students and early post-docs can present their visions for TEL. Freed from the empirical limitations of a dissertation, it should allow young researchers to take a step back and bring fresh ideas to the field. This concept was picked up by an enthusiastic group of guest editors consisting of PhD students and young postdocs at JTEL Summer School 2010. But not only is the theme something different, we also tried to innovate in the process: the programme committee included experienced reviewers as well as novel reviewers to get different perspectives on the submitted papers. Furthermore, we provided an ideas clinic, where potential authors could present their ideas and seek feedback and collaboration. An abstract submission prior to the full paper submission completed the effort to provide as much feedback and guidance as possible. The whole process was overseen by managing editor Fridolin Wild to guarantee the high quality standards of both IJTEL and Inderscience.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The ResearchGate Score: a good example of a bad metric

According to ResearchGate, the academic social networking site, their RG Score is “a new way to measure your scientific reputation”. With such high aims, Peter Kraker, Katy Jordan and Elisabeth Lex take a closer look at the opaque metric. By reverse engineering the score, they find that a significant weight is linked to ‘impact points’ – a similar metric to the widely discredited journal impact factor. Transparency in metrics is the only way scholarly measures can be put into context and the only way biases – which are inherent in all socially created metrics – can be uncovered

Open Knowledge Maps: Creating a Visual Interface to the World’s Scientific Knowledge Based on Natural Language Processing

The goal of Open Knowledge Maps is to create a visual interface to the world’s scientific knowledge. The base for this visual interface consists of so-called knowledge maps, which enable the exploration of existing knowledge and the discovery of new knowledge. Our open source knowledge mapping software applies a mixture of summarization techniques and similarity measures on article metadata, which are iteratively chained together. After processing, the representation is saved in a database for use in a web visualization. In the future, we want to create a space for collective knowledge mapping that brings together individuals and communities involved in exploration and discovery. We want to enable people to guide each other in their discovery by collaboratively annotating and modifying the automatically created maps.Das Ziel von Open Knowledge Map ist es, ein visuelles Interface zum wissenschaftlichen Wissen der Welt bereitzustellen. Die Basis für die dieses Interface sind sogenannte “knowledge maps”, zu deutsch Wissenslandkarten. Wissenslandkarten ermöglichen die Exploration bestehenden Wissens und die Entdeckung neuen Wissens. Unsere Open Source Software wendet für die Erstellung der Wissenslandkarten eine Reihe von Text Mining Verfahren iterativ auf die Metadaten wissenschaftlicher Artikel an. Die daraus resultierende Repräsentation wird in einer Datenbank für die Anzeige in einer Web-Visualisierung abgespeichert. In Zukunft wollen wir einen Raum für das kollektive Erstellen von Wissenslandkarten schaffen, der die Personen und Communities, welche sich mit der Exploration und Entdeckung wissenschaftlichen Wissens beschäftigen, zusammenbringt. Wir wollen es den NutzerInnen ermöglichen, einander in der Literatursuche durch kollaboratives Annotieren und Modifizieren von automatisch erstellten Wissenslandkarten zu unterstützen