Gen R Blog Archives – Generation R

Will Education Become More Open?

Tamara Heck on March 11, 2019

Fig 1. The interplay of open science and open education

OI:

Citation format: The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

Heck, Tamara. ‘Will Education Become More Open?’, 2019. https://doi.org/10.25815/hh4f-zn73.

Open Science Learning

Open science practitioners embrace the ideas of sharing and communicating their research and interests as well as collaborating with like-minded peers, i.e., practicing co-science (McKiernan et al. 2016) such as on the Open Science MOOC¹ platform. If they admit to those goals regarding their research, it can be assumed that those researchers adapt their attitudes and practices towards learning and teaching, respectively. So, if researchers move towards open science practices, will they do so in their higher education teaching? Will education become more open? More generally, what would open science principles (Bezjak et al. 2018) in education look like, for educators and learners, respectively?

Teaching Impact is Key to Make Science Socially Relevant

Impact School on March 1, 2019

Image: CC0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_transfer#/media/File:Knowledge_transfer.svg

Open Science Learning

DOI:

10.25815/qx24-8m92

Citation format: The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

Benedikt Fecher, Nataliia Sokolovska & Marcel Hebing. ‘Teaching Impact is Key to Make Science Socially Relevant’, 2019. https://doi.org/10.25815/qx24-8m92.

By: Benedikt Fecher, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society;
Nataliia Sokolovska, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society;
Marcel Hebing, Impact Distillery & Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society

Funders and policy makers increasingly demand that science has societal impact. This becomes apparent in national debates (e.g., the German Wissenschaftsrat position paper on Knowledge transfer) or supranational initiatives like the European Commission’s strategy “Open innovation, open science, open to the world“. The call for societal relevance of research is motivated by an increased need for scientific expertise in the light of global and multidisciplinary challenges such as climate change, migration, or digitisation, and partly of course as a return-of-investment expectation. Societal impact is en vogue.

Next Generation Researchers and Open Science in the University

Open Science Fellows Program on February 22, 2019

Image: Riesenspatz Infoillustration (http://riesenspatz.de) für Wikimedia Deutschland – Riesenspatz Infoillustration (http://riesenspatz.de) CC BY-SA 4.0

Open Science Learning

DOI:

10.25815/665f-4f56

Citation format: The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

Open Science Fellows Program . ‘Next Generation Researchers and Open Science in the University’, 2019. https://doi.org/10.25815/665f-4f56.

@OpenSciFellows | Thanks to Sarah Behrens, Wikimedia DE, Alumna Caroline Fischer (University of Potsdam) and Fellow Rima-Maria Rahal (Tilburg University).

How can we spread Open Science principles to the next generation of researchers? One way is to practice Open Scholarship already at the university. Another way is to encourage people teaching in higher education to spread the word for Open Science, such as the Open Science Fellows Program (‘Wikimedia Deutschland/Open Science Fellows Program – Wikiversity’ n.d.) in Germany. This program offers the environment and network within open communities to support and promote the idea of Open Science/Open Scholarship.The program is a joint initiative of Wikimedia Deutschland, the Stifterverband, and the Volkswagen Foundation and aims at promoting the idea of free knowledge in academic research and making scientific knowledge more accessible and reusable. Therefore, twenty fellows were selected from diverse disciplines to develop practices of Open Science in their projects and to pass on their knowledge as multipliers within their academic institutions. Above all, the program facilitates the exchange and networking of active participants in the area of Open Science to advance the gradual dissemination of science and research. Further, mentors from different disciplines offer insights into their open research practice. This program is just one possible way to address academic institutions (e.g. Berlin-Call-to-action-for-Open-Science) (‘Berlin Call to Action’ 2016) and to establish ambassadors for openness within the scientific world in order to sustainably strengthen the free knowledge movement.

Jupyter Notebooks in Higher Education

Gen R on February 15, 2019

Image: Illustration from A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. ACM, Boston, Alan Kay, 1972. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf.

Cite as:

DOI

10.25815/kwp5-xg67

Citation format: The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

Generation Research & Wagner, Andreas. ‘Jupyter Notebooks in Higher Education’, 2019. https://doi.org/10.25815/kwp5-xg67.

Open Science Learning

Thanks to Dr. Andreas Wagner for his contribution and all the pointer from de-RSE email list members.

Jupyter Notebooks are a way in which you can write and execute code in the browser. This is a small and simple step but most definitely not the end of the story. It is worth reflecting that another small step of the editable web ‘a wiki’ from Ward Cunningham in 1994 (Cunningham and Leuf 2001) wasn’t always around and the changes this brought about are plain to see.

First and foremost Jupyter Notebooks (Rule, Tabard, and Hollan 2018) has gained attention in research fields because it offers a route for reproducibility of research results. A Jupyter Notebook file can be downloaded and instantly the package can be run in the browser to generate results, say a chart, while simultaneously the data and code for generating results, such as a chart, can be examined.

Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things

Gen R on February 8, 2019

Open Science Learning

Top-10-FAIR-Data-and-Software-Things

Top 10 FAIR Data and Software Things Download

Christopher Erdmann, Natasha Simons, Reid Otsuji, Stephanie Labou, Ryan Johnson, Guilherme Castelao, Bia Villas Boas, et al. “Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things”. February 1, 2019. doi:10.5281/zenodo.2555498.

A two-day worldwide sprint held on 29-30 November 2018 to develop domain-relevant guides on FAIR.

By Chris Erdmann and Natasha Simons