Strategist.ie » digital http://www.strategist.ie Professor Robert Galavan Mon, 01 Dec 2014 16:12:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.21 Professor Robert Galavan Professor Robert Galavan clean Professor Robert Galavan robert@robertgalavan.com robert@robertgalavan.com (Professor Robert Galavan) © 2013 Robert Galavan Professor Robert Galavan strategy, management, leadership, decision making, planning, cognition, marketing, analysis, executive, strategic management Strategist.ie » digital http://www.strategist.ie/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Podcast-logo-strategist.jpg http://www.strategist.ie Collaborative Writing Tools for Academics and Students http://www.strategist.ie/collaborative-writing-tools-for-academics-and-students/ http://www.strategist.ie/collaborative-writing-tools-for-academics-and-students/#comments Tue, 07 Oct 2014 21:31:51 +0000 http://www.strategist.ie/?p=531 Sharing documents with colleagues is a fairly seamless process these days. Much more challenging is moving beyond sharing and on to real (even real-time) collaboration. If you have ever collaborated on a document or presentation you will know the problems associated with keeping track of the latest version, particularly if two (or more) people work [...]]]> Sharing documents with colleagues is a fairly seamless process these days. Much more challenging is moving beyond sharing and on to real (even real-time) collaboration. If you have ever collaborated on a document or presentation you will know the problems associated with keeping track of the latest version, particularly if two (or more) people work on it at the same time. Changes get missed, overwritten and it is all just a lot of bother. I have personally used several tools for collaborative writing efforts and there is no perfect option. If you want to delve more deeply have a look at the work of Christof Schöch who’s presentation at Digital Humanities in Australia is linked here.  Here is a quick start on 6 tools that I think are worth considering.

1. The most basic of the bunch is Google Drive

Basic it might be, but it is an very robust way to collaborate on documents, and the interfaces are friendly to the non techies. The learning curve is low and you can be up and running in 5 minutes. The files generated can be exported in popular file formats such as .docx and PDF. The text Google drive imageeditor is well developed and now handles some of the added value items like footnotes and tables. There is also a handy comments feature which is great where you want to bring attention to an issue without taking the responsibility for actually changing somebody else’s text. We all have some colleagues who find that a step too far in collaborative writing. I have found it is best to keep the documents relatively small and save them in sections. If the document gets too long the response times of the editor can slow and the same sluggishness issues have appeared where there are too many collaborators working simultaneously. What’s too many – I’m not sure, perhaps 4+. One downside is that the version history has limits, and while this is often not an issue, when it becomes an issues it is often a huge issue. I have a few friends who don’t like proprietary tools from the Google like giants and so push me to use open source. Of course I have other friends who don’t know what open source is, but either way there are options discussed below.

 

2. The most academic of them all is FidusWriter

Fidus writer imageFidusWriter is a tool focussed solely at academic writers. It has a nice simple interface that covers more complex tools like Latex support, the ability to import BibTex from a reference manager, reference formatting and bibliography publication, citation styles,  graphs and more. 

If you like the idea of having total ownership of your content and running the software on your own server this may be the tool for you. If you don’t then it is definitely not. FidusWriter must be installed on your own server. Is it worth it? Probably not if you work with different collaborators on an occasional basis. However, if you have a team with some technical ability then the feature rich product may be well worth the time investment. You can set up a test account to give it a try here.

 

3. The big project option is Mediawiki

media wiki imageMediawiki is the software originally developed to run Wikipedia. So we know it has scaleability. It doesn’t like concurrent editing of documents, so real time collaboration in writing is not its forte. It also uses wiki syntax which is quirky if you don’t know it, but there is now a basic and developing wyswig editor available. Where Mediawiki scores is in its ability to manage extensive revision histories with easy comparison and roll back. You can set up a hierarchical structure to the documents in the project and use that hierarchy to map onto your project phases, teams, objectives etc. The software is open source and can be installed on your own server, but there are also hosted instances of it that are free (read the terms carefully) and paid. So if managing a farm of documents and keeping track of changes is your issue, this may be the solution.

 

4. The definitely not obvious (but very useful) option is Penflip

It is not obvious because its origins are in GitHub, a truly famous repository for code writers the world over. Penflip is essentially a front end to the GitHub repository focussed on writing. Why is this different – largely because it follows a line of logic that works well for open source coders where the objective is not always a single agreed end point. Coders take copies of a master (fork it) and when done can maintain that fork or suggest it for merging back into the master. So if splitting, developing, and merging back seems like a process that would suit your workflow (and mindset) then this could be a great solution and requires no self hosting. Create an account and off you go. Formatting is somewhat limited (Markdown syntax is used). What it does boast though is a powerful version history that allows you to compare documents in great detail. No concurrent editing though. Penflip is free for public projects, but that won’t be of much use to academics. It is currently $8 per month for up to 50 private projects. As an indication as to the target market, it now has output options in ePub, so you can write and publish your ebook in one place.

 

5. If LaTex is your thing then Authorea my be your new best friend

In the science community LaTex is fairly ubiquitous in science authorship, largely because of its handling of formula, graphics and its publishing options (see a few more reasons here). But if you want to collaborate then you need to go beyond the single installation of something like Texmaker. Authorea has most of the benefits of LaTex (and for those who know why it is important, it also complies with Markdown). It is simple to get up and running on (but there is a limit to private documents on the free version). One of the really neat features is what they call the “news feed” which tells you what’s happening to your document as collaborators make changes. It also allows you to publish to HTML and have people comment on your work. If you are even remotely interested in Markdown/LaTex collaboration options, then you really need to try this one out.

6. My favourite of them all is EtherPad

Etherpad is concurrent collaboration on steroids. Get 5 collaborators working concurrently changing the same sentence and watch this tool handle it brilliantly as the colour coded changes happen in front of your eyes. It is not a big system version management tool like Wikimedia, it is not a rich featured editor like FidusWriter or a LaTex capable Authorea. It is however a most brilliant (light and free) brainstorming tool for use where real time content origination is really important. If you think watching it change as people type is fun, then you will really enjoy the feature that allows you to replay the writing process and see how it emerged.  I don’t see that as a really useful function, but it is fun to watch. It is an open source tool that you can put on your own server, or you can jump into one of the free installations. I have found that MoPad works well.

 

There are plenty of other option out there as well. DBook is a nice premium product for large items like books, and then there are more structured systems like PBWorks for creating your own collaborative intranet. If you just want the list of links to the tools you can get them on Diigo here.

I am not a science writer and so although I know Markdown and Latex to some extent, those tools never really feature as go to options for me. My collaborative workflow seems to have drifted to the two simplest tools. EtherPad to get origination done quickly and with a real time collaborative zen to the work. Then cut it out of there (most free sites will delete your work after 30 days) and drop it into Google Docs where some niceties can be added and more collaborative editing done. The final stage almost always involves an output to Word and the drawing of straws to see who will insert the Endnote citations.

   

About the author – Robert holds the Chair in Strategic Management at the School of Business and is Co-Academic Director of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Conflict Intervention at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He was the founding Head of the School of Business and served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Robert was head of Executive Education at the Irish Management Institute and prior to this spent 18 years in industry.


Professor Robert Galavan PhD
BA (Mgmt.), MA (Ad. Ed.), Dip. (Strat), PhD
Chair in Strategic Management

School of Business
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Maynooth
Co. Kildare
Ireland

Twitter


Blog/Website

 

Email
Robert@RobertGalavan.com
]]> http://www.strategist.ie/collaborative-writing-tools-for-academics-and-students/feed/ 0 LSE Future of Academic Impact Conference http://www.strategist.ie/lse-future-of-academic-impact-conference/ http://www.strategist.ie/lse-future-of-academic-impact-conference/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:05:55 +0000 http://www.strategist.ie/?p=341 Today I am at the LSE Future of Academic Impact Conference.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/impact-conference/

Follow the conference on Twitter at #lseimpact

The main conference room is pretty full with about 350 people expected to attend. Obviously it is an issue touching the hearts of academics. There are also a number of breakout sessions. First [...]]]> Today I am at the LSE Future of Academic Impact Conference.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/impact-conference/

Follow the conference on Twitter at #lseimpact

The main conference room is pretty full with about 350 people expected to attend. Obviously it is an issue touching the hearts of academics. There are also a number of breakout sessions. First up for me is the session on Academic Blogging. 

Academic Blogging session lead by Chris Gilsen and Stuart Brown

The key recommendation seems to be to start out with a multi author blog and consider single author later on. A great question from the floor was about the infrastructure needed to successfully manage a multi-author blog. The answer – more resources than most of us have. Chris and Stuart are full time on the LSE blog and the day includes working on :

 Copy editing

  • Commissioning
  • Fact checking
  • Sourcing images
  • Editing
  • Feeding/checking twitter
  • Watching the stats

For those thinking of blogging focus on who are you blogging for:

  • Students
  • Other academics
  • Policy makers
  • Politicians
  • General public

The editors look at writing style and format

  • More informal
  • Shorter
  • Put your findings up front
  • Provide background
  • Introduce the authors
  • Use narrative titles
  • Put a great summary up front or lose the audience

 Think about

  • Linking
  • Google visibility
  • Timescales – articles may rise in interest later

A few more links that might be of interest (thanks @briankelly)

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/documents/#blogs

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/blogging-practices-jiscmrd-2011/

 

Back to the main room for

Impact and the New Digital Paradigm

First on stage is Victor Henning the CEO and F0under of Mendeley (see here for an earlier post on Mendeley).

http://www.mendeley.com/

Mendeley now has 2 million users. Most of its users are in Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard.

More that 300 million research papers uploaded since 2009. De-duplicated this still sits at 75 million research documents. this is almost twice what you find on SCOPUS.  

Mendeley institutional edition now providing librarians with new tools for engaging with their faculty. Impact with a new twist is now being used at the Smithsonian and other leading institutes – the institutional edition allows librarians to connect with user generated content linked to articles and see how they are being used (or not used).

Mendeley runs a live system which allows for up to the minute reporting without the delay of citation building seen in Google Scholar. 

http://www.mendeley.com/global-research-report/

The next developments is Mendeley providing access to the data to developers building third-party applications. More than 1500 developers now working on new ways to use the data.

For example:

Reader Meter

Impact Story http://impactstory.org/

Altmetric.com http://altmetric.com/

Paper Critic http://www.papercritic.com/

openSNP http://opensnp.org/

 Kleenk.com http://kleenk.com/

 

Ziyad Marar Global Publishing Director of Sage now on stage.

Scholarly publishing is heterogeneous.

There are 3 million articles submitted to 30,000 peer review journals run by 2,000 publishers each year. 1.5 million articles get published. Of that 1.5 million Social Science counts for just over 10%. The average Social Science journal publishes much less (about 40) articles per year than in science where this can be in the hundreds or even thousands.

 In the scholarly communications industry quality and authority are key. Marar believes that this comes predominantly from peer review. Sage questioning in Sage Open how validity in STEM transfers to Social Science. To build a scholarly reputation requires an assessment of expert peers, not just popularity. Academic publishing is not the same as the music industry. We have a lot of work to do to figure out how, in the new digital paradigm, we help upcoming scholars to develop an authorative voice.

 Jason Priem from Impact Story discussing Altmetrics

Working from how scholarly letters were innovated to create the first journals in the 1600′s.

The next revolution of publishing will drive diversity not conformity. More of the process may be explored by publishing data and analysis and visualisation. [I think we will get very different responses to that suggestion depending on the field]. Publishing the roots of research not just outputs. Twitter Citwations as the new impact measure!

1961, Garfield creates the Science Citation Index. Altmetrics now bringing this into the 21st century. Using measures from popular press, wikipedia etc.

http://www.impactstory.org

http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/ 

Journals are broken – they are the best solution using 17th century technology. Suggests using the web natively… This could mean measuring impact at the level of the item itself and not dependent on the reputation of the journal. Would have loved to hear more from Jason, I think he had about a quarter of the time he needed.

Jason’s slides are available here https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1Y4JnchsmHHiOQdJsEpQr33qmMWqhZJrPTDAg1cZoCcI&start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.i0 

Q&A

How AltMetrics will deal with the potential for data to be gamed and scammed.

Certainly there is error in measurement – fix with better instruments. AltMetrics is more about uncovering the ‘story’ now while we make the measure more robust. Also remember that traditional journals are also gamed (see http://www.strategist.ie/it-could-happen-to-a-dean-open-access-and-the-problem-of-predatory-publishers/)

Metrics are NOT impact – they are indicators that we might be on the way towards impact but, real impact changes the world!

New impact measures do not replace others. They add another way to find interest, make connections, expose knowledge – but, they do not in themselves assess authority. Some argument that peer review is core – others arguing that the peer review process may actually stifle creative and innovative work. Pre print articles have the potential to change the rules of this game. Being reviewed by ones peers is important – however this is not the same as supporting the current peer review system. Authority too closely linked to prestige in the current system.

 How doe we assess authority from the data (not the popularity, celebrity, prestige)?

Sage publisher doesn’t not know how whether the new metrics will work. [Establishment digging in - just possibly]. Henning’s view is that we should trust the community of scholars to expose quality issues. More eyes on the problem may be better than a few anonymous reviewers. Jason Priem – quantification of impact is already embedded and drives hiring and pay. AltMetrics can help broaden that measure. Ziyad Marar making the point that in social science the judgement of experts may be more important than in the physical sciences. Henning disagrees – it is not always easy to know who is ‘qualified’ to judge.

A fantastic session comes to a close – this could have run all afternoon!

 

Breakout session on Academic Podcasting and Impact 

with Cheryl Brumley and Mark Carrigan

 Why podcast

  • Raise your own profile
  • Raise the profile of projects you are attached to
  • Multimedia content for individual/collective web presence
  • Disseminating research findings
  • Making events available to those no physically present
  • Connecting to the wider public(s)

Mark and Cheryl are not too precious about the definition of a podcast – think audio (and eventually video) online.

The rubric they offer is on a scale from simple to complex

  • Micro podcast
  • Interview
  • dialogue
  • Videocasting conferencing
  • Magazine shows

Thinking of higher education as a rich resource of converations makes it seem very sensible to try and capture some of these conversations.

Before you podcast make realistic assessments

  • Desired level of quality (from iphone through to pro editing suite)
  • Environment for the recordings – office/outdoors/large empty rooms
  • Length of podcast – need quality sound for extended podcasts.

Equipment from basic to more complex

  • Microphone
  • USB podcast mike 
  • Shure SM58
  • AKGC1000s (good option for sound control outside)
  • Also recorders basic Olympus to more complex Tascam
  • Editing software – Audacity

The basic message is that you can get into podcasting very cheaply and develop more complexity later.

Promoting podcasts

  •  Put them on personal or multi-author blogs
  • Personal or department web pages
  • Twitter, facebook, academia.edu
  • Sound Cloud
  • Audioboo
  • iTunes U

 Some interesting websites

http://www.transom.org

http://www.thepodcastguy.com

http://www.audacity.sourceforge.net

http://policy.europe.eu

http://lsepoliticsblog.com

http://www.lsereviewofbooks.com

 … and a little test of Audioboo (recorded on iPhone a a later session).

http://audioboo.fm/boos/1094651

listen to ‘Test podcast from #LSEImpact’ on Audioboo

 Wow, that was a a rapid fie session… billed as one hour, slides done in 15 minutes!

 One more resource – ESRC guide to podcasting

http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/tools-and-resources/impact-toolkit/tools/interactive-media/podcasts.aspx 

Back to the plenary now…

Impact as a driver of Open Access

Stephen Curry from LSE…

Open access gives faster access to information and dissemination to potential users

UK policy for Gold Open Access: CC-BY (questions about whether it is worth it)

Examples of new journals “eLife” launching soon and will come with a digest that is accessible to the public. http://www.elifesciences.org/the-journal/

Impact factors are not to be used in marking assessments  – this is not to be used

“Impact factors are wrong and bad and must stop” [no sitting on the fence here].

If we don’t want to impact factors then we need other ways of capturing the “essence” of the value of the work. there is a duty to publish your paper and disseminate (may need lay summary) to those who paid for the research. Open Access is a route to reducing total publishing costs which have “got out of control”.

 

Robert Kylie from Wellcome

Start with the fact that we don’t always know the significance of research when it is done (e.g. DNA fingerprinting). IVF was research in the early 60′s but had little societal impact until the late 70′s.

Definitely greater downloads of papers with Open Access. No definite evidence to say that this translates into greater citations.

Another benefit if OA is re-use. For every dollar that the US government invested in the genome project it generated over one hundred dollars in economic activity.

From 2012 Welcome will require all articles for which they paid to be published disseminated CC-BY.

 

Well that’s all from Senate House in London. A great day and wonderfully passionate views shared. 

 

About the author – Robert holds the Chair in Strategic Management at the School of Business and is Co-Academic Director of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Conflict Intervention at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He was the founding Head of the School of Business and served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Robert was head of Executive Education at the Irish Management Institute and prior to this spent 18 years in industry.


Professor Robert Galavan PhD
BA (Mgmt.), MA (Ad. Ed.), Dip. (Strat), PhD
Chair in Strategic Management

School of Business
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Maynooth
Co. Kildare
Ireland

Twitter


Blog/Website

 

Email
Robert@RobertGalavan.com
]]> http://www.strategist.ie/lse-future-of-academic-impact-conference/feed/ 0