Friday 17 June 2011

Who is doing what with Web 2.0 


Franklin, T. and van Harmelen, M. (2007) Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, London, The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education.

A widely quoted rule of thumb is that 1% of Web 2.0 users create content, 10% comment or in 
some way add to the content (e.g. adding a tag), and the remaining 89% consume content without 
adding to it. On the basis of survey data, Forrester Research has refined this broad distinction into 
categories of creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives.


AGE  ROLE                  12 – 17     18 – 21     22 – 26    27 – 40      41 – 50    51 – 61      62+


Creators                            34 %        37 %         30 %        19 %         12 %        7 %          5 %
Critics – comment 
and add ratings etc             24 %         37 %        34 %         29 %        18 %        19 %        11 %
Collectors – RSS 
aggregator users, 
bookmarkers                     11 %          16 %        18 %         19 %        19 %        16 %       11 %
Joiners – join social 
media sites                         51 %          70 %        57 %         29 %        19 %         8 %         6 %
Spectators – watch 
and read                            49 %           59 %        54 %         41 %        31 %        26 %       19 %
Inactives – online 
but no social 
media, e.g. only email          34 %          17 %         21 %        42 %        54 %         61 %       70 %

Friday 10 June 2011

Basic Blue Skies Research in the UK: Are we losing out?

Lifted from....Belinda Linden


http://www.j-biomed-discovery.com/content/3/1/3 accessed 10 Jun 2011.


The term "blue skies research" derives from Julius Comroe, who explained in 1976 how scientific discoveries often arise from tortuous curiosity-driven paths, rather than a direct goal-driven route [11]. He used as his example an event where Charles Wilson, President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defence and an opponent of basic research, said: "I don't care what makes the grass green!" Comroe claimed that Wilson might just as well have said, "I don't care what makes the sky blue!" Comroe defended the need for basic research by describing the work of a British physicist called John Tyndall whose research in 1869 explained the blue colour of the sky by using a glass tube into which he introduced certain vapours. When illuminated, the tube filled with many fine particles. When a powerful beam of light focused on the tube in a dark room, a sky blue cloud filled the tube [12]. Comroe describes how through this discovery, Tyndall's work explained many other unrelated concepts. His examples included the development of a test for optically pure air that was unable to develop bacteria, success in convincing scientists of Pasteur's claim that there was no such thing as spontaneous generation, research demonstrating how lung airways remove particles from inspired air before reaching the alveoli. Tyndall also discovered 50 years before Fleming how penicillium bacteria could successfully destroy a mould [13]. He showed how a light beam followed a curved route, leading to the later development of the flexible gastroscope and bronchoscope [14]. Tyndall's work therefore provided strong evidence to show that important discoveries are often curiosity-led rather than goal-driven. Comroe asked US cardiologists to list the professional activities that they considered to be the most valuable. When the origins of these advances were examined, he demonstrated that more than 70% of the clinical tools used by cardiologists arose from fundamental, curiosity-driven research performed without a cardiological outcome in mind. This report was used as a key argument to convince the US Congress that basic blue skies research had a better than average chance of translating into something clinically useful compared to that derived from problem-oriented research [24].

Back to Blogging

Despite my best efforts to forget blogging, it would appear we're back into the online, 'say what you mean in the most public of ways for all posterity'! Love it.