COLLABORATION USING OPEN NOTEBOOK SCIENCE IN ACADEMIA - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 439

25.5.2.2 Primary Work (Equipment Setup, Data Acquisition, Data
Analysis) Each student has a designated area on the wiki for recording
electronic notes detailing his or her work while setting up an experiment,
taking data, and analyzing data. Students have leeway as to how they organize
their work, but the default method is a chronological system based on OWW's
lab notebook with one-click setup [174]. Primary notebooks of students from
prior weeks or semesters have become the de facto laboratory manual for the
course. When performing background research for the laboratory work, the
instructor has observed that most students refer to other students' lab note-
books in combination with a lab manual from the prior instructor [175]. This
behavior is encouraged, as is citing and linking to those resources.
The instructor has observed that students' primary notebooks have con-
verged on a structure that is a mix of chronological and topical recording of
notes. A general structure that has emerged is for the primary notebook to
have the following sections: title, purpose/overview, equipment and setup, data,
data analysis and code, results/link to results summary, discussion of errors,
and acknowledgments. This is not a rule and students are free to record their
information in a variety of formats provided suffi cient information is recorded.
A guiding principle that the instructor dictates is that the main purpose of the
electronic laboratory notebook is “reproducibility.” For the purpose of the
junior laboratory, “ reproducibility ” is defi ned as the ability for the same
student to replicate the experiment one year later using only his or her own
laboratory notebook as a guide. Students should imagine whether they would
be able to obtain measurements with similar amounts of random and system-
atic errors after their memory has faded over the course of a year. Anecdotally,
this appears to be an understandable goal for the students.
25.5.2.3 Equipment Setup Students are required to record the make and
model number for all the equipment used during their experiments. They are
also required to record how the equipment are set up and detailed procedures
for obtaining data. From 2007 to 2010, there has been a marked increase in
the percentage of students who have smart phones in the laboratory. This has
correlated with an increase in the usage of digital photographs to describe the
setup of the experiment. This behavior is strongly encouraged by the
instructor.
25.5.2.4 Data Acquisition Students are required to record their data elec-
tronically and to display the data and detailed notes about how the data were
acquired in their public notebooks. A common problem with any electronic
notebook is diffi culty in capturing information and data without disrupting the
experimenters' ability to work. In particular, for the junior laboratory, it takes
some effort to record data in the wiki, especially tabular data. Uploading
images also requires many manual steps. Finally, light from computer screens
is sometimes too bright for use next to an experiment with a dim signal (such
as during optical spectroscopy by eye). OWW is run on a MediaWiki engine,