Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
posts and comments. The personal nature of posts may assist in making people
more comfortable with describing their work in a public space by avoiding the
additional fear of having their text edited. However, at the same time it does
not encourage the more direct interaction that appears to be supported by
wiki-based systems. A key aspect for both systems is effective notifi cation of
the community when new content has been created. There is a signifi cant
technical infrastructure available that supports this for blogs, including RSS
feed manipulation tools like Yahoo Pipes and collaborative RSS reading envi-
ronments such as Google Reader where content can be shared, tagged, and
commented on. The confi guration of this for specifi c projects will require care.
Both blogs and wikis suffer from a problem in notifi cation where important
changes are made to a post or page. In the case of most blogs modifi cations
are not posted to the feed, whereas for wikis in general the feed contains all
committed changes. Neither of these extremes is helpful, and in addition the
useful display of changes to a preexisting document remains a challenge. The
effective notifi cation of signifi cant or important changes is an important tech-
nical challenge for the effective use of collaborative online tools for recording
research.
25.7
CONCLUSION
Collaboration on many levels can be facilitated by ONS and other open-
science projects. However, getting things done generally requires a specifi c
person to champion a specifi c subset of tasks [196]. Fortunately, there have
been enough collaborators during the past few years in the open-science com-
munity with enough shared goals between projects to enable useful tools and
resources to emerge.
Concerning collaborative platforms, for UsefulChem, an evolution took
place over the course of the project. Initially blogging and commenting on
blogs was a signifi cant means of public communication. A blog was tried ini-
tially to host the actual laboratory notebook, but limitations quickly led to
migration to a free hosted wiki on Wikispaces and raw numerical data stored
in public Google spreadsheets. A mailing list was in use for a brief time to
facilitate public communication with collaborators. However, in the latter half
of the ONS projects at Drexel and much of the open-science community,
FriendFeed became a very important mode of public communication.
In the case of using OpenWetWare for teaching laboratory applications,
the fl exibility of ONS allows implementation without excessive planning. The
ability for students to view each other's work and the ease with which the
instructor can provide specifi c feedback are strong assets to this approach.
The Laboratory Blog system has demonstrated that a blog-style framework
is a useful way of generating an online research record. It seems particularly
effective at supporting the small scale, particularly one-to-one collaborations
and monitoring of student work. The use of one blog per person and a lack of
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