Learning and
Scholarly Communication
in the Age of the Internet
2nd Leverhulme Trust Public Lecture
in a series on “Learning Networks”
Caroline Haythornthwaite
Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor, Institute of Education, University of London
Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois
Use licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
States License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
My Background and Interests
• How do people work, learn and socialize together at
a distance and through computer media?
 Communication, Collaboration, Community
• Studies : Online Learning Networks
 Social networks / virtual communities
 Distributed learners / e-learning
 Collaborative research teams / distributed knowledge
 Peer production and knowledge communities
 Information sharing and learning / ubiquitous learning
Leverhulme Trust series on
Learning Networks
Dec. 1, 2009
Learning in the age of Web 2.0
Feb. 4, 2010
Learning and scholarly communication in the age of the
Internet
Feb. 23
New theories and perspectives on learning in the digital
age
Mar. 11
Social networks and learning
Mar. 30
Social informatics: E-learning as a socio-technical
intervention
tbd
Ubiquitous learning
Today’s Focus:
Knowledge Sharing and Production
• Two trends in Internet-based production
 Collaborative Peer Production
 Free/Libre Movement
• Two parts to this talk
 Exploring the attributes of knowledge crowds in
comparison to knowledge communities
 Examining scholarly communication and academic
publishing as a “crowds-meets-community”
example
Collaborative Peer Production
Crowd-Based
From commons-based
peer production
to virtual communities
Community-Based
Free/Libre Movement
• Open source, open science, open access, creative
commons
• Origins in Open Science
 Academic journal system
 University research dissemination
• Free/Libre
 Open source/Free software movement (Richard
Stallman)
 Free as in ‘free speech’ (not as in ‘free beer’)
 Free as in ‘Libre’ (not as in ‘Gratis’)
Collaborative Peer Production +
Free/Libre + Internet
• Contributions
 No longer fixed, with an identifiable state, or provenance
 Mutable, updateable: Rapid, seamless, anonymous
• Copyleft
 Right to use, change, redistribute granted as long as the
product is also ‘copyleft’
• Creative Commons licensing
 Move beyond software to any production, and
particularly those on the Internet
• Open access
 Free as in ‘Gratis’
Scholarly Crowds and Communities
• Much attention to knowledge communities
 Epistemic communities, discourse communites,
communities of practice, communities of interest,
affinity spaces
• Turning now to attend to knowledge crowds
 Commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing
• Both crowds and community are enabled by
 New and expanding online technologies
 Changing options and practices of online participation
 Creative commons copyright licensing
Knowledge Crowds vs Knowledge Communities
• Contrasting these two forms helps tease out the
motivations of contributors to each, as well as to
address what forms best address which knowledge
activities
 How are these different kinds of knowledge initiatives
organized?
 What distinguishes a successful, free-wheeling, online,
crowdsourced knowledge collective from the formal
dynamics of a knowledge community?
 How do crowds and communities support knowledge
processes of learning, debate, data collection, analysis,
dissemination and evaluation?
Crowds and Communities
• Community-based
• Crowd-based
 Centralized effort by anonymous
strangers, contributing to a
common goal, with little
expectation of persistence or
continued commitment
 Similar others
 Known and continuously visible
to each other
 Contributing to the community
 Expectation of persistence over
time and continued
commitment
Lightweight to Heavyweight
Crowd-based
Lightweight
Community-based
Heavyweight
CONTRIBUTIONS
• Many, simple,
discrete,
unconnected
CONTRIBUTIONS
• Fewer, more
complex, diverse,
connected
CONTRIBUTORS
• Many,
lightly-tied
non-networked
individuals
CONTRIBUTORS
• Fewer,
heavily-tied,
networked
individuals
… where ‘weight’ refers to the commitment and
engagement with the production, not to the
significance of the product itself
Lightweight Peer Production
• Distributed computing (use
of Idle computer cycles)
 Berkeley Open Infrastructure
for Network Computing
(BOINC), e.g., SETI@home
Hominid Fossil
Venture
NASA Clickworkers
• Knowledge aggregators
 NASA Clickworkers,
23andWe (genomic info),
Distributed proofreaders
• Citizen science
 Biology sample collection,
environmental monitoring,
voluntary geographic info.
• Collaborative tagging
• Hybrids: crowd + community
 Wikipedia (talk pages),
OpenStreetMap (talk pages)
Heavyweight Peer Production
• Open source projects
• Communities of
practice
 Linux, Wikipedia, Apache,
OpenStreetMap
 Distributed teams and
organizations
• Blogging communities
 Slashdot, Digg, Livejournal • Learning communities
 Citizen journalism
 Communities of Inquiry
 E-Learning environments
• Serious Leisure
 Collaborative learning
communities
 Geo-caching; Last.fm
• Academic disciplines
• Gaming communities
 World of Warcraft
 Age of Mythology (Gee, 2005)
 Disciplines, fields,
societies
Exploring Differences and Dimensions
• Dimensions of collaborative production
 Contributions
 Contributors
 Learning and Commitment
 Recognition, Reputation and Reward
 Authority and Control
 Motivations and Coorientation
Contributions
Lightweight
• Many, small,
similar
• Independent
• Assessment
• Quantitative
• Automated
• Address
problems
of ‘uncertainty’
NB. Light and heavy in
the following slides
represent idealized ends
of a continuum
Heavyweight
• Diverse, small to
large
• Interdependent
• Assessment
• Qualitative
• Human
• Addresses
problems
of ‘equivocality’
Contributors
Lightweight
• Many, undifferentiated
• Little to no training
• Social network ties
weak or non-existent
• Actions coordinated by
overall authority
• Attention given to
quantity
Heavyweight
• Select, differentiated
• Need training or expertise
• Social network ties
strong among core actors
• Actions coordinated by
group decision
• Attention given to quality,
and to who is judging
Contributor Networks
• Communities depend on strong-tie core
 But, they also include weak tie periphery
 Lurkers, newbies, future central actors
• Crowds depend on weak-tie numbers and reach
 But, peer productions are “latent tie” structures on which
ties may form, generating community-like traits
 E.g., attention to ranking of quantity of contributions
 Creating communities among crowd-sourced projects
 E.g., in the ‘talk’ pages of wikis
Learning and Commitment
Lightweight
Heavyweight
• Learning
• Learning
 What and how to contribute;
community practices, structures, roles
 Minimal instruction
needed to contribute
• Time to complete task
 Limited, one-shot
 Each contribution
dealt with separately
• Membership
• Time to complete task
 Ongoing, revised, re-evaluated
 Contributions evaluated collectively
• Membership
 Limited, gated, qualified, apprenticed,
role specific
 Easy entry and exit
• Commitment
• Commitment
 Task oriented, Low overhead to
start; no obligation to stay
 To task, group, overall project goals, to
learning norms and about others
Recognition, Reputation, Reward
Lightweight
• Quantitative Evaluation
Heavyweight
• Qualitative Evaluation
 Automated count of contribution
 Undifferentiated, easily
automated, amenable to
statistical evaluation
• Contributor reward and
reputation
 Based on count of contributions
 Easily aggregated automatically
 Signalled by instrumental
quantitative rankings
• Evaluator status does not
matter
 Human judgement of quality,
relevance, importance
 Reflects community values
 Differentiated, variable, not easily
automated
• Contributor reward and reputation
 Based on judgements by others,
according to community values
 Signalled with differentiated,
personal awards and recognitions
 Community-centric rewards/awards
• Evaluator status matters
Authority and Control:
Enterprises of Coordination and Collaboration
Lightweight (Coordination)
• Centralized authority
Heavyweight (Collaboration)
• Distributed, community-based
• Control by the designer /
director
• Control by core and
community
 Weakly tied contributors do
not have established means to
communicate and coordinate
• Consensus
 Can be managed by statistical
processing
 Strongly tied contributors can
coordinate to effect outcomes,
including changes in practices
• Consensus
 Managed through conversation,
argument, adherence to norms
(e.g., wiki ‘talk’ pages, FAQs)
Motivations and Coorientation
Personal
• Stimulation,
entertainment
• Interest for work, learning
and/or play
• Self-promotion,
career promotion
‘Personal but
shared need’
(Raymond, Benkler)
“They may be
teachers,
parents,
academics, or
hobbyists, but
they are all likely
to be unusually
committed as a
common project
to producing
materials that
are useful to
teachers and
students.”
Shared (internal)
• Shared with community
• Social presence
• being there with others
• Attention to others’ opinion of
own work
Shared (external)
• Coorientation to topic, longrange goals, method or
philosopy of production (e.g.,
open access)
• Trust in use of contribution,
the ‘social contract’
Personal but Shared
• Re voluntary OpenStreetMap data being provided to Google during the
Haiti crisis
• Yes, I generally don't want to just give my data to Google without getting
anything back and so yes I am a strong supporter of a share-alike license
normally. But the reason I want a share-alike license is because I don't
want to work for free and want to get paid for my work. Not with money
but normally with more data. However here in Haiti, my payment would
be that this work might save lives or at least help make it less
devestating for some. This is more than Google can ever give back!
[Comment from amm at Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:10:28 +0000; emphasis
added;
•
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Harry%20Wood/diary/9332
Retrieved Feb. 4 2010
• For more on OpenStreetMap, see Muki Haklay’s blog:
http://povesham.wordpress.com
Social Contract
• Academia
 Perceived defection of publishers from
disseminating knowledge – in synch with shared
interest of academics – to making money
• Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free. (NY Times)
 Economics professor puts text online because
“This market is not working very well except for the
shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We
have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/technology/15link.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&t
ntemail1=y&oref=slogin
Summary: Lightweight & Heavyweight
Lightweight
Heavyweight
• Contributions are similar, require
little learning or effort
• Weak or no association between
contributions
• Minimal commitment to belonging
and continuing
• Weak or no ties between
contributors
• Contributors have coorientation to
overall goals
• External authority and control
• Evaluation based on quantity of
contributions
• Errors handled by quantity and
statistical averaging
• Contributions differ, require
learning, continued effort
• Strong interconnection between
contributions
• Commitment to belonging and
staying
• Strong ties to community members
• Strong coorientation to goals,
product AND to community
members
• Internal authority and control
• Evaluation of quality of
contributions, and of contributors
• Errors handled by contributor
vigilance
Academic Production in the
Age of the Internet
• Crowds-meetscommunity example
• A heavyweight
knowledge
community meets a
lightweight
production challenge
Academic Production: Heavyweight
• Strong internal disciplinary conventions
 Subject, writing and methodology conventions
• Strongly tied, mutually visible peers




Disciplinary standards for tenure, promotion
Disciplinary rankings of journals
Peer review of publications, grants
Recognizable accreditation and ranking of
individuals and institutions
• Long-term commitment to disciplinary knowledge
 Apprenticeships, promotions, journals
Scholarly Publishing:
Personal but shared interests
Personal
Shared (internal)
• Tenure, promotion
• Personal recognition
• Economic and career
survival (Publish or
perish)
• Colleagues, academic
department, discipline,
university
• Professional organizations,
conferences, journals
• Methodology and publishing
conventions
Shared (external)
• Institutional
• University, Library,
Students
• Public
• Knowledge, Education,
Society
Academic Calculus: Where to publish?
• What’s the prestige
value of the resulting
publication?
 to my institution,
colleagues, discipline,
scholarly community,
tenure committee
• What is the likely
timeframe?
 (1) review, (2) decision on
acceptance, (3)
appearance in print or online
 How much time do I
have?
• What is the likelihood of
• Will anyone find it?
acceptance?
 By the publisher, journal
editors, etc.
 Retrieve it, cite it, buy it,
shelve it, put on a course?
Why Now?
• Because information has
broken the bonds of print and
is making a run for it on the
Internet …
• Traditional publication venues
and practices are challenged
by the supposedly easy
distribution of texts and
instant fame to be had via the
Internet.
Information in the Internet Age
• “Information wants to be free because it has
become so cheap to distribute, copy and
recombine too cheap to meter. It wants to
be expensive because it can be
immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That
tension will not go away. It leads to endless
wrenching debate about price, copyright,
intellectual property, the moral rightness of
casual distribution, because each round of
new (technological) devices makes the
tension worse, not better.” (Stewart Brand,
1987)
Information in the Internet Age
‘Information wants to be free’
• “free of structure and arrangement, free of usage restrictions,
and/or free for the taking” (Kaser, 2000)
• Freely produced, disseminated, retrieved
• Free of form: paper, journal, book, web, photocopy, scanned
• Free of industry – publishers, book trade, bookstores – and
their copyright rules
• Free of old communities with their editorship, peer review
and gatekeeping, their lack of timely processing
Information in the Internet Age
• Dissemination is unbundled from
 Consideration of cost (given access to a computer and network
account)
 Knowledge of production (given mastery of increasingly simple
means of producing digital documents)
 Review (by publishers, peers or other gatekeepers)
• Which bypasses
 Established production processes – which bothers publishers
 Reputation and reward systems – which bothers academics
 Filtering and retrieval mechanisms – which bothers librarians
Information in the Internet Age
• Information ‘wants to be expensive because it can be
immeasurably valuable to the recipient’ (Brand)
 But, when ‘anyone’ can post to the web, the value is in being retrieved
- in being found, cited, linked to
• The balance of power is tipping from contributor to retriever
 Without publisher and peer community gatekeeping, all contributions
are perceived as equal
 The value of placing a work with a highly respected publisher falls short when
balanced against the retrieval value of being found online.
 Without the library as gatekeeper on retrieval, all retrievals are
perceived as equal [PageRank notwithstanding]
 Hence the perception that the first item on a Google retrieval is as good as any
other
What Information Really Wants
• Information wants to be attached
 to its creator, reputation system, discourse community
• Information wants to be found
• Information wants attention … and it wants it now!
 by friends, colleagues, readers
• Information wants to be networked
• Information wants to be alive
 to be part of a conversation,
to further an ongoing discussion,
negotiate meaning, to evolve
• Information wants to be part of a community
www.writersfestival.co.nz
Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Internet
• Internet is both a solution and a driver of these ‘wants’
 To be Free, but also Fast, Attributed, Found, Networked,
Evolving
• Internet sets the expectations of authors, readers,
scholars, institutions, libraries and archives
 That informaton will be free to retrieve, modify,
redistribute, freely available, freely contributed and free
to contribute
• The knowledge opportunity is in both crowdsourcing
and community production
• Leads to renegotiations around academic publishing
Renegotiating the relationship between
institutions, authors and publishers
• Addressing loss of trust
 By academic institutions /
libraries
 Buying back the work of
employees
 By authors / academics
 Scooped by online
publication, with review times
too long for tenure
 By public interest
 Cost of publications, access to
publicly funded research
results
• Balancing personal with
shared focus
 Personal
 Ownership of ideas,
exclusive access to data,
tenure and promotion
 Shared internal
 Peer review, tenure and
promotion criteria
 Shared external
 Public access, public
knowledge
Academic Publishing:
Movements motivated by coorientation to public access
• Free to retrieve
 PKP – Public Knowledge Project
 “Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management
and publishing system that has been developed by the
Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded
efforts to expand and improve access to research.”
 Public Library of Science
 “a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians
committed to making the world's scientific and medical
literature a freely available public resource”
Public Interest
• The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National
Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy
of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of
Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a
charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP
publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in
science, engineering, and health.
… Hundreds of these books can be downloaded for free by
the chapter or the entire book, while others are available for
purchase. Our frequently asked questions guide answers questions
about purchasing and accessing our electronic books.
•
(http://www.nap.edu/about.html, emphasis added)
Academic Publishing:
Movements motivated by coorientation to public access
• Free to disseminate
 Institutional repositories
 Limited crowdsourcing: limited to members of
institutions, limited within copyright
 SHERPA (UK) – Securing a Hybrid Environment for
Research Access and Preservation
 RoMEO – Rights Metatdata for Open Archiving
 SPARC (US) - Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition
 author addendum for submissions to publishers
Recapturing Author Rights
“Author retains: (i) the rights to
reproduce, to distribute, to publicly
perform, and to publicly display the
Article in any medium for noncommercial
purposes; (ii) the right to prepare
derivative works from the Article; and (iii)
the right to authorize others to make any
non-commercial use of the Article so long
as Author receives credit as author and
the journal in which the Article has been
published is cited as the source of first
publication of the Article.” SPARC Author
Addendum
(http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/AccessReuse_Addendum.pdf; retrieved Feb 1, 2010)
Academic Publishing:
Movements motivated by coorientation to public access
• Free to reuse and free to retain intellectual
property rights
 Creative Commons Licensing
Academic Publishing:
Movements motivated by coorientation to public access
• Free to remix and remediate
• Free to use new forms of technology for work
creation and publishing
• Free to retain personal interest within a
shared context
Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig
• So Code v2 is officially launched today [December 2006]. Some may
remember Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, published in 1999. Code
v2 is a revision to that book not so much a new book, as a translation of
(in Internet time) a very old book. Part of the update was done on a Wiki.
The Wiki was governed by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license. So too is Code v2.
Thus, at http://codev2.cc, you can download the book. Soon, you
can update it further (we’re still moving it into a new wiki). You can also
learn a bit more about the history of the book, and aim of the revision.
And finally, there are links to buy the book more cheaply than you likely
can print it yourself.
Most important, however, as we come to the $185,000 mark of the
CC fundraiser: All royalties from Code v2 go to Creative Commons, in
recognition of the work done by those who helped with the wiki version of
Code v1.
•
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003633.shtml (Emphasis added)
Academic Publishing:
Movements motivated by coorientation to public access
• Free to contribute to new forms of peer production
 While still meeting personal interests within a shared
context, such as academic recognition
• Considering the worth of
 Online publications
 From peer reviewed journals to blogs and commentaries
 Collaborative products
 multi-disciplinary, multi-author initiatives




E-research in social science and humanities
Data as academic work product
Islands in Second Life
E-learning materials
Crowdsourced from Experts
• The Flora of North America Project will treat more
than 20,000 species of plants native or naturalized in
North America north of Mexico, about 7% of the
world's total
 … Species descriptions are written and reviewed by experts from the
systematic botanical community worldwide, based on original
observations of living and herbarium specimens supplemented by a
crucial review of the literature. Each treatment includes scientific and
common names, taxonomic descriptions, identification keys,
distribution maps, illustrations, summaries of habitat and geographic
ranges, pertinent synonomy, chromosome numbers, phenology,
ethnobotanical uses and toxicity, and other relevant biological
information. (http://hua.huh.harvard.edu/FNA/index.html)
Summing Up: Light to Heavyweight
Lightweight
Cooperatives
Heavyweight
Collaborations
• Crowdsourcing
(NASA clickworks)
• Communities of
practice
• Distributed
computing
(SETI@home)
• Scholarly
societies
• Self-publishing
online (blogging)
• Academic
disciplines
• Professions
-------Backdrop for Scholarly Communication--------•New forms of Internet based dissemination and retrieval
•Reuse, remix, remediation; Creative commons licensing
•Peer review and academic publishing norms and cycles
References
•
Benkler, Y. (2002). Coase’s penguin, or, Linux and the nature of the firm. Yale Law Journal,
112, 369-446.
• Benkler, Y. (2005). Common wisdom: Peer production of educational materials. COSL Press.
http://www.benkler.org/Common_Wisdom.pdf
• Brand, S. (1987). The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. Penguin.
• Haklay, M. &Weber, P. (2008) OpenStreetMap: user-generated street maps. IEEE Pervasive
Computing, 7 (4). pp. 12-18.
• Raymond, E. (1998). The cathedral and the bazaar. First Monday, 3(3).
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3 /raymond/
• Willinsky, J. (2005). The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and
open science. First Monday, 10(8). http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/
willinsky/index.html
For papers by the author that expand on this presentaiton, see:
• Haythornthwaite, C. (in press). Online knowledge crowds and communities. In Knowledge
Communities. Reno, NV: Center for Basque Studies. [http://hdl.handle.net/2142/14198]
• Haythornthwaite, C. (Jan. 2009). Crowds and communities: Light and heavyweight models of
peer production. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society. [http//hdl.handle.net/2142/9457]