Uploaded the files to NSF today; the grants office will push the magic button tomorrow to finalize it. I'm done, I'm free, woohoo!
Here's the narrative,, in PDF form. And here's the reference list, also in PDF. (NSF requires them as separate pages.)
The final version of the project summary reads like this:
This is a proposal to establish a Microcontent Research Center housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in collaboration with faculty at the University at Buffalo. The center would sponsor, collect, and disseminate research on the topic of microcontent publishing—in particular, weblogs (or “blogs”)—as a tool for collaborative teaching, learning, and research. It would sponsor regular workshops and colloquia on the topic of microcontent publishing in specific academic and pedagogical contexts, and would engage in collaborative activities with other US-based educational institutions, as well as organizations in other countries currently pursuing related research (specifically Norway, Austria, and Japan).
The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is based in its exploration of a new publishing environment that shows signs of having a significant impact on scientific communication, education, and publication. The collaborative and knowledge-sharing impact of weblogs and similar personal publishing tools are quickly reshaping not just traditional journalism, but publications in a wide variety of scholarly fields. However, the sudden appearance and popularity of these technologies has resulted in somewhat of a research vacuum—very little systematic research is being done on the effects and impact of these technologies, and what little has been done has not been organized and made accessible to those most likely to benefit from it. Additionally, little support currently exists for the development of tools to improve the filtering, data mining, archiving, and distribution of materials published in these microcontent formats. Better understanding and management of this growing field of content publication will be increasingly important for scholars in all scientific disciplines.
The PIs on this project bring an ideal mix of research and educational experience, as well as institutional affiliation, to the project. Elizabeth Lawley has a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, and teaches in a large Information Technology department with excellent laboratory facilities and commitment to undergraduate research. She brings knowledge of scholarly publishing, information organization and architecture, and extensive undergraduate and graduate teaching experience to the project. Alexander Halavais, has extensive experience in studying collaborative online communication and publishing environments, including work that examines the effects of micropublishing on traditional journalism and methods of automatically analyzing content and hyperlink structures within collaborative micropublishing environments. They are joined by a research team at both institutions who represent the cutting edge in content analysis, social network analysis, information visualization, and technical publishing.
The broader impacts of the proposed activity lie in its examination of an important but until now overlooked communication and publishing environment. The potential of weblogs and other microcontent tools are only beginning to be addressed, and the proposed research center would bring together those scholars best able to explore the technology, as well as scientists able to develop tools that extend the power of current authoring and publishing environments. The proposed center would sponsor and collect research on use of weblogs in classrooms, use of weblogs by educators—for communication not just with their students, but with the larger academic community, and use of weblogs by researchers.
The project has several goals. The first is to establish new research directions and tool development related to microcontent publishing. This would be accomplished through the workshop series, as well as through the virtual visiting scholar program. The second is to attract students to the field of information technology, by involving them in the use and development of innovative communication technologies and offering them the opportunity to participate in both the workshop series and ongoing research activities. The third is to encourage extensive collaboration and communication between researchers and technologists in the US, Europe, and Asia. The participants in the workshops are expected to come from diverse industrial, academic and government institutions. The links forged in the intensive workshop environment will, we hope, establish a shared research environment and community of practice to support ongoing collaborative work.
Alex drove in from Buffalo today, to meet with me and a few colleagues about the proposal. We had a nice lunch, then found an empty room with a whiteboard and had an excellent brainstorming session.
I've transcribed the crazy whiteboard scribblings into an outline, and will post that later this week (after I've gotten it into some form of reasonable organization). Alex took pictures of the whiteboard before he left, so I'm guessing (hoping...) he'll post those here.
One thing we talked about at lunch that didn't make it onto the whiteboard was the "why RIT? why us?" aspect of the proposal. Lots of good reasons for that. One is our ability--as a "PUI," or primarily undergraduate university--to incorporate significant undergraduate and graduate student research into the project. Another is our richness of faculty research interests, ranging from database/data mining expertise to HCI to information science to virtual worlds. We've already begun integrating blogs into our curriculum--using/customizing blog environments in web design classes, writing blog software in web programming. It feels like a perfect fit--let's hope NSF agrees!
The NSF ITR grant deadline is 2/12, so we've got to get a move on. But today's meeting was very positive, with a lot of good content coming out of the brainstorming. It's amazing how much more bandwidth is available in a face-to-face meeting of five people than there is in a text-based simulation of same. That's one of the strong justifications for building workshops/seminars/colloquia into the proposal ("blogshops," as one colleague called them), so that those interested in research and tool development can meet like this more often.
Spent the weekend reading NSF grant materials, and the evening collecting my thoughts about the NSF proposal. Feedback is welcome, publicly or privately.
The links I've been using as reference are:
The full (one-page, 582-word) proposal summary draft follows...
ITR: Microcontent Research Center Project Summary
This is a proposal to establish a Microcontent Research Center housed jointly at the Rochester Institute of Technology and SUNY-Buffalo. The center would sponsor and collect research on the topic of microcontent publishing--in particular, weblogs (or "blogs")--as tools for teaching, learning, and dissemination of scholarly and research-related information. It would sponsor regular workshops and colloquia on the topic of microcontent publishing in specific academic and pedagogical contexts, and would engage in collaborative activities with organizations in other countries currently pursuing related research (specifically Norway, Australia, and Japan).
The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is based in its exploration of a new publishing environment that shows signs of having a significant impact on scientific communication, education, and publication. The collaborative and knowledge-sharing impact of weblogs and similar personal publishing tools are quickly reshaping not just traditional journalism, but publications in a wide variety of scholarly fields. However, the sudden appearance and popularity of these technologies has resulted in somewhat of a research vacuum--very little systematic research is being done on the effects and impact of these technologies, and what little has been done has not been organized and made accessible to those most likely to benefit from it. Additionally, little support currently exists for the development of tools to improve the filtering, data mining, archiving, and distribution of materials published in these microcontent formats. Better understanding and management of this growing field of content publication will be increasingly important for scholars in all scientific disciplines.
Few scholars and scientists have addressed or explored the innovative and ?? nature of this method of publishing and communication. The bibliography of related works that we have included lists only one peer-reviewed conference paper specifically on the topic, and a handful of magazine articles and books that address the topic somewhat tangentially. The PIs on this project bring an ideal mix of research and educational experience, as well as institutional affiliation, to the project. Dr. Lawley has a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, and teaches in a large Information Technology department with excellent laboratory facilities and commitment to undergraduate research. She brings knowledge of scholarly publishing, information organization & architecture, and extensive undergraduate and graduate teaching experience to the project. Dr. Halavais has extensive experience in studying collaborative online communication and publishing environments, and [blah blah blah - Alex, need your input here. Toot your horn.]
The broader impacts of the proposed activity lie in its examination of an important but until now overlooked communication and publishing environment. The potential of weblogs and other microcontent tools are only beginning to be addressed, and the proposed research center would bring together those scholars best able to explore the technology, as well as scientists able to develop tools that extend the power of current authoring and publishing environments. The proposed center would sponsor and collect research on use of weblogs in classrooms, use of weblogs by educators--for communication not just with their students, but with the larger academic community, and use of weblogs by researchers.
[A little more room here, to address..."How well does the proposed activity broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)? To what extent will it enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks, and partnerships? Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society?"]
Here are some not-well-thought-out opinions. They are really a reply to Liz's post, but they are long enough that I am breaking convention and throwing them to the top level:
I still like the blogging center of excellence idea, but I also think it may be slightly premature. Such a (fundable) center, it seems to me, would be a natural spin-off of any sizable collaborative research venture.
I think the combination of your points would make for an interesting proposal. I'll restate these with my own spin (and a focus on your third point, I suppose):
1. Is there a clear way to measure the effects of blogging within a research field?
There is an inherent difficulty in establishing such metrics, as we are looking at a swiftly moving target. Nonetheless, we should be able to establish, in more than an anecdotal way, that blogging leads to significant progress within scientific fields of study.
I think we can borrow pretty heavily here from a tradition in measuring R&D capacity, especially at the national level, and extend these measures to the blogosphere.
2. What (formal or systemic) factors lead to the highest degree of (e.g.): (a) community formation, (b) production of new ideas, (c) whatever metrics we establish in #1>
That is, are some blogs better than others. Once we know what is good, we can start to talk about some--perhaps abstract--means to achieve better collaboration.
The literature on "communities of practice" would provide some basis for establishing a model here, though there is a lot of chaff to get through there (IMHO).
3. How can the diffusion of such technologies of collaboration be encouraged?
Liz, you've suggested Turkey dinners, but I don't know that this is a scalable solution :). The question is: once we know that these things are good, and how to make them better, how do we sell them to a scientific community. I'm thinking about this in terms of my graduate students and fellow faculty. How do I sell them on the idea that taking a few minutes (who am I kidding?) of their day out to read and write in blogs is a productive pursuit?
One of the ways I do this is by establishing empirically (in #1 and #2) that there are productivity gains--I prefer "creativity gains"--to be had by getting on the blog wagon.
Another, as you suggest, is to look for the reason folks pick up blogging (uses and gratifications) in law, journalism, etc., and how this might be translated into scientific endevors.
My guess is that we may be able to borrow something from the push on electronic portfolios in the education world, as well.
In any case, I think it would be beneficial to keep the idea of what concrete results we can produce at the forefront. Faculty that made visits last year also suggested ITR was open to social scientific work--more open than some other obvious contenders in NSF. But I think it's a very good idea to frame our research in a strongly empirical--and dare I say quantitative--way.
Here is one final suggestion. Perhaps not now, but at some point we might want to invite one of the program officers to check out the blog, and perhaps offer comments. The former, rather than the latter, seems more plausible. As Seb has already mentioned, this approach to public grantwriting is not only unusual, but something of a proof-of-concept in terms of our proposal itself: i.e., collaboration via blogs leads to significant research.
Met yesterday with some people from our grants and contracts office to talk about the ITR program and the angles this could take to fit that solicitation.
They told me that up 'til now, ITR has primary funded more "hard" research, as opposed to "soft," although the solicitation this year has a lot more "soft" language in it.
We'll also need to focus in on the research question(s) to be addressed.
As we talked, I started to see some directions emerge.
First, there's the issue of determining what professional fields blogs are currently being used in (we know, for example, that law, computer technology, and journalism are early adopters), and whether the technology will diffuse into other professional/academic fields. Finding a way to track and describe that would be one interesting area of research for a multi-year project--since I think we're close to the "tipping point" on this technology, it would be a great time to be taking a longitudinal look at the changes as they occur. Related to that is the cross-cultural component--blogging seems to be big in a couple of specific geographic areas--US, Scandinavia, Japan. The same areas that Rheingold looked at in Smart Mobs.
Second, what impact is blogging having on more traditional publications--not just the traditional news outlets (which is getting discussed already), but also scholarly publishing. Will there be "peer reviewed" blogs that carry credibility similar to peer reviewed journals? Can a "slashdot" style karmic moderation system play a role in scholarly publication? (Alex, seems like this is up your alley...)
Third, how can blogging provide new channels for academic collaboration--with what we're doing here being a meta-example of that. It seems clear that blogs provide researchers with the ability to quickly find others with similar ideas... through the automated tools (like waypath) that can do semantic analysis, through trackbacks and links, and through "matchmakers" (like Seb!).
Finally, how can blogging change pedagogy, particularly in science and technology education? There are people looking at this in the "edublogging" circles, but so far I haven't seen any research focused on this in higher ed, and specific STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas. Of particular interest here may be the fact that blogging gives teachers and researchers more of a "human voice," which could well have an impact on attracting women into STEM fields, an area of particular interest for NSF at this time. Research done to date on why women have been coming into computing in smaller numbers seems to point to their impressions of the field as being unwelcoming, impersonal, etc.
We also tossed around the idea of proposing things like an academic blogging research/resource center ("blogging center of excellence"?) where tool development, research, etc could be centralized and made available.
So...comments? Are people still interested in this?