Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the Boundaries between Research and Learning

Friday 29 May 2009 16:00 - 17:30

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS (map)

Registration: Please email your name and affiliation to events@oii.ox.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)1865 287210

Speaker

Professor Christine L. Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

Scholarship in the digital age is characterized by data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, interdisciplinary, collaborative research. The same can be said of learning, especially as the research infrastructure is leveraged to support cyberlearning. At the intersection of these themes lie research data, which have become a new stream of scholarly capital. Data can be aggregated to ask new questions, in new ways, and to make comparisons over time and circumstance that were not previously possible.

Capturing and curating data for reuse is among the key challenges of cyberinfrastructure. If research data can be made useful for learning, the payoffs are even greater, as students can engage in scholarly processes, learn by doing, and explore their own research questions. Making research data useful for learning is even more difficult than for scholarship, however. This talk will compare developments in scholarly information infrastructure and in cyberlearning, reflecting on the implications for scholarship in the digital age.

This talk is a preview presentation of a keynote talk for the Open University 40th Anniversary Conference to be given on 2 June 2009.

Biographies

Professor Christine L. Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. She is the author of more than 180 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. Both of her sole-authored monographs, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (MIT Press, 2007) and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World (MIT Press, 2000), have won the Best Information Science book of the year award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She is a lead investigator for the Center for Embedded Networked Systems (CENS), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, where she conducts data practices research. She chaired the Task Force on Cyberlearning for the NSF, whose report, Fostering Learning in the Networked World, was released in July, 2008. Professor Borgman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the US National Academies' Board on Research Data and Information.

Webcasts

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the Boundaries between Research and Learning
Recorded on: 29 May 2009 Duration: 00:42:02
Capturing and curating data for reuse is a key challenge of cyberinfrastructure: Christine Borgman compares developments in scholarly information infrastructure and cyberlearning, reflecting on the implications for scholarship in the digital age.

Projects

OeSS: The Oxford e-Social Science Project
October 2005 - March 2012
The Oxford e-Social Science project aims to understand how e-Research projects negotiate various social, ethical, legal and organizational forces and constraints, in order to help researchers avoid these problems when building scientific collaborations.

Last updated on: 17 May 2013