I found David’s report fascinating and helpful. In fact, I immediately sent a colleague (at another university) a link to the Orlando project and was sufficiently inspired by David’s comment about moving figures and tables to think about including one (via a link in the paper) to a paper I’ll be working on later this fall.

Somewhat to my surprise, my colleague hadn’t heard of Orlando, even though it would seem to be a natural data source for her and her students. And less to my surprise, after my initial enthusiasm for the idea of the moving figure (shades of the animated photos in the Daily Owl), I realized that I probably won’t get around to implementing it.

This made me think about network effects in the adoption of new technologies. The classic network effect occurs when the value of some technology or practice is a function of the number of people using it. This is the case for many communications technologies — telephones, e-mail, auction sites, Adobe Acrobat all become more useful the greater the number of other users. And the more people use a technology, the easier it is to find people to help you learn how to use it yourself, so the cost of adoption goes down as the payoff goes up. But I wonder if there isn’t another kind of network dynamic at play with the use of new technologies for scholarly communication. I suspect that most academics don’t use academic communication technologies that require developing new skill sets because the marginal benefit from the startup cost is less than what one would gain from the same investment of energy in more familiar activities (i.e. writing the next paper as opposed to learning how to enable readers of the one you have just finished to manipulate your data). Why this should be the case is not entirely obvious — the same academic might think nothing of teaching a new course (if the topic is interesting) or learning a new language (if a humanist) or a new computer program (if a social scientist). Only when some critical mass of colleagues adopt the new technological approach do the rest fall into line — which is to say only when one is in danger of appearing archaic does one invest the time necessary to master the new techniques.

I think we see this in the interesting data on the proportion of faculty having their own websites that Andrew presented in his post. The difference between 40 percent (political science) and 85 percent (computer science) seems to represent a kind of tipping point phenomenon — every computer scientist who received his or her Ph.D. in computer science after 1980 or so has a website. It apparently has become part of what one expects of one’s colleagues and oneself. By contrast, in political science it remains optional. (I suspect we would see this kind of bimodality — penetration rates of 40 percent or less or 80 percent or more and few in between — if we looked at the entire distribution of departments.)

So why would academics who think nothing of designing a new course or learning a new research skill shy away from new technologies for academic communication? For two reasons. First, the system rewards new courses and new research techniques more heavily than it rewards new forms of communication. (It may not reward new courses very much, but at least it doesn’t sanction them. Traditional scholars often turn up their noses at new communication methods — note the dramatic disciplinary differences in attitudes towards Powerpoint, for example.) Second, academics and other professionals distinguish (if only implicitly, by placing them in separate mental boxes) between routine and nonroutine innovation. For whatever reason, relatively few academics see acquiring expertise in new communication tools as ‘routine innovation” and, consequently, they are less ready to invest in it. Some are, of course - either because they have complementary skills acquired before graduate school, or because they are in a discipline like computer science that inculcates such skills. But it is striking that our graduate programs (in the social sciences and humanities at least) are not teaching students to view technological communication skills as a core competence.

Two points about this. First, whether or not the vision of the future set out by the Ithaka report becomes a reality will depend to a great extent on whether the potential users of new technologies value what they can provide enough to learn how to use them. Academics can change — almost all academics use e-mail, most (outside the humanities, at least) now use PowerPoint, lots of people have their own websites, and some have even taken up blogging. Nonetheless, I expect that academic communication will progress a lot more slowly than academic communication technology. Second, one of the best ways to promote the use of technology to facilitate academic communication might also be one of the cheapest — Require graduate students to take a course in technologies of scholarly communication (or include it as a significant unit in research methods or similar courses) and demonstrate competence in at least one new technology as part of the qualification process.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 10:35 pm and is filed under The Future of Scholarly Communication.