May 3rd, 2009
Scitable brings peer-reviewed credibility to the Wikipedia age
Regular readers will know that I’m actually a pretty big fan of Wikipedia. I think it has as much, if not more of a place in student research than actual encyclopedias did for us Gen-Xers when we were younger: it’s a starting point and a great source of background information. It’s a nice source for quick answers, too, many of which, despite being “crowd-sourced”, are reliable, well-cited, and accurate.
However, Wikipedia remains woefully inadequate, as were traditional encyclopedias, for any sort of deep understanding of a subject. Similarly, while crowdsourcing allows for incredible breadth, it also places a real burden on the reader for evaluating the integrity of the information. The sheer volume of Wikipedia, as well as its anonymity, also makes a real peer-review mechanism virtually impossible to enforce.
Scitable, on the other hand, brings the ease and accessibility of Wikipedia to the depth and credibility one would expect from the Nature Publishing Group (these are the folks who bring us the journal Nature, of course, as well as varied publications in science and medicine, ranging from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology to Molecular Psychiatry).
I had the opportunity to talk last Friday with the Publishing Director of Nature Education, Vikram Savkar. Nature Education is a relatively new group within the 140-year-old Nature Publishing Group. According to Mr. Savkar, Nature Education was formed two years ago out of Nature’s commitment to “improving science education worldwide.”
The first deliverable from the Education group is Scitable, an incredible combination of social media and a vast library of articles “commissioned, edited, and reviewed by NPG editors.” While Nature Education intends to expand Scitable’s offerings to include cellular and molecular biology and ultimately tackle the physical sciences, their initial focus has been on genetics.
Exploring Scitable makes it very clear that this strategy of sticking with a single area of expertise and dealing with it expertly and in-depth makes a great deal of sense. I’m not a geneticist, but I spent enough years in the publish or perish world of biomedical research to know that they nailed this. The content is accessible, deep, relevant, and understandable. Entire college courses could be taught around this material and there is more than enough content to keep high school students digging deeper into their Advanced Placement Biology courses or to build introductory genetics curricula.
Here’s where Scitable really takes this to a whole new level, though. As Mr. Savkar points out,
Kids are digital natives. They expect data to be online and social and are accustomed to learning from people rather than from text on a page.
Current resources, though, are largely in textbooks and he (as well as the Nature Publishing Group and the scientists with whom they interact) sees clearly that this mode of learning is “out of step with what students find engaging.” Thus, Scitable allows teachers anywhere in the world to build virtual classrooms around “course packs” (pre-defined collections of articles that could act as building blogs for a course) and around any additional content from Scitable or elsewhere (including the teacher’s own materials). It only takes moments before a teacher is greeted with a welcome screen:
Click here to see a gallery of Scitable screenshots.
It’s then a piece of cake to assign due dates to the readings, engage in live or asynchronous discussions with students, and add extra resources and coursepacks. Scitable is an ultra-specialized BlackBoard on steroids with an incredible library of content behind it. Remarkably, though, it’s friendly enough (and provides a wide enough range of resources) to be useful in high school, college, and graduate school.
I feel a bit like Monty Hall or a used car salesman to note that “it doesn’t end there, folks!” However, there really is more. Again, as Mr. Savkar explained,
…one of the main goals of Scitable is to engage with students in the ways that they find natural and stimulating. A key aspect of that is the global community of faculty, researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and other scientists that we’re pulling together into a global community oriented towards teaching and learning. Students can connect with them through the site, and that adds a powerful dimension to their learning experience.
For instance, students in any country - India, Ghana, Australia, the U.S. - when they are having difficulty understanding a complicated concept, or are looking for guidance on career possibilities, or just general support can reach out to the scientists in the site, via message or even live chat. We’ve seen that many of the scientists are more than happy to help these students out - scientists can be very passionate about education.
This kind of mentorship is something we want to expand in the future because we see how useful it’s proving to aspiring scientists. We also recently added an Ask the Expert feature. Students can post a question, and our experts will answer it generally within 48 hours. That’s been heavily used since we launched it. So clearly there is a thirst among students to connect with reliable and credible people; and we’re addressing that.
Needless to say, I’m impressed. There is a reason why I’ve spent a lot of time lately talking about social media in education: because it can yield products like this. Obviously, I’m not the only one who is impressed. Faculty in 85 countries are using Scitable with increasing uptake at the high school level. It only looks to be getting better. Over the next three years, Nature Education hopes to make Scitable a turnkey educational solution with gradebooks and improved assessment modules, allowing students, regardless of geographic location or socioeconomic status to have full access to complete courses.
I’d like to wrap this up by paraphrasing part of my conversation with Mr. Savkar:
Science has traditionally been taught as collection of facts that students need to memorize, but science is really an ongoing discovery process - Scitable reflects this approach.
We want to bring this to students and immerse them in research with Scitable so that they learn science as not just fact, but “as a product of this experimental tradition.”
With Scitable, we are combining the best of what’s new and emerging with the best of Nature’s traditional strengths.
Share your experiences with Scitable below.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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