My mentor sent me an intriguing link concerning an evolution in the standards, structure, presentation and style for online articles published in the CELL network of 2000 scientific journals.
here are the essential new proposed standards, which would be a great way for us to prepare lesson prep materials for our college . I will explore this with my lesosn authors and other curriculum developers.
KEY FEATURES OF THE PROTOTYPES:A hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers of content based on their level of expertise and interest. This organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization of a traditional print-based article in incorporating the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure. A graphical abstract allows readers to quickly gain an understanding of the main take-home message of the paper. The graphical abstract is intended to encourage browsing, promote interdisciplinary scholarship and help readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests. Research highlights provide a bulleted list of the key results of the article. Author-Affiliation highlighting makes it easy to see an author’s affiliations and all authors from the same affiliation. A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures. Integrated audio and video let authors present the context of their article via an interview or video presentation and allow animations to be displayed more effectively. The Experimental Procedures section contains alternate views allowing readers to see a summary or the full details necessary to replicate the experiment. A new approach to displaying figures allows the reader to identify quickly which figures they are interested in and then drill down through related supplemental figures. All supplemental figures are displayed individually and directly linked to the main figure to which they are related. Real-time reference analyses provide a rich environment to explore the content of the article via the list of citations
it seems to me i am only starting to scratch the surface of documenting my research and reporting it out as i go thru the combination of: Twitter, my blog, the college blog, Youtube, FoE, RL, cohort sharing on Moodle etc
i am imagining a place where students begin to develop their own research interest architecture set up along the lines of the article template but expanding into all the “fields” of interest, and some of those are made public in the same way the farmer has a roadside stand to sell fresh vegetable that were planted, harvested, cleaned and made presentable elsewhere on the farm
this is in line with the agriculture metaphor we talked about last year; with each “field” being an area of intended deep research, with the barn being the place where general purpose tools and equipment are maintained.
Now the idea of “making public” or “reporting out” is evidence of a successful, sustainable reserarch process going on in the farmland.
New pastures are added, often times in fields that are adjacent to our current crops are growing; other times we explore deep dark uncertain woods.
After a time we may decide to take on the task of clearing the forest to permit growing of crops, while at other times we may wish to simply hunt in the woods for the occasional insight and surprising case study, while keeping it’s essential wildness intact.
Maybe we are hunting with cameras and voice recorders. Not everything must be or should be clear cut David Boje’s ideas about preserving the rich antenarrative, would map to the idea of keeping the essential chaotic richness of story fragments alive prior to pasteurizing and sanitizing the antenarrative into a grand narrative:
I sense a systems dynamics diagram and a voice presentation coming on 😛
seems to me that CTU could blaze some new trails by establishing an area where students could do this kind of thing so that the “export to CELL article template” function would be painless. No reason to have to recreate your intellectual lineage for each article etc.
Your articles become your calling card and link to the fulll body of your work, the virtual CV etc
Your conference papers become “calling cards” and marketting freebies to give short overviews of your interests etc