Dental Floss, the Truth and the Efficacy of Research

The saying when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail is true. As a new student of research, I'm seeing the connections to, and the importance of, research everywhere. People without even a passing interest or awareness of research however, could not escape the story trending lately about the effectiveness of dental floss. I was amazed at how innocuous a story as dental hygiene was the lead item for a brief period on television news while simultaneously blowing up on Twitter. I think this story speaks to something a little more profound than gum disease; it speaks to what we think is common knowledge, or more specifically scientifically correct, suddenly being challenged. It's also interesting that a lot of the stories in the media focused on the validity of the research that supported flossing as a part of good dental hygiene. Some of the research was sponsored by the industry that makes billions of dollars a year selling dental floss, hardly an impartial sponsor. After the body of research was reviewed, the number of participants, and the length of how long the subjects were studied was also questionable. Perhaps it would serve the general public more if people understood what a peer review is, how a body of research develops and changes over time, and most importantly, how critical it is to at least try and eliminate bias in a research study. It is kind of tricky though, to encapsulate all that minutia about research, in a 140 character tweet.

Let Academic Documents Live!

I remember meeting a friend many years ago at the McMaster University library where she was a student. While waiting for her to finish up, I browsed the stacks and came upon graduate student theses. One tome stood out: "The Role of Dionysus in Greek Mythology". It was several hundred pages thick. I wondered at the time and energy that must have been spent researching and writing this document. That was my first real exposure to academic work, and it was intimidating to say the least. I'm sure that thesis is still in the stacks at the Mac library, but in light of this week's readings, it has got me thinking - where does academic knowledge live? In scholarly journals? In the stacks of a library? As nebulous data until someone connects to it through a link or a Google search? The most surprising read was Citations are not enough: Academic promotion panels must take into account a scholar’s presence in popular media (Biswas & Kirchher, n.d.). The statistics of how little peer reviewed academic papers are cited, let alone read is disheartening. In another reading, Blogging in the Academy (Nackerud & Scaletta, 2008), the authors describe how faculty and students at the University of Minnesota were using a then newly implemented blogging platform. I copied and pasted one of the links referenced in the article. The whole platform has been shut down. I'm guessing the university felt students and faculty could make use of other readily available commercial blogging platforms instead. And the blogs contained therein? Gone with the wind unless individual bloggers took the time to transfer their blogs somewhere else. In both of these cases, the formal academic documents and personal blog posts are not really living. In the digital age, if academic work is to live, it has to be part of a inter-connected web of similar information or what George Siemens referred to when he spoke of forming connections. The article (Wecker, n.d.) on Academia.edu left me more cautiously optimistic. Despite some push-back by some academic institutions, Academia.edu and the whole open access publishing inititatives seem to be a way for academic work to live in the digital age.

The Seductive Detail

I never knew how much I loved terminology until I started this course. While researching my longer critique for Assignment 4, I came upon the term The Seductive Detail. It is interesting that I discovered this idea while investigating cognitive load theory in the context of online learning, because it was actually John Dewey in the early 20th century who came up with the term. Dewey was referring to text passages or illustrations, that while increasing reader interest, were not central to the main content. Could Mr. Dewey have even imagined the YouTube, MOOCs and Khan Academy world we live in today? And yet the seductive detail is quite relevant today for educational researchers to examine. Is a video, an interactive game, or even the narration in an online learning module supporting the learning process, or possibly distracting from it? My investigation into cognitive load theory and the seductive detail has so much relevance to my elearning development practise. Now that I am beginning to understand the ramifications of how content is organized on human cognition, I will be using multimedia that more judiciously. In a world of online distractions, I don't want my learning content to be just that much more visual (or audio) noise.

Bias in Academic Research

An interesting article in the Globe and Mail about how academic research can be susceptible to racism or sexism.

On the Ground, In the Air

As I complete readings in the Introduction to Research course, I am beginning to see binary viewpoints in academic articles; either on the ground, or 30,000 feet in the air.  I am not speaking of the theoretical framework or the methodology the researchers take, but rather how micro or macro focused the literature is in scope. I just finished an article discussing how a group students felt about their first-time experiences with distance learning. The authors summarized the reflections of twenty students from their own video logs. There was a lot of personal feedback from the students as they tried to balance school work and other commitments. The students also shared their feelings about their relationship with the learning technology and the academic supports available to them. This study, very much rooted in phenomenology, gave me a micro, on the ground view of the subjects. I felt like I really understood the their individual challenges and motivations (or lack thereof).

A few other articles I recently completed were research reviews of distance education and the digital divide. After a lot of synthesis, the authors present the reader with a "state of the nation" snapshot of what the research at a macro level says about their respective subject matters. An aerial view of distance education, or the digital divide in education, as it were. As I read more academic articles, I can see the benefits of both the on the ground and in the air views. Sometimes you need detailed data from specific subjects, within specific situations. At other times, you need to understand what the emerging trends are in an industry, sector or country.

Just to keep it interesting, I added a new word to my vocabulary this week, meso, an intermediate level of analysis. This came up in one of the articles I was reading. I'm still working on the analogy for meso. The walking on stilts view? The hot air balloon perspective? I'll get back to you on that one.

Citation Snowballing

I don't know if anyone has come across this term, but I just had to share it:

Citation Snowballing

I came across this term while reviewing an article for Assignment 3. It is essentially searching the cited articles in an academic article and reviewing them for key words. Presumably to see if those articles are relevant to the research at hand.

Great definition here from HLWIKI Canada.

Big data goes around the world

Please forgive me for paraphrasing iconic Canadian rock band Rush's lyrics to their 1985 song "Big Money", but if you substitute "money" with "data", you might see a more accurate reflection of the digital world we live in over 30 years later:

Big money goes around the world
Big money underground
Big money got a mighty voice
Big money make no sound
Big money pull a million strings
Big money hold the prize
Big money weave a mighty web
Big money draw the flies

Songwriters: NEIL PEART, GEDDY LEE WEINRIB, ALEX LIFESON
"Big Money" lyrics provided for educational purposes and personal use only.

I was Master of Ceremonies for a college I.T. conference a couple of weeks ago and the theme was Big Knowledge. There was also a separate technology conference happening in downtown Toronto the same week focused on big data. Clearly, big data is a buzz word, but it might be more than a buzz word du jour. Big data might be a real Orwellian manifestation of living in the digital age. This term was until recently, usually talked about in the context of large retailers trying to sell you more goods based on shopping patterns and demographic information extracted from huge sets of transactional data. A quick Google search of "big data" today yielded news stories about automobile traffic, human judgement versus data driven decision-making in manufacturing, and  U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot research initiative. As big data grows exponentially, so does it's potential uses and misuses.

I'm beginning my current academic studies at a time when research is also being impacted by big data. Vice-President Biden's aforementioned Cancer Moonshot project is an effort to double the pace of preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer (The Rocket Fuel for Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot”? Big Data - MIT Technology Review). Part of that project is an effort to bring together enormous amounts of cancer research so it can be better shared by academia, industry and government. This is a challenge I heard a few times from keynote speakers at the conference I was hosting; how do we organize and standardize huge amounts of data from disparate sources, structured in different formats? If this challenge can be met, the potential for research, and by extension, industry, government and society is enormous. But unless there is rigorous security, ethical and legal structures in place outlining how big data can, or cannot be used, the potential for violations of personal privacy and research ethics is equally enormous. Big data is a tsunami of information, all of our own making. The question is, will we be able to harness that energy or will it overwhelm us?