Talk on Collaborative Pedagogical Documents

We recently hosted a conference at Perimeter Institute on “Open Science”. Video from all the talks is available here. I spokeIt might be more accurate to say that I occasionally mumbled something intelligible in between long stretches of the words “um” and “ah”. Luckily, you can watch the video at high speed by using using a browser plugin like Video Speed Controller for Chrome. Unfortunately, I don’t know a simple way to embed playback speed controls directly into the HTML rather than forcing you to install a plugin or download the video and watch it with a player featuring such controls.^a on the importance of “knowledge ratchets”, i.e., pedagogical documents (textbooks, monographs, and review papers) that allow for continuous improvement by anyone. After starting off with my new favorite example of how basic physics textbooks, and physicists, are egregiously uninformed about central elementary things, I ranted about how important it is to allow for people who are not the original author to contribute easily to the documents composing our educational pipeline (broadly construed to include the training researchers on recent developments).

(I forgot to put on the microphone for the first minute and a half; the sound quality improves after that.)

Luckily, when I wanted to illustrate the idea of in-PDF commenting on articles that generated feedback for the authors, I didn’t have to just use mock-ups. Luis Batalha from Fermat’s Library took the mic for the second half of the talk to show off their Chrome plugin “Librarian” and talk about their strategy for gaining users. Incidentally, if you have that plugin you can check out the two great recent AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”) with Ian Goodfellow and collaborators at Google Brain.

Slides for the talk are available here, which includes the last half of the slides I didn’t have time to go over.