Peter: Given how complex the work that you do and how the world is shifting – I mean really shifting when it comes to the use of knowledge, the sharing of knowledge, the interaction between various sectors – there are people who are looking for stability, that are looking for answers that are looking for evidence.
David: yep Peter: And so you hear a lot of this conversation in a town like Ottawa or Washington or London of evidence-based decision making that somehow evidence is going to provide that certainty or that stability among all of these shifts. When you hear that word – evidence - is that what you think of? What do you think of when you hear evidence?
David: I'm trained as an academic; evidence is very clear, the rules of evidence do apply. There is good evidence and there is bad evidence – there's empirical evidence and there's opinion. I mean there's a variety of things there and you can recognize it when you see it. The core business of SSHRC of course, is quality control and ensuring quality control through a peer review process. And that is ensuring …really at the heart of that is making sure that the experts examine other experts in order that the quality of the evidence that they bring to bear is of sufficiently high standard – that it meets those rules of evidence in themselves.
Peter: Right David: I mean this is what…this is what the core business of SSHRC is. The real challenge is not producing the evidence; the real challenge is putting the evidence in the hands of people that can use it in a format that's appropriate, in a way that is timely, and addressing the capacity issues on both sides. The capacity to be able to communicate that evidence from the academic perspective and the capacity to be able to absorb and utilize that evidence from the policy makers' perspective to put it specifically. Peter: So you've describe some of how that's happening here at SSHRC and the shifts that are happening. I mean if you have a crystal ball – where is this moving? What are the trends? I know that you spend a lot of time looking at trends hoping…trying to align activities with those trends but what's happening here? David: A couple of things are just beginning to…we we're getting a little bit of clarity on a couple of things that I think are going to be the real major waves of the future. One is the clustering of research capacity, of knowledge generation capacity in itself. Not around disciplines, not around areas of research, not around the structures of the council particularly, but around the interests of those who do research and that could be a variety of different things and we're seeing those shifts particularly within universities themselves - the emergence of new institutions that focus on particularly, areas of education and of knowledge generation. For example Richard Marceau, the provost of the new University of Ontario Institute of Technology will be giving a brown-bag seminar for our staff tomorrow. The mission of that brand new university is to take an industrial focus to traditional programs and to utilize the latest educational technologies to be able to do that. It is a…essentially a professionally oriented university – very interesting. We have very few of those in this country, although we have many models in other countries, but Canada has been slow to develop that sort of thing.
What it does is it clusters capacity of like-minded individuals who have a certain orientation towards post secondary education – that of the professional accreditation. That is not the traditional humanities college approach or the fine arts college approach but we're also seeing those models emerge as well. A good friend of mine, Michael Owen has just become the VP of Research at the Ontario College of Art and Design, which is a degree-granting institution that takes a completely different approach – it's not the professional accreditation approach, it is focused on the cultural development of art and design in itself. It moves the fine arts college model even a little bit farther down that road, which is really interesting. And of course we have traditional humanities oriented institutions like Trent University for example, who are doing just fine, there's no problems there at all. We are also seeing that take place, not at the institutional level but at the individual level, where we're seeing individual researchers around things for example, environmental history – very, very strong cluster of researchers right across the country who look at environmental issues from a historical perspective – and they come from a wide variety of disciplines, but the discipline's not important – what's important is they're looking at environmental issues in the past and try to understand the past in order to better map the future – and they come from about 15 different disciplines all together. How do you go about supporting that in a way that is not disciplinary specific? It's very difficult. Peter: It's more of a network David: Well it is indeed a network but it goes…but it's not just a network either. It is a, to use the word we use, it is a cluster of individuals who can, not plug into a piece of technology, but who can engage in an ongoing process of learning and discussion and that can use whichever means they think is appropriate to do so. We don't determine that beforehand, indeed they don't determine that beforehand. They explore what works best.
The second thing is the development of new web-enabled, sophisticated locations for research communication. The best I've seen, and indeed we have a new announcement on this right now, is the Social Science Research Network in the United States, they have now just launched this week, the Humanities Research Network. And what these are, are essentially the marriage of Web 2.0 technology to a electronic library and we're starting to see a number of these projects emerge right now that are very sophisticated, that are communication oriented but that bring an enormous amount of content – real high quality content to the table at the same time, within the same facility. We've had discussion forums for going on 15-20 years now but what we haven't had is the marriage of the discussion forum in the library and that's what's taking place, both on the internet and in the physical space in itself. If you go and look at the University of Calgary's new library, that's what it is, there are very few books - great many computers, and a lot of tables – low tables that people sit around. Some of the challenges especially for a granting agency around that are just beginning to be evident. I had a good discussion with a VP of research just yesterday – How do you build something like this? How do you take peer-to-peer interactive technologies and marry them to a virtual library and ensure quality control, ensure broad communication, ensure inclusion? How do you expand that beyond the limits of the capacity in the university? Who's going to pay for it? Who's going to finance this? Where's the content going to come from? How do you do the actual marriage in itself in the technological sense between documents that reside in a library and the discussions that go on between individuals or groups of individuals? We don't have good technologies for that just yet, although they're just beginning to emerge, but clearly the need for that is already there. It strikes me as both a social and a market opportunity at the same time.
Peter: What about within the organization of SSHRC? How is all of this movement…how is knowledge mobilization, new forms of leadership, all of this access to so many different forms of data, information and knowledge, affected the organization…the operation of what is a part of bureaucracy of the Government of Canada?
David: Its impact internally has been a rocky road - put it that way. We are, as any government agency indeed any agency period - or any organization period - it need not just be any government and the private sector operates the same way. It's difficult to respond to emerging trends because of the structures that already exist and that's because – and not for any reasons of inertia or anything like that but because the structures that already exist have great value. The disciplinary focus within our major program, the standard research program…grants program, has real, positive effects and it is an excellent way of distributing research funds but it does have limitations and you have to balance the potentially good aspects of that with the potentially new aspects of that and be able to make the shifts based on evidence of real value rather than simply what the new trend is or what you think the direction is going in because we can't afford to lose the support of the community that we support. We can't afford to stumble over doing our job simply because a small portion of our community needs something new. What we need to do is determine whether that small portion is growing - at what point does it become an area of real need and is it going to supplant the existing structures within our granting programs for example. And that's something that takes real investigation, you really have to wait, it can be frustrating at times, the development within the academic community is not a linear process and a development of technologies is not a linear process. We have long periods of delay, we have long periods of soul searching about new ways of going about doing things and we have to wait for people to come up with new ideas often – the Open Access Movement is a good example. We're changing our programs right now – restructuring a number of different programs in order to respond to this movement that says we can provide access to the best academic research knowledge without having to charge, without having to put up price barriers to access that knowledge. But how do we do that is not necessarily evident. We have to come up with a new way…new ideas to be able to do that effectively because the reality is most scholarly communication in written form right now, is done through a subscription business model and that's been around for 300 years. The reason it's been around for 300 years is that it works not because it's just simply a dinosaur. You don't go around replacing something that works with something that might work just a little bit better without understanding what the implications are going to be. Peter: Right. Well you've spoken a little bit about some of the challenges ahead. What are some of the rewards ahead for what you're describing? David: Well I mean, this operates of course at every different level from me as an individual right up to society as a whole but the…if you look at it in the most general sense, and this is where CCL is really well situated, it is the capacity to learn in itself and the capacity to be able to find those things that allow you to invent – that lead to innovation in the real sense…in the broadest sense. The way to innovate of course, is to understand the context, the rules, how to break those rules, what is the potential of new ways of…new pathways of doing things. And you have to be able to…to be able to do that you have to have access to knowledge, access to wisdom, and at the other end of the scale, access just to raw data. What is emerging is an enormously efficient ways of doing those things that we've never had access to in the past. In the history of humanity – I mean it's really quite stunning – the Social Science Research Network for example, has got about 160 of the cutting edge, research results papers, articles from around the world on a variety of specific issues that's expanding every day. It takes me all of a matter of seconds to tap into that really, high, high quality library. I've never been able to do that in the past – indeed no one's been able to do that in the past unless they were members of a specific institution, had paid their tuition, or were part of a specific organization that had financed something like that or had direct, physical, geographic location to their advantage - the library was next door – or had access to the technology that was necessary to be able to do these things. The potential to learn is really the new…the greatest benefit that we're beginning to see. What the consequences of that are however, are completely unknown. We've never had a situation before where the vast majority of the population of any country or of any society had direct knowledge unfiltered through political processes, commercial processes, limitations according to class or according to money. Those things are now evaporating and what the consequence of that is, is unknown.
Peter: Is anybody's guess? David: Is anybody's guess. Peter: Okay, what about the field of knowledge exchange and knowledge mobilization. In ten years, where do you see those that are trying to encourage and develop and create the infrastructure for knowledge mobilization – where do you see that being?
David: I wouldn't want to put a specific time scale on it – trained as a historian. What we're seeing right now is the typical processes that take place with the introduction of both new social relationships and new technologies at the same time and those always go together – they're never separate from each other. What we're likely to see in about 10 years, is much more sophisticated and indeed, much more stable institutions for learning that utilize both the new social relationships and the new technologies. And that is a variety of things that will mostly be web-enabled in order to broadcast them to as many people as possible, will most likely not focus on the individual paying for access but rather the collective, providing the resources in the way that we generally run universities for example which is a mixture of individual paying tuition for the smaller proportion and the public paying for the larger proportion. That's most likely going to evolve simply because it has to deal with the inequities in resources and with the potential to learn and when people begin to, as they are right now, grasping that potential and then you start to see more stability within the facilities in themselves. YouTube is not going to go away for a very, very long time, in part because people see enormous capability within that technological platform in itself.
Peter: Absolutely David: And the potential is not what the technological platform but is with the social relationships that come out of it. And those are the things that are really going to drive the need for stability in the institutions and in the facilities and they are going to become like the hospitals or like the schools or like our pension plans – they will become stable in themselves because they are in need and people see the value in them.
Peter: This is great David, any last words?
David: You raise a number of really interesting questions in your list here. The question of rewards around knowledge mobilization has always been…or knowledge transfer or whatever has always been a real problem because the incentives – I mean to talk like an economist… Peter: Right David:…the incentives to move beyond your core mission as a individual, as an academic, or as a, for example, the owner of a company seeking knowledge, has always been…the incentives have always been quite limited. The incentives, of course are very different depending on who you are and what role you play in society. And one of our real challenges here is how do you develop those incentives in order to give people the rewards that they should have from engaging in activities that move beyond what they do in their everyday lives - academics talking to policy makers – private sector company owners going into the university and seeking knowledge, policy makers within the Federal Government bringing knowledge from a wide variety of areas together in order to deal with the specific policy issue that has many, many implications. How do we build rewards into a system to allow people…to incent people to do these things? And that's a real challenge. Much of what I've been looking at is the more practical the more reward or incentive oriented aspects of that – what can we put in place to move people to do something that they want to do, they know they should do but don't have the resources? Peter: But rational behavior dictates that they are going to do what they get rewarded for.
David: Yes Peter: What I've heard is we've come a long way in quite a short period of time and that it's probably getting even faster. David: It's going to get faster but it's also I suspect, going to get more stable. Peter: Okay.
David: That the period of instability created by the introduction of the computer is now, almost a generation old and it usually takes about a generation for these things to shake out.
Peter: That's very good. David: The automobile, the train, the printing press – all of that did exactly the same thing and now after the generation now is the kids are coming up, who are familiar with the technology, can start to focus on well what can I do with this and not the whiz-bang aspects of the thing in itself.
Peter: Right, so now it's the production – it's where the real value gets determined. David: Yes, yes, and that's where people are going to come up with the innovation and the new sets of rewards, the new ways of incenting people to do things and the new knowledge, then feeds back into the learning process. Peter: Very good. Thank you David.
David: You're welcome
