Exploring Open Science with Computer Science undergrads

York University Computer Science & Engineering professor Anestis Toptsis was kind enough recently to invite me to speak to his CSE 3000 Professional Practice in Computing class.

He gave me two lecture sessions this term, one to talk about library-ish stuff. In other words, what third year students need to know about finding conference and journal articles (and other stuff too) for their assignments and projects. You can find my notes here, in the lecture 1 section.

In the second session, which I gave yesterday, he basically let me talk about anything that interested me. So, of course, I talked about Open Science. Here are the slides I used, heavily based on the talk I gave at Brock for Open Access Week a little while ago.

I tried to emphasize demoing the projects as much as possible rather than just talking about them. I also emphasized the Polymath-type projects more than in the previous talk -- a strategy suggested by Michael Nielsen in an email exchange.

How was the reaction? A little stunned, I think, perhaps because I covered a lot of ground in a short period of time, from the state of scholarly publishing to blogging networks. But overall, I did seem to have their attention so that's a good thing.

I'm giving this talk again to first year Computer Science students in January so I have another kick at the can to get it right. I think I'll pare it down quite a bit and try and talk in greater detail about fewer concepts as well as integrating my overview with the detailed case studies a bit better. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

And once again, thanks to Anestis for giving me this great opportunity.

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