Developmental Physiology Virtual Collaboratory Project
Dr. Warren Burggren (University of North Texas) and Legier Rojas (UCC)
Comparative physiologists have a long, rich history of collaboration. Coming together to discuss and perform experiments is deeply ingrained in the way we create our experimental programs and in how we train our students. Yet, future collaborative activities and environments are likely to be (indeed, some would say must be) quite different from those we currently experience. Increasingly, research projects in comparative physiology are multidisciplinary in nature, requiring not only multiple skill sets but, ironically, also specialized, expensive, and non-portable facilities. External forces are also shaping the future of collaboration, not the least of which is the expense and uncertainties of national and especially international travel.
Fortunately, new and relatively inexpensive technologies are emerging for enhancing electronically-based communication, or “virtual collaboration”, particularly with the higher network speeds afforded to institutions with access to Internet2 (Olsen, 2003). For example, interactive video studios are now commonplace on university and college campuses. With respect to technology in hand, we could carry out virtual conferences, dissertation committee meetings, and even the simple “brainstorming” so vital to research collaboration. Web-based cameras (the so-called “live-cams” common to many “reality” web-sites) allow us to use inexpensive technology for connectivity using the World Wide Web. Video telephones, which emerged into common culture through news coverage of the US-Iraqi war, are providing yet another way for the spoken word to be supplemented by visual images of the communicating parties. Additionally, a variety of web-based tools are available to assist virtual collaboration - see, for example, the NSF-supported Distributed Knowledge Research Collaborative (www.dkrc.org/technologies/dktech-ISRL.shtml), developed by the NSF-supported Information Systems Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Despite technology that allows fellow biologists in a particular community to interact virtually in substantial, meaningful ways, few of us have expanded virtual collaboration beyond email, web surfing and program or image downloading. From the perspective of collaboration, we continue to operate in institutional isolation until we emerge for the annual society conference, research trip to another lab, or expedition to a field site. In this regard, despite the tools available to us, collaboration at the beginning of the 21st century is little changed from that carried out by Per Scholander, Lawrence Irving or Ladd Prosser in the middle of the previous century. The challenge before physiologists, then, is not to develop new technology for virtual collaboration – for that already exists (e.g. Lunsford and Bruce, 2001). Rather, the challenge is to develop a climate for virtual collaboration where this new technology can be deployed by making its use sufficiently easy and attractive such that it becomes integrated into the day-to-day activities of physiologists and their students. We propose the creation of an innovative, entirely electronically-based “virtual collaboratory” to serve the emerging field of Developmental Animal Physiology. One of the major goals of the virtual collaboration across the DepCo project is to produce general improvement to our research by: a) saving time when “virtually” exchanging ideas without physical presence b) reducing the amount of the budget dedicated to travel and c) having the opportunity to reach top researchers with limited time to share, giving us conferences without the mobilization of large groups of peoples, implicating large saving in time, money and resources.
This project has been written up in Science's NetWatch, (Vol. 298, P. 185, November 29th, 2002) as an example of a Community-based web site. In that sense the BTF could be benefit of this initiative receiving collaboration from established researchers in animal behavior.