Internet Biologists: The First Two Years

By Chin Hoon Lau

Content

1.The mission and organizational nature

2.  Knowledge agenda of Internet Biologists

2.1. Internet literacy and integration of Internet into teaching and research, with emphasis on Bioinformatics
2.2. Distance learning and teaching of advanced subjects
2.3. Virtual collaboration
3.  Summary of Achievements
4. Outlook




1. The mission and organizational nature

"Internet Biologists (IB) is an independent international platform dedicated to forming an international community of biologists interested in collaboration and promotion of excellence in scientific scholarship through the Internet. It strives to foster virtual connections between Biologists at disparate locations, provides training opportunities for research scientists with the integration of Internet tools into their research, and provides networking and mentoring opportunities for the international Biological research community." -- Mission Statement
Internet Biologists http://www.netbio.org  is best described as a purely virtual organization. Most of the members did not meet each others face to face to start with, and very much remain so until today. It has a purely virtual origin and no physical base. Internet Biologists is rather comparable to a scientific association like international biochemical or cell society. The distinctive differences with the former are that Internet Biologists is not funded, not part of any established institution, and its front-running work in many areas is yet to be characterized by present accreditation or reward systems.

Internet Biologists is not a public discussion group. The latter is accessible to public at any time, has a high turnover in focus and participant, is generally devoid of  systematic and direction towards a common need.  In addition, the administration of these discussion groups is normally a personal effort in the form of  a moderator or coordinator.

In contrast to these online discussion groups, Internet Biologists has developed direction and agenda for the development of specific knowledge. Informal and loose organizational structures and mechanisms have evolved to improve sustainability. At the same time we are working towards our mission, Internet Biologists is concerned about accountability and professionalism, and how it projects itself to its potential stakeholders (participants, collaborators or supporters). Its administrative process, like that of any university or organization, is exclusive to members only. This privacy is crucial to the development of trust and sense of belonging. Internet Biologists interacts with the broader biology or Internet community through services like course offerings, collaborative programs and final products like papers and reports.
 

2.  Knowledge agenda of Internet Biologists

Members of IB share interests in professional and knowledge development in one of these niche areas, and are interested to see how and where IB as a front-running entity is leading to.

2.1. Internet literacy and integration of Internet into teaching and research, with emphasis on Bioinformatics

Through courses  like "Bioscience Resources on the Internet" (BRI) and "Doing Biological Research on the Internet",  Internet Biologists seeks to guide a participant to be an effective user of the Internet, become an active Internet organizer or information provider, and to acquire the online community development skills needed to support a team of providers or members. Collaborative learning, giving flexibility to constant role changing between participants and faculty is the central theme of our design. Literally, our program is not learner centered, but team centered  in which faculty, organizers and selected participants all form a team to learn and complement the expertise of each others.

2.2. Distance learning and teaching of advanced subjects

BRI is a complex course which covers a wide range of  subjects.  This is a difficult endeavor compared to courses with defined prerequisite and learner's background, like Cell Biology 102 and Calculus 212. Furthermore, in contrast to courses offered by one or two lecturers from a same department, the virtual coordination of BRI organizers and content development imposes extra layers of complexity.

We rely on a team of people who functions as organizer, facilitator and lecture contributor to plan and deliver the course. Through planning, preparation and delivery of the online courses, through response and feedback from participants, and through repetitive offering of a same course, we gain first hand experience on online planning, teaching and learning. We come to appreciate the advantages, limitations and pitfalls of giving instruction across distance. We question about adoption of a particular instructional technology. We collect knowledge about the diverse need of the biological community and how best can we cater for the need, and how can we improve the design and quality of our programs.

As a grassroots provider, Internet Biologists is also interested to find solution to the teething issues of recognition, accreditation and standards. We need to face the thorny decision as to where we should lead and where we would expect others to emulate our work, and what existing rules and practices our original approach  must be adjusted to in order to be recognized. For instance, should we become more "official" by adopting standard courseware and classroom software? Should we not asking for full Curriculum Vitae and authentication of participants attending to our course? We may still hold that Internet is for pure exchange of knowledge and paper qualification does not need to have a place. However, to accommodate for general perception and as a display of credential, academic titles are now being displayed next to the name of our members in member page.

2.3. Virtual collaboration

If Internet were to become a vehicle to quicken the pace of collaboration, exchange and creation of knowledge, the primitive nature of Internet should not be allowed to become a hurdle that offsets the speed advantage. Through mainly the work mentioned above, members of Internet Biologists are exploring and observing the issues and mechanisms in collaboration across time zone, distance and cultural orientation.

There is no cookbook recipe to distance collaboration as the chemistry is very much dependent upon the type of people, prior experience and personal or team motives. Furthermore, while it is crucial to be result-oriented, the process of arriving at a mature community is itself important. Having played a part in creating its history and culture gives members a sense of ownership and belonging. Having said that, through trial and error we did develop some understanding of charting the development of online community. It has been our interest to develop guidelines or checklists that lay down these basal structure and mechanism. These equivalent an operation manual. They will allow an online organizer to jump-start on the human and technology management and calibrate from there for specific applications. This will help speed up the time needed for completing the start-up-to-stability-to-quality process, and to channel precious voluntary resources into creating knowledge rather than re-inventing and testing the structure.
 

3. Summary of Achievements

For the first two years, the main concerns of Internet Biologists are stability and definition of niche and direction. We have formed a team, got a small number of prototypic projects going, and tried to comprehend and invent basic operation and coordination. Through the time spent together on improving communication and  these projects, we came to appreciate the intricacies and delicacies of  virtual teaming and collaboration on a network, at which most of us are perfect strangers. Members, especially the organizers, would now have a feeling regarding the advantages and limitations of  voluntary resources.

Dated from the time when BRI was planned to August, 1998, Internet Biologists (IB) has grown from a temporary assembly of a handful of local organizers into an international virtual organization with 34 members of exceptional experience in knowledge development  from science, distance education and knowledge development. BRI has transformed from one that was written by a sole author and instructed by two consultants to the 4th edition that was planned, organized and taught by a battery of IB members. BRI has now a reservoir of articles part of which have been made public to non-participants. This collection helps to consolidate the base of content development of BRI. Members of IB have presented BRI at a virtual conference, and it was a subject of an article of an international newsletter and a local newspaper column. In addition, we have accumulated wealth of raw data and first hand experience to write papers for sharing our experience with the biology and education community.

BRI has an advanced cousin, the "Doing Biological Research on the Internet (DBRI)". Both BRI and DBRI now constitute part of the Biological Internet Program, a new program covering the curriculum on the teaching and integration of Internet into study and R&D. Another two projects of Biological Internet Program which are under development are Online Scientific Networks and Community, and Biological Internet Associate Program.

Internet Biologists have also been strengthened by two other innovative projects: VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) applications for biological simulation, and the Virtual Institute of Wet Biology which has its own team of personnel taking care of a few projects and databases.

In preparing this grassroots assembly for wider recognition, we have identified some gaps in organizational knowledge and attempted division of labor and re-grouping of expertise as a remedy. For this, we have formed the Virtual Teaming and Professional Development which had motivated the creation of mission statement. It is hoped that through this division our scientists will be exposed to project management, critical knowledge like encryption and security technology and techniques for virtual collaboration etc. Another division, Curriculum Development coordinates quality assurance and instructional design. These two areas of work prepare our learning programs for accreditation. At present, we need to continue development of these divisions and we hope to attract more expertise to assist us in these areas.

Most significant of all these achievements, we have been able to continuously and actively working towards our mission, and have been successful in leadership development and renewal during the first two years. All these have been achieved with zero funding, and could not have been possible without the generous donation of precious time and physical support from its members, and their willingness and patience to bear with unknown and unpredictability.
 

4. Outlook

The shape of Internet Biologists' future depends on how we work on it at present. No futuristic projection is intended  in this article. I can only picture where we are now putting Internet Biologists in analogy with a typical length of scientific grant or graduate research, say, 5 years. At Internet Biologists, we have spent the first two years which can be characterized by learning, trial, groping, and thesis definition. At the end of two years, we got a basic set-up: a team, a core group of organizers, a handful innovative projects, and a unique organizational culture.

When Internet Biologists was set up it was envisioned as a model for,


I believe we are getting very close, if not have already in some aspects, to become a model, although no detail cyber infra-structure and guidelines can be developed overnight. I hope these attributes will continue to be a part of Internet Biologists.

It will be critical that we next concentrate on developing depth instead of creating new projects, and have more people filling the identified gaps. By depth, I have in mind the fulfillment of two purposes. The first one is to stay at the frontier, continue to be innovative and retain the emulative value for other online or physical initiatives. The second is about adjusting our approach to a format acceptable to current norm of accreditation and standards.

Internet Biologists is filling certain niche areas that are extremely difficult for any organization to handle alone. This will make us remain useful to the biological Internet community, and at the same time speak for a need to actively seek cross-organizational cooperation. In addition to cross-networking,  we need more inputs  from professionals experienced in the learning standards and accreditation for our coming agenda. These people do not necessarily need to come from academia; those from the industry and entertainment world may be in a more innovative and competitive mindset to help us  create a standard. In addition, I hope we could be enriched by people working on online community but using different framework and technology from those we are familiar with or accustomed to.

Over the past, we have been dealing with a few catch22 situations. We hope to attract a good number of participants to our courses yet not too many to jam our process. We hope more people will get to know and assist Internet Biologists but we would not be able to cope with massive influx of messages and exchanges if we were to start aggressive publicity campaign, and the coordination when the administrative base expand too sharply. We are about to go through the accreditation verdict yet we can barely afford the time and energy for dealing with the lengthy bureaucratic process. In essence, we have come to a stage that direct funding has become critically important to keep us achieving the mark.

Funding is also needed so that we could document our experience in a form of report, papers, guidelines, checklists and protocols. These documents are needed for internal reference (for example, for new member and partnership orientation, or the sub-community of VIWB or Biological Internet Program), and for the wider scientific and Internet community.

The list of items to look out for can be endless, but the future organizers of Internet Biologists are in a much better position to enrich the outlook. As we have come this far, I hope all of the members will stay on, with the same degree of patience, tolerance and enthusiasm,  to see how this unique creature called Internet biologists is doing. It has been a good time to be in a team like this. Again using the 5-year mark, I am confident that by 2001 our association with Internet Biologists will bring us rewarding professional credential and self-enrichment and will make a significant contribution to the biological Internet. I cannot help imagine where the members could all meet in real life then!

END

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Readers are invited to read about developmental and organizational perspectives in "In Search of Permanency: A Founder's Perspective on Sustainability of Purely Virtual Team"

The author is the Founder of Internet Biologists. He can be contacted at chlau@emile-21.com

First released for internal and restricted review: 8 September, 1998.  Public release  26 October, 1998.