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Slowing down the journal club

The journal club #TJC15 is a fascinating phenomenon. Laura Gogia ‘birthed’ it from her spontaneous live-tweeting of an article written by me and Jenny Mackness. As authors, it was exhilarating and informative to see live responses to our work. It was spontaneous, people responding to our paper as they encountered it, and I was thrilled by the responses.
As Laura developed the concept, I became interested in this idea of a swift journal club, enabled by Twitter and curation tools. Laura, the originator, moved swiftly to organise around this emergent phenomenon: to create a persistent place at https://tjc15.wordpress.com/ that records archives, upcoming events and even research.

Laura’s idea is that :
“Twitter Journal Club is an open learning experience on Twitter (aggregated around the hashtag #tjc15) in which participants read a previously agreed upon article at a scheduled time, live-tweeting as they go. The articles – which must be openly available either through pre-print or open access – are recommended by participants via Google Doc and read in order of recommendation.” more

Participants are responding with ideas, helping out with support for annotation and Storify by Mariana Funes. I think that the beauty of it is that people can participate in different ways.

Before the June journal club, I spent a little time reflecting on how I could best contribute to and benefit from #tjc15. Anyone who knows me, will know that I have a tendency to talk too much so I always try to make sure that I avoid hogging the conversation in a face to face session. But we don’t need to wait for a gap in the conversation to post a tweet to a hashtag and the stream can get hectic. I came up with a plan to slow down my experience of the journal club to see what difference that might make.

I decided:

• to read the paper quickly before the session
• to make my primary focus on reading the stream rather than posting to it
• to note three issues that seemed important to me from reading the paper and make those my contributions spread over the hour
• (apart from those contributions) to concentrate on thinking about / occasionally responding to the ideas of others

I shared my plan with the club and paced my 3 issue tweets across the hour with the first one 10 minutes into the hour.

So how did it go?
I can’t speak for others (they probably didn’t notice) but I had a much better experience. I felt as if I had created more thinking space for me to reflect on what I, but also more importantly others, got from the paper.

I am interested in how we can slow things down a bit in other online associations, creating the pools alongside the fast-running streams. What do you think?