Social Labs in Universities: Innovation and impact in Medialab UGR / Laboratorios sociales en Universidades: Innovación e impacto en Medialab UGR

Social laboratories, defined as experimental spaces for co-creation, have currently become the main centres of innovation. Medialabs are experimental laboratories of technologies and communication media which have co-evolved along with the digital society into becoming mediation laboratories of citizen experimentation, observing a confluence of both models. In the last years, these centres have expanded within the higher education context, generating new forms of innovation and posing the issue on how to measure the impact of such open spaces. This paper analyzes the origin and development of social laboratories in Spain. It first reviews their historical development since its antecedents in the 19th Century until the most recent initiatives. It focuses specifically on initiatives launched within the university context, highlighting their role as motors of innovation. Then, it presents the case of Medialab UGR, a co-creation and digital culture centre of social collaboration framed in the digital context. Finally, it offers a first approach towards the assessment of its social impact by using the Twitter and analyzes its capacity to mobilize and reach non-academic audiences. The findings show the plurality of actors involved in this type of networks as well as the difficulty and complexity of the task on the development of indicators that can comprise both, academic and social interests.

[1]  Emilio Delgado López-Cózar,et al.  Ciencia 2.0: catálogo de herramientas e implicaciones para la actividad investigadora , 2009 .

[2]  Ramón Salaverría,et al.  Los labs como fórmula de innovación en los medios , 2015 .

[3]  Anton J. Nederhof,et al.  Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Review , 2006, Scientometrics.

[4]  Pekka Himanen,et al.  La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información , 2002 .

[5]  Daniel Franco Romo,et al.  Scolari, Carlos (2008): Hipermediaciones. Elementos para una Teoría de la Comunicación Digital Interactiva , 2011 .

[6]  James H. Collier,et al.  Social Epistemology , 2014 .

[7]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  SSH & the City. A Network Approach for Tracing the Societal Contribution of the Social Sciences and Humanities for Local Development , 2016 .

[8]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  Social Media Metrics as Indicators of Broader Impact , 2016 .

[9]  José Manuel Ruiz Martín,et al.  Los cuatro ejes de la cultura participativa actual. De las plataformas virtuales al medialab , 2016 .

[10]  Jason Priem.  Scholarship: Beyond the paper , 2013, Nature.

[11]  Esteban Romero Frías.  Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Digitales : una visión introductoria , 2014 .

[12]  Bradley M. Hemminger,et al.  Scientometrics 2.0: New metrics of scholarly impact on the social Web , 2010, First Monday.

[13]  J. Dewey.  Democracia y escuela , 2009 .

[14]  Zaid Hassan,et al.  The social lab revolution 1 , 2014 .

[15]  Daniel Torres-Salinas,et al.  Altmetrics: nuevos indicadores para la comunicación científica en la Web 2.0 , 2013 .

[16]  Dale T. Miller,et al.  Rediscovering Social Innovation , 2008 .

[17]  Wilbur Carey Phillips.  Adventuring for democracy , 1940 .

[18]  Martin Weller,et al.  The digital scholar : how technology is transforming scholarly practice , 2011 .

[19]  Atau Tanaka,et al.  Situating within Society: Blueprints and Strategies for Media Labs , 2011 .

[20]  Adolfo Estalella Fernández,et al.  Laboratorios de procomún: experimentación, recursividad y activismo , 2013 .

[21]  Fernando Toledano Cuervas-Mons,et al.  Nebrija MediaLab: un valor añadido a la docencia y al desarrollo de competencias , 2014 .

[22]  B. Wellman,et al.  Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community , 2011 .

[23]  Daniel Torres-Salinas,et al.  Presencia en redes sociales y altmétricas de los principales autores de la revista El profesional de la información , 2014 .