Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

“Altmetrics: A manifesto,” published five years ago this month, described an academic publishing landscape in which the volume of literature was exploding, and the three traditional filters used to help researchers gauge the relative importance of individual papers in their fields—peer review, citation counting, and a journal’s average citations per article—were failing to keep up. Scholars were moving their work onto the web, and alternative, article-level metrics drawn from online reference managers Zotero and Mendeley, scholarly social bookmarking services such as CiteULike, or even page-views of blogs and “likes” or comments on mainstream social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter could be used to track the impact of new research in real time, wrote ­Impactstory ­cofounder Jason Priem; Wikimedia Foundation head of research Dario ­Taraborelli; Paul Groth, then-researcher VU University Amsterdam; and Cameron Neylon, then–senior scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Could these new metrics be just as relevant as peer review and citations when judging the impact and influence of new research?

The MET project released progress reports as its research and analysis progressed. Through these reports, practitioners and policy makers have had quick access to the data developed through the project in order to begin thinking through the practical implications of the work prior to release of the final report.

In January 2013, the MET project released its third and final set of findings, which sought to answer three questions from practitioners and policy-makers: Can measures of effective teaching identify teachers who better help students learn?; How much weight should be placed on each measure of effective teaching when combining classroom observations, student surveys, and student achievement gains?; And how can teachers be assured trustworthy results from classroom observations?