Social Networking

Wisdom Of The Cloud

Nature's Scitable social network hopes to get students excited about science.

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- There are few better examples than Wikipedia to demonstrate the divide between old media and new. Offline encyclopedias are static, isolated and expensive; the online version is dynamic, social and free.

Thanks in part to that divide, the sciences are floundering among young people. A recent report from the nonprofit Battelle Memorial Institute found that only 52% of 12th graders are at or above a basic level of achievement in the sciences. Of high school students taking the ACT test, only 28% would be prepared to take a college biology course.

Vikram Savkar is looking to change that. He's the publishing director for Nature Education, a division of the Nature Publishing Group. In January he launched Scitable, an online learning tool aimed at galvanizing youth interest in the hard sciences. Nature wouldn't provide exact data on Scitable but says the site has "hundreds of thousands of users" so far.

Scitable is essentially a textbook wrapped in a social network. Registered users can search a topic like genetics, and find articles, definitions, images and multimedia. From those pages, users can send questions to subject-matter experts or chat with other people reading the article.

The intended audience is a new one for the publisher, which produces 70 academic journals all aimed at research scientists.

Scitable focuses on science for science students. The basic idea, says Savkar, is market development. "Science students are our future customers," he says. "There's a big problem: tremendous attrition."

Vikram Savkar is looking to change that. He's the publishing director for Nature Education, a division of the Nature Publishing Group. In January he launched Scitable, an online learning tool aimed at galvanizing youth interest in the hard sciences. Nature wouldn't provide exact data on Scitable but says the site has "hundreds of thousands of users" so far.

Scitable is essentially a textbook wrapped in a social network. Registered users can search a topic like genetics, and find articles, definitions, images and multimedia. From those pages, users can send questions to subject-matter experts or chat with other people reading the article.

The intended audience is a new one for the publisher, which produces 70 academic journals all aimed at research scientists.

Scitable focuses on science for science students. The basic idea, says Savkar, is market development. "Science students are our future customers," he says. "There's a big problem: tremendous attrition."