The Ed Techie

Punk, Queen & New Romantics in digital scholarship

It may be tired after the whole edupunk thing (curses to you Groom!), and has more than a whiff of old men reliving their youth about it, but nevertheless I'd like to revisit punk music as an analogy for current changes in ed tech. This time it is nothing to do with the approach or the values, but rather the lesson of what a revolution actually look like.

In his book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton makes the point that we are living through the midst of a revolution, and it's very difficult to see what the outcome will be. While I think that digital, networked and open approaches to scholarship do represent a revolution, I think we also tend to over simplify what this means. John makes this point also.

There is a tendency to think of revolutions as absolutes: pre and post. Everything that has gone before is swept away and everything that happens since is cast in the new light.

But for many revolutions this isn't the case. The actual picture is far more subtle, and interesting. I was reflecting on this the other day with regards to my own musical tastes and history. My musical tastes really started emerging in the immediate post-punk era, and this coloured everything for me. So my early album purchases were The Jam, Clash and later Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes. I inherited a completely dismissive attitude towards anything pre-1976. I scoffed at prog rock, folk and metal.

This wasn't actually a bad attitude to have as a teenager, you're meant to have strong tastes. But it did mean it took me longer than it should have done to come round to bands like Led Zeppelin, or Nick Drake.

But the lesson is, for many people my age punk was a defining revolution in music. But it wasn't as all encompassing as history may have painted it. I had plenty of friends whose musical tastes remained largely untouched. Queen, Iron Maiden, Luther Vandross - punk had no impact here.

And I had yet other friends who didn't think they liked punk, but went on to become new romantics (it was a confused time). And while that music had different values, it was a 'scene' that was undoubtedly influenced by the possibilities that punk had awoken in people.

Now this isn't just a nostalgia trip - there is an analogy here with digital scholarship, and what revolutions feel like. There are scholars for whom the digital aspect is nearly all consuming - I'm one of them, I simply can't imagine what it's like without working in a networked manner. There are those for whom it is largely irrelevant. Think of them as the Queen fans of scholarship - they have been successful and have a preference for an established way of working. Then there is probably a middle group, whose tastes and practices are touched by the existence of digital scholarship, even if they are not particularly strong advocates. These are the new romantics.

I guess the point is, a revolution changes some things completely, alters some, and has no impact on others, but we tend to focus only on the first of these.

Levels of friction in sharing

Over the past week or so I've had a couple of twitter discussions around 'frictionless sharing'. Brian Kelly captured some of this discussion in Storify and then followed up with this post (like a dog with a bone, Brian has also created a wikipedia stub :)

The term has been somewhat corrupted by Facebook, which has inevitably led to it being rather sneered at. Particularly worrying I think is unintentional sharing, ie Facebook simply broadcasting your actions. Sharing should always be a conscious decision I feel. 

Pete Johnston made the point about context, which is another concern around frictionless sharing. Consider the following examples:

1) You 'favourite' a number of offensive tweets from people to be used in a talk about online behaviour.

2) Your daughter borrows your iPod and listens to some teeny bop music, which is displayed in your LastFM profile.

3) You collect a number of articles in Scoop.It which demonstrate fallacious arguments about the net generation.

In each case you wouldn't want the casual observer to infer any endorsement of the resources by yourself, but without any clear context, that could happen. Nonetheless, frictionless sharing represents a significant practice for academics I feel. Much of the value of a scholar is to be a knowledge filter. They are also knowledge creators, through research, of course, but a valuable role is to read around a subject in more detail than most people have time for, and to filter the key resources and messages. Thus if someone I know and respect curates a subject in Tumblr (or delicious, or Scoop.It or Mendeley) then having access to that set of resources is tremendously useful to me as a researcher. It doesn't mean I shouldn't do my own research, but knowing that this is what the world expert thinks is interesting, is a useful resource. And for anyone doing this the simplicity of the tools I mentioned (which usually equates to clicking on a bookmarklet) doesn't cost them much in time, effort or money. This can be seen as democratising this kind of knowledge. Previously I would need to know the person in order to find out what they thought was of value in their field, but now it's open to all.

This kind of trusted digital curation is increasingly valuable I feel, and one that is not easily recognised by current systems. Someone could be the key 'go-to' source because they spend a lot of time reading and filtering, but not publish anything themselves, and yet have a huge impact in their field. Stephen Downes is a good example of someone who is highly valued for this curation role, but he combines it with producing his own excellent material as well. But if he didn't and only did the filtering role, that would still be enormously valuable and yet difficult to recognise formally (imagine trying to put it through the REF in the UK).

I want to emphasise that this doesn't mean all sharing should be this way. I think we can see increasing levels of friction in sharing, and arguably, the value of the resource increases as more friction is added. In the chapter on openness in my Digital Scholar book, I suggest three degrees of sharing friction: 

1. Frictionless – sharing that occurs without much additional effort required, for example, if a scholar is gathering resources for her own research, then using a social bookmarking tool is an effective tool for her as well as making the list public.

2. Quick sharing – this requires a small level of effort, so does not occur simply as a by-product, but the effort required is minimal, such as sharing a link via Facebook or uploading a Powerpoint presentation to Slideshare.

3. Content creation – this requires some effort to produce a digital artefact, for instance, creating a blog post, a YouTube movie, or adding and synchronising audio to a presentation to create a ‘slidecast’. The effort and expertise required are still relatively low compared to many traditional forms of output.

 

 

Earning every mile

The end of the year is time for my traditional running review post, much to the pleasure of absolutely no-one, including myself. Still, that's what traditions are for, so here goes.

First, the data part, because you're worth it:

• Total distance: 1028 miles
• Number of runs: 136
• Total duration: 182 hours
• Average distance: 7.56 miles
• Average duration: 1hr 16mins
• Average pace: 10.09 min/mile

Compared with last year, where I was a bit lost and only did a total of 831 miles, this was a big improvement, and I finally broke that 1000 mile barrier. Even so, this still only comes in at just over half an hour a day on average. That's not actually that much time is it? I probably spent this much time watching Masterchef. So there is plenty of time to do more. I like this video that asks, 'can you fit in all the sleeping, watching TV and being online time into 23.5 hours a day?':

 

The biggest single factor in increasing mileage this year was running two marathons. I did my first one back in April in an ok time of 4hrs 11mins and then a second one in November in a poor time of 4hrs 30mins. I learnt two things about myself from these experiences.

Firstly, ignorance is a kind of bliss. When I first started running I thought doing a 10K was a big deal. Then I moved up to, and stayed at, half marathon distance. But having done a marathon now, I have knowledge of long distance, and I don't think I could be happy with just staying at shorter distances. The problem is I like those shorter distances, and I'm even worse at longer ones. Sometimes newly acquired knowledge isn't always a blessing. Like when you begin to understand about writing or film making, you can't simply 'enjoy' a book or a film anymore, there is always some critical appraisal occurring. But of course, this brings with it pleasures of its own, and longer distances do have that. They also have a lot of really boring, slogging it out miles too though.

Secondly, I have to earn every mile. I am not a natural athlete. I know people who put in less training than me and complete a marathon in 3 hours. Even if I gave up work and concentrated solely on running, I couldn't do that - we're just built differently. This came home to me as I struggled around the second marathon in Nice. I hadn't put in the same level of training as for the first marathon, and it showed. There was no reserve of natural talent I could draw upon - every bloody mile has to be earnt.

In making my tenuous connection to learning, I'd say there are a lot of similarities. Some people can breeze through a course and an exam, others have to work hard, study long hours and fret through the night for every single mark. And no matter how hard they try most people won't achieve top marks, but they still study and learn and gain from it. Learning, like running, is about competition with yourself, not others.

How to undermine Facebook

Like many people, I have a Facebook profile, but it isn't something I use much. And like many people I've become increasingly uneasy about the way our interactions are monetised and manipulated. I don't mind this to an extent - I'm willing to trade off free use of something for some adverts I ignore, for example. But it's begun to feel all rather insidious with Facebook.

Alan Levine posted that he wasn't going to dramatically quit Facebook, but his plan was to maintain a non-presence:

But quitting seems to pointless. Or impactless. So I have an evil plot. I am keeping my facebook account, but I have completely neutralized its presence. I belong to no groups, like nothing, or use anything that sucks in my information 

But I think you could take this one step further. In those fantasy books and comics, when a human needs to slay a monster, they nearly always have an epiphany where they use it's own strength against it. The same approach could be applied to the behemoth of Facebook.

What Facebook really sells to companies is meaningful data and connections. The key to this is that they are meaningful. If I 'Like; a company it matters because my friends will believe that I really endorse their products. If I install an app it's because it appeals to me. And if people who Like X tend to also Like Y then that becomes valuable data.

But what if those actions weren't meaningful? What if they were genuinely, and deliberately random? A company may get some benefit along the lines of 'all publicity is good publicity', but the real value of knowing it's something I genuinely like is removed. And this corrupts the data set, because those connections between points are no better than a random number generator.

So, if I was a real hacktivist type, I'd create a tool that searches Facebook and randomly suggests companies to Like and apps to install. Then we'd all do it, and Mark Zuckerberg would cry 'I'm melting, I'm melting.'

This is only a half-serious suggestion - the point I want to make is that in social media, it is integrity that counts - data integrity, personal integrity and behavioural integrity. Which prevents marketing firms and retailers with a problem as often they are trying to modify or coerce this integrity. But as soon as you do that, the whole approach becomes meaningless. If I retweet something because I might get a prize, then people don't value that tweet. And so the moral is, don't sell your integrity cheaply. And don't manipulate our integrity or we can use it against you.

The three ghosts of open access articles

WARNING - this post contains stretching of a flimsy idea to breaking point. Look away if you find strained literary metaphors distressing.

In keeping with the festive season, I'm going to frame some thoughts on stages of academic publishing with a Dickensian motif. I'm trying to develop an approach that covers three phases of a journal article's life, so let's go for a Christmas Carol. 

The Ghost of Articles Past - Scrooge is shown his own past Christmases, and given to reflect and reinterpret them. The ghost says he is there for Scrooge's 'reclamation'. For articles, they are usually published in a journal, where they may receive an initial flurry of interest, and unless they become a standard text they fall into obscurity (indeed most never emerge from obscurity). As I mentioned in my last post, I'm interested in the possibilities that open access allows for a new life for articles, for them to be taken, republished in different collections or reused in different contexts. This can happen with existing, proprietary articles but it's a closed process, it is open access that allows for the generative, innovative reuse that will allow articles to be reclaimed.

This idea is somewhat in its infancy in terms of meta-journals and having a critical mass of open access content, but in other ways one of the oldest practices online with bookmarking, linking, blogging. So it indeed resembles the first of Dickens' spirits in being "like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium"

The Ghost of Articles Present - This is the easiest one, as it represents the norm. I've written about academic publishing a lot, especially in this chapter of my book, so I won't repeat it all here. But despite the many criticisms we may have of it, the carefully researched, well-written and peer-reviewed article has a strong place in academia and is in many ways the core practice that allows it to distance itself from commercial or marketing influence. But it's also a bloated industry in its own right and one that is both bountiful and undergoing change, just as Scrooge is in the midst of change as he views the different interpretations of present Christmas. So we can both see the current publishing model as akin to the Ghost who was "a jolly Giant, glorious to see" and also one who like the Ghost of Christmas Present is destined to fade soon.

The Ghost of Articles Yet To Come - one of the most interesting developments over recent years has been the rise of the physics pre-print repository arXiv. Articles that are ‘published’ here are not peer-reviewed, so can be pre-publication, or unpublished. An initial filter is applied, which is that the article is of reviewable quality. To quote the arXiv founders: “that they would not be peremptorily rejected by any competent journal editor as nutty, offensive, or otherwise manifestly inappropriate, and would instead at least in principle be suitable for review.”

ArXiv has become the de facto distribution medium for scholarly articles in Physics, with Sir Martin Rees commenting it has “transformed the literature of physics, establishing a new model for communication over the whole of science. Far fewer people today read traditional journals. These have so far survived as guarantors of quality. But even this role may soon be trumped by a more informal system of quality control, signaled by the approbation of discerning readers”. 

These are articles that have not yet been published, but could be. They are thus akin to the Christmases of the future that Scrooge sees - they are shadows, possibilities, but not definite. In the removal of the heavy peer-review process this approach strikes fear into many academics, like the Ghost who "was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form... the Spirit neither spoke nor moved"

My plan is to try and cover all three of these aspects. I have the Meta EdTech Journal, am an editor on JIME, and am trying to set up an arXiv type pre-print for ed tech. I think people often see new technological approaches supplanting old ones, but it's the complementary nature I find interesting. It is the advent of alternatives to previously monolithic systems that is exciting.

So, join with me and Scrooge in saying:

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"

 

Launching Meta EdTech Journal

The other day I was trying to find a list of Open Access journals. I found this very useful open list from George Veletsianos. While looking through the journals it occurred to me that what would be useful would be a regular review of these, or a kind of meta-journal. Not one that just lists all the papers, but rather a filtered view.

I mentioned it on Twitter and Doug Belshaw pointed me at the new Google/Wordpress collaboration, Annotum - a WordPress theme for creating open access journals.

So in the a spirit of DIY, I have created Meta EdTech Journal. The idea is simple - three times a year an issue will be published, collating some of the articles from the open access ed tech journals. At the moment this is at my discretion, but I would welcome an editorial board, or perhaps editors to work on very focused special editions. You could imagine very interesting special editions drawing on the open access journals in all manner of subjects, and using material from the past three years or so. A Meta EdTech Medical Education Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Social Media Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Mobile Learning Special Edition? Well, you get the idea, they're all relatively easy to do.

Now, you could say, 'so what?'. After all, there's nothing in this I couldn't do in a blog, delicious, tumblr, paper.li, scoop.it, etc. However, I have come to the conclusion rather late in life, that context is important. By looking roughly journalish, calling itself a journal, behaving like a journal, and crucially only gathering together journal articles, it begins to feel like a journal. And that might be of interest to a few people. 

What I find most interesting about this though is the potential for interdisciplinarity. I have gone for a fairly boring Ed Tech focus, but you could have some really interesting intersection. Interdisciplinary journals have traditionally suffered because of the economics of publishing - they just don't have a big enough audience. But if you are drawing on open access publications, you can make an interdisciplinary journal on any subject you want (provided there are enough open access papers to draw upon). Classics and Manga Studies? You bet. Postmodernism and Sports Psychology? Why not.

The other mild revelation, is that it's yet another example of what I like about open access. It's the unpredictability and different uses that content can be put to that is really exciting. Your article no longer sits in just one journal, but may appear in dozens of different 'mashup' or meta journals. Each of these may have a different audience, beyond the scope of the original journal. Again, as an author, why wouldn't you want this? The development of meta-journals itself may be a driver for open access, since authors want to be included in them.

A couple of admin points: I've tried to give the proper attribution for each paper but if anyone thinks it looks as though I'm trying to claim authorship, let me know (it automatically adds 'Author' as the person who creates the post, which is annoying). I'm not a WordPress expert so I'm not sure I've set it up optimally. For instance I couldn't see how to create Issues, so I have simply created a page for each issue, and listed in the sidebar. Again, any thoughts on this are welcome.

We'll see how it goes, maybe no-one will read it, as the other tools I've mentioned above already fulfill this function. But for now, it was kinda cool to think 'this afternoon, I'm going to create a journal, on my own, with no funding.'

Yeah, but who pays?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/68751915@N05/6355351769/ by 401Kcalculator>

My colleague, Gill Kirkup, asks this question of digital scholarship, and it is a frequent refrain of Alan Cann's. It's a good question, and one I usually try to have an answer for. I don't think I am guilty of Gill's charge of hoping for the "internet equivalent of the tooth fairy". In fact, one of my complaints about the current academic publishing model is that it's a poor economic one. Now, one can make many arguments about open access that don't address the economics, for example around it being a public good, or a more effective way of working for instance, many of which are compelling in their own right, but in this post let's just focus on the money bit.

And I should add that there are much broader 'who pays' questions - there is a who pays in terms of environmental impact of running servers, and also 'who pays' in terms of higher education and society, but both of these are beyond the scope of this post, and I'm concentrating on the 'who pays' question as it is conventionally put in terms of open scholarship.

While I think it is a good question to ask, I'm also suprised at how much people think new ways of working are necessarily unsustainable. I think this arises partly because we're often talking about many different things when we ask the question 'who pays?'. Gill probably has open access publishing in mind, but others will be referring to OERs, or digital scholarship in general. I'll take a few interpretations and look at the 'who pays' question for each. Some are easier than others, but none assume a complete overhaul of global financial systems, radical change in human behaviour, or liberal quantities of fairy dust. They're all doable.

Open access publishing - this is the one that has had the most attention. Let's assume we want to keep a peer-review journal system - this is by no means certain, but it addresses the question most directly. Willinsky suggests you can publish an open access journal for zero cost. As an editor of one, I'd say this is unlikely - you need someone to do some of the admin support and technical setup and maintenance, even if you're using OJS. And handling promotion, library and database take-up is quite a specialised skill. A bit of copyediting is also necessary, although the degree of this varies. But the large bulk of the journal process - peer review, editing, organising, decision-making - is stuff academics generally do for free anyway. So the associated costs are quite low. 

One model for OA is the gold route, or author pays. Usually this means the research funder builds the costs in. This pretty much maintains the current model, and ensures OA, so in that sense, it is realisable. However, the costs under this model are high - somewhere around $5,000 per article if published by a commercial publisher. Whereas a non-profit, open access journal (say one run by a society) has much lower costs, around $750 (see Clarke for lots of numbers). Most of that difference in cost is going on proprietary systems, marketing, shareholders and salaries. And that money either comes from research grants or libraries. While I'm not after making people redundant, those additional costs aren't factors that are really the concern of academic researchers.

The cheaper, non-profit versions could be funded through the research councils (either through author pays, or directly as ongoing research distribution sources), through library consortia (as Frances Pinter suggests), or through universities. Universities used to run their own presses, but these became difficult to maintain and were often sold on, but the online equivalent of a university press might see a central team of one techie, and two admin or librarian staff (say) supporting 5-10 online journals. That is a much more sustainable model.

If any of the above solutions seem unrealistic to you, then imagine if I was trying to sell the idea of the current model - research councils fund research, this is undertaken by university staff, ofte subsidised by the institution, they then write articles, these are reviewed and edited by staff in other universities, for free, then all of this labour is provided to commercial publishers who sell the product back to the same universities and make very considerable profits along the way.

Open scholarship - more generally, we can talk of open scholarship, which is just sharing stuff you do. This might be a conference presentation, data from a research project, workshop structure, etc (as well as the publications above). This is the one area where I really don't see the 'who pays' question. The actual costs involved in doing so aren't great - you've prepared your presentation, and maybe practised it, so adding this to Slideshare is a minimal effort. People often ask of blogging, 'where do you find the time?' but for me having an effective online presence is such an integral part of how I work the question I ask back is 'how do you operate without it?". It is rather like asking them 'how do you find the time to read?'.

I also feel that we are often blind to the inefficiencies in the ways we work currently, because we're accustomed to them. In a word - meetings. I tend to spend three days on campus, during which time I am in meetings solidly, usually through lunch. While these are often necessary, I also know that I get a lot more actual work done on the two days I work from home and communicate via other methods. And while I love meeting people at conferences, these are hugely wasteful of time, and much of that connection can be formed via other means. That's not to say we should abandon all conferences, but maybe you don't need to go to one a month now. Finding other ways of working often leads to open practices as a by-product. For example, if I want to share a presentation I've just finished, then instead of emailing to everyone there, I put it up online and make it open to all. 

So, in short, open scholarship I feel is just absorbed as part of everyday practice, using a combination or free tools and services and different approaches to working. 

Open education - this, I think, is the most difficult to answer the 'who pays' question, because teaching money (whether it comes from the state or the student) is what really funds higher education. There has been lots of work on the sustainability (or otherwise) of the OER movement. David Wiley has probably the best review, and suggest three models: The MIT, USU and Rice models. The USU model is near to making OER a by-product of teaching, releasing content as you go. Whether this will impact on student numbers in the long term if everyone did it, we don't really know, but generally the feeling is that it wouldn't as students want more than just the content.

Open education isn't just OERs of course. There are open courses, which can be bespoke MOOCs of the type George, Dave and Stephen run eg Change. I wouldn't suggest these are sustainable as the entire replacement for all higher education (and neither would any of their developers). That's not what they're about. We should rather view these as new types of learning offerings we can do that are complementary to, or parallel to, existing structures. So if you want to try an experimental subject or approach but can't get it approved, then setting up a MOOC is relatively low cost. They are action research if you like - something we couldn't do before, but can now.

Perhaps more relevant are the boundaryless open courses. For example, Alec's or Jim's courses which have a traditional, campus, fee paying student body, but which is open to anyone else to take part in, for as long as they like. These can be a win-win situation - students get access to a wider range of expertise and participants, and the open participants get to experience part of study. My guess is this approach wouldn't really hit student numbers and, if your course is online, it doesn't take much to make it open. I think making the case as to why the university should do this is a tougher sell, but in terms of the costs, it needn't undermine existing models (it may even act as a good recruitment vehicle).

A recent, interesting example, combines open education potentially with open publishing. The Stanford AI course has gained incredible student numbers. The course uses a text authored by one of the lecturers, which suggests a future model might be something like: write an open access textbook - create a course from it - sell more copies of your book and get increase sign up to the university version of the course with accreditation. Everyone is a winner.

I don't suggest that it is easy to tackle the 'who pays' question for all forms of openness but I would argue that none of them are based just wishful thinking or naivete. And I would also suggest that we should examine some of our current economic models carefully and ask just how sustainable they really are in a digital, networked world.

Digital scholar book launch

For those of you who found something better to do yesterday afternoon (I can't imagine what that could be), here the webcast of my book launch can be found here. 

The event seemed to go ok, although I fear I was a bit rambling, and didn't really do the elevator pitch thing for the book. John Naughton said some very kind words, and then we had a good discussion with the audience and wider twitter participants.

And below is my Prezi, which I still don't think I've got the hang of - I just don't think I'm a visual kinda guy. 

Digital Scholar - book launch on Prezi

Doomed, entombed and marooned

In my book launch yesterday (I'll blog that later), I used a Dad's Army clip to summarise some of the feelinsg of angst and criticism around digital scholarship:

 

I think this is a pretty good summary of some of the anxieties:

• Doomed - a kind of technological dystopian view, such as Nicholas Carr's The Shallows. It doesn't matter what we do, we're all destined to become stupid, dysfunctional and somehow, lessened by the technology.
• Entombed - the 'we are slaves' to technology type view, for example Lanier's You are not a Gadget. We are placing technology in too powerful a position and dehumanising ourselves in the process. Some of the neurological scaremongering comes under this category too.
• Marooned - the impact on our social behaviour, and society in general. Turkle's Alone Together argues that paradoxically, the more we communicate, the more alone and isolated we are becoming.

I think each of these perspectives has something going for it (apart from the Greenfield nonsense), but at the same time, I feel they are taking a very narrow perspective to make their point, and relying heavily on anecdote and their own perception. For instance in her TED talk Turkle bemoans that many children come out of school and the first thing they see is their parent with their head bowed over the smart phone. And that this is very damaging. This makes we wonder what type of world Turkle is comparing it too - what about when the parents weren't there at all, because they had to work and the kid went home alone? Maybe being connected ia your smart phone allows you to do the school run and liberate the latch-key kid. I don't know if this is true, but it's the difficulty of basing your argument on personal interpretation such as this.

So, anyway, that's my shorthand for digital scholarship angst now - doomed, entombed and marooned.

A digital scholar is...

Just a quick post as a reminder that my book launch is next Tuesday, 15th at 3pm - it is being streamed live and we'll be hoping for some twitter contributions.

We have a prize of a signed (or, even better, unsigned) copy of the book, which we've simplified. Just do a tweet completing the sentence 'A digital scholar is...' and tag it #digitalscholar and I'll pick one winner on the day.

I've been doing some Despair.Inc posters for my talk on the day, so thought I'd share this one: