The Ed Techie

It's kinda personal

Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this!

You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're people who wouldn't have read it. And the book brings out different concerns and reactions in them, many of which hadn't occurred to me. This going beyond your usual readership is a salutary lesson for any writer, and has made me rethink some of the way I write.

In his post Jim comments:

"I understand it would be impolitic for Martin to mention this in the book given his audience, but for me that is the real radical line of reasoning for open scholarship—a clear picture of just who the people behind the ideas ideas are, and what “such people” represent more tangibly as human beings."

I don't know about impolitic, I just forgot to mention it. Whenever I do sessions on social media for educators I always address this point. Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different). So you need to put an element of personal in there, the people I follow on blogs and twitter don't just broadcast cold ideas. But having said that, one of the mistakes I think people make when they first start blogging is to go too personal. I'm not particularly interested if you went to the cinema last night and the film was quite good and then you had a curry. 

So It's about that bridging between personal and professional. Now if you went to the cinema, and had a revelation about open access while watching a 3-D slasher movie, I'm interested. I think the personal element is essential in good online presence (but that doesn't mean I want to know when you've had an argument with your spouse). Which raises the question, are there some roles where it's effectively impossible to do good social media? I think it's very difficult to be a police officer or politician or senior manager online as you end up having to sanitise every output to the point where it becomes unengaging. If you don't there are people who will use it against you. So, as you go higher up the career ladder maybe effective online presence becomes more difficult.

In Amis's The Pregnant Widow the main character finds financial success but as soon as he does, his ability to write poetry dries up. You can't have both. Maybe that's the way it goes with social media.

 

Open scholarship as resolution to the academic dilemma

There is something of a tension at the heart of the relationship between academics and the institutions that employ them. Institutions want to have academics with a high profile and external recognition. But they also want them to do work for them, as they're paying the wage. Academics want to have a high profile and external recognition, but also recognise that a good proportion of their work may need to be for the institution in roles that don't attract much of this.

Usually this balance is fairly easy to maintain, but the problem is that much of the work involved in scholarship doesn't directly benefit the institution. Consider these examples:

• Examining PhDs
• Giving keynote talks
• Being external examiner on a course
• Sitting on project advisory boards
• Reviewing papers for journals
• Being an editor, or sitting on a conference committee
• Writing journal papers

Performing many of these can come under the type of work you need to do to stay current in your field (examining PhDs is a good way of being up on research I've found), but others less so. Giving the same keynote for the tenth time might help the individual do some networking, and could possibly lead to a joint research bid, say, but the direct benefit for the institution is rather tenuous.

As an aside these are also the type of 'glue' functions that keep scholarship functioning, and operate on an unspoken reciprocity basis - eg if you don't examine PhDs then you can't expect people to do the same for you. There is a strong element of game theory here. You could indulge (or an institution could demand that its staff indulge) in selfish behaviour. This might lead to gains for you, but only if others continue to be benevolent. If everyone opts for selfish behaviour then we get the familiar tragedy of the commons - the whole system becomes unsustainable because it would be foolish to be anything other than selfish.

When times are good, this tension is less evident. But when times are tough, and staffing levels low, then this tension comes to the fore - "you can't attend this committee meeting that you're now on, because you're in Cyprus giving a keynote? But you didn't attend the last one because you were in Edinburgh doing a PhD viva."  Or, "you're teaching load has doubled, John has retired, can you take on his PhD students as well?"

Maintaining an external profile is still important to the individual (indeed, when job security is low, it becomes an increased priority as you may find yourself looking for a new post). So, how to do it when there are competing demands on your time? There are obviously lots of negotiations and ways of stressing academic credibility, etc which will vary from person to person and institution to institution. But part of the answer is also to engage in open scholarship.

This came to mind as I struggled to manage my own workload the other day (yes, time to break out the violins). In doing my workload planning for the year it became apparent that I was (as all good footballers say) committed 150%. We pretended this wasn't the case to make the figures fit, but it means there is no slack in my diary, and that's before new things such as FutureLearn come along.

I currently turn down about an invitation a week to speak at various events because I've invariably got meetings for the various OU projects I'm leading on already in the diary (ramp up the violins). I managed to write a paper before Christmas but I'm struggling to produce another one. It is a good paper I think, but I need 3 to 4 days uninterrupted to write it and put the data into order. Traditional scholarship is just very time consuming. This is a good thing, it means the outputs are (hopefully) of a high quality. 

But you may get squeezed on this, and this is where open scholarship comes in. While I haven't managed to write my paper, I have managed to produce a couple of blog posts. I can do these in a lunch time, or on a Saturday morning when I'm trying to avoid watching James Martin misuse the word literally on Saturday Kitchen. MOOCs may play into this also, if your teaching load is increased, then making courses open at least gains some external profile (although, as I am learning, it does involve a lot more work too). The same might be true of presentations shared via YouTube or Slideshare. 

So, the question that is usually asked of open scholarship type activities is "how do you find the time for all this extra stuff?" We may be seeing this inversed - how do you find the time for the traditional stuff? 

Digital scholarship, tenure & barometers

I use this blog as well as our university repository system to keep track (and shamelessly publicise) those journal article things that your grandad told you about.

I have a new article out in RUSC (the open access journal from the University of Catalonia). It has the snappy title of "Digital scholarship and the tenure process as an indicator of change in universities". You can access the PDF here through our repository, or at RUSC here.

It's an extension of some of the stuff I covered in the book, and I'm making the argument that how universities respond to the challenge of recognising digital scholarship can be taken as a barometer for how well prepared they are for dealing with the complexities of operating in a digital, networked context. Here is a quote from the conclusions:

"Recognising and rewarding digital scholarship has a significance beyond the promotion of individuals. For universities, as they seek to manage change to a digital, networked society, it acts as a strong indicator and vehicle for change.

There are two main reasons for prioritising the recognition of digital scholarship. The first is the message it sends to individuals within the university. Because they operate in an open, digital, networked manner, digital scholars are often well known in their institution (for example, many of their colleagues will read their blogs). If a well-known digital scholar struggles to get their work recognised, then it sends a message to the rest of the university that this is not the type of activity that is likely to be rewarded, with a subsequent decline in its uptake. The reverse happens if that digital scholar is rewarded; it sends the positive message that academics should engage in this type of activity.

The second reason for recognising digital scholarship is to encourage institutional innovation. For example, universities are beginning to explore the use of Facebook to support students, or the use of blogs to disseminate research findings to the public, or new models of course development based on third-party content and crowdsourcing. There are very real benefits to the institution from these approaches, such as reaching new audiences, increasing the university profile without advertising, increasing student retention through improved peer support, lowering the costs of course production, developing new research methodology, etc. But it is difficult to realise any of these institutional approaches to new media if the university does not have a solid base of digital scholarship experience to draw upon. Having a range of digital scholarship experience amongst the faculty will be the key resource in realising the change required for many universities, and an appropriate reward and tenure process acts as a means of facilitating and encouraging this."

Blogging was the best decision

I have an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was asked to write a piece about the role of blogging in academic life. In many ways this is a tad quaint, blogging is hardly the new kid on the block (indeed it is now ripe for the X is dead meme). But maybe that's the point, it's been around long enough that we can assess its impact in real terms, and not just as the new shiny thing. My approach was to take blogging as a representative for new forms of scholarship, and how it had impacted upon my practice. 

There is nothing in it that will be a surprise to readers of this blog (it doesn't contain unusual cake recipes for instance), but it was quite nice to reflect on blogging from some position of maturity (by which I mean having been blogger for a few years now, not that I am mature, which of course, I'm not). The gist is probably in this paragraph:

In terms of intellectual fulfilment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap.

The role of respectable idiots

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/6846455366/>

I gave a talk at the Higher Education Academy 'New Places to Learn' seminar yesterday about openness and the institution. I was proposing that in order to facilitate openness you need a combination of a top-down and bottom-up process. So for example, OER projects such as OpenLearn, combined with creating the space for academics to generate and share their own content (eg by recognising digital artefacts in promotion).

One aspect I raised for creating the environment within which academics engage in openness of their own free will is the role of the 'respectable idiot'. This is a person who has a degree of respect within the institution as a 'proper' academic. This is crucial, they can't be someone who is seen as 'out there' and unlike other academics, as they'll just be dismissed as 'not like me anyway'. So they're respectable, but they're also prepared to engage in some of the experimentation and playfulness that exploring new media requires. This may mean messing around with video, or keeping a part-personal blog that doesn't use the academic voice, experimenting with format, etc. They're prepared to put a bit of their reputation on the line. The role of these people then is to act as bridges between the more radical experimenters and the main body of academia. By being respectable they demonstrate that this is a legitimate activity.

Perhaps immodestly, I think I'm a bit of a respectable idiot in the OU. And many of the people I like and follow on-line would fall into this category too. So, if you're looking for ways of encouraging uptake of new forms of scholarship in your institution, then you can do worse than finding and then shining a light on, your respectable idiots.

10 Digital Scholarship Lessons in 10 Videos

I've given a talk with this title 3 or 4 times recently, so thought I'd best get around to blogging it. In the presentation I caution that you shouldn't really trust people who give lessons about the future - they're usually trying to sell you something. But lessons is a nice way to frame it, so treat them more as opinions I've come to over the past couple of years.

Lesson 1: It's not just for geeks

It is easy sometimes to get bogged down in conversations about the latest technology, API calls, RSS feeds, linked-data, etc and it seems very technical. Sometimes this has the effect of making academics think 'it doesn't relate to me'. But we shouldn't let the geeky talk (which is necessary sometimes) cloud the fact that we are looking at changes to very fundamental scholarly practices.

Lesson 2: Researchers are in a dilemma

Researchers are caught between the potential of new approaches and operating within a conservative context. A range of studies have shown recently that researchers are often cautious in their use of new technology and rather risk adverse. 

Lesson 3: Interdisciplinarity is in the network

While many people point to the importance of interdisciplinary work, it is actually difficult and costly to realise. The 'light' connections we have and ease of republishing means that interdisciplinary results can be achieved easily with low cost.

Lesson 4: We're all broadcasters now

Broadcasting and large scale public engagement used to be the reserve of those on TV or radio. As I've argued before, scholars produce a lot of content, which with minimal effort can be converted into shareable, digital resources.

Lesson 5: We're operating in an attention economy

When content and connections are abundant, then we lose the monopoly on attention. I think playing the attention game doesn't come easily to academics and is viewed as somewhat beneath them. But nevertheless this is the environment the digital scholar operates in. It can be quite subtle things such as a good title, or using interesting images in a slideshare presentation, or making use of different media, posting at a favourable time of day, utilising the network, etc. But increasingly we are competing with an excess of demands on everyone's attention and merely assuming the quality of your research or teaching will win out may not be enough.

Lesson 6: We can rethink research

I covered this in an earlier post, but to reiterate, we are often operating within a mindset of how research is performed, funded and disseminated which doesn't take into account new possibilities.

Lesson 7: New skills will be required

I didn't want to produce a checklist of digital literacies, but the following are the types of skills that will be useful (but not essential to have all of them): video creation, site analytics, curation/filtering, writing for online, liveblogging/amplifying, data visualisation.

I would probably have an entirely different list next year, but just looking at this set you appreciate how few academics are really adept at most of them, and also how unrepresented they are in formal recognition systems. But nevertheless they will become increasingly significant I'd argue, for instance research councils will be looking for alternative means of disseminating research findings, or the use of analytics to inform teaching or research.

Lesson 8: It'll impact even if you ignore it

Here I replayed the network weather argument, using the academic conference as an example of a fundamental practice that is changing because of the impact of technology, regardless of whether you personally use them or not.

Lesson 9: It's about alternatives

I can't stress this one enough. It is tempting to portray it as a case of the old model dying, being replaced by the sexy new one, and hey, if you're not on the bus with the hipsters, you'll be swept away. But the real picture is much more subtle and complicated than that. It is not the case of existing practices being killed off, but rather of us having a richer set of alternatives to choose from. The monopoly of the incumbent forms may be killed off, but not necessarily the forms themselves. Peer-reviewed journals are a good example here - they're no longer the only game in the scholarly communication town, but they still have a role.

Lesson 10: Don't focus just on risk

According to Tversky and Kahneman, we are programmed to focus on risk, but not so good at seeing benefits. In his book from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton has this quote from James Boyle, which sums it up:

“We are very good at seeing the downsides and the dangers of open systems, open production systems, networks of openness. .. Those dangers are real… we are not so good at seeing the benefits and the converse holds true for the closed system.”

So people often think of all the bad things that might happen, for example if they post stuff online someone might pinch their ideas, or it might take time, or there may be issues around rights, etc. But they're not so good at imagining positive outcomes, such as it might connect you with more peers, lead to new forms of collaboration, improve citations, be a useful teaching tool, or just be fun.

I used a video to set off each lesson, so here is the slidedeck, with the videos removed but a link to each one. 

UPDATE: And if you want to see me doing it live, then here is the presentation with videos at LSE.

 

Ten lessons in digital scholarship

View more PowerPoint from Martin Weller

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.

 

 

Yeah, but who pays?

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.

Ten digital scholarship questions for researchers

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/elycefeliz/3262326159/>

In my talk the other day for the Change MOOC, and in my book, I argue that digital scholarship has the potential to alter the way we conduct research, or at least to add some new tools to the toolbox.

Now checklists should be treated with even more caution than a finding that 3D improves learning, so take this as some things to think about rather than a definite checklist you can submit to your research funder. I'd be interested to hear of other suggestions, and also whether this is all stuff people are doing anyway. My feeling is that when it comes to writing research proposals we're all locked into a set of existing behaviours, and more significantly, the process is so arduous that you focus on surviving the process itself and not on thinking beyond it. In other words if the research funders aren't asking for it, we don't consider it. But if we (and by we, I mean researchers) want to take ownership of our own practice, then maybe we should.

So here's my list of digital scholarship type stuff to consider for your project:

1. Do you have an open access publishing policy for the outputs of the project?
2. Will you make the data openly available, or is some of it not appropriate to do so? If so, where will you put it?
3. Will there be one main individual in charge of social media communication or is it just distributed across the group?
4. Will you have specific twitter/blog/youtube accounts for the project or do individuals in the project have a high online reputation it would be better to utilise?
5. How will you incorporate analytics into the project? Do you expect to get a certain number of views, dwell time, global distribution, etc on a main site?
6. What media will you use? For example, will you create a 'trailer' video for the project and an overview of the findings?
7. How will you archive discussion around the research, eg twitter hashtag conversations?
8. Will you provide a curation service, eg a Scoop-It page of relevant resources as you go along?
9. Are there new methodologies you will employ, eg crowdsourcing?
10. Is there a planned release for findings throughout the project? Will any aspects be not open for dissemination eg via twitter or blogs?

I'll stop there because ten is a nice number.