The Ed Techie

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

The Nessman Cometh

It comes to pass...

Scott Leslie is coming to stay at the OU for a month under an OLNet fellowship. Scott is one of my long time blog/Twitter chums and his blog was one of the very first I started reading back when we used to say 'blog is short for weblog'.

As I commented in an earlier post, I don't view online friendships as f2f ones waiting to happen, but even so it'll be great to finally meet.

So this is just to ask three sets of people if they fancy a meet-up with Scott while he's here:
OU people- I'll try and get Scott to give a talk, but informal chats would be goodyoo so let me know if you fancy an edtech coffee.
Cardiff social media/bloggers - Scitt wil probably come down for a weekend so maybe we can arrange a meet-up.
UK edubloggers - wonder if we could organise something?

Let me know in the comments, we need to show these Canadians what they're missing.

The future of ed - my contribution

George Siemens and Dave Cormier are running an open course on the Future of Education. They have asked for contributions on this topic, so my musical slideshare is below. As well as the various angles you might expect, I think the answer is the presentation itself - when you think about why have I created a presentation for two people I have never met, on a course I won't teach on? The answers are because it's easy, because I have a social connection, and because I think it's fun (and there's probably a bit of ego in there too). And as I say at the end, that we can do this is kind of amazing isn't it?

So here is my contribution, I'm sure they'd like yours too:

Future of Education

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

Is public engagement an old media concept?

"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert..."

The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought.

In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave a good answer, saying that she is a Classicist, she usually speaks to a hundred or so people, if she can make a programme that reaches thousands, then that's a win, and she'd 'worry about their postcodes' later. Which is I think the right attitude, no matter what you do, not everyone is going to be interested in classical history. Tristram Hunt used a quote from Bush's presidential campaign, that of 'the soft bigotry of low expectations', in this context to suggest that we dumb down or transform content to meet a middle class perception of the needs of others, only succeeding in patronising them.

But what all of this set me thinking was that the whole concept of 'public engagement' seems very rooted in traditional media. It has as its assumption a control of what is 'put out there' and thus a need to ensure that it meets the needs of the public. Public engagement becomes an issue because of economics - it costs lots of money to make traditional broadcast and so you have to a) demonstrate value for money by engaging 'the public' and b) need to meet as many different audiences with the same piece of content as possible.

If we switch to a new media (I know,I know - when will it stop being new?), then these two restrictions disappear, or diminish anyway. This is particularly true if we adopt a 'low friction' model of production from academic activity - we make slidecasts of talks, video interviews, lectures, podcasts, blog posts and put papers up online. Any one piece of output is not likely to engage all of the public, but some will, and they will engage small, interested groups. 

This is classic Long Tail distribution - lots of content, each piece of which appeals to only a few individuals, but the cumulative effect is that of engagement. And academic work produces lots of content - it can almost be seen as a Long Tail content production system. This view may also remove some of the tensions in the academic - broadcast relationship: there is no requirement to appeal to a mass audience.

There will undoubtedly still be a place for academics who are good on TV and radio, but this provides an alternative view of public engagement. If we were to think of how you could get better public engagement around this type of content then the focus would shift - it might not be about content but about tools, or promotion, or community.  

Those OER issues

The final session of the Fiji workshop was an organized debate between two teams, one taking the pro-OER case and the other the anti one. I led the anti- team with Frank Rennie leading the pro case. I ought to say that I was asked to do this, I’m not an anti-OER person.

I think most of the argument I’m going to put have been said elsewhere, so there’s nothing particularly new in this post for people who follow the OER movement, but having been through the process of collating the arguments, I thought I’d put them here too.

So my main arguments were:

• Sustainability – this is the daddy of all the arguments, with Big OER projects costing substantial amounts of money, there is a real issue around whether we can afford to continue to do OER, or at least in the way it is realised currently.
• Lack of reuse – I just borrowed from David Wiley on this one.
• Reuse is hard – going back to my previous post about adaptation, and building on the experience of the partners in this project, it seems that taking an existing OER and adapting it to your context is actually really hard work. Often it saves little time and requires a different skill set than simply creating your own from scratch.
• Individual/institutional resistance – this isn’t really an argument, but just pointing out that there is a lot of work to be done to overcome resistance from institutions and individuals to sharing. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it, but we shouldn’t underestimate the effort required also.
• Leave it to others – or put another way ‘education ain’t no good at this stuff’. To demonstrate my point I pulled up traffic data comparing Slideshare to MIT’s open courseware and the OU’s openlearn, and even worse, Wikipedia compared to these two. Traffic may not equal quality learning, but my argument here was that while education ponders different ways of doing this, comes up with repositories that take years to get built and develops complex usage and metadata processes, other people just get on with it.
• Lack of evidence – we simply don’t know if OERs are useful pedagogically (we’ve got lots of anecdotal evidence). What is the return on investment here? Sure some people find them useful but then so would flying out individual educators out to each of those people to give one to one tuition, but we wouldn’t argue that is sustainable.
• Cultural imperialism? – I borrowed from Dave Cormier on this one. As he puts it: "If the MIT edtech curriculum started being the default curriculum taught in even 10% of chinese universities this gives whatever professor is teaching that course ENORMOUS control over the direction of the industry"
• Quality/Depth – I don’t really buy this argument but I thought I should include it, that there may not be the depth or range of coverage.
• Learn through creation – this one came from some people on my twitter network when I said I was looking for anti-OER arguments, and I think it’s quite a subtle one. If adaptation is difficult then there may be a tendency to use OERs ‘as is’, and I think there is some initial evidence that supports this is the main use. For the educator much of the learning, both about the subject and how to teach it, comes from the process of creation. It is the old adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. If people begin simply taking existing OERs will there be a process of deskilling, dumbing down or simply not progressing?

None of these are deal breakers for OER, and we can see all of them as the type of issues that arise in a new discipline. Our debate also ended up being focused around a technicality, as to what constituted an OER. I limited it to the big, formal OER projects as these were easier to attack, and I could make the arguments about sustainability and education projects not being the best way to move this forward. But if by OER we really mean 'shareable assets' then a lot of these arguments become weaker.

As I said I don’t necessarily buy all these arguments and could put some pretty good counter claims to them myself, but for those of us in and around the OER world they're worth addressing. The worrying thing is that my team put our case so convincingly, we won the debate. And I didn't really want to...

Aggregation not adaptation

Tony Bates gave a keynote at the Fijian workshop I was at. It was, as always, good value as he covered changes in technology and their implications. I was in broad agreement with him but one element had me questioning him afterwards.

He repeatedly stated that if he were doing this presentation as a set of OERs he would chunk it up, stop at certain points and introduce a learning activity. He’d set it out with learning objectives at the start. In his advice he suggested that educators shouldn’t do it themselves (‘you’ll get hurt’, he joked) and should seek support from instructional designers and technical staff.

These two things seemed wrapped up in a particular view of OERs to me. In my question I argued that his don’t do it yourself advice rather precluded a bottom-up approach to OER generation, which was in my view, the best way to go. He gave a robust defence, arguing that we need both, but to maintain quality people should seek help and support.

Reflecting on this made me appreciate that I have come to a particular view around OERs, without really stating it. There is some of it in my Little OER and big OER post, but for clarity (and for you to knock down), it goes something like this. I like OERs that:

• are not explicit learning content – they do not have to be generated with the aim of being used for learning;
• do not specify the learning that will occur – I like Zittrain’s concept of generativity, that a system will have unpredicted outputs when you allow a level of creativity. I want a ‘system’ that is generative with respect to learning, and thus specifying learning outcomes or activities restricts this;
• are easily aggregated into a pathway or framework which is created by the educator. This is where I see the educator coming into the system, they pull together many different resources, and add context, activities, extra material and interpretation.

One question then is ‘are these OERs at all then, or just ‘stuff on the web’?’ I’m not going to answer that on the grounds that it sounds like the interminable ‘what is a learning object?’ debate that I gave too much of my life to a few years back.

This seems to me another possible interpretation of the principle I suggested in another post that ‘complexity resides in the network, not the application’ (I repeat this to myself twenty times every morning as a mantra). The reason I felt uncomfortable with Tony Bates’ approach was that it was pushing that complexity back in to the app (or the resource).

An upshot of all this is that I think the emphasis in much of the OER movement is on the adaptation of OERs. This is because they are Big OER, with the complexity built in to them. The Little OERs I prefer aren’t adapted, they’re aggregated, and you add stuff around them. If I was ‘World OER Leader’, then shifting the emphasis to aggregation would be my first and only decision, before I resigned and let David Wiley do the job because he’d be better at it.

Violinists and OERs

This is the first in a trio of OER related posts. I’m in Fiji currently, for the final meeting of the Sidecap project which has been looking at OER use in developing countries/regions (specifically in this project, Mauritius, West Indies and South Pacific).

I’m sure many of you will know this story, it's the kind of thing that gets passed around on email, but it was new to me (I checked and it’s true, not an urban myth). This is the common account, from Hoax Slayer:

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written,with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

It’s usually taken to demonstrate that we don’t stop and appreciate what is around us, and in our busy lives we can pass by things of beauty and value. But I’m going to interpret it from an OER perspective.

It has two lessons here: the first is that people don’t value free things, or are suspicious of free. We have become accustomed to roughly equating monetary price with value or quality. Free is therefore obviously low quality or suspicious at least. My colleague Patrick McAndrew has related how many people are dubious or uncertain when they encounter openlearn. Their concern is that it isn’t free, that they can’t ‘just take it’, and often need a lot of reassurance that this indeed the case. So the violinist’s story reinforces the message that getting people to value free is still an issue.

The second lesson is about context. When they hear this story many people are critical of the commuters who passed him by, declaring that they would have stopped and listened, or it’s an American thing (or a Washington thing). I’m pretty sure I would have walked by also. Why? Because I’m in an underground station, which is an unpleasant place to be, I want to get out of it as fast as possible; Because I’m probably on my way somewhere and I like to be punctual; Because I’m not expecting to encounter classical music there and so have a different mindset in place; etc.

If we transport the scenario to the lunchtime and he is playing in the sunshine in the park, then my guess is that the outcome would have been different. The stunt was set up by The Washington Post, and they obviously wanted the outcome they got, so chose the conditions least likely to favour people stopping. From an OER perspective context is highly significant – the context of the learner when they encounter the OER. For example if it is being pushed in their face when they’re trying to do something else online, then they’ll ignore it, as commuters ignored the violinist because it interfered with their primary task. If you catch them at a more leisurely online time, or when they are actively seeking learning, then the reaction will be different. This would suggest that ‘build it and they will come’ is not sufficient alone as a strategy – this is equivalent to the violinist playing the concert hall. Sure it may be full but you will only reach certain people. Going out to learners in the right spaces and the right times is the key, and like our violinist, I’m not sure I have the answer to that one.

My final offer is this: nothing

 

Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image.

Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative.

And this is the problem for any online commodity - there is always a free alternative available. It may not be as good, but it'll do. I apply the same approach to articles and referencing - if I have to pay to access your article, I'll find an alternative which says more or less the same thing, and which I can access freely.

The question for anyone wishing to charge for an online product then is this "are there free alternatives available". If the answer is yes, then forget charging.

In this respect I was reminded of Michael Corleone in The Godfather 2. Senator Pat Geary is attempting to extract a bribe from him and Micheal responds:

"You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing"

Corleone has violence and intimidation to back up his offer of nothing - we have abundance of alternatives. I'm not arguing whether this is morally correct, maybe we should pay, but the point is about behaviour.

Big OER and Little OER

I am in Eskisehir, Turkey currently for the final meeting of the Edushare project. This has partners from Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia and the Maldives. Two weeks ago I was in Jamaica for a meeting of the Sidecap project, which has partners from Mauritius, Fiji and the West Indies. I took over both of these projects when Robin Mason sadly passed away earlier this year. They both came from EU funding and are both looking at the use of OERs in higher education in what we might call 'developing' (though I'm not keen on the term) countries.

Several things have struck me during these meetings, which I thought I'd share. Many of these are blindingly obvious, but it's when you put them together that the case for OERs becomes strong.

1. The context within which higher education operates varies enormously. Many of these universities are operating across huge geographical areas for instance, but also factors such as internet access will vary from 7% of the population in one place to nearly 80% elsewhere. The demographics will vary, and when you add in political factors such as different governments or regions attitude towards education, it becomes very difficult to make many of the general assumptions we use in higher ed.
2. The financial crisis has hit education very hard in many of these countries. One person told me their funding was 40% of what they had last year. That doesn't leave much room for experimentation with curriculum or technology.
3. The issue of sustaining and developing local communities is becoming increasingly important. If you don't want all your smart people to disappear to get educated elsewhere, then you have to offer them decent education in their home location. Many people would like to stay, but feel they can't and thus the brain drain continues meaning the poorer areas lose the very people who might help them improve.

These three factors have made me rethink my feelings towards OERs. Obviously I was all for OERs from an idealistic perspective, but I was beginning to wonder if the institutional approach of MIT, the OU, etc wasn't a bit, well, learning objects. It is well-intentioned, it is professional, it is academic. It's also a bit dull, not very reusable, doesn't lend itself well to all the tools we like, and is a bit worthy. In short, it wasn't the sort of reusable 'learning' (or any) resource I tend to use every day - such as YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, etc.

But, I've come to appreciate the value of university generated OERs, because they help address the three factors I set out above and also because they have one crucial advantage over the sort of user-generated, web 2.0 resource listed previously, namely status. Status is important in many countries (all?) and many partners reported resistance to the use of OERs because the academics felt that using a YouTube clip (or whatever) wouldn't be seen as proper academic material (by themselves, colleagues or students). But using OERs from internationally recognised universities where the status is not in doubt removes some of this anxiety. It also legitimises the concept of reuse and raises the status of 'free stuff'. More than one partner commented that there was a perception that if content was free, it couldn't be of good quality.

So, given the three factors outlined above it may be that OERs are the only way many countries can realise a sustainable higher education system that meets the needs of their population. And given the status issue, university-generated OERs are a major part in this.

In a response to my pedagogy of abundance talk Michelle Hoyle raised the issue about the cost of OERs, and used the term 'big and little OERs', which I think is a useful distinction (or you might prefer to think of them as top-down and bottom-up OERs).

Big OERs are institutionally generated ones that come through projects such as openlearn. Advantages = high reputation, good teaching quality, little reversioning required, easily located. Disadvantages = expensive, often not web native, reuse limited

Little OERs are the individually produced, low cost resources that those of us who mess about with blogs like to produce. Advantages = cheap, web (2) native, easily remixed and reused. Disadvantages = lowish production quality, reputation can be more difficult to ascertain, more difficult to locate.

A mixture of the two then is complementary and viable I would argue.

Universities as copyright warriors

mollyali http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollyali/3101921963/>

To follow up on my last past and clarify a few points.

I wasn't arguing that universities should ignore copyright because they think they're special, or that they should advocate wholesale piracy. Rather it was that universities are in a privileged position. They can fight on behalf of the general populace.

In oppressive regimes it is often universities who form the opposition. They are the harbour for free thought and legitimate protest. It is the students and academics who fight on behalf of higher ideals. Copyright and the large organisations who seek to enforce it can be seen as the oppressive regime of the creative net. So in a digital society, the role of the university should be to take a stand against this form of tyranny.

As an academic, particularly one at the Open University, I need never worry about copyright. I am lucky - there is an excellent rights department who will negotiate on my behalf, chase up rights, manage complicated clearance, and so on. It isn't that these people the world over aren't doing a good job -  it's they're doing too good a job. They are playing the copyright game which is perpetuating control.

So here is what I'm not saying: We can break any copyright we like and say 'it's okay we're educators.' I am not suggesting universities should encourage piracy, but they should be doing everything they can to encourage new forms of expression, creativity and communication. Also I think creators should be rewarded for their work - but let's be clear, rights are owned by large companies who buy them up purely as a revenue stream. This has little to do with rewarding the artists. See my last point below on how we might legitimately reward artists while still encouraging remixing.

Here's what I am saying: Universities can take a stand at an institutional and professional level to help change the landscape. They are in a unique position to do so as they both create content and perform the social good of education. They possess both a stick and carrot.

Now individuals can take a stance but it is at the institutional level that change really happens. This is what the Cape Town Declaration was trying to achieve. Here are some actions they could take, ranging from the relatively mundane to the revolutionary:

• Promote open publishing - academics should be encouraged to work on, and publish in open journals, or open forms of publishing
• Recognise open work - the promotions and rewards criteria should explicitly reward 'open' work by academics 
• Release archive content - the Open University is different from many universities in that it has a large archive of broadcast material. It is working hard to a) digitise this and b) get rights clearance. The latter is a nightmare - any use of music, anytime a third party image or clip is used, or someone is interviewed we have to get clearance all over again, because the initial clearance didn't include open, online release. A very brave move by the OU (and even better, the BBC) would be just to release all this material and effectively put down the challenge 'we think releasing this for education is in the public interest, if rights owners want to challenge that then let's have this debate publicly'. While they may not have the same type of archive, many universities will have an archive of sorts. Releasing this content will force the copyright issue.
• Use open content as default - try and use open, freely accessible content. This will force rights owners to make their content available, otherwise it won't be seen. The suitability of content for its teaching purpose is the priority, but the starting point should be to use open content.
• Legitimise the mashup - by making remixing and the mashup a form of output that is recognised in assessment, universities will go a long way to making it a legitimate form of expression, and thus pushing the rights issue further.
• Make creative commons a default - open licences such as creative commons should be the default mode of operation for all universities in terms of academic output, and student material. There will be exceptions (eg research with a commercial or sensitive nature), but this is about changing the default settings.
• Use material we find online (eg YouTube clips) and not worry about clearance - playing the 'has every second of this clip been rights cleared, otherwise we can't use it' game undermines the value of the remix, and plays into the hands of rights owners.
• Teach and encourage attribution and reference - one of the cornerstones of academia is correct attribution. In the video below Lessing talks about extremism on both sides of the rights debate. As well as fighting against the oppression by rights, universities have a role in education on the other side. Making attribution a core skill we recognise is one way of doing this.
• Developing new models - it seems to me that we have a rather blanket response from rights owners. If we want people to respect rights at all then we have to make it easy for them. Negotiating for rights clearance with a large multinational is not going to work for an individual. But, if there was a simple 'pay to use' scheme then a lot (not all, but enough) of people would use it. For example, when I wanted to use 'Anarchy in the UK' for my edupunk video, I'm not going to track down clearance, but if there was an iTunes type rights use store, and it was a set, iTunes type price (got to be less than £1), then I'd use it. Universities could surely help in developing a responsible model such as this.

Here is Lessig, making most of these points much better at TED (via Mark Morley):