The Ed Techie

Openness has won - now what?

As we start the new year and survey the open education landscape, it's hard not to conclude that openness has prevailed. The victory may not be absolute, but the trend is all one way now - we'll never go back to closed systems in academia anymore than we will return to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Whether it's open access publishing, open data, MOOCs, OERs, open source or open scholarship - the openness battle has largely been won.

Time to rejoice! But, of course, it's never that simple. When it was simply open vs closed it was a clear distinction. Openness was good, closed was bad. As the victory bells sound though it doesn't take much examination to reveal that it has become a more complex picture now. This is completely natural (it's not a failing). I always used to wonder what happened after the credits rolled in big good vs evil films (where good had been triumphant naturally). In Star Wars, the Empire is destroyed, the Rebels have won! Now what? Well, my guess is you'd go back ten years later and find bickering amongst former allies, that trade wars had arisen, political struggles for power were in place and differences which had been set aside during the great struggle were now coming to the fore. The same with Lord of the Rings. You think the elves, dwarves, hobbits and humans were all still chums 20 years after Sauron had been defeated? Oh no.

In both cases things were better than the dark days, but they wouldn't be simple sweetness either. People (and aliens, and dwarves, and elves) have a tendency to find forms of conflict and disagreement. I apologise slightly for the military language in this post (war, battle, peace, etc), but in many ways that is my point - in the good old days of openness, it felt very much like a conflict - for example between open access publishing and commercial publishers. But that type of language no longer suits the world we are in.

So it is with openness. And that's okay, I know Gardner Campbell bemoaned "that's not what I meant at all", but we shouldn't view this as either an opportunity missed (we could have had the openness camelot!) or romanticise some brief period when it was all okay. The general direction is positive, but it just doesn't seem as noble or simple as it once did.

We replace open vs closed with a set of more complex, nuanced debates, which are, to be honest, a bit boring for many. For example:

• xMOOCs vs cMOOCs
• CC-By vs CC-NC
• Gold vs Green OA
• Self-hosted vs Third party services

But that's the nature of these things - after the grand struggle comes the hard work of the peace. This isn't sexy work, it's about drafting policies, agreements, processes. All of which consolidate the peace and move things forward. It's interesting that history teaches us that often the people who were the leaders and pioneers in the war, aren't the same people you need for the peace. I wonder if the same is true in ed tech?

 

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.

The issue of scale

Michael Feldstein has an interesting post on the issue of scale, inspired by Jim Groom's Open Ed keynote. Michael's post is very reflective and thoughtful and he admits he'd always sort of dismissed Jim and the edupunk stuff as interesting, but it doesn't scale, and scale was what he was concerned with. He concludes he was wrong to do so, and maybe Jim's approach does scale, but not in the conventional sense:

"But if we can create a world in which the average community college student asks her professors what their credentials are to teach their classes, then all else becomes possible in educational reform."

In his comments on the post Scott says:

"what I object to is an idea of “scaling” that works through what I call “massification,” e.g. find something that works and that either make that single instance bigger, or simply replicate that model holus bolus. I take this to be the industrial model of growth."

Now I work for an institution that has scale at its heart. It is all about delivering quality education at scale. I ran a course with 15,000 students on it. That's scale. And it isn't the kind of organic, network scale that Scott is talking about, it's the industrial type scale we traditionally think of. I've met plenty of OU students who will tell you enthusiastically that study with us has changed their lives (for the better). I occassionally bump into students who took my big course back in the early 2000s, and for whom it was a major event in changing the direction they took. So scale doesn't have to be dehumanising, it can still be designed with learners at the heart and every care taken to ensure that they have a personal, well structured learning experience. And delivering that at scale helps lots of people.

But the type of scale we're looking at with Jim, and which Scott refers to, is different. We've always known that an exciting lecturer will enthuse students, there's nothing new in  personality being a factor. But we do see a form of scaling when this is done online and in the open, which is new. In this TED talk Chris Anderson highlights the power of video to accelerate innovation:

I think his ingredients of a crowd, light and desire apply to how work like Jim's scales. I have pondered before about what I could take away from DS106, and the answer is not 'be Jim', but it might be 'have greater student involvement'.

Are the two forms of scale at odds? I don't think so, and I would urge Michael to keep worrying about scale - my experience is that it can work and when it does it has a real impact on people's lives. That's not something to be sniffed at. But the new form of scaling is significant too. Maybe through the former we encourage people to participate in the latter, and maybe the latter provides means of making the former more engaging and responsive. 

And the other thing I know about scale is this - it doesn't always matter. Sometimes you do something on a small course for example, which would never scale. But that's okay, it doesn't have to - it just works here and now.

Open as in... doors, arms, ended?

With a fanfare and much waving of pompoms, I can announce that the open access version of my book is now online, via the good people at Bloomsbury Academic. It is available online in plain HTML format, broken down by chapters. I'm excited about this because now I can point people at it and pass it around freely. 

A couple of people have requested other formats, eg epub, pdf, etc. I could do these, but my feeling is that what's significant is the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence. If anyone wants to take the HTML version and create an Egyptian hieroglyphics version delivered via 1988 version of HyperCard - well, they can.

In open source communities they often make the distinction of free as in free speech (meaning that you have freedom to alter the code), and free as in beer (meaning gratis, zero cost). This set me thinking - I wonder what the open in open access means: 

• open as in arms - it is welcoming, friendly even, particularly given the network around it (eg you can twitter me and tell me it's rubbish), it is not a product in a vacuum.
• open as in doors - you are invited in, like an open door policy to look around
• open as in ended - this is not to say I have an ongoing commitment to update it, but that the possibilities of the licence allow it to be open ended in terms of format

One I'm not sure about is whether it is open as in minded - it is not a co-constructed text, a wiki-book, it is still a one to many broadcast model. Which is appropriate sometimes, I want to hear what, say Clay Shirky, has to say on a subject, not 10,000 people around him, but I wonder if there is more that can be done around the open-minded angle.

On that note I am running a week of the Siemens/Downes/Cormier MOOC extravaganza, starting 26th September, and I'll be using my book as the basis. So maybe this is a way of being open-minded, constructing a course, or event, around the open access version so it can be discussed and interpreted.To this end I would like people to vote on the topics we'll cover in the week - choose three from this list.  Anyway, I hope you can join in the course, or failing that, get a chance to check out the OA version of the book.

Meanwhile here is Elbow singing Open Arms, which I think is all about open access publishing...

 

What can I take away from DS106?

I think we can say that Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course has been very successful in generating an online buzz, and as a model of what you can do with an open, online course. The development of DS106Radio has been something to behold as it has taken on a life of its own. As D'Arcy has commented most of the technology for this has been around for a while, but it all seemed to coalesce into something quite magical. Jim has some thoughts on DS106 radio here, arguing that it "provides is a model for yet another platform for sharing, creating, and trying to foster conversation."

I've been thinking about DS106 recently because I'm part of George Siemens' MOOC later this year, and I'm scheduled to rewrite some of the OU's Masters in Online Education soon, so I've been thinking what can I learn from it.

I'm reading Bolano's 2666 at the moment, and Jonathan Lehman's NYT review claims that it is "a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form". If it's not too pretentious to say so, I'd suggest the same is true for DS106 and the online course.

It's important to realise what isn't transferable (or readily transferable anyway). I'm not Jim (you'll have noticed), and part of the success of the course is centred around Jim's own personality. There would be something very sad in educators pretending to be Jim in order to recapture the same sort of atmosphere. But in this there is the first lesson, which is that some element of the educator's personality in an online course is both possible and desirable. Social media tends to work precisely when there is that element on personal mix, and to strip that out makes it a less engaging experience. This may be difficult to implement in the OU distance education setting which has always worked hard in its written material to remove the individual and to strive for a neutral tone. 

Another element that may not transfer well is the use of radio. Again this has been partly driven by Jim's personality, plus the amazing contribution of people such as Grant Potter. I would hazard that if I attempted it, the airwaves would remain silent, because the audience for my Masters course is quite different. Plus I would never get it through the OU's course approval process because of copyright issues. But as with the point above, it is not the surface element that is important, but rather, what it demonstrates. In this case the radio and the course as a whole shows that, given the right platform, students can be real co-creators of the course as a whole and of great content.

My third element is that of experimentation. I worry that as students pay more for their study, they will become increasingly conservative, as will institutions.  DS106 demonstrates that you can still experiment, as long as you frame it for students, and that the experience students get as a result of that can be far richer than a carefully controlled course design process. Who knows, it may even be fun.

Lastly, the course highlights the benefits of openness. For the on campus students they get access to a wider range of learners and a broader experience than they would otherwise. Jim gets people who help with technical issues (such as Grant), and suggest activities and assignments (such as Tom Woodward). And Jim's institution, University of Mary Washington, gets some good publicity and reputation for free. Openness is therefore an effective and efficient approach for all concerned.

So, although I doubt I'll be in a position to do anything as radical as DS106, by looking beyond the immediate elements, there is more that is transferrable from it into everyday practice than you might think.

 

What is the learner responsibility in open education?

I gave a presentation for George Siemens last night as part of CCK11 on, you've guessed it, digital scholarship. It was a bit rambling, but generally well received. I noticed a couple of comments on Twitter along the lines of 'how does this relate to the course content?'

Having done a few such sessions this isn't the first time I've seen such queries. I don't mean to dismiss these, I think they raise an interesting issue for open education.  

Firstly, if a student is getting a course for free do they demand the same type of QA as one they've paid for? I really mean this, if MOOCs are serious then maybe they need to be offering the same quality levels of traditional courses. On the other hand, I haven't been following CCK, I'm willing to do a free presentation, but if I have to link it to course objectives, then I'm less likely to do so.

Secondly, in an open, connected world of abundant content, perhaps the key skill is to learn how to make the connections between a wide range of free content and core principles. This is also a reflection on the changing nature of the educator - the role of the 'lecturer' is not to deliver the content but to find it, structure it and help interpret it.

Lastly, I wonder if, even in this more advanced set of learners, it demonstrates that old learning habits die hard. We are accustomed to signing up for a course, and whether it's free or not, being directed through it very explicitly. If so, then the applicability of the MOOC to all subject areas and levels may be rather limited. Which brings me onto my bigger point - if you are signing up to a MOOC as a learner is there some implicit contract you are agreeing to?

Out of the total numbers of educators there are very few who have run an open course, (I can think of 10 maybe), and there is a slightly larger number of people who have presented on them, but still not many - in my university there are probably only a handful of us. So it's worth sharing our experiences of them as we go, as I expect it will become more common. Generally I like doing them. I think the open aspect means I can explore ideas, and use these sessions as a bit of a test-bed. After all, I'm doing it for free, so I may as well get something from it. I've developed ideas from these sessions and particularly the feedback you get into published work. They also help connect you with good people, and expand your network. The sessions are usually more interactive and encouraging than face to face ones I find. And, perhaps most importantly, I can do them from my home, while having a glass of beer (shhh, don't tell anyone).

So I'd encourage people to have a go at them, but participants should also be aware that these sessions aren't devised specifically for the course in question.

It's all about me

A quick round-up of some open stuff I'm doing.

Firstly, a special edition of RUSC, edited by George Siemens and myself is available, which focuses on social networks in education. There is an intro from George and me, and then some articles that are actually worth reading (unless you speak Spanish, you'll need to change the language to English in the box over on the right).

That Siemens character works you hard once you're in his network, so on Wednesday 26th Jan, I'm giving a talk on digital scholarship as part of his CCK11 course, at 7.30pm UK time. It'll be in Elluminate.

Lastly, if you want to listen to two middle-aged men reminisce about their youth and in particular, 80s b-movies and their love of VHS, then Jim Groom and I plan to do a LIVE internet radio show for ds106 next Thursday 3rd Feb at 9pm UK time. Details to follow (ie once Grant tells us how to do it). Expect rambling, incoherence, maybe a little swearing and the word 'remember' to feature strongly. After the rabid success of ds106 radio, someone has to try the live stuff, and it's better to start with someone who has no reputation to lose.

Just in passing - none of these are done in work time or form part of my official work plan. Interesting, probably.

A Man/Me/Then Jim - digital storytelling

Like Alan Levine I have signed up for open courses but never completed them (I too am an OCDU (Open Course Drop Out)). This raises some issues for open education in itself - motivation to complete is not just about interest but also about pressure. If you have paid for a course then your commitment to it is higher, or if you've told everyone you're doing something it's harder to drop out.

But I'm willing to try again, particularly for something as innovative as Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course ds106. I have a meta interest in this beyond the content (which I think will be great fun), and that is to see how a course which aggregates content from participants in the cloud feels and works. 

Already you can see that the open nature of the course has led to participants suggesting ways in which it can operate, or possible activities. This is partly a result of Jim having a good network who want to work with him, but also because the boundaries of the course are not fixed.

The course starts in January, but as a pre-course activity we were asked to create an animated gif of a favourite film which captures the essence of it. In an attempt to export some culture and sophistication to these rowdies, I created the following gif from Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique. I cheated and used the online service GifSoup (warning, lots of the Gifs on the home page appear a bit 'adult'). I haven't seen this film for years, but I remember the brewing tea scene. It could be because it's contemplative, beautiful and about silence. Or it could be because I like tea.

GIFSoup

PS - blog title is from this Rilo Kiley song.

 

A failure of ownership

In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are three examples of this in action:

1. VLEs - the central role of elearning was underestimated by many and so we looked for simple solutions. The commercial VLEs offered this, but our return was an attempt by Blackboard to patent the very idea of elearning, and of increasingly costly contracts. Because the VLE became so embedded in institutional systems it became almost impossible to overthrow once it was in place.
2. Tenure, assessment and publications - as I've mentioned in an earlier post, the complexity of measuring excellence in different fields was outsourced to the peer-review process. This placed publishers in a central position in academia, since they controlled the routes to career progression. Related to this was the manner in which scholars bowed to governmental pressures for assessment exercises which sought to quantify the quality of research. This reinforced the publishers' position since their journals were linked directly to institutional funding.
3. Publication - many professional societies and university presses handed over their publications to for-profit publishing firms, effectively outsourcing the process, the proceeds of which they would then have to buy back. As Edwards and Shulenberger suggest the relationship with publishers operated successfully when it was seen as a fair exchange, a ‘gift economy’, but, they claim “beginning in the late 1960s and early '70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity.” In Clarke's analysis of publishing costs he reports that an ejournal article published by a for-profit costs around $3400 whereas one published by a non-profit professional society costs around $730. The difference is largely because of the expensive software the commercial publisher has developed to maintain their competitive advantage and "their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection." None of these seem to me to be related to scholarship.

George Siemens has argued that we should take ownership of the open education debate before it is too late, and given the above history, I would say he is right. The message I take away from the above is that we allowed this to happen because we failed to engage with the required technology. Large scale open source projects could have (and in cases such as OJS and Moodle have been successful) solved many of these problems and the overall cost to universities would have been much less than being at the mercy of commercial companies for whom scholarship is not their primary interest. The type of resistance we saw, for example, to the very concept of elearning, often on the grounds of commercialisation of education, did not prevent it, and in many ways played directly into their hands. Far better is to take the attitude of inventing your own future.

I'm not against commercial partnerships in education, for instance many of the free services I like to promote seem to me better for being not developed in education (eg Flickr), but we should be aware of what it is we are handing over. As we face the question of 'what do we do about web 2.0/cloud computing/social media?' then a full understanding of what it can do is essential, and simply handing over the problem to someone else will not serve us well.

The strange case of the unconnected conference

(An unexpected appearance by the Two Ronnies went some way to alleviate frustration about the lack of wifi at OpenEd 2010 - Richard Hall and Joss Winn in full flow).

I was at the Open Ed 2010 conference last week. First off, I want to say that it was great to finally meet Brian Lamb and I really enjoyed presentations from Richard Hall, David Wiley, Erik Duval, Joss Winn and others. So this post is not a comment on the quality of the conference or the discussions I had there.

The conference was held in the science museum CosmoCaixa. This is a great museum and my daughter loved it. It is, sadly, not a great conference venue. Although they had wifi in every room which you could connect to, the bandwidth coming into the museum was so low that in reality no-one could get online (I had visions of a 14K modem in an office somewhere which then got fed into all these lecture halls with great AV facilities and their own routers).

This made me reflect on how connectivity, and the amplified conference has become the norm for me. Being unable to connect had a serious impact on the nature of the conference I think, in the following ways:

1. Loss of archive -  It couldn’t be streamed, or tweeted, or live-blogged, so the more holistic, distributed record of a conference that has become the norm was lost.
2. No backchannel – within the conference itself not being able to chat with other participants and share thoughts meant some of the immediate conversation around a presentation was lost.
3. Stunted presentations – many presenters wanted to at least demonstrate a site. I foolishly wanted to play some YouTube vids (although thankfully an Ethernet connection had been found for presenters by the time I came to present which gave some limited access). Being unable to do so made it seem like we had been sucked into a conference in 1995.
4. No wider participation – at least with those present you could have conversations over coffee, but I am also accustomed to have dialogue with those in my network who aren’t present. There were many time I would have tweeted during a talk and I know I would have had a response from someone in my network who wasn’t present.
5. No amplification – if one of the measures of success for a conference is its impact in its field then to lose connectivity for its duration results in it effectively being isolated. Not to be able to amplify the content and discussion at a conference to a global network severely restricts its significance.

Before someone jumps in and says ‘perhaps you should try talking to the person next to you’, yes I did plenty of that. I’m capable of doing both. And I think there is increasing value in hosting ‘disconnect’ events, where you deliberately don’t have access, such as writing retreats. But these types of events are geared up for this and it’s what you sign up for. What the experience here brought home to me is that amplification is not an interesting extra or a techie nice-to-have – it’s essential.