The Ed Techie

Online conferences & the legitimacy deficit

(Wordle of OU Conference - we asked participants to give us 3 words describing it) 

In the second post following up on the OU online conference, I want to explore some issues around perceptions of online conferences. The feedback from the conference thus far has been almost entirely positive (I'll blog the questionnaire results later), but I have also picked up a couple of issues which I think are worth pulling out.

It strikes me that in some ways online conferences are in a similar position to distance learning 40 years ago, or elearning 10 years ago. They have a legitimacy deficit to some, and thus have to work extra hard to overcome it. When something is new there is an understandable tendency to take that instance as representative of the whole, in a way one never does with accepted norms. Thus if you have never met someone from a particular country people will often take the first person they meet to be representative of that nation. And yet they wouldn't expect any random person off the street to be representative of their own country. So when you are pioneering in something you have this representative burden, which I think we just have to accept, but it underlies some of the points below.

Online conferencing doesn't separate from daily tasks sufficiently - this is also one of its strengths of course, in that you can attend, when if you had to give up two or three days you may not. But a few people commented that either they weren't allowed to prioritise virtual attendance over other work, or that if they were in the office, then people assume they are interruptible. If you attend a face to face conference the physical separation immediately performs this function. I did think this was just one of those things we'll get better at, and learn ways of coping, but maybe not - the physical will always trump the virtual for attention.

Online doesn't command as much attention - on a related note, although attendance was about the same as the physical event held the previous year, I might have expected it to be higher. When you have a physical conference on campus you can't help but notice it is going on - there are signs, catering, people looking lost. A virtual conference, despite all the communications you might deploy, loses some of these cues.

Commitment to online is lower - when you are travelling to a physical conference you need to make some preparations: accommodation, transport, child care cover, etc. The beauty of an online conference is that you don't need to do all this (and thus people attend who couldn't normally). But it also means it doesn't foreground in your attention until the day. We had some people with connection problems, which was easily fixed, but because it happened on the day it was too late and they gave up. We had sent out instructions about checking the connection prior to the conference, which might be seen as the equivalent of booking your accommodation, but it doesn't register in the same way as making physical arrangements.

The camelot comparison - when being compared against an existing practice, there is a tendency sometimes to accentuate the positive elements of the entrenched practice. Not every face to face conference is a success. Not every speaker is engaging. Not every location wonderful. But the new version is often compared against the idealised version of this.

Unrealistic burdens - with new formats unrealistic demands are sometimes placed upon them which are never asked of the existing practice. An online conference doesn't need to be for everyone. Not every physical conference is meant to appeal to everyone. The whole conference format doesn't appeal to many people, but we don't hear from them, because they don't go to conferences. Some people will have a very strong preference for face to face only, which is fine. This is one way of doing conferences, it isn't trying to be the only way.

But to summarise, online conferences are different things to face to face conferences. They have different advantages, disadvantages, modes of operation, and interactions. Just as with elearning it is a mistake to only compare them with the existing practice, because it's what they do differently that's intriguing.

Some thoughts on open conference contributions

Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here.

 I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. 

To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have in the main sessions, and I'd need to think about how we get better engagement around them for any future conferences, because many of them are excellent. But what I wanted to do in this post was pull in a few of them and what thoughts they had given rise to. What is key in this is that the format really helps. It's almost like, erm, the medium is the message.

First up is something very simple, but it made me reflect on how important personal contact is. Heather Richardson, a tutor on the creative writing course, created a short hello video for her students and showed them around some of the course materials.

During the conference a number of people said how good it was when the speaker put up a photo of themselves, just so they could make that human connection. I think Heather's video is a good example of this. It is also important that it isn't a course team video, but that it comes from the tutor as this is the student's point of contact. I think it's also significant in that it isn't high quality video production - the implicit message in this video is that I'm one of you, and also, you could do this too. I'd like to see more tutors doing this sort of thing.

The second video is from Janet Haresnape which sets out an activity for demonstrating genetic drift in evolution. The audio quality isn't great, but I think it's a really good experiment. With a day's recording effort and input from one AV professional I reckon we'd have a useful learning resource that many others could use. And there must be many more examples like this around. What we need is for people like Janet to have a go at creating something and then the OU can pick some to add a bit more gloss to and you'd have more 'learning objects' than we ever got from learning object approaches.

In the next clip Jennefer Hart asks 'What is  design atelier?'. This is part of a research project, and what I like about this short movie is that it isn't telling you about the project but rather prompting you to think about it. One could imagine taking this to the next step and asking people to respond with a YouTube clip and then you'd have a nice playlist, which becomes a meaningful resource.

Creating adverts or promotional videos for courses is something we'll see more of (both Tony Hirst and Alec Couros have started doing really good ones). This one from Giselle Ferreira is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind.

And lastly, mainly to wind up AJ Cann, here is an excellent video about the Second Life activity for postgrad students:

Now I could have got all this from traditional papers, but I think asking for multimedia content had two key benefits for me: firstly it encouraged some people to produce content when they hadn't before; secondly seeing the content made me think about how the OU can use and generate digital artefacts in different ways.

I've only picked out a few contributions here to make some more general points, they're all worth looking at.

The ups & downs of embracing unpredictability

In a recent presentation I argued that producing low cost content as a by-product allowed institutions to embrace unpredictability, in a way they can't do when spending large sums of money on content. If you are spending a decent amount of money you need a project, with identified target customers, objectives, key performance indicators, a budget, lines of responsibility, etc. But a lot of the fun stuff online happens unpredictably. The makers of Downfall didn't intend for it to be an internet meme  after all (and then blew their chance when it became one). As John Naughton puts it the net is "a global machine for springing surprises".

In a small way I had an example last week, which will be familiar to many bloggers. I wrote a post about peer review, the essence of which was to say I would no longer review for closed journals. I knocked it out fairly quickly, in half an hour while I was waiting for a meeting to start (blogging is great for filling these gaps) and did some quick calculations. John Naughton blogged it, and from John's link I received the equivalent of the blogging Legion D'Honneur, Cory Doctorow blogged it at BoingBoing. A ripple then starts so a few others blogged it (including Richard Stallman and George Siemens). You can see this peak of traffic here:

This is fun when it happens, but you can't predict it. In my view the previous post to that one, on new local newspaper models, was a better one. But you'd drive yourself insane by attempting to predict which posts get picked up and by who. There is undoubtedly a threshold - once someone like BoingBoing links to a post then there will be an almost guaranteed level of traffic. But there are too many variables to know when something might get linked to. The message for this is twofold - firstly just keep going, and secondly, be very wary of any expert who tells you they know how to generate traffic and control that pesky unpredictably.

OU Conference - agenda (and backup)

Tomorrow is the OU Conference, which we're running in Elluminate and Cloudworks. The final agenda is below, if you haven't seen it. We're seeing this as an experiment this year and so will be evaluating it. An open online conference plays into a few agendas at the moment: economical; green ICT & impact. After the conference I am going to outline what we've done so others can use it.

Oh, and this post is also acting as a backup in case Cloudworks should fall over. Note that each session has a separate Elluminate URL (so we can record them and release as separate resources), and the limit for each session is 400 users, on a first come, first served basis.

See you on the other side!

June 22nd Morning - Open Content

You need to log into Elluminate here: 

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=cpp1&password=M.698B12259317B5E61C82621C5E0A7A

• 9.30 - 10.00 Welcome to conference - Martin Weller
• 10.00 - 11.00 OU Presentations:
  Cloudworks (Grainne Conole)
  iTunes U (Peter Scott)
  SCORE (Chris Pegler)
• 11.00 -11.40 Moderated discussion - in separate 'rooms' in elluminate
• 11.40 - 12.30 - external speaker: Prof. Frank Rennie (UHI)

June 22nd Afternoon - Open Learning

You need to log into Elluminate here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=cpp1&password=M.694D972D3E96B7AC0FA57F5D1D56A2

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU presentations:
  SocialLearn (Simon Buckingham Shum)
  OpenLearn (Laura Dewis)
  OLNet (Patrick McAndrew)
• 2.30 - 3.15  Moderated discussion
• 3.15 - 4.30 External speaker - George Siemens (Athabasca)

June 23rd Morning - Open Teaching

You need to log into Elluminate here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=cpp1&password=M.CBE6F6FED2FF061AE4BD391A790598

• 9.30 - 10.30 OU Presentations:
  Creating open courses (Tony Hirst)
  Digital Humanities & Classics Confidential (Linda Wilks/Elton Barker)
  Open to knowing about climate change (Joe Smith)
  
  
• 10.30 - 11.15  Moderated discussion
• 11.15 - 12.00 - External speaker: Helen Milner, UK Online Centres

June 23rd Afternoon - Open Access

You need to log into Elluminate here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.9DDE389EFCE7B76F7880AE9C0939F4

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU Presentations:
  iSpot (Doug Clow)
  The OU in Africa - HEAT (Alison Robinson)
  Open CETL (Steve Swithenby)
• 2.30 - 3.15 Moderated discussion
• 3.15- 4.00 Closing Talk: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
• 4.00 - 4.30 - wrap up, Martin Weller

Open Conference video interviews

I conducted a set of interviews for the OU Conference. They all focused around the same 4 questions:

• What are the benefits of technology for learning?
• What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment?
• Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years?
• What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference?

I interview our Vice Chancellor, Martin Bean, as well as Grainne Conole, Simon Buckingham-Shum and Andrew Law.

They raise some great points, including the impact of social networks, dimensions of openness, moving beyond simple sharing of data, and changes in the nature of conferences. It was intriguing how the same questions elicited very different responses. If anyone else fancies answering these questions from their perspective, please share with us, it'd be a great resource.

You can see the videos in this playlist:

I am the weak link I'm afraid, a career as interviewer does not beckon. But if you like watching a boring middle-aged man wearing a slightly snug tank top and waving his hands around, you've hit pay-dirt.

The return on peer review

A while ago I took a decision to only publish in open access journals. I recently received two requests to review articles for journals. Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing. 

So it's something we all do, isn't really recognised and is often performed on the edges of time. It's not entirely altruistic though - it is a good way of staying in touch with your subject (like a sort of reading club), it helps with networking (though we have better ways of doing this now don't we?) and we also hope people will review our own work when the time comes. But generally it is performed for the good of the community (the Peer Review Survey 2009 states that the reason 90% reviewers gave for conducting peer review was "because they believe they are playing an active role in the community")

It's a labour that is unaccounted for. The Peer Review Survey doesn't give a cost estimate (as far as I can see), but we can do some back of the envelope calculations. It says there are 1.3 million peer-reviewed journals published every year, and the average (modal) time for review is 4 hours. Most articles are at least double-reviewed, so that gives us:

Time spent on peer review = 1,300,000 x 2 x 4 = 10.4 million hours

This doesn't take into account editor's time in compiling reviews or chasing them up, we'll just stick with the 'donated' time of academics for now. In terms of cost, we'd need an average salary, which is difficult globally. I'll take the average academic salary in the UK, which is probably a touch on the high side. The Times Higher gives this as £42,000 per annum, before tax, which equates to £20.19 per hour. So the cost with these figures is:

20.19 x 10,400,000 = £209,976,000

[Update - Alan Cann gave me this link, which puts the cost at £1.9Billion a year]

I accept this is subject to lots of objections, it may well be less, but then again, many reviewers are often eminent, and thus further up the pay scale, so it could be more. It seems a reasonable conclusion based on the data we have. So that's over £200million a year that academics are donating of their time to the peer review process. This isn't a large sum when set against things like the budget deficit, but it's not inconsiderable. And it's fine if one views it as generating public good - this is what researchers need to do in order to conduct proper research. But an alternative view is that academics (and ultimately taxpayers) are subsidising the academic publishing to the tune of £200 million a year. That's a lot of unpaid labour.

Now that efficiency and return on investment are the new drivers for research, the question should be asked whether this is the best way to 'spend' this money? I'd suggest that if we are continuing with peer review (and its efficacy is a separate argument), then the least we should expect is that the outputs of this tax-payer funded activity should be freely available to all.

And so, my small step in this was to reply to the requests for reviews stating that I have a policy of only reviewing for open access journals. I'm sure a lot of people do this as a matter of course, but it's worth logging every blow in the revolution. If we all did it....

For local people - new models for newspapers

In case you hadn't seen it, the Guardian is running an interesting model with some local versions. Cardiff Guardian is one of the first ones (Edinburgh and Leeds being the others). It is ostensibly run by one person (Hannah Waldram), who covers local news, and then pulls in Cardiff related stories from the existing Guardian stock material. Added to this there are guest posts from local people, some crowdsourced content (eg Flickr photos) plus third party tools, such as MySociety.Org and FixMyStreet. The outcome is a very useful site and, if you live in Cardiff, very engaging too.

What is interesting about it is that it offers a potential model for how many sectors can combine new and existing approaches (I'll come to education in a minute). It takes existing content, which you have a system producing anyway, and gets an additional use from it. This is combined with quality contributions from a dedicated (and employed) person to generate enough content, but also draws on the wealth of content created by those with an interest. Here is my summary of how I think it works:

You could see how this might be a model transferable for education also. In my Academic Output as Collateral Damage post I suggested we could view higher education as a long tail content production system. This is equivalent to the big Guardian content the local version draws upon - there is a pool of academic related content being produced. If you want to create a specialised course then you have one dedicated academic to draw this together and add in additional material. They then combine this with third party content and services. A course, almost by definition, has an interested group of participants, so the course content becomes populated by student contributions, but also by small invited pieces from other academics.

If you have such a model in place, then you could see how you could quickly create course for niche interests, timely events, specific employers, etc. And at little extra cost. The trick I suspect is putting in place a system that allows it to happen easily. The Guardian example is permitted because of all the prior work that the Guardian has put in to becoming a web-savvy newspaper.

Article on Digital Scholarship published

This is just because I like to keep track of 'traditional' publications here too.

Along with some colleagues at the OU (the bulk of the writing was by Nick Pearce) I submitted an article, entitled Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work, to a special edition of In Education, edited by Alec Couros. It is (of course) open access, and has now been published (Technology & Social Media (Special Issue, Part 2), 2010, 16(1)). We took Boyer's framework of scholarship and reconsidered it in light of new technology, particularly with the lens 'openness' across each of the four components. It looks like a good edition overall, so worth looking at all of the articles, even the one by that Siemens chap ;)

A small point, but it's another example of the non-traditional, network world feeding into the traditional, formal scholarship one - I know Alec through blogs and twitter and saw through George Siemens that we was asking for articles, and I suspect that was how he garnered most of the contributions.