The Ed Techie

If nobody speaks of remarkable things

For my digital scholarship book I wanted to take a random working day and record my working pattern and my use of technology. Yesterday was that day, and so here is my account:

Before breakfast, while getting my daughter ready for school and feeding the dog, I do my morning communications check, including email, my blog and Twitter. Via the latter I see that Scott Leslie has posted a response to my blog piece on reductionism. Scott is someone I have known online for a few years, but finally met this year. We have been debating this topic in some detail over the weekend on twitter. We have differing views but the discourse has proven, I think, to be mutually beneficial in developing our own thinking. I also see that Google have donated $100k to Bletchley Park in order to try and keep Alan Turing's papers in public ownership. I respond to a couple of comments from the previous night when I had tweeter that I was seeing the film The Social Network.

After my wife and daughter leave, I go to my office to work. As I am writing today my intention is to not engage too much in online chat, so I don't have email or twitter open in my tabs in Google Chrome.

Before I start work on my chapter I post a comment on Scott's blog post, and send a tweet seeking confirmation about the Bletchley Park news (it having only appeared on Twitter thus far). I also bookmark a blogpost on the crowd sourcing of educational tools by NMC, which came to my attention because it is tagged ''digital scholarship' and I have a Google Alert set up for this term so I get daily emails for results.

I then start writing - I have amassed around 30 articles, blog posts and reports for my chapter on academic publishing. These have been found largely through search, following references and names in some papers, links that have been passed to my by my network and my own references that I have collected using Tumblr. All of the articles are open access, although I spend a frustrating half an hour trying to locate one reference which seems to have disappeared.

After writing for most of the morning I take a break, and during this mentally compose a blog post, which some of the book authoring has led me to. The post, around 500 words argues that scholars have failed to take ownership of their own practices, particularly with regards to technology. This will form a theme in my book, so I decide to test it out by blogging it. I quickly find a creative commons image to use in my post, and it only takes 15 minutes to write as I have much of the material to hand. I post it, announce this on twitter and then return to my chapter. Later I want to follow up a particular argument around costs so search for references and find four good articles. 

In my afternoon tea break I compose my a photo for Flickr. I am not a very gifted photographer but I am currently undertaking the informal 'photo a day' project, and am on day 170. Having taken my photo, uploaded it to Flickr and tweaked it with the free online Picnik tool, I take a look at some of the recent uploads from my contacts.

I also check Twitter and see that two people have retweeted the link to my blog post. I check my blog and see that it has had around 170 hits today, which is about normal. In my email there is a message confirming that i am speaking at Cardiff Business school on Friday. This talk has arisen due to a contact I made at the regular social media meetings that were organized in Cardiff.

For my final push at writing for the day I write up the notes of a talk given by Mark Patterson of PLoS, which I attended in Cambridge the previous week. I check some of my notes and find references for this at the PLoS site.

Later that evening I take my daughter to her horse riding lesson. I take my iPad so I can finish reading Anya Kamenetz's DIY U which I have as a Kindle book. I also make some notes for this post.

What does this digital scholarship snapshot tell us? Firstly, it's quite traditional. This is partly because I am writing a book, but it is also representative. I didn't spend the day overlaying different data formats or creating a musical mashup, or anything exciting like that, I spent it writing. Related to this the technology used is fairly simple - there are no specialist tools in use here. There is a mixture between the professional and personal in their use. Even on a relatively unconnected day when I am engaged in the solo pursuit of writing I still maintain social connections with a global network of peers. A significant point is that there is a vast amount of high quality information available to me without leaving my house. I like the way that different elements of work fit in the elements of my day and that there is a wide range of granularity of outputs, from writing a book to individual tweets. Lastly, these are small, subtle changes and yet the way they intermesh to create the fabric of a working day is, I feel, quite remarkable. We've just become so habituated to them that we fail to appreciate this.

If anyone else would like to share an account of a normal working day, I'd love to read it. It is in this detail that the real changes are revealed. 

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.

Reductionism is your friend

<management of complexity - http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelheiss/3090102907/>

Plenty of better qualified people than myself have made this point, but it's cropped up a few times in both Twitter and face to face conversations, where 'reductionist' has been used in a generally dismissive way, as if to be identified as such signifies the end of a discussion. So, partly because I want to clarify for myself, and also to get feedback in case I'm missing something, I thought I'd set down my take on reductionism.

In general, I think reductionism is a sound approach. Anyone with a child will know that we are natural reductionists. When your child goes through the 'why?' phase what they want is a sub-explanation to a seemingly simple question ('Why is it cold?'). That nearly all children do this naturally should tell us it's a pretty good knowledge gathering approach. You look for answers to a higher level phenomenon by breaking it down into its constituent parts.

Reductionism works well - all around you are the products of reductionism: that computer you're using could have a sticker on it 'Powered by reductionism'; that book on evolution 'Authored by reductionism'; that medicine that is curing your disease 'Brought to you by reductionism'. 

So why are people so down on reductionism? Dan Dennett puts it well in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

"The term that is most often bandied about in these conflicts, often as a term of abuse, is 'reductionism'... [reductionism is made to look] philistine and heartless, if not downright evil... There are bland and preposterous readings of [a reductionist] claim. According to the bland readings, it is possible (and even desirable) to unify chemistry and physics, biology and chemistry, and yes, even the social sciences and biology... According to the preposterous readings, reductionists want to abandon the principles, theories, vocabulary, laws of the higher-level sciences, in favor of the lower-level terms. A reductionist dream, on such a preposterous reading, might be to write "A Comparison of Keats and Shelley from the Molecular Point of View"... Probably nobody is a reductionist in the preposterous sense and everybody should be a reductionist in the bland sense, so the 'charge' of reductionism is too bland to merit a response"

The problem is that of 'greedy reductionism' as Dennett terms it, whereby too much is claimed, too quickly and overly simplistic explanations are given which miss, or ignore some of the complexity. In reaction to this it seems that sentiment has swung too far the other way and declared all reductionism wrong.

There are also phenomenon that reductionism is not good at explaining, for example chaos theory, and emergence. Some scientists will argue that emergence can still be explained in reductionist terms we just don't have sufficiently complex models, and others that it can't and there are emergent properties that are greater than the sum of the parts. This is a debate worth having and whether different approaches are viable to different phenomenon, but surely the conclusion is not that reductionism never works (we have plenty of evidence to the contrary).

Other people have a general mistrust about reductionism, that it is mechanistic and they want to retain some sense of the whole. This can be a misunderstanding about what reductionism seeks to do, as Dennett suggests. As both Marr and Pylyshyn have argued there are different levels of explanation: if you want to know why I was running down the street you expect a psychological explanation ('I was late for a meeting') not a biological one ('my muscles were contracting causing my legs to move in response to messages from my brain'), or a chemical or physical one.

The concern I have about those who wish to dismiss reductionism in favour of more holistic responses is that it is often a pseudo-explanation or even a dead-end. For centuries the church provided this pseudo-explanation along the lines of 'It's God's will', which effectively means don't look any further. But being good little reductionists, people did look further and we found subsequent explanations at every level we looked. This didn't stop people feeling emotions, producing art or making jokes. So I am always wary when reductionism is rejected but nothing offered in its place other than vague ideas of complexity or emergence (or even mysticism). We've been here before. (There is also a slight implication that reductionism is in some sense 'right wing'. I'm probably naive in this sense, but I simply don't understand this at all.)

I fully concur that reductionism is a) not always the best way to explain things b) may miss some subtlety between the components and c) may not be the correct approach as we look at emergent properties in complex systems. But that doesn't mean it offers nothing, so rather than the rejection of reductionism being an endpoint in an argument ('that's so reductionist!') it should be the start, in that you need to have a good reason why it won't work and what you are replacing it with.

A conspiracy of sentiment

Yesterday Paul Chambers lost his appeal against his fine and conviction for posting a joke on twitter which was prosecuted under the anti-terrorist legislation.

The case was so obviously ridiculous that everyone thought common-sense would prevail, but eschewing humour and reality, Judge Jacqueline Davies deemed the tweet "menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed."

Any ordinary person would have seen it as a joke. I had previously thought this was simply a case of the law getting itself in a mess, escalating something and then being unable to climb down. Added to that a healthy dose of people not understanding twitter. 

Now though I'm convinced it's more than that. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, I know all those involved haven't got together at some late night meeting and decided to make a random citizen's life a misery. But when something so nonsensical progresses through multiple stages and possibilities to put an end to it, then you have to look for some explanation. I think although there is no outright conspiracy, what we do have is a conspiracy of sentiment. All those involved at various stages: politicians, the police, CPS, judges, media are all acting from the same unspoken emotional base. This can be summarised as: they hate you.

They hate that you undermine their carefully crafted messages and turn them into jokes. They hate that you are forming new methods of entertainment that they don't understand. They hate that you can organise yourselves without them knowing about it. They hate that power has been democratised. They hate that you get at content for free. They hate it, hate it, hate it. So when the opportunity arises to stamp on one of you snivelling social media types, they grasp it with both hands.

And that's why the Twitter Joke Trial is important - because it reveals the mindset of those in power, and because it will be the first of many attempts by them to control or at least seek revenge on what they don't understand and loathe.

The Lamb Formula = Good enough?

In my previous presentation one of the slides I didn't get to displayed the following Venn Diagram for what I term 'The Lamb formula'

(Image created by crappygraphs)

This is from Brian Lamb, who borrows the title from Errol Morris' documentary, to describe the kind of technology he likes, and thinks is useful. My take on these three elements (which may be different to Brian's) as they pertain to education is:

• Fast - Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This means you can experiment quickly.
• Cheap - tools that are usually free, or at least have a freemium model so you can buy any extension out of your own pocket. Animoto is a good example - you can create free 30seconds videos or pay a small one-off fee to create a longer one. Slideshare is an example of a free service. This means you don't need to get authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means you don't need to worry about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
• Out of control - they are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element, and are more flexible. 

Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services, and the uses they put technology to in education. If you've invested £300K in an eportfolio system, say, then there becomes an obligation to stick with it over many years. If you've picked a free blog tool and told students to use it as a portfolio you can switch if you want to and also put it to different uses.

There are, of course, many times when this approach may not be suitable, but that doesn't mean it is never appropriate. Thinking about this also brought to mind a couple of conversations I've had with Liam Green-Hughes recently, who is very interested in the notion of 'good enough'. Liam is referring to hardware often when he talks about this, the Flip cam being a good example. It is good enough at recording to make the lightweight device and the ease of use be determining factors.

I have wondered what 'good enough' means in education terms. In his Open Ed keynote Erik Duval suggested that we can afford to disrupt education, because we don't do a particularly good job anyway. I think we do sometimes become scared of experimenting in education and become obsessed about every possible bad scenario, while ignoring some of the current deficiencies (in fairness this is partly a reaction to the litigious environment universities now have to exist in).  The good enough approach suggests that using fast, cheap and out of control technologies in education is at least good enough, and may be superior in that offers new ways of working. 

Let's play OER Roulette!

(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney)

This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts.

For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way.

I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed on it, which they would spin to select the next number to play. I wanted to recreate this, but transporting a big wheel was unrealistic, so I got my daughter to get members of the audience to select cards. My talk had the hypothesis that by considering OERs as big and little, it provided a lens on a number of issues around OERs, including:

• Sustainability
• Working methods
• Production time
• Context
• Academic status
• The role of content
• The nature of projects
• Sites vs Portals
• Aggregation vs Adaptation
• Implict messages

This gave the presentation a non-linear structure and because I had more subjects than could be covered in the allotted time, a degree of uncertainty. It also means I can give the same presentation again and it will at least be slightly different.

The presentation is below, which I haven't had time to turn into a slidecast and is now linear, so it loses some of the interactivity. I quite liked using this approach and given my previous post on not doing presentations, it at least allowed me to play with the format to a degree, but I would have preferred it to be more participatory.

OER Roulette

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

Am I done with conferencing?

This is no reflection on Open Ed, I’ve been moving away from conferences for a while. I enjoyed giving my presentation at Open Ed, and I managed to make it interactive to an extent. But I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m done with the traditional conference format. I had a couple of discussions with Brian and Scott around this and talked about how difficult it was to break away from the traditional format. The reason comes down to money essentially, although it’s tied up with a host of other issues.

There is a circular logic in organising a conference that is difficult to escape, let’s call it the Conference Conservatism Circle, which goes something like this: In order to make a conference viable you need people to attend and pay fees. To attend most people need to get funds from their university or a research project. To justify this they need to give a presentation. A presentation needs to be peer-reviewed so they can include it on their CV. People only attend conferences that offer this. You are organising a conference and need to make it viable…

 

Cycle

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

This is another example of where academic practice is continuing despite the alternatives now available. Before we had a digital, open, network then getting people together so they could present to each other was a reasonably pragmatic solution to knowledge sharing. We have largely continued with this practice despite it no longer being the best use of the time.

I’m not arguing for all online conferences here, I think getting together with people is valuable. Indeed it’s precisely because I think it’s valuable that I think we should stop wasting it giving presentations.

The barcamp and unconference models have experimented with this, but this more fluid, practical or discussion based approach has not been widely taken up in academic circles, largely because of the economics I outlined above (and a rather innate sense of conservatism amongst academics). Here are some questions I’ve been asking of myself:

• If peer-review is still important then how about a more open model, where your proposal for a suggestion is voted on by all delegates prior to the conference?
• Why don’t we use the net for the information dissemination function (eg make our presentations live beforehand, as video or slidecasts) and then use the face to face segment for discussion?
• Can we have more practical sessions that aim to develop something? This could be a site, a learning resource, some code, a set of guidelines, etc. But actually have functioning outputs from conferences, instead of just suntans and hangovers.
• Some people are worth seeing as presenters, so is there a proportion of the conference (but a minority) that is given over to these?
• Would more open presentation formats work, eg having to speak on a random subject for two minutes?
• If conferences are really about forming networks can we facilitate people forming groups (based on prior discussions and interests) around developing research projects?

All of these seem to me good uses of the conference time and having people co-located, yet all would struggle to get acceptance and funding as proper academic activity. We do have, for instance, research proposal sessions, or writing workshops, but these are both rare and distinct from the normal conference activity. I know some conferences have been experimental in their use of the format, but the majority of conferences across disciplines are still quite traditional and are locked into the Conference Conservatism Cycle.

So my modest proposal is one of direct action. As with my stance on only reviewing for open access journals, if we all insisted on moving away from the traditional presentation format, would conference organisers, and more importantly, funders shift practice also?

I know I’ll probably renege on this, but I’ll try it out: If you want me to come to your conference, then I will only do so if I can try something akin to the formats above, and not a standard presentation.

 

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.