Last year I took on the role of co-editor of JIME (The Journal of Interactive Media in Education). JIME was founded in 1996 and was one of the first open access journals, and operated an innovative open peer review system. But it had been a bit neglected over the last few years, so we shifted it to OJS, worked through the backlog of review papers, tidied up the scope, reappointed an editorial board, and now I'm pleased to announce a new issue.
And now that JIME is up and running again, we are seeking new submissions. We're operating a fairly traditional model, so academic papers, peer-reviewed - take a look at Focus and Scope for the type of thing we're after. We will be doing some more experimental special issues, eg multi-media, later also. I hope to see you there.
So, I've been in New Delhi this week as a keynote speaker at the EdgeX conference. It was great to catch up with George, Dave, Stephen and Grainne, and to meet Jay Cross, Clark Quinn and LesFoltos. Viplav Baxi and the team were the most amazing, hospitable hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to be here. I thought I'd share a few of my own perceptions from the visit, although one has to accept they are based on a very limited scope of India, but for what it's worth.
Start-up fever - It feels like a very exciting place to be at the moment. The opening speaker said he felt blessed to be living here to witness change and a form of social democratisation experiment in such a vast scale. And the oft-repeated mantra was that education was key to this. Social entrepreneurship is seen as the means to achieve this. Just about everyone I spoke to had a start-up company. If you hadn't initiated one start-up before breakfast it was a slow day. And while this is undoubtedly driven by the desire to make money, it was also seen as the way to get things done, and the social good element seemed to be a strong driver also.
Scale, scale, scale - It is the numbers in India that make drive a lot of this. We were variously given figures of 150 million to 500 million people who needed to be educated over the next couple of decades. Those kinds of numbers are probably not going to be satisfied by a single solution. And so all manner of educational businesses and inititiatives become viable, because a small slice of that is still a big number.
Beware the undead - there are a lot of US and UK universities hovering around India, trying to sell their model as a solution. With higher education on its knees in the west, this big market attracts the half-dead universities to suck on its new blood. Ok, I'm overplaying it. I think there are undoubtedly mutually beneficial collaborations that are being established, but as George exhorted, "stay Indian". There are aspects of the Indian context that are unique and simply importing a model wholesale won't work.
Beware the bubble - while it did feel like a very exciting time, the reality of India is never far away and it may be that the task is just too great to be sustained. The last time I felt in the midst of such collective fervour was when I was at a tech conference in the US at the start of the web 2.0 explosion. I remember having breakfast and on a table of 8, being the only person without two start-ups on the go. This kind of enthusiasm is liberating, and can produce great things, but it tends to run out of steam, so I would just caution against a potential bubble here. Having said that, if I was a) younger and b) more business minded, I'd be in India now.
I met some great people, and learnt a lot, so I'll be fascinated to see how it develops. At the moment, I'd sum it up by saying it's a place where a youngish man can tell you he has 800 acres of a new city to develop a university of his own design and you don't dismiss him as delusional.
[This is another from my catalogue of strained metaphors, and my grasp of religious history is rather tenuous, so I'm sure people who are better acquainted with the subtleties of Hussite history can point out lots of flaws with it. But take the surface points as of interest.]
I've been giving a talk recently called "Digital Scholarship: 10 Lessons in 10 Videos". I'll blog these in detail later, but one of my lessons is that we should rethink research. By this I mean we have a certain attitude towards how research is conducted, which was shaped prior to the arrival of digital, networked and open technologies. Some of that attitude still works, but there are also a host of possibilities that remaining wedded solely to that view prohibits.
An aspect of this that interests me is the Do It Yourself (or Do It Ourselves as Tim O'Reilly has it), do it now approach. In my talk I give three examples from my own experience:
But you can think of many other examples: Jim Groom's DS106 mega experiment or the MOOC approach from George Siemens and co can be seen as research and experimentation in the open.
"what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing."
Back to research then, and our ingrained attitude goes something like this:
Come up with an idea
Write a proposal
Get funding
Do research
Publish
Obtaining the funding is often an absolutely necessary step - you can't build a Large Hadron Collider in your back yard after all. But it also performs another function - it validates research as something worthwhile. So ingrained is this approach, that if you don't get funding, it doesn't count as research. We don't question it anymore.
But with the arrival of new easy to use tools, open data, a network of peers and cheap or free storage, you can do a lot of research now without funding. The video I show for this lesson is this one from Derek Sivers. He's talking about starting a business, but a lot of it could apply to research also:
So what's all this got to do with a 14th Century Czech Priest? Well, Jan Hus argued that we didn't need priests, that everyone formed part of the church and the Papal hierarchy should be undermined. I'm not making any comment on his religious argument here (he says, trying to avoid offending anyone). There is an analogy with this approach to research though. For the Catholic churches read research councils. We are all the research councils, we don't need permission to conduct our practice and we don't need their approved channels to reach the audience.
My argument is not to overthrow research councils, we still need them, but to propose that often there are low to zero cost alternatives available which might get at some of your research question. We should consider these at least without always defaulting to the funding = research model.
Mind you, poor Jan didn't have a happy ending, so maybe I should stay quiet.
