The Ed Techie

Losing the glue of scholarship

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This thought has been bubbling away with me for a while, so I'll try and express it here, but it may be patchy (yes, yes, no change there).

The financial crisis and rising tuition fees (particularly in the UK, and Europe will probably follow given the state of their economies) has placed a number of pressures on higher education. One of the outcomes is that greater accountability and transparency is demanded. That's only to expected and is reasonable - if students are paying high fees which pay academics salaries then we need to demonstrate that those academics are engaged in meaningful work. And as employers struggle with less money, they will place more demands on their staff, so will ask them to account for their time to a much finer level of detail.

Many people outside of higher ed will shake their heads and think 'we've all had to do that for years anyway.' I have some sympathy with this view, academics have often had a cushy life and hidden behind vague work related tasks with little connection to outputs.

But as this begins to bite, it's surfacing a number of tasks which we have always performed as part of scholarly practice, but which are hard to link to a direct output or return on investment. Consider the following:

• Reading around your subject area - academics will read journal papers, books, blogs etc as part of their everyday practice, just to stay current in their field. This may not have a direct, or immediate link to teaching (ie you are not researching something in order to teach on a specific course) or be related to a specific research project. It's just part of what you do. 
• Peer review - I often get asked to review papers for journals. If they meet my open access test, then I usually say yes. But there is no direct return on this.
• Experimentation - in the field of educational technology in particular (but also in other disciplines I suspect), experimenting is essential. The key to this is that you don't know if it will be successful or what it will lead to. You trust your academic instincts that it's an interesting thing to do. Much of playing with new technology would come under this. So when I've played around with MOOCs for instance, giving talks or running a small one with George. A few years later, I'm now being asked to contribute to a strategic appraisal of MOOCs for the university. But I couldn't have predicted this, or stated it as an outcome.
• Giving presentations - on an almost weekly basis I get asked to give a presentation, usually at another university for a staff development day. I decline most of these because I am running a big internal project at the OU and have a number of other roles, so I'm nearly always in meetings. And even if I wasn't, I believe that I should prioritise doing work for the place that pays my wages. In order to do these talks now I have to take leave, and without wishing to sound mercenary, if I'm going to spend a day giving a talk instead of with my family, I'll only do that if I get paid. Many such staff development days don't have a budget, and operate on reciprocal good will.

This raises two very important questions for me with regards to how scholarship functions:

1. Are these kinds of tasks the unseen glue that binds scholarly activity together? So, if we lose, or at least drastically reduce, them does it fundamentally undermine the whole practice, or will we just find other ways of achieving them (for instance giving a talk remotely is a lot more efficient than travelling to the venue).
2. Does it demonstrate that they are tasks which should have an associated cost, and we've just been hiding that hitherto? If we value the tasks then maybe we should attach a cost to them, then we can properly account for that time. Or are they such nebulous tasks that this wouldn't work and we need to trust academics to spend a degree of their time doing 'scholarship type stuff'.

Many universities do have an allocation of staff time that covers most of the above, and is labelled something like 'personal research time'. But I think we'll see more of a squeeze on that time and a greater demand for identifiable outcomes from it. So I guess we'll find out how important this glue really is.

 

Education & the language of change

Occasionally a blog post comes along in your field which you feel is seminal, a must-read. Think Scott's just share or Jim's glass bees post. Last week it was George's turn, and his post on the commercial pressures and interests around education is thought provoking and honest as he wrestles with the issues. If you haven't read it already, then please do so.

One element I wanted to expand upon was the language of change that is employed by many both within higher ed, and in companies with an interest in it. The common phrase now is to declare that education is broken. I commented on George's post that this is really beginning to irritate me. I don't deny that there are issues in education that need addressing, but by labelling it as broken, the response then becomes obvious "well let's fix it". And I'd be surprised if the person telling you that education was broken didn't just happen to have a fix in their back pocket.

Mike Caulfield sums it up in the comments better than I did, by talking about a rhetoric of crisis and a rhetoric of opportunity. Our responses to these different uses of language can be profound:

"The rhetoric of opportunity is better than the rhetoric of crisis for a number of reasons. In a rhetoric of opportunity, things which are improvements move forward, things which are not do not. A rhetoric of opportunity doesn’t denigrate the people who are doing wonderful things now, and it doesn’t pretend that what we have now is any worse than what we grew up with."

I am not advocating a linguistic determinism here, but the way we talk about a subject has implication for our actions. For instance, in this study Thibodeau & Boroditsky found that the metaphors used to frame a problem influenced the solution that subjects proposed, so if crime was couched in terms of a virus or a beast like metaphor, would shape how people thought it should be handled. And interestingly, when asked to justify their solution they do so by using data and reasons that back up the original metaphor, even if they are unaware of the metaphor in the original text.

A similar pattern is happening with education - the metaphors and language we use is influencing the manner in which we progress. 

Like George, I have nothing against entrepreneurs, I feel that their agility can complement the rather slow nature of higher education. But I do resent companies or individuals trying to frame the problem so it places them in the powerful position of the new gods. There is one phrase anyone with a solution to a problem fears more than any other: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". In order to justify a cure, you have to convince people of the brokenness of the current situation. And again, this is not to suggest education doesn't have issues, but I prefer Mike's notion of a rhetoric of opportunity.

I don't have an easy solution, indeed I would suggest you avoid anyone who does claim to have a simple solution to the multi-varied, messy domain of education. But I feel very strongly that education is doing lots of things right, and it isn't a problem waiting to be fixed. It's a set of challenges and opportunities, which both those inside and outside of the current system can address.

For now, join me in this pledge - if anyone says education is broken, I will walk out of the room.

[Update - almost as if they were trying to prove my point, David Kernohan pointed me at degreed.com which is asking people to take a photo declaring "Education is broken. Someone should do something." That someone being them presumably with their shiny dot com]

 

The role of respectable idiots

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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.

What I learnt from a photo a day

I've blogged on this before, after I had done my first year of a photo a day, using Flickr. I stopped that in July 2011, and found that I wasn't taking any photographs. So after some encouragement from Karen Cropper to try blipfoto, I started again in Oct 2011.

Today I ran a session at the OU along with Juliette Culver on what I learnt from a photo a day. It was a fun workshop and went down well. The slidecast is below, complete with sh**e photographs.

 

What I learnt from a photo a day

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10 Digital Scholarship Lessons in 10 Videos

I've given a talk with this title 3 or 4 times recently, so thought I'd best get around to blogging it. In the presentation I caution that you shouldn't really trust people who give lessons about the future - they're usually trying to sell you something. But lessons is a nice way to frame it, so treat them more as opinions I've come to over the past couple of years.

Lesson 1: It's not just for geeks

It is easy sometimes to get bogged down in conversations about the latest technology, API calls, RSS feeds, linked-data, etc and it seems very technical. Sometimes this has the effect of making academics think 'it doesn't relate to me'. But we shouldn't let the geeky talk (which is necessary sometimes) cloud the fact that we are looking at changes to very fundamental scholarly practices.

Lesson 2: Researchers are in a dilemma

Researchers are caught between the potential of new approaches and operating within a conservative context. A range of studies have shown recently that researchers are often cautious in their use of new technology and rather risk adverse. 

Lesson 3: Interdisciplinarity is in the network

While many people point to the importance of interdisciplinary work, it is actually difficult and costly to realise. The 'light' connections we have and ease of republishing means that interdisciplinary results can be achieved easily with low cost.

Lesson 4: We're all broadcasters now

Broadcasting and large scale public engagement used to be the reserve of those on TV or radio. As I've argued before, scholars produce a lot of content, which with minimal effort can be converted into shareable, digital resources.

Lesson 5: We're operating in an attention economy

When content and connections are abundant, then we lose the monopoly on attention. I think playing the attention game doesn't come easily to academics and is viewed as somewhat beneath them. But nevertheless this is the environment the digital scholar operates in. It can be quite subtle things such as a good title, or using interesting images in a slideshare presentation, or making use of different media, posting at a favourable time of day, utilising the network, etc. But increasingly we are competing with an excess of demands on everyone's attention and merely assuming the quality of your research or teaching will win out may not be enough.

Lesson 6: We can rethink research

I covered this in an earlier post, but to reiterate, we are often operating within a mindset of how research is performed, funded and disseminated which doesn't take into account new possibilities.

Lesson 7: New skills will be required

I didn't want to produce a checklist of digital literacies, but the following are the types of skills that will be useful (but not essential to have all of them): video creation, site analytics, curation/filtering, writing for online, liveblogging/amplifying, data visualisation.

I would probably have an entirely different list next year, but just looking at this set you appreciate how few academics are really adept at most of them, and also how unrepresented they are in formal recognition systems. But nevertheless they will become increasingly significant I'd argue, for instance research councils will be looking for alternative means of disseminating research findings, or the use of analytics to inform teaching or research.

Lesson 8: It'll impact even if you ignore it

Here I replayed the network weather argument, using the academic conference as an example of a fundamental practice that is changing because of the impact of technology, regardless of whether you personally use them or not.

Lesson 9: It's about alternatives

I can't stress this one enough. It is tempting to portray it as a case of the old model dying, being replaced by the sexy new one, and hey, if you're not on the bus with the hipsters, you'll be swept away. But the real picture is much more subtle and complicated than that. It is not the case of existing practices being killed off, but rather of us having a richer set of alternatives to choose from. The monopoly of the incumbent forms may be killed off, but not necessarily the forms themselves. Peer-reviewed journals are a good example here - they're no longer the only game in the scholarly communication town, but they still have a role.

Lesson 10: Don't focus just on risk

According to Tversky and Kahneman, we are programmed to focus on risk, but not so good at seeing benefits. In his book from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton has this quote from James Boyle, which sums it up:

“We are very good at seeing the downsides and the dangers of open systems, open production systems, networks of openness. .. Those dangers are real… we are not so good at seeing the benefits and the converse holds true for the closed system.”

So people often think of all the bad things that might happen, for example if they post stuff online someone might pinch their ideas, or it might take time, or there may be issues around rights, etc. But they're not so good at imagining positive outcomes, such as it might connect you with more peers, lead to new forms of collaboration, improve citations, be a useful teaching tool, or just be fun.

I used a video to set off each lesson, so here is the slidedeck, with the videos removed but a link to each one. 

UPDATE: And if you want to see me doing it live, then here is the presentation with videos at LSE.

 

Ten lessons in digital scholarship

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