The Ed Techie

Quality is the best gaming device

[There are some games you shouldn't play - image http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatwhat/8457309/]

Gamification comes up a lot in higher education. It's a by-product of a metrics driven economy, as soon as you meaure something, and add value to that measurement, then people will find ways to gamify it. The measurers often know this, and the trick is if you can get people to do the desired behaviour through gaming, then it's worthwhile, for instance good assessment will mean that learners end up acquiring desired skills and knowledge, even if they game the system. But too often, gaming itself becomes the focus.

The following are all aspects of gaming for higher education:

• Assessment gaming - are there ways of getting good scores in assessment with minimal effort?
• Teaching - are there ways of getting good scores in the National Student Survey? Can we find ways around contact hours?
• Learner analytics - if you start measuring performance through 'data exhaust', and attaching value to it, then it stops being exhaust, a by-product of natural behaviour and becomes a deliberate action. For instance if time spent in the VLE is a measure used to automatically monitor students, they will soon log on for long periods, while they go to the pub.
• Research metrics - the REF is essentially a very expensive exercise in gaming. Universities game it by buying in good REF researchers just before the REF deadline, sacrificing some staff for others (eg put your name first because that person isn't going to be refable) or moving non-eligible staff to teaching contracts. Individuals game it by getting their papers cited (self-citation, mutual citation circles), getting students to publish papers with their names, and publishing in targeted journals.
• Online identity - methods of increasing blog traffic, gaining reputation, getting attention.

It's quite a depressing list, you could spend all of your time being concerned with gaming and not with the actual work it is meant to represent. All these was brought into focus for me by this great blog post from author Paul Raven. A wannabe ebook author writes to him asking for advice on how to get improve sales. The potential author asks:

"Why not start a Facebook Group: “The EBook Likers?” Join the group, and you pretty much agree to go around and LIKE all the other Member’s eBooks which are on Amazon. The Power of LIKE!"

And he goes on, excitedly:

"Something like this goes on every day at Twitter... The I’ll-star-your-tweets-if-you-star-my-tweets factor. Most tweeps on Twitter rarely, if ever, favorite any tweets at all. But there is an in-bred niche of super-favoriters who go to Favstar to track exactly how many stars and retweets each of their tweets get.

By analyzing the data, it becomes clear that the Favstar Superstars don’t achieve their status with superior content, but with superior networking. Take any Favstar Superstar and examine several of their tweets in detail, and you will find the exact same avatars always at the beginning thirty spots, with just a few odd avatars; the further up the number of stars a tweet gets, the more variety in avatars."

He continues with lots of such possibilities and questions. As Raven points out, he never mentions his writing once, and asks nothing about the craft of writing. It's a sad example of how gamification becomes the focus itself.

Raven offers this sage advice:

"There’s one thing that might make your book sell better, though — and that’s making it a better book. Or making a new book that’s better than the last, and another one that’s even better than that, and then another and another. And sending them out, whether to agents or editors or straight into the whirlpool of the Kindle store, and letting them speak for themselves, while you wait at home patiently, writing the next one."

That is the key for me. Whether it's blogging, teaching or writing research papers, the thing to focus on is the quality of the activity itself. Sure, there are some things that are easy and worth doing - I use images in blog posts because I think it may attract attention, and I tweet a link to my posts when I publish them, I tend to blog during weekdays as no-one reads at weekends, etc. I want people to read my posts, I just don't want to fundamentally alter the nature of what I do to achieve that end. So, for instance, I don't play games such as trying to create controversy to get hits, or breaking posts up into shorter ones on the basis that more posts create more traffic, or spend time promoting posts in other forums. 

But it's an easy trap to fall in to - the next time I find myself thinking, or sitting in a meeting discussing, methods of gamification, I'll remember that needy writer in Raven's post. That way lies madness.

 

The Great Open Access Swindle

In my digital scholarship book, I make two pleas, the first is for open access publishing, and the second is for scholars to own the process of change. I've never been great at a rousing finish, but the book ends thus:

"This is a period of transition for scholarship, as significant as any other in its history, from the founding of universities to the establishment of peer review and the scientific method. It is also a period that holds tension and even some paradoxes: it is both business as usual and yet a time of considerable change; individual scholars are being highly innovative and yet the overall picture is one of reluctance; technology is creating new opportunities while simultaneously generating new concerns and problems....

...For scholars it should not be a case of you see what goes, you see what stays, you see what comes, but rather you determine what goes, what stays and what comes."

The open access element has proceeded faster than even I imagined when writing this back in 2010/2011. The Finch Report can be seen as the crowning achievement of the open access movement, in setting out a structure for all UK scholarly articles to be published as open access. But in typical "you academics are never happy" mode I've become increasingly unhappy about the route Open Access is taking. And the reason is that it fails to meet the second of my exhortations, ie it is a method being determined by the publishing industry and not by academics themselves.

The favoured route is that of Gold OA - ie authors pay publishers to have open access articles published, usually through research funds. This is good in that it means these research papers will be openly available to all, but bad from a digital scholarship perspective. And here's why:

Ironically, openness may lead to elitism. If you need to pay to publish, then, particularly in cash-strapped times, it becomes something of a luxury. New researchers, or smaller universities won't have these funds available. Many publishers have put in waivers for new researchers (PLoS are excellent at this), but there's no guarantee of these, and after all, the commercial publishers are concerned with maximising profits. If there are enough paying customers around then it's not in their interest to give out too many freebies. And it also means richer universities can flood journals with articles. Similarly those with research grants can publish, as this is where the funding will come from, and those without, can't. This will increase competition in an already ludicrously competitive research funding regime. You're either in the boat or out of it will be the outcome. The scholarly kitchen has a good piece of OA increasing the so-called Matthew Effect. It would indeed be a strange irony if those of us who have been calling for open access because of a belief in wider access and a more democratic knowledge society end up creating a self-perpetuating elite.

It will create additional cost. Once the cost is shifted to research funders, then the author doesn't really care about the price. There is no strong incentive to keep costs down or find alternative funding mechanisms. This is great news for publishers who must be rubbing their hands with glee. It is not only a licence to carry on as they were, but they have successfully fended off the threat of free publication and dissemination that the internet offers. Music industry moguls must be looking on with envy. The cost for publication is shifted to taxpayers (who ultimately fund research) or students (if it comes out of university money). The profits and benefits stay with the publishers. It takes some strained squinting to view this as a victory.

Steven Harnad argues again for Green OA, claiming that

"Publishers– whose primary concern is not with maximizing research usage and progress but with protecting their current revenue streams and modus operandi –are waiting for funders or institutions to pledge the money to pay Gold OA publishing fees. But research funds are scarce and institutional funds!are heavily committed to journal subscriptions today. There is no extra money to pay for Gold OA fees"

It doesn't promote change - in my book I also talked about how a digital, networked and open approach could change what we perceive as research, and that much of our interpretation of research was dictated by the output forms we have. So, for instance we could see smaller granularity of outputs, post review, different media formats, all begining to change our concept of what research means. But Gold OA that reinforces the power of commercial publishers simply maintains a status quo, and keeps the peer-reviewed 5000 word article as the primary focus of research that must be attained.

I've heard Stephen Downes say that as soon as any form of commercial enterprise touches education it ruins it (or words to that effect). I wouldn't go that far, I think for instance that commercial companies often make a better job of software and technology than universities, but academic publishing is such an odd business that maybe it doesn't make sense as a commercial enterprise. As David Wiley so nicely parodies in his trucker's parable, there isn't really another industry like it. Academics (paid by the taxpayer or students) provide free content, and then the same academics provide free services (editorship and peer-review) and then hand over rights and ownership to a commercial company, who provide a separate set of services, and then sell back the content to the same group of academics. 

I know a few people who work in commercial publishing, and they are smart, good people who genuinely care about promoting knowledge and publishing as a practice. This is not a cry for such people to be out on the streets, but rather for their skills and experience to be employed by and for universities and the taxpayer rather than for shareholders. In this business Downes' contamination theory seems to hold, there is simply no space in the ecosystem for profit to exist, and when it does it corrupts the whole purpose of the enterprise, which is to share and disseminate knowledge.