The Ed Techie

MOOC disco

So just before Christmas I finally managed to air a slot on DS106 Radio (thanks to Alan for being patient with the most needy DJ in DS106 history). It was remarkably easy to do, so I'd recommend it to anyone.

My idea was to create a set where each song reflected on some aspects of MOOCs. On reflection I don't think this came across without me doing some talking inbetween. I opted for film clips instead, but I think the "music connected by a theme we can discuss" approach has merits which I'd like to revisit. I know from compiling the set that even if it's an issue you've thought about a lot, adding music to it gives it a vibrancy or nuance that wasn't there previously. It would be a fun way to explore some issues without having to reference French philosophers (yes, I'm looking at you Cormier).

For the record, here are the tracks:

I'll let you make the connections to the topic.

And here is the (probably illegal) archive of the broadcast. It starts a bit quiet but cranks up halfway through the first song. See how many film clips you can get.

MOOC disco archive

 

 

Gravity always wins

More out of tradition than profound insight, here is my annual running review post.

First, since you demand it so, is the data:

• Miles run: 1049
• Duration: 188:58 hours
• No. runs: 141
• Av. distance: 7.44 miles

Not bad overall, on a par with last year. It seems that having struggled to break the 1000 mile barrier for a few years I can now do it, but not with much to spare. Any significant increase would mean changing my approach drastically.

It's been a bad year in terms of events though, I signed up and trained for the Llanelli marathon in April, but went to India, caught Delhi belly and bailed from it. I did the New Forest Half marathon in September (wet, slow) and that was it. I decided I needed a new challenge so signed up for the Lakeland 50 and set off on a mountain/trail running regime. I found that I really enjoyed running through forests and taking 5 hours or so to complete a run with lots of walks in it, necessitated by hills. It's a different rhythm to road running. We live outside of Cardiff and I have Caerphilly mountain and lots of trail runs of around 15-20 miles on my doorstep. And then there's the Beacons less than an hour away, and I managed a 20 miler around the peaks here on my own. I'm not much of a navigator, but Sarah has loaded up her extensive set of trails onto a GPS device for me which I follow slavishly.

But I came to realise that was the extent of my ambition. As I mentioned last year I don't have a reservoir of fitness to draw upon and to do the 50 I'd need to be up in the mountains every weekend. As I slogged around the Gower coastal marathon (eventually only doing the half) I realised I don't love mountains in the same way Sarah does. I like them, I enjoy being in them, but I don't want to spend 20 hours dragging myself through the mud. I do actually like doing the running part, and sometimes it's so steep, or icy, or boggy, or treacherous, that you hardly run at all.

Living with an ultra runner kind of distorts your sense of distance. In our house the following sentence can be uttered with a straight face: "I'm only going to do 20 miles today". The word 'only' has no rightful place in that sentence.

So, I decided on reflection that the 50 isn't for me, and instead have signed up for an event a month, consisting of halfs, marathons and even a 10k. I've enjoyed the trail running so I want to keep that in the mix. I suppose my lesson for the year is that you need to both always be exploring what kind of runner you are, and also know when something isn't your bag. But to accept that may not always be true - in a year's time I may find the thought of going 0.1 mph uphill, knee-deep in icy mud a really appealling day out.

The other thing I've taken on this year is to start studying an MA in History, and there's an element of this here also. I am of a scientific bent and I'm finding the subtle disciplinary differences and attitudes interesting. But I'm now of an age when I can appreciate them, whereas I think my younger, more arrogant self, would have had to be in one camp. 

The year has ended badly though, with a virulent flu bout (no, not effing 'manflu') which has laid me up for 10 days over Christmas (no alcohol, no food, no holiday!). It means my first event - a marathon in January - is unlikely to happen as I've lost the key period I needed and am still not back running. But hey, I lost a stone in weight, so when I do start back, I should be flying.

Calling OA academic book publishers

Now is the time for you to seize the moment and make a small to modest profit while performing a useful academic function. 

Okay it's not quite a passionate rallying cry, but I've been thinking about open access book publishing recently for two reasons. The first is that on an almost monthly basis I get emails from colleagues/peers/random people asking me about my experience of publishing with Bloomsbury Academic because they are writing a book proposal and want to go open access. They've either been told no by established publishers or 'yes, but it'll cost you £20,000 - will your university fund it'. To which the answer is no, or 'eff off you cheeky money grabbing ...', depending on the author. This indicates to me that there is a market for more OA book publishers out there. 

While we're here, I'll answer the query about Bloomsbury - my experience was very positive, they did a professional job on copy editing, they were prepared to go to several designers to get a cover we liked, they produced a good web site for the free online version, and were brave in giving it a CC-NC licence. So, I'd commend them to any authors.

The second event that set me thinking about OA book publishers was the recent FlatWorld Knowledge debacle. Once proclaimed as a model for sustainable open textbooks, they recently announced that, erm, they weren't offering books for free anymore.

I don't know FWK's business model but it seems to me they went too ambitious. They were after that big US set textbook market. This means you have to have a big product. Which means you can then get venture capital (of $26 million), which means you have to have a really big product, and so it goes on. They developed their own platform to allow annotation of books, and sales system. But when you're doing that you get through a fast money burn rate, and then the idea of, you know, giving books away seems less appealing to the VCs who've piled their money in.

But I think the more modest market of academic text books could be accommodated by a far simpler model. The reason academics are going to publishers and not just sticking their own books up online is that they get a range of benefits from the publisher, which include:

• Reputational benefit - if you self-publish you're seen as a looney with a fragile ego, if a publisher puts your book out, you're an author. This matters in academia where the book sales won't amount to much more than in literature (where you can be the next 50 shades success and not give a damn about reputation because you have a massive yacht).
• Copyediting - you really do need a professional to go through an 80,000 word book and do a proper job of copyediting
• Layout, design - no, you can't use that clip art. Or comic sans.
• Manufacture - making all those book things
• Promotion - this is probably the biggest one. Getting books into libraries, promoted at conferences and reviewed in places is difficult. I have to say all my publishers have really relied on me to provide places for review, and even then I'm not sure they ever got them reviewed, so this service isn't as good as it should be. But library distribution is important.

I've raised this before, but it seems to me that these functions are not difficult to realise for a commercial publishers and don't require huge amounts of upfront investment, unlike FWK, if they make use of existing tools. Let's take each of them in turn:

• Reputational benefit - this will take time to acquire, and will need the publisher to operate a quality threshold. This will probably necessitate reviewers looking at proposals and making recommendations. I do this occasionally and going rate seems to be about £50-£100.
• Copyediting - this is generally outsourced by publishers (mine were in India). 
• Layout, design - again, this can be outsourced. You'd want a housestyle and template, and much of it can be done by the author.
• Manufacture - use print on demand or simply operate through a provider such as Blurb. You provide the online version free, and take a percentage of the sales of the print ones.
• Promotion - this would require decent knowledge of how to get books into libraries, and a good social media, network presence. But it's not insurmountable and most publishers don't do great at this anyway.

So how to make it all pay? I'd suggest two options:

1) The authors pay upfront the production costs (for copy-editing, reviewing, design and initial print run), but then keep a large proportion of profits. My royalty because I wanted to go OA was less than 10%, so authors may want to gamble and go for a 50% return if they think it'll sell well. 

2) Company pays production costs, but claims a larger percentage of royalties.

In both cases the online text is free under a CC licence and the physical book costs (and maybe a 99p Kindle version?). I think there are a lot of models that could be explored here that existing publishers don't seem willing to engage with. This would be a prime model for University presses of course, but most of those have been sold off or disbanded, so I'll reiterate my call for a rebirth of university presses. But it looks like some publishers are giving it a go - Open Book Publishers are operating a model similar to the one I've set out for academic texts in the Humanities. I think there's room for a few more in the market too.

It's not without risks, and the returns may not be as large as FWK hoped for, but I think it's a viable business model. And it's one the sector seems to require. So, go on you entrepreneurial types, give it a go. I'll come on board as your Chief Biscuit Officer if you want.

 

 

Education in 'not broken' shock

This is what all education is like - FACT.

I've complained about the "education is broken" meme before - my reservations about it have been threefold:

i) It's just lazy - saying something is broken (or dead) avoids having to do any subtle analysis and appeals to a simplistic viewpoint. 

ii) It frames technological change as a crisis and not an opportunity - Mike Caulfield covered this better than me, but once you adopt a 'broken' metaphor then a whole set of language accompanies it which frames it as a negative problem to be fixed.

iii) It's suspicious - those who peddle the "education is broken" line usually have something to gain from its acceptance. Either they are directly selling a solution that will mend it (after all, a broken something needs to be fixed, see point ii) or they have individual prestige in being seen as someone who can at least see the means of fixing it.

I've been studying the Masters in History at the OU recently (it's an 18 month long haul, only 2 months in). So I thought I'd reflect on how 'broken' this experience feels. The answer is, well, not at all really. This isn't an advert for the OU, I'm sure the majority of reliable HE institutions would provide a similar experience. The point is that it isn't a radical course in terms of approach or technology, and so provides a reasonable experience of what education is really like I think. I'm sure there are plenty of worse examples, and grudgingly, maybe I'll concede there are some better ones, but this is what distance education in the 21st century roughly equates to, I'd hazard. 

First of all we had to read quite a dense text (Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortunes), we were provided with reviews around it and the first assignment was based around analysing its approach. The aim of this was, I think, to introduce us to the type of academic writing in history (I suspect it weeds out the people who really just want to do genealogy), and to think about the range of references and resources required to provide a comprehensive argument (Davidoff and Hall are exhaustive, and at times, exhausting in this respect).

The assignment was an old fashioned 2500 word essay. And it worked - I read the book in a much more analytical manner because of it, I followed up references, I considered the manner in which evidence is found and constructed to form a picture, I engaged with fellow students in the VLE (shhh).

We're now on to a more active block, looking at the range of online resources. This is enjoyable stuff, I really didn't know there was just soooo much stuff out there. I have been lost for a few evenings in the House of Commons Parliementary Papers, or the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, or the National Library of Wales, etc.

I'm not going to do a critique of the course, but studying it has reinforced my belief that "Education is broken" is an unhelpful stance to take. For a start it doesn't reflect the reality. I would urge anyone who uses this claim to study a course outside of their own domain of expertise and see how it feels (I'm obviously focusing on higher ed here, the claim is also frequently used for K12, which I can't claim expertise in). I think many protaganists are basing their claims on rather outdated views of what it feels like to be a student. 

But more importantly, if one adopts the broken stance then you want to start afresh. In my experience this isn't beneficial. I can see how you could take the existing course and maybe add some new elements in to it, or campaign for open access to all historical archives for instance, explore new forms of assessment, find ways of making such courses more accessible and open (I didn't say MOOC, no sir), etc. These are opportunities to build on top of a successful approach, which seems a better, if less sexy approach, than demanding wholesale revolution with some glorious new leaders installed.

Reflecting on this has made me think of a fourth reason why I don't like the 'education is broken' rhetoric, and that is it is fundamentally cliquey or elitist. It's underlying message is "all these other people don't get technology like we do. That's why they're stuck in that old fashioned way of thinking which we know is hopelessly broken. Come join our new gang." But of course, if this new gang became the establishment they'd quickly abandon it. They don't really want educational change, they just want to feel cool for a while. Let them do that, we can do better.