The Ed Techie

Battle for Open webinar

As part of Open Education week, the OER Research Hub organised some webinars. One was around my Battle for Open idea/forthcoming book. It was my first attempt to condense the book into a presentation. The areas I covered were: the roots of open education; Open access publishing; OERs; MOOCs; Open scholarship; The Silicon Valley narrative; some warnings, and conclusions.

For the 4 areas of openness (OERs, MOOCs, OA and open scholarship) I tried to set out the success of the open approach and also the key areas of battle. 

You can watch/listen to the webinar here. The slidedeck is below:

The Battle for Open from Martin Weller

Art of Guerrilla Research workshop

On Monday I ran a workshop with Tony Hirst on the Art of Guerrilla Research. This was a vague idea I'd floated a while back, and Rhona Sharpe of ELESIG got in touch, asking if I could run one of their masterclass workshops on it. This was a good opportunity to think through the idea with others.

With tongue a bit in cheek I proposed a manifesto for Guerrilla Research which was: 

• It can be done by one or two researchers and does not require a team
• It relies on existing open data, information and tools
• It is fairly quick to realise
• It is disseminated via blogs and social media
• It doesn’t require permission

It is that last one that is most significant I think. This is stuff you can just do, it doesn't require funding, permission from IT services, access to privileged data, etc. It is thus more exploratory in nature, Tony used the phrase 'recreational research' (I hope Tony blogs his slidedeck soon). Another point I was trying to explore is one I've made before, that we have become enculturated into thinking about research in a particular way. What constitutes research is the 2 year funded project with a journal article at the end. Like much else to do with digital scholarship, it is not the case that this traditional approach is not valid, but rather that we now have a much more extended toolbox and set of possibilities. But culturally we still fall into a certain set of behaviours.

It was interesting that a lot of the people at the workshop classified themselves as being outside traditional academic roles, so couldn't engage in traditional research anyway as it wasn't part of their remit. For these people guerrilla research is all they've got.

The slidedeck is below:

The Art of Guerrilla Research from Martin Weller

 

[Update: here is the video of the session, it's a bit quiet]

 

Open research ethics - the puppy killer scenario

Yesterday I ran a workshop called "The Art of Guerrilla Research" for ELESIG, along with Tony Hirst. I'll blog it later but basically it was about what sort of research can you do without permission and funding, eg asking questions of open data (hence Tony describing the things he does).

One issue that was raised a few times was that of the ethics of it. The assumption has long been that anything openly available is fair game. So for instance there is a lot of research that uses travel blogs as its data source, and they don't require the permission of these people to analyse them or interpret them. In general, this is my stance too, but thinking through the types of things Tony does with data led me to come up with a scenario which would raise ethical issues. I offer it just as an example of how it isn't quite as clear cut as you may think regarding openly available data.

Let us imagine that there is a heinous crime we can all agree is very bad - puppy murders (I'm using a silly example so people won't get distracted by a specific crime, but you can replace puppy murders with a small or large crime/amoral act of your choice). Tony does a FOI request to find all the people convicted of puppy murders over the past decade. He then finds which of these have Facebook pages that are openly available. He creates an interest graph of their listed interests, and shows that puppy murderers tend to have a number of interests in common. He blogs this, just out of interest.

Someone else then comes along and finds all the people on Facebook who also have these interests, and publishes a list of 300 people who have 'puppy murderer' type interests. One of these, although entirely innocent of any puppy mistreatment, is attacked by a mob who accuse him of being a puppy murderer.

Now, this has used all openly available data, publicly and knowingly shared by the individuals. But by taking it and creating a new interpretation of that data, new knowledge has been generated which the original posters could not have foreseen. The new form of this knowledge then carries an ethical dimension. This is obviously an extreme example, but it illustrates the potential complexity of assuming all open data is fair game.

Open scholarship, social media & libraries

I gave a presentation to a conference of university librarians in Aarhus, Denmark last week. Social media and the role of the librarian was their theme. I won't pretend to be an expert on libraries, but taking Shelby Foote's quote that "a university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library" you could argue that the factors affecting higher ed are the same for libraries.

The talk was kind of a cross over between my Digital Scholar book and the new Battle for Open one. My argument was that openness represents a key direction for libraries, and that social media plays a vital role in this. I then set out four such areas: MOOCs, OERs, Open Access and Open Scholarship, and the role of social media in each. You can view social media as the glue binds these, or the substrate, that underlies them. For instance, social media creates a pressure for open access, since people want to share articles, and there is no point tweeting a link to an article that asks someone to pay $50 to view it.

The talk went well (I think) and provoked some good discussion. Anyway, the slidedeck is below:

 

Open scholarship, social media & libraries from Martin Weller