The Ed Techie

The role of respectable idiots

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/6846455366/>

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.

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

View more PowerPoint from Martin Weller

Punk, Queen & New Romantics in digital scholarship

It may be tired after the whole edupunk thing (curses to you Groom!), and has more than a whiff of old men reliving their youth about it, but nevertheless I'd like to revisit punk music as an analogy for current changes in ed tech. This time it is nothing to do with the approach or the values, but rather the lesson of what a revolution actually look like.

In his book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton makes the point that we are living through the midst of a revolution, and it's very difficult to see what the outcome will be. While I think that digital, networked and open approaches to scholarship do represent a revolution, I think we also tend to over simplify what this means. John makes this point also.

There is a tendency to think of revolutions as absolutes: pre and post. Everything that has gone before is swept away and everything that happens since is cast in the new light.

But for many revolutions this isn't the case. The actual picture is far more subtle, and interesting. I was reflecting on this the other day with regards to my own musical tastes and history. My musical tastes really started emerging in the immediate post-punk era, and this coloured everything for me. So my early album purchases were The Jam, Clash and later Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes. I inherited a completely dismissive attitude towards anything pre-1976. I scoffed at prog rock, folk and metal.

This wasn't actually a bad attitude to have as a teenager, you're meant to have strong tastes. But it did mean it took me longer than it should have done to come round to bands like Led Zeppelin, or Nick Drake.

But the lesson is, for many people my age punk was a defining revolution in music. But it wasn't as all encompassing as history may have painted it. I had plenty of friends whose musical tastes remained largely untouched. Queen, Iron Maiden, Luther Vandross - punk had no impact here.

And I had yet other friends who didn't think they liked punk, but went on to become new romantics (it was a confused time). And while that music had different values, it was a 'scene' that was undoubtedly influenced by the possibilities that punk had awoken in people.

Now this isn't just a nostalgia trip - there is an analogy here with digital scholarship, and what revolutions feel like. There are scholars for whom the digital aspect is nearly all consuming - I'm one of them, I simply can't imagine what it's like without working in a networked manner. There are those for whom it is largely irrelevant. Think of them as the Queen fans of scholarship - they have been successful and have a preference for an established way of working. Then there is probably a middle group, whose tastes and practices are touched by the existence of digital scholarship, even if they are not particularly strong advocates. These are the new romantics.

I guess the point is, a revolution changes some things completely, alters some, and has no impact on others, but we tend to focus only on the first of these.

Levels of friction in sharing

Over the past week or so I've had a couple of twitter discussions around 'frictionless sharing'. Brian Kelly captured some of this discussion in Storify and then followed up with this post (like a dog with a bone, Brian has also created a wikipedia stub :)

The term has been somewhat corrupted by Facebook, which has inevitably led to it being rather sneered at. Particularly worrying I think is unintentional sharing, ie Facebook simply broadcasting your actions. Sharing should always be a conscious decision I feel. 

Pete Johnston made the point about context, which is another concern around frictionless sharing. Consider the following examples:

1) You 'favourite' a number of offensive tweets from people to be used in a talk about online behaviour.

2) Your daughter borrows your iPod and listens to some teeny bop music, which is displayed in your LastFM profile.

3) You collect a number of articles in Scoop.It which demonstrate fallacious arguments about the net generation.

In each case you wouldn't want the casual observer to infer any endorsement of the resources by yourself, but without any clear context, that could happen. Nonetheless, frictionless sharing represents a significant practice for academics I feel. Much of the value of a scholar is to be a knowledge filter. They are also knowledge creators, through research, of course, but a valuable role is to read around a subject in more detail than most people have time for, and to filter the key resources and messages. Thus if someone I know and respect curates a subject in Tumblr (or delicious, or Scoop.It or Mendeley) then having access to that set of resources is tremendously useful to me as a researcher. It doesn't mean I shouldn't do my own research, but knowing that this is what the world expert thinks is interesting, is a useful resource. And for anyone doing this the simplicity of the tools I mentioned (which usually equates to clicking on a bookmarklet) doesn't cost them much in time, effort or money. This can be seen as democratising this kind of knowledge. Previously I would need to know the person in order to find out what they thought was of value in their field, but now it's open to all.

This kind of trusted digital curation is increasingly valuable I feel, and one that is not easily recognised by current systems. Someone could be the key 'go-to' source because they spend a lot of time reading and filtering, but not publish anything themselves, and yet have a huge impact in their field. Stephen Downes is a good example of someone who is highly valued for this curation role, but he combines it with producing his own excellent material as well. But if he didn't and only did the filtering role, that would still be enormously valuable and yet difficult to recognise formally (imagine trying to put it through the REF in the UK).

I want to emphasise that this doesn't mean all sharing should be this way. I think we can see increasing levels of friction in sharing, and arguably, the value of the resource increases as more friction is added. In the chapter on openness in my Digital Scholar book, I suggest three degrees of sharing friction: 

1. Frictionless – sharing that occurs without much additional effort required, for example, if a scholar is gathering resources for her own research, then using a social bookmarking tool is an effective tool for her as well as making the list public.

2. Quick sharing – this requires a small level of effort, so does not occur simply as a by-product, but the effort required is minimal, such as sharing a link via Facebook or uploading a Powerpoint presentation to Slideshare.

3. Content creation – this requires some effort to produce a digital artefact, for instance, creating a blog post, a YouTube movie, or adding and synchronising audio to a presentation to create a ‘slidecast’. The effort and expertise required are still relatively low compared to many traditional forms of output.

 

 

Yeah, but who pays?

My colleague, Gill Kirkup, asks this question of digital scholarship, and it is a frequent refrain of Alan Cann's. It's a good question, and one I usually try to have an answer for. I don't think I am guilty of Gill's charge of hoping for the "internet equivalent of the tooth fairy". In fact, one of my complaints about the current academic publishing model is that it's a poor economic one. Now, one can make many arguments about open access that don't address the economics, for example around it being a public good, or a more effective way of working for instance, many of which are compelling in their own right, but in this post let's just focus on the money bit.

And I should add that there are much broader 'who pays' questions - there is a who pays in terms of environmental impact of running servers, and also 'who pays' in terms of higher education and society, but both of these are beyond the scope of this post, and I'm concentrating on the 'who pays' question as it is conventionally put in terms of open scholarship.

While I think it is a good question to ask, I'm also suprised at how much people think new ways of working are necessarily unsustainable. I think this arises partly because we're often talking about many different things when we ask the question 'who pays?'. Gill probably has open access publishing in mind, but others will be referring to OERs, or digital scholarship in general. I'll take a few interpretations and look at the 'who pays' question for each. Some are easier than others, but none assume a complete overhaul of global financial systems, radical change in human behaviour, or liberal quantities of fairy dust. They're all doable.

Open access publishing - this is the one that has had the most attention. Let's assume we want to keep a peer-review journal system - this is by no means certain, but it addresses the question most directly. Willinsky suggests you can publish an open access journal for zero cost. As an editor of one, I'd say this is unlikely - you need someone to do some of the admin support and technical setup and maintenance, even if you're using OJS. And handling promotion, library and database take-up is quite a specialised skill. A bit of copyediting is also necessary, although the degree of this varies. But the large bulk of the journal process - peer review, editing, organising, decision-making - is stuff academics generally do for free anyway. So the associated costs are quite low. 

One model for OA is the gold route, or author pays. Usually this means the research funder builds the costs in. This pretty much maintains the current model, and ensures OA, so in that sense, it is realisable. However, the costs under this model are high - somewhere around $5,000 per article if published by a commercial publisher. Whereas a non-profit, open access journal (say one run by a society) has much lower costs, around $750 (see Clarke for lots of numbers). Most of that difference in cost is going on proprietary systems, marketing, shareholders and salaries. And that money either comes from research grants or libraries. While I'm not after making people redundant, those additional costs aren't factors that are really the concern of academic researchers.

The cheaper, non-profit versions could be funded through the research councils (either through author pays, or directly as ongoing research distribution sources), through library consortia (as Frances Pinter suggests), or through universities. Universities used to run their own presses, but these became difficult to maintain and were often sold on, but the online equivalent of a university press might see a central team of one techie, and two admin or librarian staff (say) supporting 5-10 online journals. That is a much more sustainable model.

If any of the above solutions seem unrealistic to you, then imagine if I was trying to sell the idea of the current model - research councils fund research, this is undertaken by university staff, ofte subsidised by the institution, they then write articles, these are reviewed and edited by staff in other universities, for free, then all of this labour is provided to commercial publishers who sell the product back to the same universities and make very considerable profits along the way.

Open scholarship - more generally, we can talk of open scholarship, which is just sharing stuff you do. This might be a conference presentation, data from a research project, workshop structure, etc (as well as the publications above). This is the one area where I really don't see the 'who pays' question. The actual costs involved in doing so aren't great - you've prepared your presentation, and maybe practised it, so adding this to Slideshare is a minimal effort. People often ask of blogging, 'where do you find the time?' but for me having an effective online presence is such an integral part of how I work the question I ask back is 'how do you operate without it?". It is rather like asking them 'how do you find the time to read?'.

I also feel that we are often blind to the inefficiencies in the ways we work currently, because we're accustomed to them. In a word - meetings. I tend to spend three days on campus, during which time I am in meetings solidly, usually through lunch. While these are often necessary, I also know that I get a lot more actual work done on the two days I work from home and communicate via other methods. And while I love meeting people at conferences, these are hugely wasteful of time, and much of that connection can be formed via other means. That's not to say we should abandon all conferences, but maybe you don't need to go to one a month now. Finding other ways of working often leads to open practices as a by-product. For example, if I want to share a presentation I've just finished, then instead of emailing to everyone there, I put it up online and make it open to all. 

So, in short, open scholarship I feel is just absorbed as part of everyday practice, using a combination or free tools and services and different approaches to working. 

Open education - this, I think, is the most difficult to answer the 'who pays' question, because teaching money (whether it comes from the state or the student) is what really funds higher education. There has been lots of work on the sustainability (or otherwise) of the OER movement. David Wiley has probably the best review, and suggest three models: The MIT, USU and Rice models. The USU model is near to making OER a by-product of teaching, releasing content as you go. Whether this will impact on student numbers in the long term if everyone did it, we don't really know, but generally the feeling is that it wouldn't as students want more than just the content.

Open education isn't just OERs of course. There are open courses, which can be bespoke MOOCs of the type George, Dave and Stephen run eg Change. I wouldn't suggest these are sustainable as the entire replacement for all higher education (and neither would any of their developers). That's not what they're about. We should rather view these as new types of learning offerings we can do that are complementary to, or parallel to, existing structures. So if you want to try an experimental subject or approach but can't get it approved, then setting up a MOOC is relatively low cost. They are action research if you like - something we couldn't do before, but can now.

Perhaps more relevant are the boundaryless open courses. For example, Alec's or Jim's courses which have a traditional, campus, fee paying student body, but which is open to anyone else to take part in, for as long as they like. These can be a win-win situation - students get access to a wider range of expertise and participants, and the open participants get to experience part of study. My guess is this approach wouldn't really hit student numbers and, if your course is online, it doesn't take much to make it open. I think making the case as to why the university should do this is a tougher sell, but in terms of the costs, it needn't undermine existing models (it may even act as a good recruitment vehicle).

A recent, interesting example, combines open education potentially with open publishing. The Stanford AI course has gained incredible student numbers. The course uses a text authored by one of the lecturers, which suggests a future model might be something like: write an open access textbook - create a course from it - sell more copies of your book and get increase sign up to the university version of the course with accreditation. Everyone is a winner.

I don't suggest that it is easy to tackle the 'who pays' question for all forms of openness but I would argue that none of them are based just wishful thinking or naivete. And I would also suggest that we should examine some of our current economic models carefully and ask just how sustainable they really are in a digital, networked world.

Ten digital scholarship questions for researchers

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/elycefeliz/3262326159/>

In my talk the other day for the Change MOOC, and in my book, I argue that digital scholarship has the potential to alter the way we conduct research, or at least to add some new tools to the toolbox.

Now checklists should be treated with even more caution than a finding that 3D improves learning, so take this as some things to think about rather than a definite checklist you can submit to your research funder. I'd be interested to hear of other suggestions, and also whether this is all stuff people are doing anyway. My feeling is that when it comes to writing research proposals we're all locked into a set of existing behaviours, and more significantly, the process is so arduous that you focus on surviving the process itself and not on thinking beyond it. In other words if the research funders aren't asking for it, we don't consider it. But if we (and by we, I mean researchers) want to take ownership of our own practice, then maybe we should.

So here's my list of digital scholarship type stuff to consider for your project:

1. Do you have an open access publishing policy for the outputs of the project?
2. Will you make the data openly available, or is some of it not appropriate to do so? If so, where will you put it?
3. Will there be one main individual in charge of social media communication or is it just distributed across the group?
4. Will you have specific twitter/blog/youtube accounts for the project or do individuals in the project have a high online reputation it would be better to utilise?
5. How will you incorporate analytics into the project? Do you expect to get a certain number of views, dwell time, global distribution, etc on a main site?
6. What media will you use? For example, will you create a 'trailer' video for the project and an overview of the findings?
7. How will you archive discussion around the research, eg twitter hashtag conversations?
8. Will you provide a curation service, eg a Scoop-It page of relevant resources as you go along?
9. Are there new methodologies you will employ, eg crowdsourcing?
10. Is there a planned release for findings throughout the project? Will any aspects be not open for dissemination eg via twitter or blogs?

I'll stop there because ten is a nice number.

Digital scholarship = unspoiled holiday destination

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanjibm/3306287621/ by Sanjibm>

At last week's digital scholarship debate Rory McGreal raised a point that has often nagged at me. He said he didn't want blogs and other forms of outputs to be recognised, not because they weren't part of scholarly activity, but because he didn't want them to go the same way as journal articles. There is something in this - we have refined and controlled the writing process to such a degree that it is not a very pleasurable activity. Sometimes writing a good paper does feel as though you are doing something creative and worthwhile, but often there is an element of duty about it ("I need to get my publications up for the REF"), and the objective, scientific style itself is very tightly defined. 

The other forms of output we now have allow all sorts of variety - in terms of tone, content, format, size, audience, etc. It's a fun thing to do, and as these forms of output aren't recognised, it is generally something people do for the fulfillment of being creative, expressing an idea and engaging with an audience.

Now, if, as I keep banging on, we were to start recognising these non-traditional outputs, then it's not inconceivable that they'd go the way of publications. For example, only blog posts in recognised blogging sites would count, or they'd need to demonstrate the appropriate objectivity of researchers. One can imagine in five years time some new career researcher banging out posts that don't differ much from each other in order to get their technorati ranking over the required threshold.

There are some inbuilt protection mechanisms against this however. For example, the removal of the filter means that imposing the quality threshold is unlikely, because people can always go elsewhere and reputation arises from the community. 

It does strike me though that there is a bit of a dilemma in all this promotion of digital scholarship. It's rather akin to the person who finds a beautiful unspoilt holiday destination and wants to rave about it, only to find that it then becomes popular, commercialised and loses its original charm.

Digital scholarship recognition - the debate

So, I was the invited keynote debater at this year's EdMedia conference in Lisbon. I had ten minutes to put my case in favour of the following motion:

"This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship"

My (poor quality, one take audio) slidecast is below.

Digital scholarship debate

View another webinar from Martin Weller

My argument was that there are a number of converging pressures which will make recognition inevitable. These were:

1) Impact

2) Efficiency

3) Efficacy

4) Complementarity

5) Institutional benefit

6) Variety

7) Human factors

Antonio Figueiredo put the opposing motion, and Paulo Simoes captured it in everyone's (well AJ Cann's anyway) new favourite tool, ScoopIt. We ended up kind of agreeing that it would happen, but Antonio suggested it would take longer than ten years. He pulled a nice trick here inviting the audience to close their eyes and picture their university ten years ago, 'was it really so different?' he asked. He must have struck a chord with this as the no vote won the day.

Chatting to people afterwards the sentiment seemed to be that they thought it would happen, and indeed, should happen, but they were generally pessimistic about the ability of universities to change to accommodate it. I've got to say I find this kind of depressing if it turns out to be true. I'd have preferred it to be rejected because people felt it abandoned core scholarly principles or something. But to think that despite us all thinking it's a good idea, an entire decade is still not long enough to bring about a modest change in university recognition processes? If true, one wonders how displaced from society unis will look in ten years' time.

Or is that just sour grapes because I lost?

The book isn't dead, it just has new friends

So the first of my reflections on completing my digital scholarship book can probably be filed under 'No shit, Sherlock':

The book is a good format for some ideas 

I have suggested that books and articles have had a monopoly as the format for the dissemination of ideas, and new media liberate us from this somewhat. In my case the book has grown out of stuff I've been blogging over the past 4 years or so, but it isn't just a load of blog posts bundled together (whatever you may think). The length and format of a book is a very good means of both exploring ideas in depth and pulling together various strands that have been rather fragmented. Who knew eh? One of the points I make (repeatedly, ad nauseum) is that we now have alternatives, where there were previously limited options. It is not the case that the book will disappear, or is dead, but that we have alternatives now to expressing and sharing ideas. Is an article, a blog post, a video, a slidecast, a podcast or conference presentation the best? Sometimes the book really is the best format. 

Perhaps more interesting is not which one of these you choose, but the combination of them. What is the boundary of the book? Is it the physical object? What about the shared comments and highlights on Kindle? Then there will be related media, blogs, twitter conversations. The decision is less about which sole method you select but rather which one you place at the center of this distributed knowledge bundle. 

Some thoughts on the book writing process

(The printout of my book) 

I submitted the manuscript (well the Word files) of my digital scholarship book to the publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, a couple of weeks ago. It should be out in September, with an online OA Creative Commons version as well as the printy touchy feely one.

So now is a good time to reflect on the process. In the following posts I'll suggest a number of reflections on the process. Overall it's been rewarding, and a useful exercise, but I couldn't have done it without this blog. Whereas many authors create a blog to accompany a book, I think I have created a book to accompany the blog. 

I'm not sure if this is one long post or several small ones, but I'm breaking with my usual style of long (ponderous) posts and trying some shorter, pithy ones focusing on one element, because, well, because I can, which is the joy of it. So over the coming week I'll do a post a day on this subject.

And you thought you were in for a dull week...