The Ed Techie

It's kinda personal

Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this!

You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're people who wouldn't have read it. And the book brings out different concerns and reactions in them, many of which hadn't occurred to me. This going beyond your usual readership is a salutary lesson for any writer, and has made me rethink some of the way I write.

In his post Jim comments:

"I understand it would be impolitic for Martin to mention this in the book given his audience, but for me that is the real radical line of reasoning for open scholarship—a clear picture of just who the people behind the ideas ideas are, and what “such people” represent more tangibly as human beings."

I don't know about impolitic, I just forgot to mention it. Whenever I do sessions on social media for educators I always address this point. Getting the balance right is difficult. Jim is absolutely correct, it's the personal that leads to engagement, and this is a very different voice from the objective one of academic papers (which is not to say it's better or worse, just different). So you need to put an element of personal in there, the people I follow on blogs and twitter don't just broadcast cold ideas. But having said that, one of the mistakes I think people make when they first start blogging is to go too personal. I'm not particularly interested if you went to the cinema last night and the film was quite good and then you had a curry. 

So It's about that bridging between personal and professional. Now if you went to the cinema, and had a revelation about open access while watching a 3-D slasher movie, I'm interested. I think the personal element is essential in good online presence (but that doesn't mean I want to know when you've had an argument with your spouse). Which raises the question, are there some roles where it's effectively impossible to do good social media? I think it's very difficult to be a police officer or politician or senior manager online as you end up having to sanitise every output to the point where it becomes unengaging. If you don't there are people who will use it against you. So, as you go higher up the career ladder maybe effective online presence becomes more difficult.

In Amis's The Pregnant Widow the main character finds financial success but as soon as he does, his ability to write poetry dries up. You can't have both. Maybe that's the way it goes with social media.

 

Digital scholar book launch

For those of you who found something better to do yesterday afternoon (I can't imagine what that could be), here the webcast of my book launch can be found here. 

The event seemed to go ok, although I fear I was a bit rambling, and didn't really do the elevator pitch thing for the book. John Naughton said some very kind words, and then we had a good discussion with the audience and wider twitter participants.

And below is my Prezi, which I still don't think I've got the hang of - I just don't think I'm a visual kinda guy. 

Digital Scholar - book launch on Prezi

A digital scholar is...

Just a quick post as a reminder that my book launch is next Tuesday, 15th at 3pm - it is being streamed live and we'll be hoping for some twitter contributions.

We have a prize of a signed (or, even better, unsigned) copy of the book, which we've simplified. Just do a tweet completing the sentence 'A digital scholar is...' and tag it #digitalscholar and I'll pick one winner on the day.

I've been doing some Despair.Inc posters for my talk on the day, so thought I'd share this one:

A simple open vs closed tale

Science in the Sands reports how a US Professor, Dianne O'Leary, wrote to the publisher, Springer, asking for a PDF of her own paper. They refused and as her university doesn't subscribe to the journal, because it is prohibitively expensive, she couldn't get a final copy of her own article.

A later update reveals that, she could get the copy, but you have to ask the right person. This is something I have often encountered - getting the definitive copy, as quite often the last version you hold on your machine is not one that has been through final edits. So even when she could get the copy, it took a long time to obtain it, you had to find the right person to ask, and it often comes with limitations on use (such as you can't post it on a website). 

Now, contrast this with a recent experience I had with my Digital Scholar book, which is published by Bloomsbury under a Creative Commons license. I realised the other day that I too, didn't have a PDF version of the final book. The version they make available is in HTML. I knew that the book torrent site Library Pirate had made a version available. As it is a non-commercial license, this is perfectly legitimate (I think). So I went to their site and downloaded a 'pirate' version of my own book. Within minutes I had a PDF (Download TheDigitalScholar), which I could do with as I wish.

As an author, which process is preferable?

Book launch - YOU are invited

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bayasaa/2693171833/>

The good people at IET have offered to do a launch of my book, and Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Rebecca Ferguson have done a great job in organising it. Details are here in Cloudworks, the important details are below (one of them is not true, guess which one):

When: Tues 15 November 2011, 3-4pm

Where if you're OU based: Ambient Lab, ground floor of the Jennie Lee Building)

Where if you're online: Live streamed here: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1769&s=31&ran=1641022548&state=1

Twitter hashtag: #digitalscholar

Competition: YES! Win a free copy of the book. To enter the competition, please show or tell us what you consider to be "a digital scholar". Entries can take the form of an image, audio clip, video, blog post, piece of writing or animation - and will be uploaded via this cloud (or just point me at it). 

Afterwards:I shall be breakdancing at the end of the event.

Come on, you know you want to. I really hope OU colleagues will come along and external colleagues/friends/mortal enemies will join in via twitter.

 

Open as in... doors, arms, ended?

With a fanfare and much waving of pompoms, I can announce that the open access version of my book is now online, via the good people at Bloomsbury Academic. It is available online in plain HTML format, broken down by chapters. I'm excited about this because now I can point people at it and pass it around freely. 

A couple of people have requested other formats, eg epub, pdf, etc. I could do these, but my feeling is that what's significant is the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence. If anyone wants to take the HTML version and create an Egyptian hieroglyphics version delivered via 1988 version of HyperCard - well, they can.

In open source communities they often make the distinction of free as in free speech (meaning that you have freedom to alter the code), and free as in beer (meaning gratis, zero cost). This set me thinking - I wonder what the open in open access means: 

• open as in arms - it is welcoming, friendly even, particularly given the network around it (eg you can twitter me and tell me it's rubbish), it is not a product in a vacuum.
• open as in doors - you are invited in, like an open door policy to look around
• open as in ended - this is not to say I have an ongoing commitment to update it, but that the possibilities of the licence allow it to be open ended in terms of format

One I'm not sure about is whether it is open as in minded - it is not a co-constructed text, a wiki-book, it is still a one to many broadcast model. Which is appropriate sometimes, I want to hear what, say Clay Shirky, has to say on a subject, not 10,000 people around him, but I wonder if there is more that can be done around the open-minded angle.

On that note I am running a week of the Siemens/Downes/Cormier MOOC extravaganza, starting 26th September, and I'll be using my book as the basis. So maybe this is a way of being open-minded, constructing a course, or event, around the open access version so it can be discussed and interpreted.To this end I would like people to vote on the topics we'll cover in the week - choose three from this list.  Anyway, I hope you can join in the course, or failing that, get a chance to check out the OA version of the book.

Meanwhile here is Elbow singing Open Arms, which I think is all about open access publishing...

 

Kindle pricing - an apology

In my last post I mentioned that the Kindle price for my book was listed as £42 in the UK, and I was bemoaning this. It has since come down to a more reasonable £11.42 (although the US is still showing the higher price). I thought this was a result of some strange pricing policy from my publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, but it turns out the problem was with Amazon. Bloomsbury list their Kindle price as 20% below the paperback standard price. Amazon had mistakenly taken the hardback price and reduced from there, hence the ludicrously high price.

So, a fullsome apology to Bloomsbury, who are operating a sensible Kindle pricing policy. I guess it demonstrates the powerful and ambiguous role Amazon occupy. And that authors should trust their publisher more (eats humble pie).

Would you buy a book from this man?

My book, The Digital Scholar, has finally come out. When I was looking round for a publisher year ago, it was an absolute requirement that they do open access (at least one chapter of the book is a rant against academic publishing models). Bloomsbury Academic offered this and are also a reputable publisher and handled the process very well. In a rare demonstration of putting my money where my mouth is, going for an open access publisher means the royalty is much reduced from previous publishers, so it's not a path to riches, but I accepted long ago that writing academic books was somewhere on a par with flying kites in terms of being a route to money.

The paperback and hardback came out a few days before the Kindle version. The paperback is officially £17.99 but discounted on Amazon - [the Kindle version is a whopping £42! I've asked if this can be lowered because it is self-defeating. I'm not sure if this is an Amazon or a Bloomsbury thing. I've written before that what you want to encourage on Kindle is an iTunes type behaviour - impulse buying and a 'might as well have a look' attitude. A £42 price mark rules this out.]

UPDATE -the Kindle price has since fallen to a more reasonable £11.42. See next post

The open access version is released under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. Apparently it has to go through a different QA process so hasn't been released yet. I am assured it will be available by the end of the month. In many ways it is the OA version that I see as the real release. It also marks another reason why the Kindle pricing won't work - at £5-£10 you may opt for the Kindle version for convenience, rather than converting the HTML to ebook format. At £42 it's worth doing the conversion.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether open access increases sales and/or citations compared with previous books I've written. My hunch is it won't make much difference to the former (that's life in the long tail for you), but it will see a reasonable increase in the latter. And, if one accepts citations as a metric of scholarly impact (which is not entirely without contention), then as an academic that is surely what counts.

Views on a book

I have been completing the index for my digital scholarship book and thought I'd share some thoughts on different views of the book. I put the entire text through Wordle to produce the following tag cloud:

I then restricted this view to only 50 words:

And by way of comparison, here is a draft of the index in Scribd:

The Digital Scholar - Index

Two questions arise for me: do these representations reveal anything to me, as author? And do any of them provide useful insight or make you as potential reader, interested?

The word clouds contain some pretty obvious terms (if digital, open or scholarship weren't in big letters, we'd all be surprised). But there may be some subtlety in there too. The qualifiers and adjectives may be revealing, for example the prominence of 'may' and 'might' indicates that I am hedging a lot of terms, so maybe (there I go again) suggests it is a considered, balanced approach and not a mainfesto. Also the presence of 'significant', 'change' and 'new' demonstrates that I am trying to grapple with a transition in 'practice'. It also highlights which words I overuse. So I think you could glean some idea both about content and approach from the word cloud. I'm just not sure it's the best way to do it.

The index is probably more revealing about content as it shows what I think are the main concepts and also the significant names. But it doesn't show as much about approach, and as an author doesn't reveal much as I compiled it. An index created by someone else would be interesting.

Digital Scholarship - the DJ set

I have a vague idea of maybe one day doing a keynote as a DJ set (I think Brian Lamb did this once), but of course, I have never done a DJ set, and it would be a painful affair. So in lieu of that, I decided to create a DJ set to accompany my book. I used Soundcloud, to produce the set below. Lots of tracks were disallowed because they had restricted rights, so my 30 odd track set came down to 12. I've added in a little explanation in between. My mic started dodgy and then packed up altogether, so the quality of these (both in technical and content terms) isn't great, and I don't think I have a career as a late night DJ in the offing, but you get the point. All the songs seem to have been truncated at 3 minutes too, so it's not ideal. 

Of course, the main point is not the content of the set, but the existence of the set itself. I mentioned previously about the boundaries of the book being blurred and this is a further example. I can create a DJ set and share it globally, to accompany a book (about digital scholarship for chrissakes, hardly the funkiest subject!). I mean, come on, that is kinda cool isn't it?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, I'll maybe try and find an alternative means of doing it later and get a better mic. Look upon this as a first draft. Maybe a DS106radio set beckons...

 

Digital Scholarship by mweller