The Ed Techie

Reflections on openness

As part of the EVOLVE/Educamp series I gave a talk online last Monday about openness in education. You can access the recording of the Elluminate session here, and below are my slides:

Reflection in openness

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Some of the slides may be familiar to you. I set out how the Open University had been founded around the mission of being open to people, places, methods and ideas. I emphasised that the founders had shown great foresight, or got lucky, with the choice of name. Imagine how dated The University of the Airwaves (or some similar name) would sound now. But 'open' is a term that has both evolved, and gained in currency in education. If I were setting up a university now and i wanted to portray it as leading edge in terms of pedagogy, technology, and approach then 'Open' would be my term of choice.

I then went on to talk about openness in scholarly practice, referencing Gideon Burton's use of the term 'open scholar.' The thrust of my talk here was a familiar one - that sharing is the key action that both defines the digital/open scholar and is also the fuel which drives the reciprocity economy.

The question session afterwards was really variations on one question - how do you practice being open if your institution doesn't encourage it/reward it/puts obstacles in the way?

I think there are several answers to this, which those of us who promote open education could take as a challenge for research over the next few years:

1. Make the economic case - there are of course lots of other reasons why you might want to be open as an academic, but I believe if we could make some economic case, it would go a long way to easing the fears of decision makers. This type of case would be multi-layered: for example, an individual can have efficiency savings by having access to a network for support; courses can be produced quicker by using open access material; reputation can be enhanced by participating in global networks without the need for costly travel and time away; etc. I am not arguing that the economic case is the only, or most important, one, but the proprietary approach has an easy way of measuring economic factors (eg sales of items), and this is less clear with openness, so adding clarity would be a good start.
2. Create robust reward schemes - in my work on digital scholarship, I've talked about how we might adjust promotion criteria to recognise open type of outputs. As I've mused before, metrics might form part of this too.
3. Set out the benefits - a lot of work has been done here, but by carefully explaining and demonstrating the benefits to an individual academic of being open, and allaying some of their doubts, then we increase the bottom-up drivers.
4. Provide easy routes in - this gets easier all the time, but providing different ways of engaging with new technologies and therefore experiencing the benefits of a largely open approach is again part of our responsibility.

I've set up a discussion area in Cloudworks, so if you'd like to continue this discussion, add content, call me a moron, then that's the place to do it (you can do the last one here too).

A CogDog Franchise

Badge made with BadgeMaker from BigHugeLabs

Cristina Costa has asked me (and I've agreed) to do a presentation on openness in education on the 14th September. I was thinking about this and on doing something that demonstrates the power of openness, when reading through my backlog on Google Reader I came across  Alan Levine's presentation on openness at Open Ed. This is a) exactly what I want and b) much better than I'd manage.

So here's my idea: Alan starts up a CogDog Franchise scheme. Franchisees pay him an annual subscription and get to have the CogDog seal (bark?) of approval which means they get to give his presentations (instead of having to you know, create their own), and they are trusted to have sufficient knowledge to answer questions from the audience. Everyone's a winner: franchisees get to give good presentations, the audience gets a quality guarantee, Alan gets to spread the CogDog brand.

And the thing is - I'm only half joking. Sign me up.

Year of Future Learning - an experiment

I want to try something out, so would like people's views on it. My idea is to try and get some focused activity going around the concept of the learner of the future. Think of it as either a distributed research process or adding a layer of intentionality over some of what we do in the blogosphere.

I have this feeling that between us there are often very good conversations, excellent resources, great ideas, etc but we don't always take the next step in synthesising or collecting these. 

Here is what I have in mind: A loosely coupled, distributed research 'project'. We declare 09 the 'year of future learning' (#YOFL or #FLY - take your pick). I accept that 'the year of X' is a bit naff, and comes with all sorts of anti-arguments, (what about next year?) but as a means of focusing our energies, providing opportunities for review, and giving a broad enough umbrella it provides a useful framework.

This is a means of aggregating existing resources and events by tagging them - in the Weinberger sense, we may as well put our leaves on as many branches as possible, so for instance there will be sessions at Northern Voice and Alt-C which could be made part of the YOFL simply by adding the tag.

But I see it as much more than just another meme or tag, I also want to use it as a means of instigating some new open, distributed activities. I have in mind the following:

• A set of interesting questions generated by the community
• Connected blog posts around particular topics - blog-carnivals Tony has pointed me at
• An open, special edition journal
• Combined research results
• A workshop format that anyone can run, and share results via a wiki
• 'Live' events eg George Siemens' Elluminate sessions
• 'Flash debates' in twitter around a specific topic, which are then summarised
• Face to face sessions at various conferences
• A wiki/blog/site collecting all of this material together
• An end of year review

 I want to avoid any perceptions of elitism  so the idea is that this is open to anyone. I've emailed a few blog chums to see if they would be interested in doing some of the above, to give it some traction, but essentially it's open. If there is a topic of burning interest to you, run an activity and it'll be pulled in.

In addition, my colleague Grainne Conole also has lots of links into various communities, so we will be running a number of face to face activities also. This involves 'talking to people' - not sure what that is, probably some cool web 2.0 service.

The experiment for me is whether the online community can work this way, or whether it really does need a more directed, formal research project. At the moment I think we have good conversation. Conversations and dialogue can be spontaneous but they can also be focused, with a specific aim. Similarly, we have a loose-knit community of sorts, and communities can be around general areas of interest, but they can also have a common goal ('overthow a president', 'find Dave a date').

It is this second, more intentional layer that I was hoping we might foster this year. I like finding other people's posts and riffing off (or ripping off) ideas, but I want to explore whether the edublog community can do a bit more. Whether we can have purposeful conversations, aimed at addressing a specific problem.

To kick off I have created a wiki here for setting out the big questions.

I am go to aggregate anything with #YOFL and #FLY tags at some point. I make the solemn promise to summarise these once a month and try to put some interpretation to them, although anyone else is also free to do the same of course.

I will also set in motion a few activities, such as those listed above.

So, what do you think? Oh, here's a logo:

We are digitalists - these are our tools

<Image Tatuagem geek no Barcamp - Tiago Doria http://flickr.com/photos/tiagodoria/432822929/>

To avoid the digital natives and immigrants debate, let's opt for the term digitalists instead, and define them thus:

"Those who are comfortable using a range of digital media and are open to the changes that digitisation brings to society."

It's not exclusive, anyone can become a digitalist, and it's not absolute, you can be a digitalist in some areas and maybe have reservations in another. But you're not Andrew Keen.

This follows on from previous post, where I took Scott Leslie's post about just sharing to argue that the mode of sharing has changed. Digitalists know this because they do it every day through blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc. In that post I suggested that institutions developed complex approaches to sharing because they either didn't know, or didn't believe that the simple methods would work. Scott commented that the flipside of my just because complex solutions were once required, doesn't mean they will always be ending was that complex problems don't necessarily require complex solutions.

And this is key to the tools available to the digitalist, they are simple. It's Really Simple Syndication after all, not Massively Complex Syndication. So here are my list of tools that a digitalist packs in their bag before leaving home:

• Embed - as Tony says in his video, Embed changes everything. What the embed tag allows is for a wide range of media to be, well, embedded, across the web. Not in itself amazing, but its implications are profound. It means you don't have to agree how to share, you don't have to develop metadata or format standards - you just take the embed code. And what this means is that content becomes widely, massively distributed. And the result of that is that a) people can create multimedia sites without any expertise, b) people get used to sharing, c) content is no longer tied to its originating site, d) content is no longer tied to its originating context and e) models which work against embed (ie locking down content), ultimately fail because if it can't be embedded, it may as well not exist. Embed is the conduit for content across the web, and thus the key element in understanding new models of ownership, creation, business, distribution and presentation.
  
  
• RSS - I've said it before, RSS is the universal acid of the net. It allows you to subscribe to any feed which will be updated regularly. Again, not mind-blowing in its basic form, but it is what this allows which is significant. It means we can all become broadcasters, because the 'schedule' is created by the user. It means you can personalise the information you receive, by selecting blogs, podcasts, video feeds you want to subscribe to you are in charge of the information you receive. And because it is a standard, subscribing is simple, just a click and its there. Which means anyone can do it. RSS is also the means by which meta services can be constructed. Take any output as RSS and you can build a site around it - Friendfeed is a good example of this. To an extent, your online identity is a list of your RSS feeds. If you were sad enough to want to know about me, you'd get a long way subscribing to my blog, Twitter, YouTube and Slideshare RSS feeds.
• Hashtags - once we have all this information flowing around, we need to filter and organise it. Previously this would have meant establishing a committee, agreeing a new metadata field, informing all participants of the correct label, etc. With hashtags users themselves tend to think of a useful term, and put a # in front of it, which allows it to be easily located in search. For instance, there was a CETIS conference on widgets last week (I was supposed to be there but had to pull out). The participants settled on #cetis08 as the tag, and so any twitter posts, Flickr photographs, delicious bookmarks were tagged with this. Thus if you go to Twemes and enter cetis08 as your search term, you get a good feel for the conference. Hashtags allow us to filter and reorganise content - without the ownership of the label, and more importantly what is deemed worthy of a label, being determined by an authority.

What these all have in common is that they are bottom-up, simple and focused on sharing. It is this democratisation and emphasis on sharing, reuse and reorganisation that is the fundamental difference between old content models and new ones, so these aren't just geeky technical matters - they're the combustion engine of our society.

I've focused on data techniques, not actual technologies such as blogs and wikis, and I've tried to keep the list simple and easy, but I'd love to hear of any other suggestions you have for the digitalist toolbox.

Pregnancy, FLOSS and lightbulbs

Following on from what I hoped was a balanced post about the pros and cons of FLOSS software in education, Mark Ballard at the Inquirer writes a one-sided piece. At least I got to air the celebrity's favourite complaint 'I've been quoted out of context'.

It's been a strange process this debate. At the OU I've long been one of the evangelists for open source. I developed SLeD, was the VLE Director who rejected proprietary solutions, part of the team that got the OpenLearn grant, and have blogged often about how the open source method is the best way to produce content. Yet, the outcome of the debate has been to leave me less well disposed towards FLOSS. That can't be right can it, and surely can't be the aim of the OSC? But then I went and re-read the comments from pro-FLOSS people on my original post and they were all very sensible and intelligent, and with lots of suggestions I think the OU could adopt. So, my feeling was probably a personal reaction to the article. Nevertheless, I was left wondering if FLOSS support was an absolutist position, whether it was possible to be a 'bit pro-FLOSS', or was that like being a 'bit pregnant'.

The danger of articles like the Inquirer piece is that it works better if they can set up a pro and anti stance. So none of my pro-FLOSS statements make it into the piece for instance. This may be good for lazy journalism, but it's bad for open source adoption, since it alienates people.

Anyway, I initially wrote a very defensive post responding to the piece. But then I reflected on the above, and felt that was only further entrenching us, and forcing me into a position I was uncomfortable with. I want to resist those who seek to polarise views. So, instead I'll let my original post stand as it's own defence, and instead offer up this pro-FLOSS video (via BlipTV - original is here and on YouTube here):

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Should FLOSS be the only option?

The OU has been taken to task by the Open Source Consortium for supporting Microsoft Office. The OU has sent an official response, but here's my unofficial take on it.

I ought to say upfront that I love open source. Not necessarily the software (I'm pretty agnostic about software), but the fact that it's there and it works, when all conventional thought said it shouldn't. The very existence of open source gives me hope for the world. And I find the manner in which it is created fascinating, and probably the most interesting business, social and technological development of the past twenty years. But even so, this letter causes something of a dilemma for me, which I'll try to articulate.

Firstly, it is worth saying that the OU has done a massive amount to support open source, particularly in the case of Moodle. Adopting this as our VLE was a major boost to the profile of open source in education, and we have contributed a lot to that community. On a smaller scale we have developed a number of open source products (eg Compendium, Cohere, Sled, etc), and use a range on our courses. So our FLOSS credentials are pretty good. And as the letter concedes, we do distribute Star Office to all students.

Let's look at some arguments as to why the OU, and all universities might support non-FLOSS solutions.

The first argument is a pragmatic one.  I don't want to stereotype students, but let's imagine a student of Victorian literature. They don't really like using a computer, but have bought a laptop because the course has a website and they submit assignments online. They just want to be able to use the system they have, which has MS Office installed. Getting this student to install 'OUnix' as the letter suggests (particularly for distance students), is probably not going to fly. I think the OSC don't appreciate the context and range of students we support. For a start, these are not university computers, but the students' own ones, so making them install OU specific software should be limited. Secondly, they are often shared machines, either in a family or at work. Converting the family machine to a unix box may not be popular.

Negative impact on students. The technical bias of open source proponents I think sometimes blinds them to the reality of a normal distribution curve of users. It is no surprise that the OSC letter uses a computing course as an example, and not say, a social sciences one, because these do not appear on their radar. The OU spends a good deal of time and effort in getting students to that first assignment, as we know from experience that if they do this they will probably go on to complete the course. At the start, many students lack confidence and aren't sure if study is for them. It would concern me if the first thing we made a nervous, technophobic student do was to perform a complicated installation and reconfiguration of their family PC, which they don't want to do, and can fail at. We will lose them before we even start the course.

A related argument is that of suitability. As much as we like it ideologically, open source solutions aren't always the best solutions. Particularly for some very specialist software, the OU often strikes very good deals with providers to give students 'free' proprietary software which is best suited to their needs. I feel that pedagogic suitability should be the priority for a university in selecting software, although FLOSS or not may be a significant contributing factor.

The last argument in favour of proprietary solutions is that we could be seen to be providing students in certain subject areas with experience of the commercial applications they will meet in the workplace. The Cisco courses are a specific example of this, although I think it is a weaker argument for generic software, such as Office - if someone can use Star Office they should be able to use MS Office.

I have one further concern about the letter, which is that it has a rather Stalinist resonance. We are more open than you, and we will out anyone who is not open. Comrades, report anyone who does not fully embrace openness to the central committee for openness! Weller has been overheard praising proprietary software - send him to the SourceForge Gulag! I think this is a dangerous route to go down, as arguments are always more nuanced than the simple FLOSS/proprietary binary choice.

Now onto the pro-FLOSS arguments (not in general, they've been done elsewhere, but why universities should promote them):

Positive action is required. The letter makes a good point about the hamster wheel - we support proprietary solutions because they have the biggest user base, so it is a pragmatic decision. Why do they have the biggest user base? Because people support them because they have the biggest user base. If (and the if is a strategic decision for universities to take) you want to move to more widespread FLOSS adoption then you need to take deliberate steps to make this happen. As the letter suggests the OS tools on the Asus has been one such significant breakthrough, and universities could use this as a springboard for further FLOSS uptake.

The role of universities. To what extent should the OU, and indeed, all universities, force students to adopt Open Source solutions? Should universities act as a force for social change? One can see the argument here: if all universities did this, then all students would graduate as a user base for open source, which they'd take in to the workplace, forcing change there. Within a few years, it's all open source, problem solved.

FLOSS as educational process. For me, the process of FLOSS is the most interesting element. In the FLOSScom project we looked at how these approaches could be adapted to education. I think there is a lot of value in this: students as co-creators, being part of a community, engaging in meaningful tasks, etc. To take my own argument, technology can be seen as a metaphor for how universities operate, so you could suggest that in order to adopt FLOSS like practices into general education practice the first step is to adopt FLOSS software.

So there you are - you can see my dilemma. I can see both sides, but ultimately I think the pragmatic and pedagogic suitability arguments are the strongest ones for a university, and so I think the OU probably has it about right in this case. Maybe it comes down to your definition of 'open'. As I've discussed before, for the OU openness primarily means open access. This means being open to students using commonly installed software. For the Open Source Consortium, open primarily means open source. These are often mutually supportive, as the OU's adoption of Moodle demonstrates, but maybe not always?

New ways of being open

I've done a guest post for Ken Udas over at Penn State. It's called Exploring new ways of being open, and sets out some of the evolution of the term 'open' in education, from the Open University's perspective.

But more importantly, it contains a Billy Bragg quote, so go take a look.