The Ed Techie

Digital resilience

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/449142212/ by Rev Dan Catt>

Reading some of the posts and papers from Joss Winn and Richard Hall brought the concept of resilience to my attention. I'm probably deviating from their intended use of the concept, but it has been a useful way of thinking about how academia responds to the impact of digital, networked and open technologies and approaches. I was also struck by Joss' comment at Open Ed: "Resilience does not mean withstanding" (Scott Leslie also liked this). This is a useful way of thinking about how new technologies (and more importantly the approaches they facilitate) can influence scholarship, as often the reaction is to think about what we will lose and set about resisting, or withstanding, change. The argument I have been making in my book is that engagement with technology is the key to maintaining ownership of scholarship.  I have used it in one section of the concluding chapter of my book, so thought I'd share this here.

In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.” It is a perspective that has been evolved beyond the ecosystems Holling applied it to, and has found particular relevance to sustainable development and climate change. Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education, and open education in particular. Walker et al (2004) propose four aspects of resilience:

1. Latitude: the maximum amount a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover
2. Resistance: the ease or difficulty of changing the system; how “resistant” it is to being changed
3. Precariousness: how close the current state of the system is to a limit or “threshold.” 
4. Panarchy:  the influences of external forces at scales above and below. For example, external oppressive politics, invasions, market shifts, or global  climate change can trigger local surprises and  regime shifts.

This is a useful means of considering the response of academia to the potential impact of new technologies. This applies across four levels where digital scholarship is relevant:

• Governmental, national agency, research councils
• Discipline
• Institutional
• Individual

Taking these four levels and the four aspects of resilience gives us a ‘digital scholarship resilience matrix’ as shown below. Completing this is an exercise you might like to attempt for your own discipline and institution, and a relevant research council or agency. For each box enter the degree to which that example meets resilience factor, for example if you work in a very traditional discipline, such as law, you may decide that it is very resistant to change.

	National agency	Discipline	Institution	Individual
Latitude
Resistance
Precariousness
Panarchy

How you complete each entry will vary considerably depending on discipline (medical research for instance is arguably less precarious than historical research) geographical location (venture capital funding for technology research will be easier to come by in San Francisco), institution (Cambridge University is likely to be more resistant to change than a modern one) and recent events (universities in Ireland and Greece for example will be subject to the panarchic influence of recent years).

Building on Holling’s work resilience is now often defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (eg Hopkins 2009).

It is this focus on retaining function and identity that is relevant to scholarship I would argue. To return to the point above, this does not equate to resistance. Indeed, a high resistance, is not necessarily a benefit to an ecosystem, as Holling observed some insect populations fluctuate wildly depending on environmental factors, but overall they are resilient.

In terms of scholarship resilience is about utilising technology to change practices where this is desirable, but to retain the underlying function and identity which the existing practices represent. It is a mistake to think of the practices themselves as being core scholarship, rather that they are the methods through which we realise them, and these methods can change. Peer review for example, is a method of ensuring quality, objectivity and reliability. But it may not be the only way of realising this, or at least its current incarnation may be subject to change. A resilience perspective would seek to ensure these core functions were protected, and not just resist at the level of the method.

 

Running review

Because absolutely no-one requested it, here is my annual running-review-with-tenuous-link-to-learning post.

The year started badly as I'd had a month lay-off with hip bursitis. I lost some of my running mojo this year, and for long periods struggled to get out the door. I also tried mixing in other forms of exercise, including spin classes, but I always default back to running. I'm a one sport kinda guy I guess. Overall this year I have done about 830 miles, so over 100 down on last year. But on the plus side I got a personal best in a 10K (48.22) and in the half-marathon (1hr 49). The last one probably doesn't count as the organisers of the Cardiff Half messed up and the route was 193 metres short. But we'll take it, who knows I would have sped up a bit more had I known.

As the year ends I have lost some fitness, and am struggling to get motivated again, but I have signed up for my first marathon - the Great Welsh Marathon in Llanelli on 10th April, so I'll need to get going.

So what lessons from this year's running? Peaks and troughs are fine. Don't be too hard on yourself, if you need to take a break then take it. And formal structure is good, it was having the races that motivated me and I then followed a training plan quite strictly, but I can only do this for a limited period. And some variety, but not too much, is a good thing. 

Digital storytelling - don't forget the text

There are some great ideas for digital storytelling activities over on the DS106 blog (I love Tom Woodward's suggestions for restrictions eg telling stories using only photos from a specific category).

They are very video and image - centric though so thought I'd speak up for text also amongst all the mashup mayhem. Obviously people have been doing storytelling online for ages, so we need to find new ways of doing it. One possibility would be tell a story through twitter. People have tried this before, some good examples in this post.

What I have in mind is not to actually use Twitter, but to create a story from a fictional set of tweets. It would be like Cloverfield in twitter. Or taking an existing movie and retelling it as if tweets from the character. What I like about this is the possibility for the story to emerge, and for the reader to know more than the characters. So is the twitter epistolary a possibility Mr Groom?

The scholar, their content & the cloud

  by  LeeLeFever 

After the wikileaks controversy which highlighted the dangers of placing political discourse in the cloud, we have had the news of Delicious apparently being abandoned by Yahoo. Not a good week for cloud computing. As John Naughton puts it "For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for."

Does this signal the death knell for cloud computing? Should academics abandon it altogether (before most of them have even made the shift)?

I think it's a more measured response than that. I would suggest a number of responses:

i) Use the cloud for what it's best at. If you want to share content, have it easily embedded, be part of a wider community of participants, then the cloud is the best way to go. I could put my presentations in my own database, but Slideshare offers a better option and more people will find them there. If it's eyeballs and ease of use you want, then the commercial cloud is a sensible option.

ii) Store locally, share globally. Of course, putting content online doesn't mean you surrender it altogether. One should assume that you will lose these services at some point, so a local store is your backup.

iii) Find alternatives - the point of the cloud is that there are numerous services that perform the same function. Many people are shifting their bookmarks to Diigo for instance. 

iv) Develop academic solutions - I say this with some reticence since, as with learning objects, academic projects don't have a good track record in keeping things simple. But there are services we may find useful to share between universities, such as storing research data in a specialised cloud. Paul Miller has a good post on this, as does Andy Powell. I certainly think that a universal cloud service to academia represents one way we may go, but make it good like JANET, not like [insert your own choice of difficult to use, overly complex higher education web project here]

v) Accept that they are temporary.You've had seven years of delicious use, a service you wouldn't have had if you'd waited for an institutionally hosted version to materialise. Accept it was useful for that period, and move on.

vi) Develop service level agreements - this model accepts that some cloud based solutions are viable and the institution either pays for these or guarantees a number of users in return for a service level agreement. Of course, this doesn't mean the companies can't go under or the services be removed, but it does provide a level of reassurance. It also limits the experimentation and innovation at an individual level we see with the wider ecology of free tools.

I would argue that an appropriate response is not to retrench to solely internally hosted systems, either for students or scholars for two reasons: the loss of the network effect and the positive pull effect that commercial systems have had on interface and innovation. We can lose these but need to decide if that's a price worth paying.

Crowdsourcing a conspiracy of sentiment

In my conspiracy of sentiment post I suggested that established media and power resented, even hated, the use of social media because they didn't understand it and couldn't control it.

As with all conspiracies (I'm not suggesting it's an explicit conspiracy) one begins to see its reach everywhere once you believe it. But I could be alone in this, so I have decided to open it up, and also I know that I won't be able to track all instances.

So I have set up an open blog at http://conspiracyofsentiment.posterous.com/. The aim of this is to gather examples where the use of social media is a contributing factor to some negative reaction from the media, politicians, legal agencies, etc. I have added a couple already (the Sarah Baskers case and Wikileaks).

To contribute just send an email with your post to [email protected] - I will moderate. Try and set out an example and explain why it constitutes an example of a conspiracy of sentiment.

We'll see if it gets anywhere.

A Man/Me/Then Jim - digital storytelling

Like Alan Levine I have signed up for open courses but never completed them (I too am an OCDU (Open Course Drop Out)). This raises some issues for open education in itself - motivation to complete is not just about interest but also about pressure. If you have paid for a course then your commitment to it is higher, or if you've told everyone you're doing something it's harder to drop out.

But I'm willing to try again, particularly for something as innovative as Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course ds106. I have a meta interest in this beyond the content (which I think will be great fun), and that is to see how a course which aggregates content from participants in the cloud feels and works. 

Already you can see that the open nature of the course has led to participants suggesting ways in which it can operate, or possible activities. This is partly a result of Jim having a good network who want to work with him, but also because the boundaries of the course are not fixed.

The course starts in January, but as a pre-course activity we were asked to create an animated gif of a favourite film which captures the essence of it. In an attempt to export some culture and sophistication to these rowdies, I created the following gif from Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique. I cheated and used the online service GifSoup (warning, lots of the Gifs on the home page appear a bit 'adult'). I haven't seen this film for years, but I remember the brewing tea scene. It could be because it's contemplative, beautiful and about silence. Or it could be because I like tea.

GIFSoup

PS - blog title is from this Rilo Kiley song.

 

Living in interesting times

As someone whose professional life sits at the intersection of the internet and higher education, the past week has been interesting to say the least, and not a little depressing. I'm not sure I have much to add to what's been said about the two big stories of wikileaks and student fees, but I have woken up on an almost daily basis thinking 'are we really witnessing this?'. So, lest I allow it to slide into normality, I thought I'd record some of my reactions to it all.

Wikileaks

As Clay Shirky has put it, I'm conflicted about Wikileaks - even as an advocate of openness, I know there are things of my own I wouldn't want made open, and I accept that diplomats probably need to have some confidentiality in what they say (and they could be doing work for good as well as ill we should remember). At the same time, I think the possibility of openness and revelation may bring a level of accountability to states that they will have to consider. The long term effect of wikileaks may be to make states less likely to engage in dirty, clandestine work because they know, ultimately, they'll get found out. As John Naughton puts it "Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet."

But what has been a revelation to this naive observer is the naked ferocity of the US reaction. The manner in which they have coerced companies (Visa, Paypal, Amazon, etc) and strong-armed the legal systems of Sweden and the UK (I make no judgement about the allegations, and have no illusions that Assange must be a nice man, but no-one else with a similar allegation would face the same legal treatment) and conducted a global campaign, including some commentators calling for Assange to be assassinated.

As Scott Leslie pointed out on twitter the other day, this is just part of an ongoing anti-internet campaign, but I think the level, and blatantness of this campaign is revealing. If the gloves were ever on, they now seem to be well and truly off. 

Shirky sums it up: "When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of leaking the cables, or of Assange as an individual, I can't help detecting more than a whiff of the conspiracy of sentiment in this. It is not just that information has been leaked, but that it has been done through the internet, by people they don't understand, and who aren't 'proper journalists'. This is when the full anarchic nature of the net comes home to them, and the lack of control they have over it. That they invented it must be particularly galling. If they could shut it down, or control it now, they would. If you think that sounds far-fetched or paranoid, consider what would have been the equivalent if a newspaper had printed the articles:

• Closing down the printing press and forcing any other printers to refuse to work with them
• Forcing all advertisers to withdraw support
• Having the editor extradited for trial
• Making selling the paper an offence

I'm not sure people would accept this, even if they disagreed with the initial publication. The traditional media would certainly be united in condemning it as an over-reaction and as having serious consequences for free speech.

Student fees

As the bill to raise tuition fees was passed yesterday, we saw the third day of the most political, angriest demonstrations since the poll tax. Inevitably the media focus has been on the violence (and the Royals for goodness sake), and ministers have sought to explain in detail how their proposals will mean that students aren't worse off. Either they are deliberately focussing on the detail to distract and confuse, or else they have failed to really understand what the protests are about. This is about more than whether you pay back amount A or A x 3 for fees, but about what kind of society we want to live in. If it is one that doesn't value higher education (particularly the arts and humanities) and views education solely as an individual transaction to gain better paid employment then that will be a society many of us don't want to live in. 

I argued before that during the Iraq war protests, Blair should've asked himself 'what do they know that I don't?', because maybe he was dealing with too much information, and the crowd had extracted the fundamental sense of the situation. If we give some of the politicians involved with passing the bill the benefit of the doubt and think they do believe it is a fair bill, then they should be asking themselves the same question. They must be surprised by the scale and ferocity of the backlash against the bill (the same politicians were complaining about political apathy in the young only a year ago, how they must wish for a return to that apathy). Instead of dismissing this as either a) a violent fringe 'hellbent' on making trouble or b) students not understanding the bill, they should be thinking 'what is the essence they have understood that we have missed amidst all the detail?'.

I would suggest it is this - education should be cherished and promoted for any society to progress.

So between these two we find ourselves in a radically more overtly politicised world, and one where the role of the internet and education are central. Tell me now that educators shouldn't engage with technology.

More brains! The perpetuation of the zombie scholar

With Jim Groom I'm writing a chapter for the Zombies in the Academy book. It's at an early draft stage, but thought I would share it in this wiki.

My argument is that the context we have set up in education for all aspects of scholarship is like a contagion that works against innovation. This was an idea I explored in my researchers and new technology post and which forms a theme of my upcoming book (but with no zombies). There is an analogy here with the manner in which zombies turn all-comers into one of their own, which is exemplified by this clip from Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead:

 

The scholarly discipline is in ever more need of fresh brains to feed itself.

But I propose that, unlike zombification, there may be an antidote: the adoption of the fast, cheap and out of control technologies espoused by Brian Lamb.

Anyway, take a look at the paper and if you feel like contributing let me know.

If nobody speaks of remarkable things

For my digital scholarship book I wanted to take a random working day and record my working pattern and my use of technology. Yesterday was that day, and so here is my account:

Before breakfast, while getting my daughter ready for school and feeding the dog, I do my morning communications check, including email, my blog and Twitter. Via the latter I see that Scott Leslie has posted a response to my blog piece on reductionism. Scott is someone I have known online for a few years, but finally met this year. We have been debating this topic in some detail over the weekend on twitter. We have differing views but the discourse has proven, I think, to be mutually beneficial in developing our own thinking. I also see that Google have donated $100k to Bletchley Park in order to try and keep Alan Turing's papers in public ownership. I respond to a couple of comments from the previous night when I had tweeter that I was seeing the film The Social Network.

After my wife and daughter leave, I go to my office to work. As I am writing today my intention is to not engage too much in online chat, so I don't have email or twitter open in my tabs in Google Chrome.

Before I start work on my chapter I post a comment on Scott's blog post, and send a tweet seeking confirmation about the Bletchley Park news (it having only appeared on Twitter thus far). I also bookmark a blogpost on the crowd sourcing of educational tools by NMC, which came to my attention because it is tagged ''digital scholarship' and I have a Google Alert set up for this term so I get daily emails for results.

I then start writing - I have amassed around 30 articles, blog posts and reports for my chapter on academic publishing. These have been found largely through search, following references and names in some papers, links that have been passed to my by my network and my own references that I have collected using Tumblr. All of the articles are open access, although I spend a frustrating half an hour trying to locate one reference which seems to have disappeared.

After writing for most of the morning I take a break, and during this mentally compose a blog post, which some of the book authoring has led me to. The post, around 500 words argues that scholars have failed to take ownership of their own practices, particularly with regards to technology. This will form a theme in my book, so I decide to test it out by blogging it. I quickly find a creative commons image to use in my post, and it only takes 15 minutes to write as I have much of the material to hand. I post it, announce this on twitter and then return to my chapter. Later I want to follow up a particular argument around costs so search for references and find four good articles. 

In my afternoon tea break I compose my a photo for Flickr. I am not a very gifted photographer but I am currently undertaking the informal 'photo a day' project, and am on day 170. Having taken my photo, uploaded it to Flickr and tweaked it with the free online Picnik tool, I take a look at some of the recent uploads from my contacts.

I also check Twitter and see that two people have retweeted the link to my blog post. I check my blog and see that it has had around 170 hits today, which is about normal. In my email there is a message confirming that i am speaking at Cardiff Business school on Friday. This talk has arisen due to a contact I made at the regular social media meetings that were organized in Cardiff.

For my final push at writing for the day I write up the notes of a talk given by Mark Patterson of PLoS, which I attended in Cambridge the previous week. I check some of my notes and find references for this at the PLoS site.

Later that evening I take my daughter to her horse riding lesson. I take my iPad so I can finish reading Anya Kamenetz's DIY U which I have as a Kindle book. I also make some notes for this post.

What does this digital scholarship snapshot tell us? Firstly, it's quite traditional. This is partly because I am writing a book, but it is also representative. I didn't spend the day overlaying different data formats or creating a musical mashup, or anything exciting like that, I spent it writing. Related to this the technology used is fairly simple - there are no specialist tools in use here. There is a mixture between the professional and personal in their use. Even on a relatively unconnected day when I am engaged in the solo pursuit of writing I still maintain social connections with a global network of peers. A significant point is that there is a vast amount of high quality information available to me without leaving my house. I like the way that different elements of work fit in the elements of my day and that there is a wide range of granularity of outputs, from writing a book to individual tweets. Lastly, these are small, subtle changes and yet the way they intermesh to create the fabric of a working day is, I feel, quite remarkable. We've just become so habituated to them that we fail to appreciate this.

If anyone else would like to share an account of a normal working day, I'd love to read it. It is in this detail that the real changes are revealed. 

A failure of ownership

In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are three examples of this in action:

1. VLEs - the central role of elearning was underestimated by many and so we looked for simple solutions. The commercial VLEs offered this, but our return was an attempt by Blackboard to patent the very idea of elearning, and of increasingly costly contracts. Because the VLE became so embedded in institutional systems it became almost impossible to overthrow once it was in place.
2. Tenure, assessment and publications - as I've mentioned in an earlier post, the complexity of measuring excellence in different fields was outsourced to the peer-review process. This placed publishers in a central position in academia, since they controlled the routes to career progression. Related to this was the manner in which scholars bowed to governmental pressures for assessment exercises which sought to quantify the quality of research. This reinforced the publishers' position since their journals were linked directly to institutional funding.
3. Publication - many professional societies and university presses handed over their publications to for-profit publishing firms, effectively outsourcing the process, the proceeds of which they would then have to buy back. As Edwards and Shulenberger suggest the relationship with publishers operated successfully when it was seen as a fair exchange, a ‘gift economy’, but, they claim “beginning in the late 1960s and early '70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity.” In Clarke's analysis of publishing costs he reports that an ejournal article published by a for-profit costs around $3400 whereas one published by a non-profit professional society costs around $730. The difference is largely because of the expensive software the commercial publisher has developed to maintain their competitive advantage and "their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection." None of these seem to me to be related to scholarship.

George Siemens has argued that we should take ownership of the open education debate before it is too late, and given the above history, I would say he is right. The message I take away from the above is that we allowed this to happen because we failed to engage with the required technology. Large scale open source projects could have (and in cases such as OJS and Moodle have been successful) solved many of these problems and the overall cost to universities would have been much less than being at the mercy of commercial companies for whom scholarship is not their primary interest. The type of resistance we saw, for example, to the very concept of elearning, often on the grounds of commercialisation of education, did not prevent it, and in many ways played directly into their hands. Far better is to take the attitude of inventing your own future.

I'm not against commercial partnerships in education, for instance many of the free services I like to promote seem to me better for being not developed in education (eg Flickr), but we should be aware of what it is we are handing over. As we face the question of 'what do we do about web 2.0/cloud computing/social media?' then a full understanding of what it can do is essential, and simply handing over the problem to someone else will not serve us well.