The Ed Techie

An open Open University course on openness

[Update - see James' comment below, and to clarify this is a course produced as a result of a research project in a collaboration with many others: the Hellenic Management Association, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, SPI in Portugal, ELIG, and UNU Merit. As such it's not an OU course that has been through the normal course production process, nor does it carry OU credit]

Like Tony I think the OU has been a bit slow to start creating truly open courses - I'm partly to blame since I suggested doing one a couple of years back and then didn't do anything. Before that Ray Corrigan simply released his course as openly, but that was withdrawn to make way for OpenLearn. We've had some good study skills courses from the library and Tony has dabbled with it, but I think those have largely been the release of course material. This is the first time we are running the course in the open I think (please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to undermine someone's else's claim).

So James Aczel and team have put together a course on Business and Management competencies in a web 2.0 world, which is taking registrations now for a 1st Nov start. It says:

"openEd 2.0 is a FREE/OPEN course targeting business students and practitioners alike. The course consists of two strands: an academic and a professional practice based strand, though both strands can be taken together. Furthermore, the openEd 2.0 course is MODULAR, thus learners can also “pick” the individual modules they are interested in."

I think this follows in a long tradition of the groundbreaking courses being about the subject itself - a medium is the message principle. When we ran the first elearning course its subject matter was computers and the internet. This is a good way to start since the technology and delivery are part of the experience. But it shouldn't be confused with it meaning that you can only teach about those subjects this way. Just as we can now use elearning to teach about philosophy or engineering, so open courses can be about any subject, this is just a good way of finding your feet with a sympathetic audience.

Be interesting to see how it goes.

Twitter as interdisciplinary tool & culture

I have been writing a chapter on interdisciplinarity for my book on digital scholarship, and thought I would share this section which explores the idea that social networks (Twitter in this case) can be viewed as interdisciplinary tools. One of the ideas I am particularly interested in is that a barrier to interdisciplinary work has been the existence of different cultures in various disciplines. It may be that tools such as Twitter and blogs have a culture of their own, which can to some degree, compensate for these other differences. Put simply, do bloggers in different disciplines have more in common than non-bloggers and bloggers in the same discipline?

In this post I want to look at both the culture of twitter and how this combined with its features can aid interdisciplinarity.

Three key features of twitter demonstrate how an open approach has allowed community norms to emerge. The first is the convention of putting an @ sign in front of a person’s twitter id to send them a reply (eg @mweller). This was a user convention first of all, so it would designate that a particular tweet was for the attention of a particular user. As Twitter developed it became a standard convention, and then incorporated into the software, so now users can see all replies to them listed separately. The @ reply rule grew out of the email naming convention, but has almost become synonymous with twitter now.

The second convention was the use of hashtags to define a particular comment which could be grouped together. The use of the # was proposed by Chris Messina in a tweet: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”. Hashtags can be seen as metadata, describing the content of a tweet. They became relevant as the use of search on Twitter grew. People could search on a hashtag and thus gather all of the tweets on a particular topic. This was seized on by conferences, so all the delegates at a conference would agree to use a hashtag, and later conference organisers began specifying an official hashtag. Search was originally performed by a third party service, (using the open API), but in July 2008, Twitter bought Summize, the most popular Twitter search tool. Hashtags could now be incorporated into the standard Twitter practice, and ‘trending’ became a relevant term as topics grew on twitter, often denoted by a hashtag. Apparently the Twitter team initially rejected hashtags as ‘too nerdy’, but their simple, and unregulated, creation has allowed them to flourish.

Hashtags can now be used as the means to define a community, particularly around an event, course or topic. The open data approach of Twitter means that these can in turn, be analysed to reveal connections between members, subjects of discussion, locations, and prominent members. As well as a useful means of categorising tweets, hashtags are now so ingrained in practice that they form a part of humour on Twitter, with people often creating ‘mock’ hashtags (although there are no official hashtags) as an ironic counterpoint.

The third norm to emerge is that of the retweet. This is the practice of passing on someone’s tweet. Originally this was achieved by copying and pasting the tweet and adding RT and the user’s id at the start. Boyd, Golder and Lotan identify the following motivations for retweeting:

• To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences
• To entertain or inform a specific audience, or as an act of curation
• To comment on someone’s tweet by retweeting and adding new content, often to begin a conversation
• To make one’s presence as a listener visible
• To publicly agree with someone
• To validate others’ thoughts
• As an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage by drawing attention, sometimes via a retweet request
• To recognize or refer to less popular people or less visible content
• For self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants
• To save tweets for future personal access

As with the other community behaviours, the retweet became enshrined in code, when in late 2009 Twitter implemented a retweet function on their site. This allowed users to easily retweet a message by simply clicking a button, without the need for copy and paste, but some of the subtlety as to how it appears in timelines was lost (it is shown coming from the originator and not the retweeter).

What these three examples demonstrate is that the community has evolved over time, suggesting, experimenting and then adopting norms of behaviour – the ‘stickiness’ we saw earlier with blog culture. Once it has become established, and proven to add value, Twitter have then moved to implement it in code to make it easier and also to further spread its use. They have not imposed the practice from the start, and sought to define how users will interact, which has often been the case with software development, instead they have allowed the community itself to develop its own norms.

If I analyse my own twitter network (using TwitterAnalyzer.com) then it reveals that the geographic spread of my followers is mainly across the following countries:

• UK
• US
• Australia
• Germany
• Canada
• France
• China

By analysing the biography details people provide the top professions amongst my followers are:

• Consultant
• Technologist
• PhD student
• Lecturer
• Manager
• Teacher
• Librarian
• Author

Amongst these I can identify a number of communities and networks, some of which will intersect. These include:

• Bloggers – many of the people I follow are those I already had an online connection with via blogs, and twitter was an extension of this.
• The Open University – I have acted as an advocate for Twitter in the Open University, and see it as a means of informal knowledge sharing within an organisation
• Cardiff - there is an active twitter community, which often meets face to face.
• >UK Higher Education – As well as bloggers and Open University people there is a large contingent of peers in other universities, funding bodies, libraries, etc
• Journalists and media – a number of journalists and media consultants use twitter regularly
• Tottenham Hotspur – I support Spurs and a number of the people I follow for this reason, but also there is a wider group for whom football is an interest (who are also members of the other networks)

There are a number of sub-groups in this also, for example Canadian bloggers form a coherent network of their own, and many individuals will occupy more than one category. One can view these many different groups and sub-groups as networks that will become more or less active, and distinct, according to external events. For example, during the general election in the

Huberman, Romero and Wu have investigated interactions on Twitter and find that despite many followers the number of people a user interacts with (ie sends replies to) is relatively small. This reflects findings in Facebook and is interpreted as the existence of Dunbar’s number (1998) in social networks. Dunbar’s number suggests that people find it cognitively difficult to maintain meaningful relationships beyond a certain number of friends, usually given as 150, with a smaller core group around 20-30.  While this may well be true for the more stable relationships, the use of tools such as hashtags and retweets allows for a finer grading of online acquaintance. I can read, or retweet, someone else’s posts without ever interacting with them, and they may reciprocate, without engaging in direct conversation, yet these people form part of a valuable network.

As an interdisciplinary tool my twitter network has a number of advantages, and associated issues:

• Geographical diversity – while it is inevitably centred around the UK and North America, it is a global community which brings different perspectives. It is limited by language though, and the immediacy does not allow for translation so there is a danger of English language views dominating.
• Professional diversity – within the different networks a number of professions and experience can be found, which will inevitably bring a degree of interdisciplinarity. One of the benefits of Twitter has been to improve intra-departmental communication within an institution. However, while the table above shows a reasonable range of occupations, it is still largely centred around higher education. There are, for example, very few (or no) priests, builders, make-up artists or senior retail managers in my network (which is not to say they are not present on Twitter). For interdisciplinarity this may not be an issue.
• Size – at the time of writing I follow around 1,100 people and have approximately 2,800 followers. That represents a considerable network and pool of expertise which will share a wide range of knowledge and will also respond to requests for advice on topics outside of my own domain.
• Immediacy – one of the changes Twitter required in my behaviour was a shift from exhaustive reading to regular sampling. As a blog reader I tried to keep up with most posts from those I subscribed to, with subsequent guilt when the unread count on my blog reader mounted. As my Twitter network expanded this behaviour was not possible and so a shift was required, where I ‘dip into’ Twitter, sometimes more intensively and other times I am completely absent. This is the concept of the stream, it is not meant to be consumed in its entirety, but sampled on occasion. Twitterers are responding in real-time and thus it is ideal for capturing diverse reactions and interpretations before they are filtered into disciplines. There is a consequent danger though that this relentless churning of information means useful research will be missed via this route.
• Interdisciplinary bridges – the ease of sharing provides a means to bridge disciplines, in particular the retweet can be viewed as a tool for bridging audiences and disciplines as a twitterer in one domain can rebroadcast to their network, which will have the types of sub-groupings shown above.
• An inherent set of cultural norms – the three features we saw above, as well as other practices indicate that, as with blogs, Twitter has its own set of cultural norms, which provide the required ‘stickiness’ for communities to develop. These may be sufficient to overcome the differences in cultural norms across disciplines, and provide a common framework.
• Professional and personal mix – twitter occupies an intersection between professional and personal, formal and informal, resource and conversation. In many previous tools we have sought to separate out these elements, for instance when we create forums for students in VLEs it is a common practice to have a separate ‘Chat’ or social forum so that this doesn’t interfere with the academic discussion. However, this blend in one place in Twitter both provides motivation to partake (we don’t separate out our thoughts or lives so neatly) and also provides hooks into other areas of interdisciplinarity.

The list above shows a number of benefits in developing a networked approach to interdisciplinarity which may address the issues which have plagued it for many years. Indeed if we had intentionally set out to create a tool for promoting interdisciplinary discourse, then the resultant service may have not looked dissimilar to Twitter.

Bellow's Law

 

In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. 

In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also:

there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. 

It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences, but I think the element of neighbourhood it adds is useful. We are seeing the liberation (that is obviously a term with positive connotations, but let’s go with it for now) of a number of activities that are facilitated by the digital, social network. These include the removal of filters, freedom to publish and broadcast, the ability to share easily, establishing peer networks without the need for travel, creating communities of interest around diverse subjects, etc. It is why attempts by many industries to control what is liberated ultimately fail. You can't simply say we will liberate the music track from the whole album or from its physical format and expect record companies to stay the same. If you liberate one then others will follow.

In digital scholarship an example might be seen with publishing - once we have removed the filter to publish through blogs and other outlets then the neighbouring practices cannot remain unaffected: academic journals as the main source of knowledge sharing; the tenure process and what it recognises; research and dissemination; the granularity of research outputs and activity; course content. All of these begin to change because the pressure on one element in an interconnected system has been removed. It's not entirely unpredictable, but it may be one element in the sort of emergent behaviours Scott is interested in.

If you want to know what practices will be influenced by new technologies, then a good place to start is to consider what elements have been liberated by them, and then map the neighbouring practices, sure enough you'll see an activation across these soon. 

And we don't have enough laws named after great novelists. 

The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers

Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below:

Research, technology & networks

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.

I talked about why this might be so and suggested the following reasons:

• The stranglehold of publishing - tenure and reward are still linked to publishing in academic journals, so spending time on other forms of communication is not directly encouraged. This is reinforced through research quality assessment exercises which are closely allied to publishing, such as the REF.
• Wasting new blood - related to the above, in other sectors new recruits are seen as the people who bring in new ideas. Yet in education because tenure is linked so closely to traditional outputs, new researchers are positively discouraged from spending time on other endeavours. So the very people who might engage in transforming practice are discouraged from doing so. This leaves it to tenured academics to engage in innovation, but these have mostly been successful through more traditional means so their history tells them to carry on this way. The pool of potential adopters then is decreased by the research context we have in place. I suggested this was quite a harmful environment to create.
• Antithetical to research ethos - I also put forward the suggestion that in science in particular, research is about predicting outcomes, and much of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is about unpredictability - you don't know what will happen with your outputs, or through a network.
• Research is the core practice - despite how much academics might say they value teaching, or public engagement, it is still research that is most highly valued. This means it is the area people are least willing to risk their reputation in and want to control most tightly.

I then suggested some themes that I thought were emerging, but that is for another post.

Of course one might argue it doesn't matter. Researchers will adopt new technologies if they are effective, and there is an underlying assumption in my talk that adoption is a good thing, which isn't necessarily true. This may well be the case, but there are three responses to this which at least bear consideration:

• The impact of the negative context - if research adoption of new technologies (and associated practices eg open publishing) is being impaired by the financial/reward structure we have in place, then we need to address whether that structure is doing research a disservice in the long term
• Powerful tools - I know through personal experience that even when people have been dismissive, or cautious of a particular tool, when it is demonstrated in the right context, or they appreciate its possibilities, then they will find uses for it in their academic work that I had never anticipated. This isn't true for everyone or for all uses, but it is worth chipping away at misconceptions and demonstrating potential.
• The role of the researcher - as higher education seeks to demonstrate its value to society, it strikes me that it is potentially dangerous not to be leading on the use and development of new tools, and particularly on what they mean for knowledge construction and sharing, rather than leaving it to others.

Why academic publishing is doomed

You may recall that a while ago I said I would only review for open access journals. Whenever I get asked to review for a journal now, I send back a polite reply saying telling them this, as I figure if they hear it enough it may encourage them to take an open access approach. After sending one such response to an editor, they forwarded it to the commercial publisher, to try and raise their awareness. The reply from the publisher set out a number of things they try to do, but this one caught my eye:

"Sponsored articles: Over 350 [publisher's name] journals offer authors the option to pay a $3,000 contribution fee to sponsor unlimited online access at publication to their respective articles via ScienceDirect."

I had to re-read this several times. So, not only do we provide the content, editing, and reviewing services for free, they now want us (or 'offer' us) to pay for open publication. And that's your open access model - the authors pay for it? I suppose one consolation is that it is surely not sustainable - when free alternatives exist the market will move towards them. It persists for historic reasons currently. Can you imagine taking this to a venture capitalist as a business model now?

I've used it before but Itzhak Stern's line in Schindler's list comes to mind: 'Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?'

Understanding the attention economy

My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine.

 

The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss.

Bloglines is a similar app (which I found via John Connell), here I add in my favourite blogs to create a nice bookshelf. Again it probably isn't the best way to handle hundreds of feeds, but it provides a nice window on some of them, meaning again I might read things I would otherwise skip.

 

What both of these apps demonstrate is that by adding a nice layer of UI, the way you interact with these sources can be subtly altered. For a start it seems to elevate them somewhat - these are now nice articles to be read with a coffee and a bagel.

But more significantly it highlights the importance of grabbing people's attention. This usually means by adding in some media - a post with a nice image is more likely to make me open it from bloglines (Jim Groom's Bavatuesdays wins here). Or it could be an intriguing title. There are also variables such as posting at an optimal time (weekends are rarely useful, and afternoons in the UK will get some American traffic too).

These may seem like trivial, superficial aspects for academics to be concerned with, and certainly trying too hard to get attention has the opposite effect. But in an information saturated context we can't assume good quality will always be found. As we send our little thoughts into the digital world we need to at least give them every chance to survive. I wonder if understanding the online attention economy will be a digital literacy?

Everyday I write the book

I put together a proposal before the summer, for a book on digital scholarship. It's part-polemic and part academic monograph. I want to explore the changes to academic practice brought about by three key characteristics: digital, networked and open. 

I wanted to find an open access publisher, so I'm pleased to say that it's been accepted by Bloomsbury Academic. Their model is that they give away a free HTML version, you can buy a standard hard and paperback version, or you can buy a version that also gives you access to additional online content. I don't know how much this additional content line will work, but kudos to them for trying a new model.

Before I embark on the writing, a couple of thoughts:

i) Much of the book will be adapted from blog posts here. In this sense I've already been writing the book for four years. Lots of writers do this - Shirky's books always feel as though I have already read them because you know so much of his output. This is one possible downside of writing continually in the open - a book will seem a bit familiar to many readers. As I go along I'll be blogging bits of it as well, for instance the recent pregnant widow post. My apologies in advance then if this means that when you read the book (you will read it won't you?) you have a sense of deja vu.

ii) Why write a book at all? There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that I like to write and a book gives you more space to explore ideas. And the second is that it is a nice way of bundling together content in a way that is both recognised and easily shareable.

iii) Why not just self-publish? I considered this, it would mean I'd get to keep more of the money (but then keeping a small amount or a large amount of not very much still gives you not very much). But there is a sense of legitimacy in having a publisher accept it. They also hopefully provide some services such as copy-editing and have a distribution channel which may help it get out there. And I particularly wanted to explore what it would be like to publish with an open access approach.

I've got some ideas for things I might try out for the book, including getting input from my network, so be prepared to find excuses. In the meantime, here is Elvis Costello with the title of this post:

Living in pregnant widow times

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/janrito/118498874/ black widow by Janrito Karamazov>

For the title of his latest novel, Martin Amis borrows from this Alexander Herzen quote

“The death of contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

Amis is writing about the sexual revolution, but I think the same can be applied to the digital revolution. This is what causes so much angst in the popular press, and amongst society in general. We can see what is passing, but what is forming is still unclear. Clay Shirky, talking about newspapers puts it thus:

"So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen."

We can think about some general directions of travel, we can make some guesses, and most of all, we can experiment. My interest is what the changes mean for scholarly practice, how will academics perform research, what will education look like twenty years from now, how can we best be engaged in public debates? We have a very well established set of methods for all of these currently, but it is unlikely that any of them will remain untouched by the impact of digital, social networks. And as with other industries, trying to find ways to preserve them as they are, or with a digital veneer, won't be sufficient when other find innovative ways to achieve the same ends using the new tools. If you accept the argument that we are living in such a period of change, then what academic wouldn't be interested in observing this change in any field, let alone that of their own practice.

As Amis puts it in his novel, "it was a revolution. And we all know what happens in a revolution. You see what goes, you what stays, you see what comes."

What goes, what stays and what comes - each of element of this trio is significant. Often we concentrate on 'what comes', but it's just as interesting to consider what stays. This reveals what is important to us (will journalism stay? Will universities stay?), or at least what is so ingrained culturally or commercially as to be immovable. The QWERTY keyboard has stayed thus far in the digital age, despite being an analogue solution, not through any sense of value, but because it was too entrenched to overthrow. 

What goes is equally revealing, because it demonstrates that practices and values we may have seen as unassailable are suddenly vulnerable because the assumptions they are based upon are no longer valid. The scarcity, rivalrous nature and distribution model of many goods and content is one such example. When they became abundant, non-rivalrous and freely distributed whole industries began to look weak. The 'what goes' element may also reveal to us what was important and not so important after all.

We generally assume that after a peaceful social revolution the resulting practice is an improvement for the majority of people, otherwise it wouldn't occur. Unless the revolution is imposed upon the people, then the general direction will be towards a utilitarian improvement. But this doesn't mean the post-revolutionary world will be better for everyone. There are those whose profession and identity will be strongly allied to the existing practices. There will be practices and values that are lost that we find we did in fact hold dear, but which were too closely attached to the older methods to survive. In short, there will be winner and losers. A revolution may be bloodless, but is rarely painless for all.

Which is why we see scare stories about games damaging kids health, or social networks ruining the nature of friendship, or piracy killing artistic endeavour, or the fabric of society being damaged irrevocably by the addiction to computers. We are learning what role these new tools play in our lives, and there will inevitably be mistakes, misapplication, over-use and correction. For example, many people reported something resembling an addiction to social networks when they first started on them, but these have since settled into a more controlled, regular place in our lives.

We are living in pregnant widow times, and we can see what is going, but we don't yet know what is staying and what is coming. And that's kinda fun isn't it?

The New Bereavements

In a Twitter chat with Josie Fraser yesterday, she said that the URL shortening service u.nu has closed down and joked that she wasn't sure of the correct etiquette for the passing of such a thing:

u.nu url shortening service discontinued after constant spammer abuse http://u.nu/unu-discontinued so long, & thanks fr all the links.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJosie Fraser
josiefraser

I have been pondering for a while that we face a new set of bereavements. We are probably going to face these more, so for example, how do you react when your favourite service disappears? Imagine, say, Slideshare disappeared tomorrow. How would I feel? Anger that I have lost data, annoyance that old links won't work, upset that the good people there are out of jobs, saddened that such a thing didn't survive?

Another example I've encountered over the past year is when someone suddenly quits Twitter (or stops blogging or whatever). As these are people I am unlikely to ever meet face to face they are effectively lost gone. In real life we might mourn the passing of a friendship, so how do we react online? Should one shrug, or hold a candlelit vigil?

I expect we'll face more of these new forms of small-scale loss. There will be online therapists no doubt to help us cope.

PS - if there isn't one already, then someone should start a band called The New Bereavements.

iPad connectivity issues (told through the medium of a pirate comic)

I have just been away for a few weeks in France on holiday (many thanks to Phil for trying out guestblogging for me in my absence, I'm afraid it's back to the usual bobbins now).

Just before I left, I got an iPad. This struck me as the perfect travelling gadget for all the family, so I duly loaded it with apps, music, books and some films. You can see how smug and happy I was:

I have to say, I do love using it and my daughter seemed to claim it as her own. But while I was away I discovered a real issue around its ability to pick up and hold a wifi connection, particularly when the signal is weak. It seems this is a known issue, and a fix is on the way. I hope so, because it renders the main function of the iPad - to be a handy mobile computing device - pretty obsolete. My iPhone and Netbook held the signals much better, so it wasn't an issue with the signal itself.

In the meantime, here is a tale of my experience, told through the medium of a pirate comic, developed at Kerpoof, because serious issues deserve serious chronicling: