The Ed Techie

The return on peer review

A while ago I took a decision to only publish in open access journals. I recently received two requests to review articles for journals. Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing. 

So it's something we all do, isn't really recognised and is often performed on the edges of time. It's not entirely altruistic though - it is a good way of staying in touch with your subject (like a sort of reading club), it helps with networking (though we have better ways of doing this now don't we?) and we also hope people will review our own work when the time comes. But generally it is performed for the good of the community (the Peer Review Survey 2009 states that the reason 90% reviewers gave for conducting peer review was "because they believe they are playing an active role in the community")

It's a labour that is unaccounted for. The Peer Review Survey doesn't give a cost estimate (as far as I can see), but we can do some back of the envelope calculations. It says there are 1.3 million peer-reviewed journals published every year, and the average (modal) time for review is 4 hours. Most articles are at least double-reviewed, so that gives us:

Time spent on peer review = 1,300,000 x 2 x 4 = 10.4 million hours

This doesn't take into account editor's time in compiling reviews or chasing them up, we'll just stick with the 'donated' time of academics for now. In terms of cost, we'd need an average salary, which is difficult globally. I'll take the average academic salary in the UK, which is probably a touch on the high side. The Times Higher gives this as £42,000 per annum, before tax, which equates to £20.19 per hour. So the cost with these figures is:

20.19 x 10,400,000 = £209,976,000

[Update - Alan Cann gave me this link, which puts the cost at £1.9Billion a year]

I accept this is subject to lots of objections, it may well be less, but then again, many reviewers are often eminent, and thus further up the pay scale, so it could be more. It seems a reasonable conclusion based on the data we have. So that's over £200million a year that academics are donating of their time to the peer review process. This isn't a large sum when set against things like the budget deficit, but it's not inconsiderable. And it's fine if one views it as generating public good - this is what researchers need to do in order to conduct proper research. But an alternative view is that academics (and ultimately taxpayers) are subsidising the academic publishing to the tune of £200 million a year. That's a lot of unpaid labour.

Now that efficiency and return on investment are the new drivers for research, the question should be asked whether this is the best way to 'spend' this money? I'd suggest that if we are continuing with peer review (and its efficacy is a separate argument), then the least we should expect is that the outputs of this tax-payer funded activity should be freely available to all.

And so, my small step in this was to reply to the requests for reviews stating that I have a policy of only reviewing for open access journals. I'm sure a lot of people do this as a matter of course, but it's worth logging every blow in the revolution. If we all did it....

For local people - new models for newspapers

In case you hadn't seen it, the Guardian is running an interesting model with some local versions. Cardiff Guardian is one of the first ones (Edinburgh and Leeds being the others). It is ostensibly run by one person (Hannah Waldram), who covers local news, and then pulls in Cardiff related stories from the existing Guardian stock material. Added to this there are guest posts from local people, some crowdsourced content (eg Flickr photos) plus third party tools, such as MySociety.Org and FixMyStreet. The outcome is a very useful site and, if you live in Cardiff, very engaging too.

What is interesting about it is that it offers a potential model for how many sectors can combine new and existing approaches (I'll come to education in a minute). It takes existing content, which you have a system producing anyway, and gets an additional use from it. This is combined with quality contributions from a dedicated (and employed) person to generate enough content, but also draws on the wealth of content created by those with an interest. Here is my summary of how I think it works:

You could see how this might be a model transferable for education also. In my Academic Output as Collateral Damage post I suggested we could view higher education as a long tail content production system. This is equivalent to the big Guardian content the local version draws upon - there is a pool of academic related content being produced. If you want to create a specialised course then you have one dedicated academic to draw this together and add in additional material. They then combine this with third party content and services. A course, almost by definition, has an interested group of participants, so the course content becomes populated by student contributions, but also by small invited pieces from other academics.

If you have such a model in place, then you could see how you could quickly create course for niche interests, timely events, specific employers, etc. And at little extra cost. The trick I suspect is putting in place a system that allows it to happen easily. The Guardian example is permitted because of all the prior work that the Guardian has put in to becoming a web-savvy newspaper.

Article on Digital Scholarship published

This is just because I like to keep track of 'traditional' publications here too.

Along with some colleagues at the OU (the bulk of the writing was by Nick Pearce) I submitted an article, entitled Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work, to a special edition of In Education, edited by Alec Couros. It is (of course) open access, and has now been published (Technology & Social Media (Special Issue, Part 2), 2010, 16(1)). We took Boyer's framework of scholarship and reconsidered it in light of new technology, particularly with the lens 'openness' across each of the four components. It looks like a good edition overall, so worth looking at all of the articles, even the one by that Siemens chap ;)

A small point, but it's another example of the non-traditional, network world feeding into the traditional, formal scholarship one - I know Alec through blogs and twitter and saw through George Siemens that we was asking for articles, and I suspect that was how he garnered most of the contributions.

Project report as coffee table book

I've mentioned before I was part of the Sidecap project, which looked at OER use in Fiji, West Indies and Mauritius. The project has now finished and instead of producing the standard EU report (which, let's face it, no-one ever reads) Frank Rennie from UHI decided to create it as a book in Blurb. We all contributed sections and gathered photos from the duration of the project. My book turned up today:

 

It's a small, and undoubtedly obvious point, but the glossiness of it and the approachability of the layout made me want to read it. In almost exactly opposite to the way I'd approach a normal project report. With almost no shame I am going to mention affordances - a nice glossy book affords you picking it up and looking through it, it extends an invite to you. A project report printed on A4 paper and stuffed in a binder says the opposite, it says 'move on, nothing to see here.'

You can order the book if you want online (no profit goes to us, it just covers the cost of printing). I think all publicly funded projects should mandate this as a deliverable. On my output as collateral damage riff, this is exactly the sort of thing that means a project report destined to be tucked away in the database equivalent of the final scene of Raiders of the Last Ark, becomes a findable, accessible resource.

Or was everyone doing this anyway and I've just caught up?

The documentally experience

I finally got to meet Documentally (Christian Payne) today when he was on campus doing some interviews for the OU Platform, after having always missed each other in the past. In exchange for a coffee Robyn Slingsby roped me in for a quick interview. So here I am talking about the OU conference in Audioboo:

OU conference agenda - officially awesome

As you may know I am organising the annual OU conference this year: Learning in an Open World. It is online only (in Elluminate and Cloudworks), and open to all to attend (not just OU people).

It is based around four sessions over the 22nd-23rd June and the theme is exploring Openness in Education. Each session has three OU speakers talking about a specific project. There is then a moderated discussion session where people can go into one of three (or so) Elluminate rooms to discuss issues from the talks. Then everyone 'reconvenes' for an external speaker.

I've just released the agenda, which may be subject to some change, but at the moment looks like that below. I think it's a good line-up exhibiting work the OU is doing in relation to the theme of openness, and a great group of external speakers.

If you fancy being part then register in Cloudworks and mark as attending on the Cloudworks page. At the moment the Elluminate sessions are set to a limit of 300 users (managing discussion becomes difficult beyond this), but if we look like getting more we can investigate alternatives, so it's useful for us to know who is planning to attend. We will record the sessions also, so you can play them back later, if you can't make it.

June 22nd Morning - Open Content

• 9.30 - 10.00 Welcome to conference - Martin Weller
• 10.00 - 11.00 OU Presentations:
  Cloudworks (Grainne Conole)
  iTunes U (Peter Scott)
  SCORE (Chris Pegler)
• 11.00 -11.40 Moderated discussion - in separate 'rooms' in elluminate
• 11.40 - 12.30 - external speaker: Prof. Frank Rennie (UHI)

June 22nd Afternoon - Open Learning

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU presentations:
  SocialLearn (Simon Buckingham Shum)
  OpenLearn (Laura Dewis)
  OLNet (Patrick McAndrew)
• 2.30 - 3.15  Moderated discussion
• 3.15 - 4.30 External speaker - George Siemens (Athabasca)

June 23rd Morning - Open Teaching

• 9.30 - 10.30 OU Presentations:
  Creating open courses (Tony Hirst)
  Digital Humanities (Linda Wilks/Elton Barker)
  Open CETL (Steve Swithenby)
• 10.30 - 11.15  Moderated discussion
• 11.15 - 12.00 - External speaker: Anne Faulkner, UK Online Centres

June 23rd Afternoon - Open Access

• 1.30 - 2.30 OU Presentations:
  iSpot (Doug Clow)
  The OU in Africa - HEAT (Lesley-Anne Long)
  Researching the Environment in the open (Joe Smith)
• 2.30 - 3.15 Moderated discussion
• 3.15- 4.00 Closing Talk: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia
• 4.00 - 4.30 - wrap up, Martin Weller

The network ate my newspaper

(So what do you think of David Cameron then Gordon?)

So the UK televised Leaders Debates have now finished. I have to say, it's been a blast. Not because they were good television (after the first one and the surprise Clegg factor they quickly reverted to saying the same things), but because of the back-channel on twitter. In 2008 I suggested that the Eurovision song contest was the perfect TV twitter event because

"It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too."

The same might be said of the leaders debates. Having the back channel has been endlessly amusing and inventive with twitpics, hashtags, videos and jokes being shared in real time. It has also been very informative as people have challenged the views represented and sought out facts and shared these.

Over at the BBC Rory Cellan-Jones suggests that

"So far, it's been a much better election for the mainstream media - or the "MSM" as they're described by an often contemptuous blogosphere - than you might have expected. The bloggers hoped they would boss this campaign, breaking stories, setting the mood, and leaving the flat-footed old media types trailing in its wake."

The alternative is also true - ask yourself this, could you really function as a political journalist (or academic) and not have followed this election on twitter? I'm with John Naughton who argues that:

"One of the more comical aspects of the current UK election is the way ‘old’ media (newspapers and broadcast TV) gloated about how they had ‘transformed’ the election from the venerable two-party slugfest into a supposedly more open contest. There’s a note of triumphalism here: “see”, the dinosaurs are braying, “for all this talk of an ‘online election’, the impact of the Net, social networking, twitter etc. it’s really going to be decided by older, tried-and-trusted media”. There may be a lot of cyberchatter on Twitter and Facebook, the political editors jeer, but it’s not showing up on the doorstep."

I think the effects of social networking are quite subtle. I'm not naive, I know that the majority of UK voters aren't on twitter, but this is still fairly new. How will that look at the next election? The thing about social networks is that they are difficult to manipulate. Like John Gilmore's quote about the internet, something similar can be said:

"Social networks dissipate direct pressure and push back"

This means it is much more difficult to manipulate people in a network the way the broadcast media can be manipulated. It requires more energy and when you apply that pressure the network pushes back (usually with sarcastic humour and parody, which is the politicians worst enemy).

So while old media may be congratulating themselves, they have missed the point. This is the election that marked the beginning of the end of their power, they just haven't noticed it. I am reminded of a quote from the (not particularly good) film Deep Impact, in which the President, as played by Morgan Freeman, says to the plucky reporter:

"it might seem that we have each other over the same barrel, but it just seems that way."

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

Content may not be king anymore, but it has some influential friends

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a two day staff development workshop here at the OU. It had been very well organised by the Social Sciences Faculty and the aim was to get staff thinking about using new technologies to solve some of their problems in teaching. There had been some good initial work, so the groups came with problems they wanted to address, eg student retention from 1st to 2nd level, encouraging reflection, etc.

I was asked to present on the use of blogs and wikis. I gave a brief whizz through and tried to convey my enthusiasm for them as educational tools (I ended with a half-jesting 'eat my hat challenge' that whatever their issue was, I could solve it with blogs and wikis).

Why use blogs and wikis?

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

There were also presentations on:

• Interactive quizzes
• Screen/slide casting
• Podcasting

The groups then had some hands on sessions and had to choose two technologies and on the second day, set about solving their problem with these technologies.

Can you guess which of the four technologies was most popular? The answer is Screen/slide casting, with every group wanting to create one of these, and the other three all about equal after that. I think this may have been because it was more immediate (blogs take some time to get going and you need students really) and thus suited the workshop format more readily. But I think it is also something to do with educators relation to content.

In the age of the social network, it has become a cliche to say that content is no longer king, but it is something that people can readily engage with, rather than some of the more nebulous and longer-term benefits of blogging. I saw a lot of academics very excited by the liberating effect of being able to produce their own content (this was something I had pushed as a benefit of blogs also, the easy multi-media aspect). One downloaded Camtasia and was off making videos, another used Xtranormal and soon they were producing complex ideas and scripts.

The take-away message for me then was that many people are unaware of how easy it has become to create multi-media content, and that demonstrating this is a good 'way in' to appreciating the potential of a whole range of new(ish) technologies.

Social media in society roundup

I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention:

Rentokil news release - in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but couldn't get access to the email which had been sent to journalists by Rentokil's PR company. But eventually the truth emerged:

"After a bit of prodding, their PR company Brands2Life explained how these bugs were counted. No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. ... contrary to what was said earlier, wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a “theoretical model”.

...Rentokil’s model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation to the real world.

They assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left alone, by itself, in isolation. They assumed this isolated carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. They assumed that the ratio of male and female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

They assumed – surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations, surprisingly for anyone, really – that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate. They assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes, they assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vaccum cleaners, no anything. In fact they assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was their model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

“On the above basis” Rentokil’s PR explained to me: “it is possible that the stated numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could live on a train carriage or bus.”"

Anyone who has read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will be familiar (if depressed) with this kind of PR story being taken up wholesale and unquestioningly by the press. What is interesting here is that listening to Ben on Radio 4 later that week he commented how the use of blogs and twitter allowed him the space to really track these stories down. In a newspaper column it would seem pedantic and picky, and there would be a word limit, but in the social media space he received information and encouragement from his twitter network. This means that, although they'll still try it, PR companies now have a space where they will be held to account, whereas previously no-one would get to hear about their exaggerations, assumptions or lies because of a complicit agreement in the mainstream press. The make it up and don't give a damn party is over.

Nestle - this was the subject of one of those twitter storms that brew up quickly (and I have to say, even when I agree with them, they have the whiff of a pitchfork wielding mob about them). Nestle have a Facebook page, which had been ticking along nicely for a couple of years, with people discussing how they eat their Kit-Kats. Then Greenpeace encouraged people to adapt Nestle logos, to support their anti-Nestle campaign, on the use of palm oil. Cnet covers the story here. People started doing this on the Facebook page and the Nestle representative came in heavy handed demanding they remove the copyright infringing logos, etc. Then it got going on twitter and became a trending topic, generating lots of bad publicity for Nestle.

What this demonstrates is that people will use an organisation's Facebook page as a means of demonstration and protest. The best defence against this is to be a 'nice' company, but even then some people may have differences of opinion. The difficulty then is knowing how to handle them. It's not clear who the Nestle representative was, but it could have been some untrained employee who was just given the page as part of their duty and responded brusquely. Such a response is worse than no response and for organisations the Nestle furore should be one of those case studies on handling new media.

Leader's debate - on 15th April in the UK we had our first televised leaders debate as part of the general election. It is widely acknowledged that the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg came out best in this. From a personal perspective it was the perfect twitter event TV. It wasn't particularly interesting, but the backchannel around twitter brought it to life. While the broadcast analysts were still pondering the big messages #Iagreewithnick was a trending topic, showing that the network had determined the main outcome (which the conventional broadcasters agreed upon over the ensuing few days). A tweet which got retweeted many times summed it up pithily: "What we learnt tonight: Clegg is a damn fine speaker, Cameron met a black man once and Brown agrees with Nick". In line with the first story here, it was also in online media that we saw many of the claims and anecdotes investigated over the coming few days (if you're interested, my colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum did an excellent analysis of the debate using Compendium, which was better than most of the expert analysis we saw).

What was interesting here was the way that humour was used to puncture the claims and careful gestures of the leaders in a way that serious analysis failed to do. For instance, David Cameron came equipped with a range of anecdotes aimed at demonstrating him to be a man of the people. Fridge-magnet then created a Cameron anecdote generator which got passed around on twitter.

Seeing the threat now posed by Nick Clegg, many of the right-wing newspapers turned their focus on him. The most hysterical was a piece from the Daily Mail which claimed Clegg was some form of Nazi supporter. Within a couple of hours the hashtag #nickcleggsfault was trending on twitter as people punctured the pomposity of such articles by blaming any event, from IE6, to Justin Bieber.

So while this won't be the social media election in the way the Obama one was, because the parties themselves aren't using it as effectively, it will be an election in which social media begins to challenge the dominance of traditional media as the means through which we experience it.