The Ed Techie

Bush, digital scholarship and the price of reputation

Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation.

In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity, and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the system – how to get publications out, how to network so you got invited for keynotes, etc., but on the whole it worked reasonably well if you played along.

But the very nature of the digital world is about the removal of the filter. Anyone can blog, produce a video, podcast, and generally express themselves. So, reputation becomes much harder to verify. This is a problem if we want to start rewarding digital scholarship. Put simply, 100 peer reviewed journal articles probably means you are a decent scholar – 100 (or 10,000) blog posts doesn’t mean anything. So we need to find new ways of establishing someone’s online reputation.

Let’s take Tony Hirst as an example. I think we’d all agree Tony would qualify as a digital scholar. So how would we go about demonstrating this? There would be traditional contributions too, such as developing courses, giving talks, involvement in university projects, etc but let’s focus on the online element. Here are some thoughts:

• Quality of output – Tony, or colleagues, could be asked to nominate significant contributions (blog posts, videos, etc). Personally, I've always liked the Feedistan post.
• Appearance on independent rankings – e.g. Technorati, Jane’s 100+ Elearning Professionals to follow on Twitter, or the Wikio UK blog rankings. I take Matt Lingard’s point that, especially with Twitter, these lists don’t really mean much, but if we were trying to establish an overall ranking of reputation, then collectivelythey add some weight.
• Quantity, or variety, of output – maybe being able to show the range of online activity is important, e.g. blog posts, videos, mashups, etc.
• Impact – being able to demonstrate that what you have done has been used by others. For example, Tony’s work with the OpenLearn material inspired Jim Groom and David Wiley to incorporate openlearn units into blogs.
• Testimonials – quotes from others about your work, eg Jim Groom saying “over in Great Britain there is the legendary Open University, rich with an unfair advantage of knowledge and innovation represented by cats like Tony Hirst"

I think any one of these is easy to cheat or game, e.g. by getting into blog wars you can get your technorati rating up, or by publishing very small posts you can increase your quantity, but when taken overall they provide an indication of reputation.

Which brings me on to George W. Bush. Reputation, online or otherwise, is something that it takes a long time to establish, but only a second to destroy. Bush’s failure to twice get the Paulson agreement through congress seems to me less of a failure of the Bill itself (I have no idea if it’s the right approach, and let’s face it, no-one does), but rather a failure of reputation. Put bluntly, the Iraq chickens have come home to roost. Dave Winer first pointed this out, saying:

Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. .. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I'll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.

So Bush is suffering from having sacrificed his reputation in order to legitimise the war in Iraq. And if you are going to sacrifice your reputation you had better be sure that a) it’s worth it and b) you aren’t going to need it again.

An awful lot of what us online folks do is not very easily quantifiable. Exactly how does sending a joke message on Twitter contribute to our bottom line? In the long run what we are doing is establishing our own, and by association, our institution’s online reputation. Given Bush’s reputation collapse the next time someone asks you how much is reputation worth you can answer ‘ooh, about $700 billion’.

What does the credit crunch mean for ed tech?

<Image Wall Street by BreakDennis - http://flickr.com/photos/breakdennis/2093184009/>

Brian Kelly had a post recently, entitled 'Web 2.0 in troubled economic times'. In it he stated:

"In response to a recent post CodeGorilla pointed out that at a number of participants at the Repository Fringe event had felt that use of services such as Flickr and Google should be avoided because such companies were not as well-established as many Universities."

He then goes on to suggest a number of issues we may need to address such as whether institutional IT services will be affected, whether user's expectations will change, etc. He makes the point that internally hosted services may be as much at risk as externally ones.

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones has a post in a similar vein, who sees worrying echoes of the dotcom crash.

I've been thinking about this recently, in particular what it means for education, educational technology and all the new types of activity and technologies that those of us in the blogosphere are always promoting.  I see one of two responses happening:

• Stick to what we know - in uncertain times an understandable reaction is to retreat into what you know best and what has worked in the past. These are not the times to start experimenting with new, risky approaches. For those in education that translates roughly as "stick with teaching subjects we know work, in a traditional manner. Publish in journals and get research funding in. Don't do anything rash."
• We need to find new models - this takes the opposite view: Now is exactly the time to start experimenting, because the market is tougher and you need to be more flexible. So, finding new ways of teaching, supporting students and disseminating knowledge are the best approaches  to respond to rapidly changing environments.

My feeling is that there will be some derision aimed at those who promote things such as free software, open educational resources, web 2.0 business models, etc. The accusation will be that these sorts of things are fine in a bouyant economy, but they are not practical in a global recession. We will be told that we need to be hard-headed, pragmatic, realistic. My response to this is that Wall Street is not renowned for being populated by whimsical, altruistic dreamers and hard-headed pragmatism doesn't seem to have got us very far, so maybe there is something in all this openness.

On a more general note, that response will be difficulto argue against, particularly in the US, it seems to me. The next time someone suggests a comprehensive health plan for instance, it would be difficult to dismiss it as too costly, or un-American, as the response will surely be "what, compared with putting $700 billion dollars into banks?".

I'll leave the last word with Rory Cellan-Jones, which is a nice reminder of how current context can make people lose sight of the bigger story:

Early in 2000, my BBC bosses briefly made me internet correspondent, just as the dotcom madness neared its peak. By the end of the year they had decided that the internet was "over" - as a story at least - and sent me back to the business beat.

I was slow to get Qik

I'd seen a bit of chat about the video service Qik (mainly from Scoble's twitter feed), and AJ is always trying to get us converted to Seesmic, but I hadn't really been enthused, seeing at just another way of capturing video on the web. Then this week I had a chat with OU geek/EEE evangelist Liam and he wanted to show me Qik on the mobile.

So we had a qik go with it, and minor epiphany moment - of course, it's only when you see it in conjunction with mobile technology that it makes sense. Nearly everyone has video capability on their phones, but the problem is that it uses up memory. But Qik streams to their server, so you are not storing it locally. Now I get it! We're all broadcasters on the move now. The educational possibilities of this are intriguing, and we want to explore them for SocialLearn. As well as streaming events, I like the notion of using it as your own journal - recording half thoughts, ideas, tasks, etc and linking these to your goals. There are some nice touches, eg you can set it up to automatically post to Twitter, YouTube, etc

Never let it be said that I am qik on the uptake (ok, that's enough qik/quick puns). Here is the vid we shot when playing around:

A new way of giving?

My colleague, Juliette Culver, is involved in an interesting project called Operation Sleeper Cell. It's an online multi-user game, with challenges, puzzles, etc. Juliette describes it thus:

It’s free to play and there are puzzles, creative challenges, a story to follow, events in real life, and lots of top secret stuff that I’d love to tell you about but can’t. The game lasts ten weeks and there are new missions each week. If you enjoy things like treasure hunts, you should enjoy this I hope!

Nothing particularly new there (although it looks a good example of its genre). The really interesting part is that they've developed it for Cancer Research. You can donate directly, if you feel you're getting good value from the game, or buy cells in the grid to advertise.

This strikes me as a good example of several behaviours combining beneficially. It takes the open source motivation to be involved in an interesting project to get free developers, adds in the 'pay what you like' freakonomics model from Radiohead and others, mixes up the addictive elements of gaming and sprinkles with people's tendency to want to give to charity.

Who knows if it'll work, but it could be a real model of fundraising for the future. Of course, if they did a 'be a virtual educational technologist' one, then they'd be on to a real winner.

Education is like freeze-dried coffee

(I'm writing a piece for On the Horizon, which Michael Feldstein is editing. In case it doesn't survive the cut, thought I'd share this analogy)

<Image by roadsidepictures http://flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/2634835504/sizes/o/>

The (higher) education process is largely one of enculturation, whereby students learn how to become members of the higher education community. This is appropriate for many domains and careers, but not for all and while inflexibility in the subject content may be addressed by using third party content, the inflexibility of the process is not, because the process is itself embodied in physical structures of universities. As it stands, higher education is rather akin to freeze-dried coffee – regardless of the input, the output invariably tastes of the process.

The power of sharing

I know there's tonnes on this, all that wikinomics stuff, but it's the small examples that always bring home to me the advantages of sharing. Take this week, I did a presentation on Twitter last Wednesday, and naturally let everyone know via Twitter.

Turns out a twitter friend, Martin Ebner, was doing one on the same subject today. So he did a presentation, which borrowed a couple of my slides (with acknowledgement), and then shared his presentation, and let me know via Twitter. His is a definite improvement on mine:

Microblogging & the consequences

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging)

Added to that, when I put my presentation up on Slideshare, a few people favourited it. I got notifications of this, so had a look at their pages and found other presentations they'd favourited on the same subject, e.g. Josie Fraser

The result? If I had to do another Twitter workshop tomorrow, I'd borrow from Martin's and from some of those I found via Slideshare. Within a week, and with very little effort on my part, and without leaving my desk, I have gathered a reasonable set of resources that will allow me to significantly improve my own presentation. And all this results from the initial act of being open and sharing.

Now, without wishing to sound like a broken record, you would struggle to come up with a similar scenario for sharing research findings via conventional means. Which raises the question: is the aim of research to generate official outputs or to share knowledge?

Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream

I hosted one of the technology coffee mornings at the OpenU (still trying that term) the other day, called "Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream". I talked about my use of twitter, and how we need to think of it as a different type of communication. My conclusion was that 'social is the new substratum'. A prize for anyone who can explain to me what I meant by that...

Here is the slidecast, and you can download the Powerpoint from Slideshare:

Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging)

Talis podcast

I did an interview with Paul Miller from Talis as part of their podcast series. It covers a wide range of topics: US politics, modernist literature, Babylonian horticulture, and 1920s cinema. Oh, okay it doesn't, we talked about usual stuff: web 2.0, higher education and SocialLearn. You can listen to it here: http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/2008/09/12/martin-weller-talks-with-talis-about-educational-technology-and-the-open-universitys-sociallearn-project/

OU or OpenU

My colleague, Simon Buckingham Shum, raised an interesting idea the other day when he suggested we should start calling ourselves the OpenU, instead of the OU. His argument chimes with something I have been saying in SocialLearn presentations also - namely that 'open' is  a term that has gained much currency lately.

Whether it was extraordinary prescience, or just good luck, on the part of the Open University's founders, choosing 'Open' for the name has served us very well. We could have, for instance, been called something like 'the University of the airwaves' which would have dated very quickly. Back in 1969, Open meant 'Open Access'. This was revolutionary at the time and allowed many different sectors of society to have access to higher education who had previously been excluded because of two main factors: education was full time and you needed to attend a campus. By making it part-time and distance based, the limitations these placed on people were abolished, and suddenly we found there were huge numbers of people who wanted to study, but had previously been unable to.

But 'open' doesn't really mean open access anymore, because open access isn't the big deal it was. Now nearly all universities offer some part-time modes of study and many offer distance/online courses.

But if anything, open now has gained in terms of its semantic and social significance. Here's what open can mean now in education:

• Open Source
• Open educational resources
• Open API
• Open content
• Open courses
• Open participation

In addition there is a general philosophy of openness that pervades much of the online world - blogs, twitter, facebook - they are all about the individual being open, and as a result the social norms are those of democracy, socially oriented, bottom-up, participation, and well, openness.

So, the question I like to ask is 'if we were creating an Open University now, in what ways would it be open?' I won't elaborate on that, but have a think about it.

So back to Simon's argument - 'OU' may not mean much to a lot of people, and it doesn't really make enough significance of the Open part. So we should, at least informally, start referring to ourselves as the OpenU, which chimes with things like iTunesU also. I'm giving it a go (although it takes a huge effort not to write 'OU' out of habit).

PS - don't tell the OU OpenU brand police, they'll be after me, angrily waving several years' stock of headed notepaper.

What I hope to learn from CCK08

I've signed up for George Siemens and Stephen Downes massive online open course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" which starts next week. I have a kind of meta-interest in it (as I suspect a lot of participants do), in that I'm not just interested in what the course is about, but also in how it works. So, as much as I am interested in the content, I'd have signed up if it was 'Shakespearean Tragedies' or 'George and Stephen play the banjo'.

So here's what I hope to find out over the coming months:

• To get a better appreciation of connectivism and particularly how people are applying it.
• To see how people participate in an open course
• To get a feel from George and Stephen as to how many people are doing the paid for version and whether this is a good business model (don't tell Stephen I said that)
• To see whether the absence of formal creditation for myself significantly reduces motivation (ie will I drop out?)
• How the distributed dialogue model works

It's great to see George and Stephen doing this. If we get some good research answers from it, who knows maybe it's a model for the OU in general?