The Ed Techie

Tender is the right

I wanted to hit the ground running in my stint as SocialLearn director, but we have come across a minor hiccup. For services over £139,893 we are obliged by EU regulations to go to a public procurement process. We will be doing much of the technical development externally and if at some point we exceed the EU limit without having abided by their regulations, it could get messy and we'd end up in court. So in the interests of openness, and keeping my job, we'd best go through the process.

We're putting together the tender now, which has to be posted for 30 days, then we have to select the winner, so I'm estimating a 2 month delay on some aspects of the project.

I'm divided as to my opinion on the process. I understand why the legislation is there (to stop public bodies getting someone's cousin to fulfill a multi-million pound contract), but it does feel like a very EU type solution (I doubt the US has a similar procedure), why can't we get on with determining who we think is appropriate? But then again, I've already found the process useful in clearly defining the scope of the project, and it may put me in contact with developers I wouldn't have found otherwise. I'll let you know how it goes and reflect upon my experience of it here for the benefit of those who find procurement processes and EU regulations unbearably thrilling.

SocialLearn Director

Starting in September I am going to be the Director for the SocialLearn project here at the Open University, for 6 months at least. The Vice Chancellor and senior management have agreed to fund us so we are pushing ahead on a punishing development schedule to have something usable by next February (with releases along the way).

Taking on the responsibility of director is a double-edged sword. On the one hand I can influence the project more and make decisions. On the other hand, I can't blame anyone else.

I am also using the project to explore different approaches to management. My starting rules are:

i) No regular, formal meetings. We have informal, impromptu meetings as we need them with the people who need to be there, rather than everyone coming to meetings which are scheduled.
ii) Alternative forms of output - I want us to go beyond the standard report or paper that nobody really reads, and ends up being the focus of the project itself.
iii) Openness - we will hopefully let you know how it goes as we go along and encourage input.

This last one will be particularly interesting for me - it's easy to be a blogger when you don't have much responsibility, but it strikes me that the as your official responsibility increases so the the amount of stuff you can happily blog about decreases proportionally. So, for the sake of the project I may find that I can say less and less about it. But I hope not, and my default position is to be open as we go along.

So, watch this space and see either a) a successful project come to fruition or b) a Professor unravel before your eyes. Either one should be entertaining.

iTunes nonplus

I had a strange experience with iTunes Plus recently that left me scratching my head at the logic of DRM.

I was trying to create a playlist and realised an album I had bought a while ago wasn't in my library (Chet Baker Sings, if you're interested - it's melloooooooow). It must have been lost in transfers between laptops, so I went to the music store and went through the process of buying it again. In the past when this has happened it has notified me that I already own it and has let me download it again for free. This time however, it said I could download it from iTunes Plus at a discounted price (20p a track), BUT only if I also purchased all the other iTunes Plus tracks it had picked out for me at the same time. So, in order to get the bargain price, I had to spend £3o on tracks that I already owned. Yeah, like I'm going to do that. So for all the fanfare of DRM free music on iTunes plus, it seems to be yet another way of making you pay again for music.

And they wonder why people flock to BitTorrent...

The punk zine approach

The Leisurely Historian has a nice post on what education can learn from the punk zine movement, which flourished around the time of punk. One could also expand it to any fanzine movement really (football fanzines would be another good example), where the DIY ethos makes them more valuable to a certain audience than the glossy, formal productions.

He lists several things we can learn, which I'll touch upon, but you should read his post:

• All you need is Sharpies, tape, and a Xerox machine - ie a lot can be achieved with relatively low resource. For a zine this meant you didn't need an expensive printing press. For an educator this is even more relevant with the proliferation of free tools. You don't need a corporate VLE, or an enterprise licence for broadcast, you can create it yourself from various tools and embed them in a blog.
• Fast and ugly is better than slow and pretty. This is probably another way of thinking of the perpetual beta, and also to move away from thinking everything has to be broadcast quality. Learners will often trade relevance and currency for quality of production, eg they'd prefer a regular vodcast that really helped them with their studies to a BBC programme that was interesting, but tangential.
• Don’t cover what your audience can find elsewhere - oh, how relevant this is for education. This might be the biggest lesson educators have to learn over the next few years. In a pre-digital, pre -internet age the educator did cover everything (supplemented by books and articles), but now there really isn't any need now to provide most of the content. Instead it is the process of link, embed, interpret and provide structure that an online educator adopts.
• Change things up when they get boring, but stay consistent enough that people can find you. This could again be a take on the perpetual beta approach. It isn't necessary to engage in a long user consultation exercise before undergoing a radical overhaul of design, you can change elements and if people don't like them, change back.
• There’s always some lonely kid in rural Iowa who needs to hear what you’ve got to say. Read: Long Tail. In a global education market, and if the cost of course production is low enough (because you're using free tools and content), then you can find an audience. The Semiotics of Soccer anyone?
• Make friends with a disgruntled Kinko’s employee. By this, he means zines used to get friends in offices to do photocopying for them. In the case of edtech it means take advantage of the free stuff available.

OU YouTube Channel is go

Continuing the 'every educator is a broadcaster' theme of recent months, I'm pleased to point you at the OU YouTube channel. It has two main parts (with a third 'Research' coming on line soon): OU Life which has videos from students and staff; and OU Learn which has clips from OU courses.

It'll be interesting to see how it develops. There are only a handful of videos up at the moment. Unlike a conventional university we can't just point a camera at a lecture and get a (quite boring) video. While we have a large archive, the (swear, curse, shout) rights clearance on this stuff is more difficult than it would be in a sane world, so there is something of a bottleneck.

I'm really excited about it though. What I hope is that its very presence is enough to make educators start to think of 'icasting' and producing a range of videos, and even better, getting their students to do the same.

The video above was produced on request from Laura.

SocialLearn presentation in Elluminate

I did a presentation for George Siemens last night on SocialLearn. It was an open (naturally!) session in Elluminate. George recorded it and you can relive it in all its mumbling glory here.

I think it gives a reasonable overview of where we're at, and I tried to broaden it to wider issues also. George tries manfully to make me sound coherent by asking intelligent questions, but in case you hadn't twigged it, I'm a better writer than I am speaker, so it's a bit rambling in places I fear. Enjoy?

Digital literacies

I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I'd put them in a blog post.

This isn't the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies:

• Different voices - think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D'Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I'm not sure who they are, but my guess is it probably won't bear much resemblance to your top blog list. There are a few exceptions (Grainne Conole, Terry Anderson come to mind), but generally I think blogs have allowed people to find a different voice, and that has allowed very good writers who perhaps didn't find the academic journal an appropriate publishing outlet to have a voice.
• Reuse as an artform - Steve Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso's "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". The same might be said for new digital literacies "good educators borrow, great educators mashup". Taking existing material be it content, data, tools, and remixing it isn't just a shortcut or convenience, it is an independent skill of its own.
• Becoming a broadcaster - educators need to re-envisage themselves as broad-(or narrow)-casters. A lecture is a form of broadcast. You now just have many alternatives. Creating videos on your PC is, if not simple, at least achievable. Creating podcasts is a doddle. You can blog, slidecast, webcast, or hold forth in SecondLife. These are considerable skills to acquire, see for example the videos of Michael Wesch for how good they can be. Also, if you have the time watch all of Wesch's hour long lecture on a portal to media literacy to appreciate how the new digital literacies are not just nice add-ons but essential if we are to get students to participate in education.
• Multiple outlets - an additional point to the above, you now have many different possible outlets for your material, and often for the same material. A paper may appear in the conference proceedings, on your blog,on slideshare, scribd, etc. There are multiple ways of finding an audience.
• Social motivation - why do all this? Partly it's for the creative itch, we like to express ourselves, but more prominent in the digital literacies is the social motivation. If you post something you may get comments back, which may start a dialogue, which may lead to the expansion of your network.
• New metrics - I have talked a lot about this in the past, and I still don't know what the answer is. As I've often said, I don't want technorati to replace my RAE rating because it would end up influencing behaviour. But I do know that many of the traditional metrics we apply in higher education (e.g. publishing in 'quality journals' whatever they are), are simply irrelevant to understanding digital literacies.
• Openness as a starting point - following up from my previous post, part of acquiring digital literacies is about a mindset also. One of the cornerstones of this is that you start out with openness as a default - it may not always be appropriate, but it's where you start from. That way reuse, conversation and your own literacy develop.

Openness - catch my disease

Post title pinched from Ben Lee - Catch my disease

I'm in Barcelona for the last FLOSScom meeting and I'm presenting at the Free Knowledge Free Transfer conference. The talk I was going to give was about using open source approaches in education, but I've changed it to one on how openness can be seen as a virus, which higher education is catching.

The argument goes like this: once you start being open about content, it becomes contagious to all aspects of your life. There are different ways the open virus can spread, and some people are more 'resistant' to it than others. One highly infectious carrier is The Blog. Once you start blogging you need to create posts so that provides an incentive to share more ideas, often before they are fully massaged into a conventional publishable format. The blog further increases the rate of infection by acting as a central hub for reusable material. For example you may start embedding video clips, images, etc from other people as you blog about their work.

Then the next step is that you feel you should reciprocate. An urge to share and reuse are classic symptoms of someone with open disease. You start using Slideshare to upload all your Powerpoint files. You become more confident when you receive positive feedback and feel you can risk a slidecast. Then you want to embed video clips and dabble with Seesmic.

At the same time you play around with some social networks. A colleague holds you with a glittering eye and convinces you, nay forces you, to try Twitter. Despite some early reservations you are soon addicted, and tweet all manner of things. The open disease has now begun to infect your personal as well as professional life.

And then you need to write a paper, but instead of huddling away you decide to do it in the open, and create a wiki, which others contribute to. The paper goes in to a journal, but you are asked to sign a copyright form forbidding you from releasing the work yourself, and the journal is not freely available. This doesn't seem in the spirit with which you now live your life, and so you refuse, and go looking for an open journal.

You are now looking at your teaching load next year and thinking 'how can I make this more open?' Inspired by the likes of David Wiley, you create your course out in the open. Students come to your lectures, but you also upload these to the course blog and invite anyone to participate. You next eye the assessment and decide that a standard exam is no longer the best way to assess what students are doing and create a course repository where students are 'examined' by the contribution they make to the content for the next cohort.

Next you gain a research grant and are the Principle Investigator on a four-party research project. You figure that the open principles have served you well so far, so create a project wiki, invite others to rank the project's objectives, ask for feedback on the final report and make all the findings freely available.

Open disease now infects all aspects of your life. Congratulations, now spread to others.

The weirdness of copyright

I've written a chapter for a book with James Dalziel and we are asked to sign a copyright form. Now, I usually just sign these, but I've been getting fussy about this stuff recently. So, I actually read this one, and when you analyse it, there are a number of really draconian measures in there. If you look at it rationally you think 'no-one would invent a system like this now'. To be fair, they have said we can publish the chapter online if we ask permission, and this copyright form is fairly standard. But I think it's an interesting exercise to go through it.

"Author(s) agrees to, and does hereby assign all rights, title and interest, including copyrights, in and to the manuscript to Publisher. The author retains the rights to any intellectual property developed by the author and included in the manuscript including, without limitation, any models, theories, or conclusions formulated by the author. While the author may use any and all thoughts and research results developed or accumulated while working on a manuscript, and may rewrite, update, and re-title them for use in other publications, the author CANNOT use the verbatim text of the manuscript or any part thereof that has been copyrighted"

I love the 'author may use any thoughts' line - it's nice of them to let the author keep their thoughts I guess. But the key assumption we don't question here is that they own the chapter - you have written, edited, formatted it, but have surrendered all rights to it. This is particularly odd when you consider the next point:

"Author(s) understand that no royalties or remuneration will be paid by the Publisher to the author for the above named submitted manuscript. Further, Author(s) acknowledge the manuscript is being provided on a volunteer basis for the professional recognition obtained by the publication."

So, we do all the work, you keep all the money. Woohoo! Good job we like that professional recognition so much.

"The Author(s) will indemnify and defend Publisher against any claim, demand or recovery against Publisher by reason of any violation of any proprietary right or copyright, or because of any libelous or scandalous matter contained in the Manuscript."

And we have to carry all the risk as well.

"The Author(s) agrees that until the publication of the manuscript Author(s) will not agree to publish, or furnish to any other publisher, any work on the same subject that will infringe upon or adversely affect the sale of the manuscript. Furthermore, author(s) cannot post the contents of the article on any personal website or other sites, or distribute the work to others in either electronic or print forms."

I mean, seriously, come on. They have said that actually we can, as long as we seek permission. What I would like to know is if I put something online and it increases the sales of the book, do I get a cut then?

"Contributing authors will not receive complimentary copies of the handbook; however, publisher will provide contributors to the handbook with a copy of their published manuscript along with a copy of the cover page of the publication. In addition, Publisher will provide each contributor to the handbook a 40% discount offer if they decide to purchase the handbook."

I can buy a copy of my own work at reduced cost!

"The Publisher may permit others to publish, broadcast, make recordings or mechanical renditions, publish book club and micro-film editions, make translations, and other electronic versions, show by motion pictures or television, syndicate, quote, and otherwise utilize this work, and material based on this work."

Now, granted that Edtechie The Movie isn't coming to a cinema near you any time soon, but the control still resides with the publisher. As the author I would have no say in how it is later used. When you publish online you accept this to a degree, but at least a CC licence allows me to specify that it is share-alike, or non-commercial, so gives me some element of control.

Now compare this with, say, keeping a blog:

• I can still get the professional recognition,
• I still do the work, but I can style it and edit it the way I want
• If there were any money to be made, I would make it
• It potentially reaches a wider audience
• No-one will sue me if I put it in two places or reuse it
• It is free to the reader
• I own it

Hmm, wonder which one academia should choose...

A little corner that is forever edupunk

Last night I was part of a live internet radio show, run by Graham Attwell at Pontydysgu. The theme was edupunk, and the show featured Jim Groom and Mike Caulfield amongst others.

I made the point that edupunk is a sort of metaphor, and like all metaphors we only map certain parts across to the new domain - in this case I thought it was the DIY, have-a-go approach of punk, and some of the anarchic nature of it. What we wouldn't want to map across was the slightly Stalinist approach that came with punk where people were either punk or not, and anything that was not was decreed rubbish.

And this made me think about some of the angst people have had about the term - it's seen as an either/or. Are you an edupunk or not? As I stated a while ago, I don't think I am, too much of what I do is just mundane or corporate or conservative in approach. But it struck me that it's not about being an edupunk, but rather preserving some area of what you do where you can do edupunk kinda stuff - or eduWomble, or research, or play, or social networking, whatever you want to call it. Just as Google has Google Time when employees can experiment with stuff, so universities and educators need to have edupunk time - a period when you can explore stuff away from the mass of concerns that arise whenever you try and do anything with education: learning objectives, accessibility, workloads, technical expertise, cost implications, etc. All of these are important, but sometimes you need room to explore in an area that is free from having to meet a wide range of criteria at the outset.

So new management proposal - 10% edupunk time for all. Any takers?