The Ed Techie

Digital scholarship recognition - the debate

So, I was the invited keynote debater at this year's EdMedia conference in Lisbon. I had ten minutes to put my case in favour of the following motion:

"This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship"

My (poor quality, one take audio) slidecast is below.

Digital scholarship debate

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My argument was that there are a number of converging pressures which will make recognition inevitable. These were:

1) Impact

2) Efficiency

3) Efficacy

4) Complementarity

5) Institutional benefit

6) Variety

7) Human factors

Antonio Figueiredo put the opposing motion, and Paulo Simoes captured it in everyone's (well AJ Cann's anyway) new favourite tool, ScoopIt. We ended up kind of agreeing that it would happen, but Antonio suggested it would take longer than ten years. He pulled a nice trick here inviting the audience to close their eyes and picture their university ten years ago, 'was it really so different?' he asked. He must have struck a chord with this as the no vote won the day.

Chatting to people afterwards the sentiment seemed to be that they thought it would happen, and indeed, should happen, but they were generally pessimistic about the ability of universities to change to accommodate it. I've got to say I find this kind of depressing if it turns out to be true. I'd have preferred it to be rejected because people felt it abandoned core scholarly principles or something. But to think that despite us all thinking it's a good idea, an entire decade is still not long enough to bring about a modest change in university recognition processes? If true, one wonders how displaced from society unis will look in ten years' time.

Or is that just sour grapes because I lost?

It's all about me

A quick round-up of some open stuff I'm doing.

Firstly, a special edition of RUSC, edited by George Siemens and myself is available, which focuses on social networks in education. There is an intro from George and me, and then some articles that are actually worth reading (unless you speak Spanish, you'll need to change the language to English in the box over on the right).

That Siemens character works you hard once you're in his network, so on Wednesday 26th Jan, I'm giving a talk on digital scholarship as part of his CCK11 course, at 7.30pm UK time. It'll be in Elluminate.

Lastly, if you want to listen to two middle-aged men reminisce about their youth and in particular, 80s b-movies and their love of VHS, then Jim Groom and I plan to do a LIVE internet radio show for ds106 next Thursday 3rd Feb at 9pm UK time. Details to follow (ie once Grant tells us how to do it). Expect rambling, incoherence, maybe a little swearing and the word 'remember' to feature strongly. After the rabid success of ds106 radio, someone has to try the live stuff, and it's better to start with someone who has no reputation to lose.

Just in passing - none of these are done in work time or form part of my official work plan. Interesting, probably.

Let's play OER Roulette!

(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney)

This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts.

For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way.

I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed on it, which they would spin to select the next number to play. I wanted to recreate this, but transporting a big wheel was unrealistic, so I got my daughter to get members of the audience to select cards. My talk had the hypothesis that by considering OERs as big and little, it provided a lens on a number of issues around OERs, including:

• Sustainability
• Working methods
• Production time
• Context
• Academic status
• The role of content
• The nature of projects
• Sites vs Portals
• Aggregation vs Adaptation
• Implict messages

This gave the presentation a non-linear structure and because I had more subjects than could be covered in the allotted time, a degree of uncertainty. It also means I can give the same presentation again and it will at least be slightly different.

The presentation is below, which I haven't had time to turn into a slidecast and is now linear, so it loses some of the interactivity. I quite liked using this approach and given my previous post on not doing presentations, it at least allowed me to play with the format to a degree, but I would have preferred it to be more participatory.

OER Roulette

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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.

A CogDog Franchise

Badge made with BadgeMaker from BigHugeLabs

Cristina Costa has asked me (and I've agreed) to do a presentation on openness in education on the 14th September. I was thinking about this and on doing something that demonstrates the power of openness, when reading through my backlog on Google Reader I came across  Alan Levine's presentation on openness at Open Ed. This is a) exactly what I want and b) much better than I'd manage.

So here's my idea: Alan starts up a CogDog Franchise scheme. Franchisees pay him an annual subscription and get to have the CogDog seal (bark?) of approval which means they get to give his presentations (instead of having to you know, create their own), and they are trusted to have sufficient knowledge to answer questions from the audience. Everyone's a winner: franchisees get to give good presentations, the audience gets a quality guarantee, Alan gets to spread the CogDog brand.

And the thing is - I'm only half joking. Sign me up.

In defence of Powerpoint

Okay, it's not going to win me any popularity points, but I thought I'd take a look at the fairly standard Powerpoint bashing that takes place. This article features John Sweller, saying that Powerpoint is counter productive because, according to his cognitive load theory, it is more difficult to process information that is coming audibly and visually simultaneously. Garr Reynolds (via Downes) picks up on this, and makes the distinction between Powerpoint as method and as a tool, arguing:

"I am assuming that what Professor Sweller means is that the way PowerPoint is used should be ditched, not the tool itself. Suggesting we abandon PowerPoint because it's often (usually?) misused and abused to produce awful presentation visuals is like saying we should dump the idea of 24-hour cable news because so much of it is vacuous rubbish."

I know it is common to complain of death by powerpoint, and I have sat through enough dull, bullet-listed, tiny fonted, montonously delivered presentations to make watching the entire DVD box set of Sex and the City seem like an interesting alternative. But, I want to know what these complaints are measuring against? Did I miss some public-speaking Camelot, when every lecture was given with such insight, focus and wit as to make it seem like an evening with Peter Ustinov? As I recall my (pre-Powerpoint) university lectures they were largely dull, mostly incoherent and almost deliberately lacking in humour.

The complaints about Powerpoint often come from people who are good public speakers. This is just not the case for most of us. Sure, we can make improvements (I'll return to this), but in the same way many people are not gifted comedians, or actors, most people are not talented orators. I am to public speaking what George W Bush is to free form jazz - it's just not my thing.

But, Powerpoint saves me here - by using Powerpoint (and I'm using Powerpoint as a shorthand for all presentation software, I accept that Keynote is a nicer tool), I can structure, practice and improve my presentation skills. Yes, it's a crutch, but if you need help walking, crutches are good. Powerpoint provides a framework for developing presentation skills. Over the past couple of years I have abandoned bulleted lists, moved to use of images with one message per slide and greater use of (YouTube) videos. My presentations have improved (I think) as a result. I did this by thinking through not only how I could give better presentations in a general sense, but specifically, how I could improve my Powerpoint slides.

In this sense, Powerpoint is a valuable tool. Like any technology that democratises a skill, it means that most of what you get is poor, but it also allows a mechanism to explore and develop. After all, we don't complain that most of what gets written in blogs is rubbish, we accept that is the price we pay for mass democratisation. The difference with Powerpoint is that it is delivered to a captive audience, they can't look elsewhere.

Okay, I've not convinced you to go easy on Powerpoint have I? Tomorrow: In defence of Clippy ;)