The Ed Techie

Digital resilience in Higher Ed

I've mentioned the idea of resilience before (thanks to Joss & Richard for linking it to open education and giving me the idea). When Terry Anderson from Athabasca visited us last year, I worked on a paper to explore the idea more fully with him.

Resilience borrows the idea from ecosystems, pioneered by Holling, who described it as "‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables".

In our paper we take the concept and use it as a means of thinking about how HE institutions can view the impact of digital technology. As Joss points out we shouldn't think of resilience as 'resisting', but rather an ability for core functions to persist, in a new context. Terry and I take two possible digital challenges (MOOCS, no surprise, and Open Access) and look at our respective institutions responses to them from a digital resilience perspective.

I think it's a framework that could work well as a way of thinking about how well places an institution is and areas they need to address. The scoring is subjective of course, but in a group setting it works well to create discussion. Have a go yourself for your institution (or one of your choice) and any particular challenge.

The paper has just been published in EURODL, and you can read it here. Hope you like it.

Digital scholarship, tenure & barometers

I use this blog as well as our university repository system to keep track (and shamelessly publicise) those journal article things that your grandad told you about.

I have a new article out in RUSC (the open access journal from the University of Catalonia). It has the snappy title of "Digital scholarship and the tenure process as an indicator of change in universities". You can access the PDF here through our repository, or at RUSC here.

It's an extension of some of the stuff I covered in the book, and I'm making the argument that how universities respond to the challenge of recognising digital scholarship can be taken as a barometer for how well prepared they are for dealing with the complexities of operating in a digital, networked context. Here is a quote from the conclusions:

"Recognising and rewarding digital scholarship has a significance beyond the promotion of individuals. For universities, as they seek to manage change to a digital, networked society, it acts as a strong indicator and vehicle for change.

There are two main reasons for prioritising the recognition of digital scholarship. The first is the message it sends to individuals within the university. Because they operate in an open, digital, networked manner, digital scholars are often well known in their institution (for example, many of their colleagues will read their blogs). If a well-known digital scholar struggles to get their work recognised, then it sends a message to the rest of the university that this is not the type of activity that is likely to be rewarded, with a subsequent decline in its uptake. The reverse happens if that digital scholar is rewarded; it sends the positive message that academics should engage in this type of activity.

The second reason for recognising digital scholarship is to encourage institutional innovation. For example, universities are beginning to explore the use of Facebook to support students, or the use of blogs to disseminate research findings to the public, or new models of course development based on third-party content and crowdsourcing. There are very real benefits to the institution from these approaches, such as reaching new audiences, increasing the university profile without advertising, increasing student retention through improved peer support, lowering the costs of course production, developing new research methodology, etc. But it is difficult to realise any of these institutional approaches to new media if the university does not have a solid base of digital scholarship experience to draw upon. Having a range of digital scholarship experience amongst the faculty will be the key resource in realising the change required for many universities, and an appropriate reward and tenure process acts as a means of facilitating and encouraging this."

JIME relaunch

Last year I took on the role of co-editor of JIME (The Journal of Interactive Media in Education). JIME was founded in 1996 and was one of the first open access journals, and operated an innovative open peer review system. But it had been a bit neglected over the last few years, so we shifted it to OJS, worked through the backlog of review papers, tidied up the scope, reappointed an editorial board, and now I'm pleased to announce a new issue.

This is a special issue focusing on OER, with guest editors Ester Ehiyazaryan and Alannah Fitzgerald. It's a very good issue, even if I say so myself. It features an opening article from me (what more do you want?) on creaitivity and openness in education, and then moves into 'proper' research work with papers looking at OER in Africa, motivations for reuse, and obstacles in finding OERS. I'm sure there'll be something there of interest to readers of this blog.

And now that JIME is up and running again, we are seeking new submissions. We're operating a fairly traditional model, so academic papers, peer-reviewed - take a look at Focus and Scope for the type of thing we're after. We will be doing some more experimental special issues, eg multi-media, later also. I hope to see you there.

A pedagogy of abundance - the paper

I've given a couple of talks (and blogged) around a pedagogy of abundance. In these I was exploring what abundance in terms of content might mean for education, and whether we had appropriate pedagogies, when most of our learning theories have been built on an assumption of content-scarcity.

For my digital scholarship book I made this the chapter that looks at the teaching element of Boyer's scholarly functions. I have now redone that chapter and published it as an article in the Spanish Journal of Pedagogy

Note - the journal isn't open access, but I'm trying to explore the green, or self-archiving route of OA, so I got agreement to release it myself under a CC license. So you can download it from the OU repository.

Social networks and education

(This is a bit of blog tidying, and trying to make sure I gather my publications through my blog, but it's a good read, honest).

I mentioned a while back that I edited a special edition of RUSC with George Siemens, on the use of social networks in education. We wrote an introductory piece, which can be found here.

Abstract:

The last decade has produced tremendous innovation in how people connect with one another online. Social networks have experienced a rapid increase in popularity, producing both concerns (privacy, content ownership) and opportunities. The articles in this journal can be viewed as attempts to answer the question: What should educators do about social networks?

 

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.

More brains! The perpetuation of the zombie scholar

With Jim Groom I'm writing a chapter for the Zombies in the Academy book. It's at an early draft stage, but thought I would share it in this wiki.

My argument is that the context we have set up in education for all aspects of scholarship is like a contagion that works against innovation. This was an idea I explored in my researchers and new technology post and which forms a theme of my upcoming book (but with no zombies). There is an analogy here with the manner in which zombies turn all-comers into one of their own, which is exemplified by this clip from Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead:

 

The scholarly discipline is in ever more need of fresh brains to feed itself.

But I propose that, unlike zombification, there may be an antidote: the adoption of the fast, cheap and out of control technologies espoused by Brian Lamb.

Anyway, take a look at the paper and if you feel like contributing let me know.

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.