The Ed Techie

Understanding OER in 10 videos

A long time ago, back when we still used the phrase 'web 2.0', I proposed an idea for a tool called "9 step" which sequenced online resources together, with connecting narrative. My proposal was that you can learn anything in 9 steps. I think Orson Welles once said he learnt everything he knew about cinematography in an hour, so 9 resources should be enough.

Well, due to my inability to see things through and lack of commercial flair I never did anything with the idea. Since then similar things have been trialled, to not much success, but I won't let that deter me from declaring that it was a great idea. 

Anyway, as part of the OER Research Hub we thought it would be useful to give people an introduction to OERs. I decided resurrecting my sequenced resources idea would be appropriate, but in a less ambitious manner, so I've created a YouTube playlist of 10 videos that explain OER. This goes from a simple "isn't it great" type introduction, then sets some of the context around sharing and reuse, before looking at some examples of projects and research. It ends with a long, thoughtful piece from Gardner Campbell on what openness means. 

You can add notes to a playlist, so this provides some of the narrative, but they're quite short. Even so, I think watching this playlist would give anyone a pretty good understanding of OERs and associated issues. You can view it as a course if you like. It could be massive, it's open, and online. If only there were an acronym for such things...

Anyway, see what you think, I feel we could make better use of playlists as educational tools.

A Couros birthday and user generated content

I'm sure many of you will have seen this, but it's worth showing again. Below is a video that Dean Shareski compiled for blogger Alec Couros's 40th Birthday (Dean describes the process here).

 

It's fun and heartwarming, but it's also a great example to show people about the power of the network. As I understand it someone suggested the idea on twitter, Dean then put together a Google Doc with the lyrics and contacted people in Alec's network to assign them lines. They then uploaded or emailed him the video clips, which he then compiled together.

Here's why I think it's interesting, beyond it being for Alec who's a great guy and featuring some of my favourite online people.

• It illustrates Clay Shirky's point about the cost of organisation collapsing. I'm sure it involved a good deal of effort on Dean's part to organise and compile, but imagine the effort it would have taken in a non-socially networked world.
• It demonstrates the reciprocity economy. Why did all these people contribute, many of whom (I'm guessing) Alec hasn't even met? Because he shares a lot of resources online, responds to people and is seen as a valuable member of many people's network. This was a way of saying thankyou.
• It shows the ease of production. As well as organisation being easy, this demonstrates how the production of multi-media artefacts is truly democratised now.
• YouTube isn't television. One of the complaints people such as Andrew Keen make about web 2.0 is that it's not professional. That isn't the point, this would never exist in a professional context, and yet it works very well as a piece of YouTube content.
• You can't predict what is learning content. This is part of my problem with OERs, they seem to predetermine what learning will take place. I have made many of the points above in various places, but I wouldn't have said 'what I need is a birthday video to demonstrate these'. 

Speaking of using the video to demonstrate points, I was part of the OU's annual LearnAbout Fair the other week, which is a well organised internal event, where people host different stalls demonstrating projects or technology. I was on the 'User generated content' stall, and put together a bunch of examples in a wiki, including Alec's birthday vid. I think people did really get it through these examples, perhaps more so than with the standard ones of Wikipedia, etc. Oh, and a belated happy 40th Alec.

The year of the backlash

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/frippy/1419020309/ by Frippy>

This is hardly a marvel of prophecy, but bear with me...

The signs are that this year will be one marked by something of a backlash against social media/ web 2.0/ any internet stuff. I don't mean from the traditional media, who've always been suspicious, but from people who know what they're talking about and have been advocates. In other words, increasingly 'us lot' will be declaring that this stuff is peripheral, uncool, over- rated, etc.

I think this will often been focused on a particular technology, and Twitter will be the main candidate this year. I've already seen several people I know abandon it. But increasingly it reflects a disappointment that technology hasn't delivered on its promises, and that as it becomes incorporated into everyday life it begins to look like all the stuff it was meant to replace. Hey, e-mail was revolutionary once. This cycle of attitudes towards technology is neatly captured in the Gartner Hype cycle, which, while not founded in deep research, captures instinctively what many of us feel about technology.

The other thing to bear in mind is that as technology matures, so does the criticism that goes along with it. This moves from the tabloid 'it's evil' attitude to a more reasoned approach. I disagree with a lot of what Lanier says in You Are Not A Gadget (that's another post), but I agree when he says technology criticism should not be left to Luddites (and neither should technology engagement be left to the evangelists). So part of what we will see growing this year is smart people bringing their intellectual capacity to bear on their experience with technology.

I would caution though that many of us who are prone to technology enthusiasm are also guilty of excessive criticism (I include myself in this). Maybe it's a personality thing for early adopters. My point is we should be wary of going to extremes. To return to my earlier example, the fact that Twitter won't be the tool that brings down totalitarian regimes, or that you found yourself using it too much, or that it is often trivial does not mean it is therefore useless. I think we should avoid these kind of binary distinctions: it's a revolutionary force or it's pointless. I know that, for instance, my use of Twitter has changed from a compulsion to tweet at all times, to a much more regulated, measured use. I'll go days without using it, but on other days will dip in continuously and find it entertaining, useful, engaging. And that's the same for all of it - we tend to over-indulge and then find their real value as they settle into our daily lives.

I think a healthy caution has crept into our reaction to technology now: Buzz, Ping, Wave, Quora - all of these have been met with an appropriate questioning attitude and not a blind acceptance of the next big thing. But we should also not become adverse to what can be done using tools with a little imagination - ds106 radio is a recent example of this. The technology isn't particularly complex (well, it would be beyond me, but for someone like Grant it's probably not too complex), but when you make it easy enough and get the right mix of people together, magic happens.

So I'm starting the backlash against the backlash early - YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter - these things are amazing. They're just not as amazing as we first thought, or rather, we're just beginning to find the ways in which they will be amazing.

The scholar, their content & the cloud

  by  LeeLeFever 

After the wikileaks controversy which highlighted the dangers of placing political discourse in the cloud, we have had the news of Delicious apparently being abandoned by Yahoo. Not a good week for cloud computing. As John Naughton puts it "For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for."

Does this signal the death knell for cloud computing? Should academics abandon it altogether (before most of them have even made the shift)?

I think it's a more measured response than that. I would suggest a number of responses:

i) Use the cloud for what it's best at. If you want to share content, have it easily embedded, be part of a wider community of participants, then the cloud is the best way to go. I could put my presentations in my own database, but Slideshare offers a better option and more people will find them there. If it's eyeballs and ease of use you want, then the commercial cloud is a sensible option.

ii) Store locally, share globally. Of course, putting content online doesn't mean you surrender it altogether. One should assume that you will lose these services at some point, so a local store is your backup.

iii) Find alternatives - the point of the cloud is that there are numerous services that perform the same function. Many people are shifting their bookmarks to Diigo for instance. 

iv) Develop academic solutions - I say this with some reticence since, as with learning objects, academic projects don't have a good track record in keeping things simple. But there are services we may find useful to share between universities, such as storing research data in a specialised cloud. Paul Miller has a good post on this, as does Andy Powell. I certainly think that a universal cloud service to academia represents one way we may go, but make it good like JANET, not like [insert your own choice of difficult to use, overly complex higher education web project here]

v) Accept that they are temporary.You've had seven years of delicious use, a service you wouldn't have had if you'd waited for an institutionally hosted version to materialise. Accept it was useful for that period, and move on.

vi) Develop service level agreements - this model accepts that some cloud based solutions are viable and the institution either pays for these or guarantees a number of users in return for a service level agreement. Of course, this doesn't mean the companies can't go under or the services be removed, but it does provide a level of reassurance. It also limits the experimentation and innovation at an individual level we see with the wider ecology of free tools.

I would argue that an appropriate response is not to retrench to solely internally hosted systems, either for students or scholars for two reasons: the loss of the network effect and the positive pull effect that commercial systems have had on interface and innovation. We can lose these but need to decide if that's a price worth paying.

The Lamb Formula = Good enough?

In my previous presentation one of the slides I didn't get to displayed the following Venn Diagram for what I term 'The Lamb formula'

(Image created by crappygraphs)

This is from Brian Lamb, who borrows the title from Errol Morris' documentary, to describe the kind of technology he likes, and thinks is useful. My take on these three elements (which may be different to Brian's) as they pertain to education is:

• Fast - Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This means you can experiment quickly.
• Cheap - tools that are usually free, or at least have a freemium model so you can buy any extension out of your own pocket. Animoto is a good example - you can create free 30seconds videos or pay a small one-off fee to create a longer one. Slideshare is an example of a free service. This means you don't need to get authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means you don't need to worry about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
• Out of control - they are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element, and are more flexible. 

Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services, and the uses they put technology to in education. If you've invested £300K in an eportfolio system, say, then there becomes an obligation to stick with it over many years. If you've picked a free blog tool and told students to use it as a portfolio you can switch if you want to and also put it to different uses.

There are, of course, many times when this approach may not be suitable, but that doesn't mean it is never appropriate. Thinking about this also brought to mind a couple of conversations I've had with Liam Green-Hughes recently, who is very interested in the notion of 'good enough'. Liam is referring to hardware often when he talks about this, the Flip cam being a good example. It is good enough at recording to make the lightweight device and the ease of use be determining factors.

I have wondered what 'good enough' means in education terms. In his Open Ed keynote Erik Duval suggested that we can afford to disrupt education, because we don't do a particularly good job anyway. I think we do sometimes become scared of experimenting in education and become obsessed about every possible bad scenario, while ignoring some of the current deficiencies (in fairness this is partly a reaction to the litigious environment universities now have to exist in).  The good enough approach suggests that using fast, cheap and out of control technologies in education is at least good enough, and may be superior in that offers new ways of working. 

The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers

Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below:

Research, technology & networks

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.

I talked about why this might be so and suggested the following reasons:

• The stranglehold of publishing - tenure and reward are still linked to publishing in academic journals, so spending time on other forms of communication is not directly encouraged. This is reinforced through research quality assessment exercises which are closely allied to publishing, such as the REF.
• Wasting new blood - related to the above, in other sectors new recruits are seen as the people who bring in new ideas. Yet in education because tenure is linked so closely to traditional outputs, new researchers are positively discouraged from spending time on other endeavours. So the very people who might engage in transforming practice are discouraged from doing so. This leaves it to tenured academics to engage in innovation, but these have mostly been successful through more traditional means so their history tells them to carry on this way. The pool of potential adopters then is decreased by the research context we have in place. I suggested this was quite a harmful environment to create.
• Antithetical to research ethos - I also put forward the suggestion that in science in particular, research is about predicting outcomes, and much of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) is about unpredictability - you don't know what will happen with your outputs, or through a network.
• Research is the core practice - despite how much academics might say they value teaching, or public engagement, it is still research that is most highly valued. This means it is the area people are least willing to risk their reputation in and want to control most tightly.

I then suggested some themes that I thought were emerging, but that is for another post.

Of course one might argue it doesn't matter. Researchers will adopt new technologies if they are effective, and there is an underlying assumption in my talk that adoption is a good thing, which isn't necessarily true. This may well be the case, but there are three responses to this which at least bear consideration:

• The impact of the negative context - if research adoption of new technologies (and associated practices eg open publishing) is being impaired by the financial/reward structure we have in place, then we need to address whether that structure is doing research a disservice in the long term
• Powerful tools - I know through personal experience that even when people have been dismissive, or cautious of a particular tool, when it is demonstrated in the right context, or they appreciate its possibilities, then they will find uses for it in their academic work that I had never anticipated. This isn't true for everyone or for all uses, but it is worth chipping away at misconceptions and demonstrating potential.
• The role of the researcher - as higher education seeks to demonstrate its value to society, it strikes me that it is potentially dangerous not to be leading on the use and development of new tools, and particularly on what they mean for knowledge construction and sharing, rather than leaving it to others.

Understanding the attention economy

My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine.

 

The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss.

Bloglines is a similar app (which I found via John Connell), here I add in my favourite blogs to create a nice bookshelf. Again it probably isn't the best way to handle hundreds of feeds, but it provides a nice window on some of them, meaning again I might read things I would otherwise skip.

 

What both of these apps demonstrate is that by adding a nice layer of UI, the way you interact with these sources can be subtly altered. For a start it seems to elevate them somewhat - these are now nice articles to be read with a coffee and a bagel.

But more significantly it highlights the importance of grabbing people's attention. This usually means by adding in some media - a post with a nice image is more likely to make me open it from bloglines (Jim Groom's Bavatuesdays wins here). Or it could be an intriguing title. There are also variables such as posting at an optimal time (weekends are rarely useful, and afternoons in the UK will get some American traffic too).

These may seem like trivial, superficial aspects for academics to be concerned with, and certainly trying too hard to get attention has the opposite effect. But in an information saturated context we can't assume good quality will always be found. As we send our little thoughts into the digital world we need to at least give them every chance to survive. I wonder if understanding the online attention economy will be a digital literacy?

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.

Call for papers - you know you want to

I am editing a special issue of the RUSC (a journal from the University of Catalonia) with George Siemens. The Special Issue is concerned with the Impact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning. The language of the special issue is English. George has posted the details here. The topics we want to address are:

1. The role of the educator in social networks
2. Adaptation of learning theories for digital environments
3. Systemic change in education in response to affordances of social networks
4. Social network analysis in courses and learning environments
5. Mobile devices in social learning
6. Personal learning environments and networks
7. Learning design - methods and models of designing for social networks
8. The value of openness in learning
9. Next-generation social technologies
10. Scholarship and peer review in online social networks
11. Blending virtual and physical worlds - location-based services
12. Self-formed learning support networks

The deadline is 30th June and the journal is open.

So, if you've got a 6000 word paper you're burning to write in one of these areas, and don't want to submit it to one of those nasty, evil closed journals, then come to us. We will also be badgering inviting some people to write chapters, so if you know us, it might be a good time to take a holiday.

Do you have to do social media to get social media?

Christian, aka Documentally has a post entitled "Understand Social Technology Through Participation", in which he says:

"How much can you understand from just watching and not participating?
Last night I met a Professor who although used Facebook and other platforms seemed proud to state he did not use twitter.
His job was to study social Technology and although obviously a very smart chap It made me wonder.. Is it possible to comprehend something as complex as social Technology by not participating in a platform like twitter. Can you glean just as much insight from only using sites like Facebook?..
All of my insights into Social Technology have come from my uses of it. "

I agree with him, it's been a bit of a bugbear of mine, the way for example, when Facebook was a'happening it was suddenly inundated with education, psychology, media, business and social science researchers who all wanted to have a look at this phenomenon. They did their research, wrote it up in traditional journal papers or media outlets and then disappeared. And I kept thinking 'they don't get it.'

But first I ought to put the contrary case:

It is perfectly possible to research any subject or group of individuals without using an active participation method. For example I can research the behaviour of vets, football hooligans or stockmarket traders without becoming a vet/hooligan/trader. Indeed not only is it possible, but it is often desirable to have the objectivity that research requires.

It is also the case that not everyone has to use every technology to 'qualify'. I may not use Second Life but that doesn't mean I can't comment on social media in general. And we don't want to have some kind of qualification to start with where people starting wearing a McDonalds type star badge to demonstrate their social-media expertise.

But having said all of that I think that academics and journalists who don't use the new media should be treated with caution. Here's why:

1. It's a fast changing world - the way technologies are used changes, so the survey you did last year won't apply this year
2. The use and benefits are very subtle, you have to spend some time to understand them and you only really do that by participating
3. There is an interconnection between many different tools, so you cannot cherry pick one in isolation without understanding how it might exist within an ecosystem of tools for an individual
4. It is only through participation that you begin to see the types of interesting things to ask. By using the tools you will formulate more meaningful research questions
5. If you simply research it then you see it as a distinct entity or community eg 'it's a teen thing'
6. If you want people to engage with your research then you have to earn some points in the reciprocity economy

So, in general I already dismiss any journalist article that begins "I've never used [technology X] but I know this...". But I am also suspicious of any academic article on social media where the author doesn't have a blog, or twitter id.