Being open and networked – benefits and ways forward

I recently completed H818 which, assuming all goes well with marking, will be my final module in the MA in Online & Distance Education (MAODE). This degree has taken me two and a half years alongside a full-time job and family, so it is quite a relief to make it. It has been my second Masters degree and a real contrast to my first one, which was undertaken full-time and in a more traditional academic discipline, twenty years ago. Part-time is much harder, by the way, no question.

This is a good point to take stock, then, and part of our final assessment helped us to do this by asking us to evaluate how we operate as networked practitioners. To do this evaluation, I used a framework which was presented to us by Professor Martin Weller (2013) in an audio that formed part of our course materials. He set out five benefits of being “open” in your practice as a scholar and educator, drawing on his personal experience. The audio is not publicly available, but the points are very consistent with Prof Weller’s published work.

The benefits are set out below, with reflections on my own practice in relation to each:

1. It makes your content go further, in terms of distribution, citations and use;

This is probably true for me. One of the reasons I write my blog and share my work on it is that many more people will see it and it may be useful to them, rather than keeping it private. According to my WordPress statistics, there have been over 7,000 views of my blog since I started it. This is far more people seeing my work than I can imagine happening by any other practical means.

2. It leads to unexpected outcomes, for example in Prof Weller’s case being invited to deliver a keynote presentation in India;

I have not yet been invited to India, or anywhere else externally, to present on the basis of my blog, but I have had some gratifying responses, including a blog post in response to one of mine (Weston, 2013). So this has been realised in a much smaller way.

3. It allows you to form a global network of peers without investing in a lot of time going to conferences;

Blogging and using Twitter have brought me into loose contact with an interesting range of people, although my own experience is that making a meaningful connection entirely online is not easy – it helps a lot if you can meet in person at least occasionally. During H818, I had the opportunity to meet with another student, who was visiting my home town. The opportunity to compare notes in person was valuable and hard to replicate online. Prof Weller’s network may well include people he has met at least once, which will make a difference.

4. It allows for reciprocity, such as answering questions and providing examples;

My experience of digital networking has not included much in the way of exchanging answers and examples, with the exception of a few fellow MAODE students. This is perhaps an area to focus on for development.

5. It offers interesting ways of doing teaching and education, such as MOOCs.

I have tried to incorporate Twitter and blogging into some of my teaching, although this can be hard to accommodate within course structures, and is further hampered by the fact that many students do not engage with these channels, as per the 1% rule, which I was introduced to on my most recent module.

Conclusions and directions

The overall conclusion is that, while I have seen some benefits, they are limited compared to those of a highly networked practitioner. The key point is one that I am sure Prof Weller would agree with, and has been made by other prominent networked academics (e.g. Wheeler, 2013). Blogging, and networked practice, are hard work and require sustained attention and effort. There will always be a trade-off between time invested in this and maintaining the “day job”. Of course, Weller’s key point is that it will eventually pay off in terms of the “day job”, but this will take time and will also depend what your “day job” is.

This leads to the question of my future strategy for being networked. I realise now that I have relied to some extent on the MAODE to build up my peer network – that is part of what these courses are for, of course. I will not have this help going forward, and don’t intend to do further formal studies at this stage, although on the other hand time has been freed up to focus on networked activity. Part of my strategy will be to invest some of the time I previously spent studying into updating my blog and writing more regular posts (yes, I will try!), as well as monitoring others’ blogs more closely and commenting on them. I will aim to create a “hub” for my online presence, either using my blog to do this or a new page. I also intend to use selected relevant MOOCs as networking tools, building up contacts with those who share my interests. That’s my plan – but no doubt it will evolve over time.

I will of course be dependent on the support and suggestions of you, my network, to do this, and I will offer suggestions and support in turn. I look forward to keeping in touch with you.

References:

Weller, M. (2013) ‘Benefits of Open’, H818 Unit 2 [online]. Available to OU H818 students at https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=344985 (accessed 22 February 2014).

Wheeler, S. (2013) ‘Those who are about to blog…’ Learning with ‘e’s, 5 January [online]. Available at http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/those-who-are-about-to-blog.html (accessed 22 February 2014).

Weston, C. (2013) ‘The iTunes model in education’ Ed Tech Now, 26 March [online]. Available at http://edtechnow.net/2013/03/26/itunes/ (accessed 22 February 2014).

My conference presentation – can OER pay their way

The H818 online conference has been a great experience, with more to come on Monday. There will be more on the blog about it, but in the meantime, because the conference is invitation-only, I thought I would post a recording of my presentation on my YouTube channel. Here it is for anyone who is interested:

Hope you find it interesting.

Digital mapping exercise

I am currently participating in an online conference that forms part of my MA course, and it is proving fascinating – more reflections will no doubt follow.

One of the presentations on Thursday was from my fellow student Richard Lamb. He discussed the work of Dave White, who has developed a simple method of mapping usage of websites and apps according to whether usage is primarily personal or institutional , and whether you can be considered a digital “resident” or “visitor”. This is partly trying to move on from the discredited concept of digital natives, but mostly to be a tool for reflection and self-awareness. One of the key points it raises is that the same technology can sit in many different areas of the diagram, according to the person using it. There is certainly no “correct” way to use a piece of technology. The video explaining the concept is here:

I was so intrigued by this, and Richard sharing his map, that I decided to construct my own

Daniel Clark – digital mapping

A number of things immediately strike me about this. Firstly, a lot of usage straddles personal and institutional for me – in other words I largely use the same tools for work and personal life. This is in line with one of the points in the video – we use tools we are comfortable with, whatever the context. Of course, it raises issues of privacy, work-life balance and all sorts of other things too, which I guess we are working through.

For areas where I am a digital resident, having a permanent, interactive presence, I have reflected consciously on where they should sit in the personal/institutional continuum. I see this blog as a personal channel for my own views, bit on the other hand I write primarily about education, which is the field I work in. My Twitter feed, which identifies my employer, I see as primarily for things with some relation to my work, although there is personal stuff in there too. I use LinkedIn as a handy professional address book, although do also use features like groups and discussions from time to time. I made an effort to establish Tumblr as my channel for personal blogging, but so far unsuccessfully. Maybe I am less happy to share personal material than professional, or at least semi-professional?

Many thanks to Richard for an inspiring talk and introducing a tool that I think is very helpful for raising awareness.

How universities add value in the digital age – lessons from the music industry

Music is a product that can be digitised, distributed and shared very easily and at little or no cost. This has meant that the industry has had to adapt to the digital age more rapidly than most, and is keenly watched for clues as to where others will go. There are undoubtedly lessons for education to draw from the music industry, as well as profound differences (Weller, 2011). However, there is one very intriguing parallel. At one time, you could only get an education at a university because that was where the experts and the manuscripts were, just as you could only listen to music if you went to a live performance. The development of the printing press and of recorded music respectively dealt a blow to both of these models, though certainly not a fatal one. However, we have now entered a world where knowledge in many forms, as well as music can be accessed easily and often for free. In this world, how will musicians, writers and lecturers be paid, and what is the fate of the institutions that support them?

There are a number of intriguing experiments in the music industry aimed at finding a new business model. These attempts are generally being lead by companies which are start-ups, or new to the industry. The traditional record companies have not been able to take the initiative on this, and the retailers who historically sold recorded music have not made the transition to the new world particularly successfully. Traditional educational institutions have so far fared better, but perhaps Spotify, Napster ,Last.fm and iTunes are paralleled by Coursera, Udacity, Khan Academy and Pearson in the world of education.

So how can the music industry adapt and can it show useful avenues for education? Online music services are a recent development and so research on them to date is limited, but one study of users of Last.fm is suggestive. Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson (2013) analysed customer data from the music service Last.fm. The company provides music listening services and also offers social features. The business model is a freemium one, whereby music and basic functions can be accessed for free. Those willing to pay a small subscription get an improved service, removal of advertisements and enhanced social features. As with most sites of this nature, subscriptions represent a far more profitable revenue model than advertising, and the authors were investigating the factors most likely to encourage users to subscribe.

On this point, the data was unequivocal:

“…community activity is more strongly associated with the likelihood of subscription than is the music consumption itself, and community leadership is more strongly associated with the likelihood of subscription than is mere community participation.”

In other words, the main value is derived from participating in the community, not from the content itself. The authors draw out the implication of this finding as follows:

“The adoption of this digital business strategy and its value proposition transforms the main role of the firm from providing content to establishing content-related and IT-enabled social experiences for its users…”

This emphasis is echoed by Spotify, the largest music streaming company. One of the board members at Spotify is Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and early investor in Facebook. His vision has been described as follows:

“…an online world, driven by social interactions, where there’s better music made, and distributed at lower cost, because the music will find its audience more efficiently.” (Dean, 2013)

We can attempt to apply these insights to education as follows:

1. Provision of content has little or no value. In some respects, this means that the battle for open education resources is already won (Weller, 2013). A great deal of educational resources are available for free, including some very high quality ones, so simply providing more adds little value. Universities can supply libraries, lectures and written materials if they like, but increasingly no one will be willing to pay for them.
2. Curation of content may have some value. The sheer volume of information available can be overwhelming, so a trusted “filter” can be helpful. In essence, this is the role of textbooks, reading lists and curricula. These are often provided as open education resources, can be helpful, and can probably be charged for in some cases, but even these filters are often available for free, via the MOOCs, for example.
3. Universities have a specific value-adding role in assessing and accrediting learning – for now. In the UK, universities have a monopoly on the award of degrees, which is highly valued by students and employers, based on the reputation of the university and the regulations around awards. However, the role of assessing learning is in principle divisible from the learning itself. Coursera are already charging for assessments that can count towards college credit at a much lower price than college courses (Coursera, n.d.). Over time, the financial logic will surely drive providers to assess and accredit learning separately from the act of learning.
4. The greatest value lies in provision of social experiences. This does seem to make sense in the context of education – it is the experience of direct interaction with instructors and other students that can provide learning that is not easily achieved in other ways and create value – value which someone will be willing to pay for and which provides a model for financial sustainability.

If value really comes from providing social experiences, then perhaps that is good news for the existing higher education institutions, because that is one of the things they can and do provide. The MOOCs attempt to provide social experiences too, of course, via large discussion boards, so the universities will have to stay ahead of them. However, the challenge for educational institutions is this – are they focusing most of their resources on providing a positive social experience for students? Or are resources tied up in other activities which do not relate to this? Are students simply grouped into classes, or discussion boards and expected to get on with it, or are those valuable social experiences encouraged and facilitated? My guess is that the really successful teaching universities in the future will be those whose focus is on the social experience that facilitates learning and adds real value.

References

Coursera (n.d.) College Credit Recommendation Guidebook [online]. Available at https://www.coursera.org/signature/college-credit-guidebook (accessed 1 February 2014).

Dean, J. (2013) ‘Let a Billion Streams Bloom’, Fast Company, November [online]. Available at http://www.fastcompany.com/3018622/let-a-billion-streams-bloom (accessed 5 January 2014).

Oestreicher-Singer, G. & Zalmanson, L. (2013) ‘Content or Community? A Digital Business Strategy for Content Providers in the Social Age’, MIS Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 591-616.

Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar, London, Bloomsbury Academic.

Weller, M. (2013) ‘The battle for open – a perspective’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, Nottingham OER 2013 special issue [online]. Available at http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2013-15 (accessed 20 December 2013).

Draft multimedia posters – for review

In the MA I am studying, we are currently preparing for on online conference where we will each present a paper, multimedia artefact or activity along the theme of open education. Clearly, it is critical that we focus not just on the quality of our presentation, but the journey to get there and what we learn along the way. Our task at the moment is to create a “multimedia poster” for the conference. Posters are, of course, very common at academic conference, although it seems to me that the term poster is being used quite loosely here. We need to create something to generate interest in our proposal and, provided it can be taken in within five minutes and doesn’t exceed 20MB, pretty much anything goes.

This is a bit scary, but also quite exciting and I am trying to take the opportunity to experiment with multimedia tools and learn about them. I have even set up a YouTube channel to hold the results of these experiments. I did a crash course in Prezi, which is a pretty trendy tool, and can see that it provides variety from Powerpoint, but otherwise can be quite frustrating to use. I also discovered Animoto, which offers an intriguing “painting by numbers” approach to creating videos but the results can be very impressive. I’m sure I will return to this tool.

In the end, however, I fell back on Powerpoint, which after all is a very powerful tool. The problem is that slides are often filled with text and it is essentially used as a proxy for written documents. In response to some initial feedback, I have tried to jazz up my presentation, and the results can be seen here:

The effect is a bit different to the usual academic presentation (although I hope it is still rigorous), and I am still not sure if the music engages the viewer or trivialises the comment. But then the whole point of exercises like this is to experiment a bit, and I am open to views as to whether this works, or how it could be improved.

One other issue we need to consider in putting our presentation together is accessibility. A presentation like this is clearly not much use to someone with a serious visual impairment. There are a number of options to deal with this, but I chose to record a podcast which covers the same content in audio format. There is also an opportunity here to experience how the same message may be received very differently when it is expressed using different media. To listen to the audio version, click here.

These drafts are currently being made available for peer review, so please do let me know if you have comments or feedback on them, and I hope to develop these ideas more fully both for the H818 online conference, and in a more public forum later on.

Middle class life and hard work – lessons from Amanda Palmer

For our current H818 task we are being asked to review Amanda Palmer’s TED talk on trust and giving and her accompanying blog post. In a nutshell, her thesis is that if musicians and other creatives trust their fan base, they will be rewarded, helped and paid for what they do. I found the talk absorbing and interesting but ultimately unconvincing as a model to be widely copied. Clearly, she has found an approach that works for her – being supported with donations, help and equipment from her fan base. But I have extreme doubts about whether this model is really widely scaleable and will work for someone without her charisma, fan base or willingness to couch surf. So often in the last few months I have found myself coming back to the insights of Lanier (2013), who highlights the fact that the business models of the Web currently emerging do not look like they will be sufficient to support a middle class.

The donation model that Ms Palmer talks about is a case in point. No doubt a few top stars would still get very rich – the likes of Justin Bieber and Katy Perry could, I’m sure, make plenty of money from concerts and commercial endorsements even if they gave away all their music. It would also be fine for bohemians like Ms Palmer who can, perhaps, achieve the lifestyle they want by these means. But for the rest it would be a question of scraping a living from live performances as best you can, constant travelling and complete insecurity. Things like buying houses and bringing up children, the foundations of middle class life, would be impossible. To achieve that, you need boring things like contracts, royalties and payment systems. These mechanisms allow people to achieve financial security and dignity, yes even musicians.

So is this a model we want to import into education – a handful of wealthy “rock-star” professors or universities, some travelling gurus and the rest of us getting by as best we can? Perhaps the MOOCs are taking us in this direction (maybe that’s a discussion for another post), but it’s not an attractive prospect, as one famous musician recently noted.

What I did find really interesting and useful was Ms Palmer’s blog post to accompany her talk. I came away with the impression that Ms Palmer is a seriously high maintenance lady, but I respect her honesty in giving this account of the incredible lengths she went to in preparing, honing and practising her talk, and the help she received from many others. Something like a TED talk is generally very slick, polished and professional. I get the feeling many speakers would like us to believe that they can simply turn on a performance like that on demand. Of course, they can’t, no one can. A polished performance of any sort can appear spontaneous, because people like that, but it is invariably the result of hours of thought, preparation and rehearsal. Periodically, I have come across accounts of some of the great, enduring live music acts – Queen, Cliff Richard, Lady Gaga, people like that. Their style of music and fan base varies hugely but they have something in common. All of their shows are planned, choreographed and meticulously rehearsed down to the last detail, every move, look and note. A good performance is the result of hundreds of hours of work by the band and many others.

So this detailed case study illustrates a general, very important point. Creativity is a great thing, and humanity does not progress without it. But any successful artist, musician, writer or entrepreneur will tell you that turning creativity into results needs team input and hard work – lots of it.

References:

Lanier, J. (2013) Who owns the future? Penguin, London.

Issues with costs, free and open in education – formulating some ideas for a project

We are currently working on ideas for the topic that we will use in our H818 MA project, so I am using this blog post to “think aloud” about what mine might be.

I think it will be something that builds on two strands which I believe are related:

1) I have previously written about the lack of understanding of the costs of online education and the implications to the education sector that are likely to result from the increasing adoption of new technology. As a Chartered Accountant with a commercial background who now works in higher education delivery and management, I bring a particular perspective to this. My blog post on this topic is by far my most viewed, suggesting to me a widespread interest in the topic that is not being generally met. Since writing this post, I have come across very little recent work on the subject – a paper by Rumble (2012) which notes, among other things, the general lack of interest and evidence in this area, and the work of Paul Bacsich, much of which is now quite dated.

2) Like many others, I am increasingly bothered by the proliferation of “free” services, which seems to me to often result in an opaque charging structure and unintended consequences. I have recently read Jaron Lanier’s (highly recommended) book (Lanier, 2013) which deals with this topic in some detail so I will just illustrate briefly with a couple of examples. Facebook is the most obvious example, to me, of a “free” service which we pay for in hidden ways – by providing lots of personal data to be sold to advertisers, having our behaviour modified and even allowing them to reshape our attitudes as a society to privacy. This may or may not be a price worth paying for free photo-sharing and chat, but the question is not raised often enough. For me personally, the price is too high for what I get in return.

Another example has been highlighted in our module discussions. Our module chair posted a video of Luis von Ahn’s TED talk about his work with Captcha and Recaptcha. It’s fascinating stuff, and I did not know that the Recaptcha tool is enabling the digitisation of the world’s books, or that the model is now being extended so that users can learn a language for free while at the same time translating large volumes of web content. By the way, Recaptcha is also now owned by Google.

Again, there are some issues here – issues that don’t receive enough consideration in the general enthusiasm for “free” and “open”, and certainly aren’t being considered by the TED audience if the wild applause is anything to go by. Money payments have their downside (excluding those with no money for a start), but one advantage of them is that they are reasonably transparent – if I am paying money for something I generally know how much and can judge whether it is worth what I am being offered in return. But with Recaptcha, we pay for access to “free” sites by contributing our labour towards Google’s digitisation project. Is this reasonable? I don’t know, but I wish we were able to make the choice.

Within education, this leads us inexorably to the MOOCs, the providers of “free education”, currently hunting for a business model. In the process, some of them, including Coursera and FutureLearn, have pulled off the remarkable feat of persuading universities to contribute staff time, resources and IP towards their commercial ventures in exchange for some brand-building of unproven effectiveness and a “feel-good” factor. Does “free” here really mean piggy-backing off the general funding of the HE sector? Maybe this is a good idea, maybe it isn’t. Keep in mind that, as I have previously noted, 80% of Coursera students already have a degree and 40% a postgraduate degree, so all this resource is mostly going towards those are already well educated.

You get the idea – there are some questions here that aren’t being addressed much, which is where I think the two issues are related. I wonder whether the general lack of understanding of costs, value for money and business models within has left the field open to those who, for various reasons, want to claim that they can offer it for “free”, even though the truth is that costs need to be recovered somehow and the real question is how. Can good education really be delivered for low cost at scale by using technology? This would certainly help the case that costs can be recovered by other channels, perhaps using a freemium model. Is there any actual research available into cost structures that might help us determine this? What are the ethical issues in the MOOCs finding a business model – for example, is advertising acceptable? A link posted in our tutor group shows that at least one provider is going down this route.

So the general area is understanding costs in online education and why “free” is an idea that needs to be evaluated critically. This is a big topic so for the purposes of this project I will need to narrow it down. Maybe it would be most practical to consider the following, as an implementation topic:

“Costs, business models and sustainability in open education – is ‘free’ viable?”

In the spirit of open, all feedback and reactions are welcome and will be credited if used!

References:

Lanier, J. (2013) Who owns the future? Penguin, London.

Rumble, G. (2012), “Financial management of distance learning in dual-mode institutions”, Open Learning, vol. 27, no. 1, pp 37-51.

Is open innovation relevant for teaching and learning?

For our most recent assignment, we were asked to research an area of openness previously unfamiliar to us. As someone who has spent most of my career in commercial roles, I was particularly interested to discover an approach that balances openness with commercial viability – open innovation. I had not previously come across this term, although I have seen the concept in action.

Open innovation covers a range of ways in which organisations use external knowledge to help their innovation processes, including acquiring knowledge from others, licencing innovations for use by others, or partners gaining privileged access to each other’s knowledge. It has been defined as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively” (Chesbrough et al, 2006).

We were asked to consider five specific questions.

1)    who is/are the main spokesperson(s) for this initiative

It’s hard to identify one in particular, but the term “open innovation” was coined by American academic Henry Chesborough (2003), in his book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting From Technology. His starting point was investigating why Xerox developed so many groundbreaking technologies, which they then failed to exploit. His research suggested that the technologies needed to be exploited in a different environment, in other words they were insufficiently open. Companies cited as using open innovation include Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Philips Electronics, IBM and Fiat.

2)    where the research and activity around it is occurring

All over the world – significant recent research has come from Asian academics, perhaps reflecting the sophistication of many Asian technology companies.

3)    why it appears to be happening now or in this form (which are the apparent drivers and motivators)

Open innovation is not a new approach, but seems to be becoming more popular. The reasons are not entirely clear but probably include advances in communication technology, globalisation and the increasing complexity of innovation.

4)    what product(s) or progress is/are apparent

Some companies are using open innovation very successfully but others are being held back by their managerial processes and culture, for example the “not invented here” syndrome (Lichtenthaler, 2011)

5)    how these might connect now, or in the future, with learning and teaching activity.

Learning and teaching tends to be by its nature more “open” than commerce, but issues of value capture cannot be completely ignored. This is particularly relevant for me as I work for a for-profit education provider, where considerations of openness must be balanced with commercial ones. This is not always taken into account in discussions, as observed by Chesbrough et al (2006),

“While open-source shares the focus on value creation throughout an industry value chain, its proponents usually deny or downplay the importance of value capture”

This can be naïve and lead to practices that are not sustainable. Like it or not (and many don’t), all universities are being forced to be more commercial in their outlook and think about how they are funded. This may mean that those in education have something to learn from the open innovation approach that balances openness with being commercially viable.

References:

Chesborough, H. (2003) Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston

Chesborough, H. Vanhaverbeke, W. & West, J. (Eds.) (2006) Open innovation: Researching a new paradigm. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Lichtenthaler, U. (2011), “Open innovation: past research, current debates, and future directions”, The Academy of Management Perspectives, vol 25 No. 1, pp. 75-93

The rights and wrongs of feedback

I am not much in the habit of watching those shows where celebrities are manufactured out of ordinary people, but a few years ago I got hooked on a show called “Any Dream Will Do”, with young men auditioning to star as Joseph in a new Andrew Lloyd Webber production. There were some great performances, but the single moment that has stuck in my mind was an exchange between one performer, Keith Jack, and John Barrowman, who was judging. Barrowman complemented Keith on some aspect of his performance, but they then had the following exchange:

Barrowman: “… however, your diction is appalling”

Jack: “But I’ve been working so hard on it.”

Barrowman: “Maybe, but you didn’t work hard enough”

I still remember this because it is so counter-cultural. All of us in the business of training, educating, managing and coaching are encouraged to build up confidence, to use the “praise sandwich”, to acknowledge efforts. John Barrowman here is not bothering with any of that, just delivering the brutal truth. At the moment, Keith, you are not good enough. However hard you are working, you will not be successful unless you work harder.

This story came to mind because, in preparation for our projects in our studies, we are reflecting on feedback and its uses. Is John setting a good example here of how to give feedback (it worked, by the way, Keith plugged away at his diction, fixed it, was runner-up in the competition and is now a successful actor and singer)?

In my varied career, I have had lots of experience of giving and receiving feedback. I once worked for a company where the annual appraisal process included anonymous, 360 degree feedback from 10-15 colleagues, a mix of peers, those senior to you and junior to you. It meant that we all spent a fair bit of July and August writing reviews of each other – a significant time investment. But it was considered a worthwhile investment to contribute to the development of staff.

Such systems are open to abuse and there were safeguards. Only a handful of people had access to the data about who had written comments (I was a divisional HR manager and I didn’t have access to this). The role of the line manager also became critical – filtering out “outlier” comments and dealing with anything that seemed malicious or unhelpful. But broadly, from my perspective, it worked. Appraisals were often uncomfortable, but I developed over time a very good appreciation of how I was perceived by others in the organisation, which meant that I could start to manage those perceptions. And in that sort of context perceptions are everything.

We also tried to encourage informal feedback, with mixed results. A number of factors must be present for informal feedback to work, most notably trust and respect for the person giving the feedback. I have seen many examples where “giving feedback” was in reality cover for an ego trip or putting someone down gratuitously. But a working relationship where there is enough mutual trust to give honest, balanced feedback is incredibly valuable. I guess if there is a huge amount of respect and credibility involved then, as with the John Barrowman example, that is also very helpful.

In our study context, we will be working on our projects and encouraged to give each other feedback on them. My experience of these situations suggests that people will be much happier to give positive rather than constructive feedback. Can we build up enough trust quickly so that we can critique each other in a respectful but clear way? It will be interesting to find out.

Challenges of Open Scholarship

We are kicking off our new module by reading and commenting on a paper by Veletsianos and Kimmons (2012) which seeks to discuss some of the assumptions and challenges they see underlying “open scholarship”. These will be considered in turn.

Assumption 1 – “open scholarship has a strong ideological basis rooted in an ethical pursuit for democratization, fundamental human rights, equality, and justice.”

Challenge – “it is presently unclear whether these ideals are essential components of the open scholarship movement or are merely incidental to those who are pioneering the field.”

This point is illustrated with reference to the MOOCs, which have evolved from the idealistic cMOOCs to the more commercial and corporate xMOOCs. I guess the underlying point here is that any scholarship, open or not, is eventually going to bump up against the “who pays” question. Making scholarship and learning available to as many people as possible is a noble aim and should be pursued, but the reality is that the salaries of those doing the resource and their equipment, offices etc. will need to be funded from somewhere.

There are a number of options here – the government can fund it out of general taxation, users can pay in one form or another, they can be funded by philanthropic organisations, or cross-subsidised by other activities undertaken by the institution, or various other options (apparently Udacity is even experimenting with funding education via product placement). Each of these has pros and cons and it would be interesting to review them another time. But my own view on this is that each of these models will bring its own issues and it is not obvious to me that any one of them is inherently more ethical than the others. I work for a for-profit education provider and have absolutely no ethical problems with that. This is a debate I will happily enter when needed!

On this point, I have just finished reading Who Owns The Future?, a rambling but intriguing book by Jaron Lanier (2013), which I highly recommend. He documents the way our desire for free or cheap services has lead to the creation of business models for technology companies that he sees as ultimately highly destructive. However, part of his argument is that this is the result of choices we have made as a society – it is possible for us to make different choices that will lead to a much healthier use of technology. This applies to education as much as anything else.

Assumption 2 – “open scholarship emphasizes the importance of digital participation for enhanced scholarly outcomes.”

Challenge – “scholars need to develop an understanding of participatory cultures in order to take full advantage of open scholarship.”

I completely agree with this point and wrote a previous post about the key scholarly skills of search, filtering and networking and how the cMOOCs can be great tools for learning them. These are not new skills, but have been transformed in recent years and are vital for anyone who wants to be a successful learner. They already do form part of the education process, at least for some, but in my view they need to be made central to the education we provide both to children and adults.

Assumption 3 – “open scholarship is treated as an emergent scholarly phenomenon that is co-evolutionary with technological advancements in the larger culture.”

Challenge – “we must recognize that technology, and social media in particular, are not neutral”

Again, I agree, and recently was introduced to a paper which, while accepting the value of Web 2.0 practices, highlights their inherent tension with many educational practices (Dohn, 2009). The authors particularly highlight the “filter bubble”, whereby we are only exposing ourselves to views similar to our own. This is a real risk, and needs consciously overcoming by, for example, following some people on Twitter, or some blogs, which represent views we disagree with. Another example I have strong views about is Facebook, which unashamedly represents and promotes an ideology that privacy is unnecessary and needs to be eroded. The answer seems to me to be conscious awareness of the values implicit in technology and challenging them where necessary.

Assumption 4 – “open scholarship is seen as a practical and effective means for achieving scholarly aims that are socially valuable.”

Challenge – “such practices may also open the door to new dilemmas and make some aspects of current practice less efficient.”

It’s hard to disagree with this one too – open access leads to phenomena like “data deluge” that bring new challenges, which in turn need to be overcome. There are tools available to help with this, such as RSS readers, but they represent further skills to be mastered. What I would also note (and I think the authors would agree with me here), is that, on aggregate, technology has helped us to open up access to education over the past few decades. I sometimes use as my starting point here Thomas Hardy’s great novel Jude the Obscure (1895), which focuses on the tragedy of a stonemason desperate to gain a classical education who is continually rejected by the establishment of his day. Nowadays, someone of Jude’s determination would be studying part-time or at very least be a MOOC enthusiast. Continuing issues and dilemmas should not blind us to real progress being made on some points.

Overall the authors, cautious proponents of digital scholarship, have raised a number of very important issues that need to be consciously addressed as technology changes the tools we use in education.

 

References:

Dohn, N. (2009) ‘Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education’, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4:343-363. DOI 10.1007/s11412-009-9066-8.

Hardy, T. (1895), Jude the Obscure, London, Osgood, McIlvaine & Co

Lanier, J. (2013) Who Owns The Future? Allen Lane, London.

Veletsianos, G. and Kimmons, R. (2012) ‘Assumptions and challenges of open scholarship’, The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, vol. 13, no. 4, 166–189 [online]. Available at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1313/2304 (Accessed 5 October 2013).