Periodically I receive a message from Taylor and Francis about how often a paper I published with Mariana Funes has been read. This week they sent me the following message:
Of course Taylor and Francis can’t know whether or not the article has been read. They can only know how many time the article has been clicked on or downloaded. And, yes, sharing the article on social media (as we did when it was first published on Feb 28 2018) may well increase the article’s reach.
It is gratifying to see that the article has been accessed more than 500 times on the Taylor and Francis website, but of course Learning, Media and Technology is a closed journal so the reach of the article will necessarily be confined to those with access.
But the journal did allow for open publication of the pre-print of the article, which Mariana and I did on this blog, where we provide open access to the pre-publication (but virtually identical) article for free. This version of the article has had a much wider reach.
In 2018, this blog post was clicked on 4,070 times. This year to date it has been clicked on 231 times.
Again, it is not possible to say whether or not the article has been read, only that there is sufficient interest in it for people to click on the blog post.
As yet, there hasn’t been a mad rush to cite this paper. Google Scholar shows that it has been cited twice this year. Whilst it may be that this is not a paper that will be much cited, I do know from experience that it can take a year or two for papers to come to the attention of other researchers, so there is time yet for it to be more widely cited.
It is possible that open journals still don’t have the kudos of closed journals. Someone recently told me that it wouldn’t be worth my while applying for a job that required a PhD and 4 papers published in ranked journals, because most of my papers have been published in open journals, which, because many are fairly new journals, are still building their reputation. It has always been my preference to publish in open journals. I appreciate Taylor and Frances wanting their journal articles to reach a wider audience, but I suspect that their reasons for this are different to mine.
Kudos or not, the point is that it is not simply using social media to disseminate research that makes a difference to its reach. My experience suggests that extending a paper’s reach depends at least in part on whether or not the paper can be openly accessed.
But I am grateful to the Learning, Media and Technology journal for not only publishing our article, but also allowing us to openly publish the final pre-print version, and I will now follow their advice and tweet this blog post, so that, hopefully, the article will continue to reach a wider audience. The prize for every author is to be read.
Friday’s #el30 newsletter is now available. el30.mooc.ca/archive/18/11_… If you are at all interested in the future of open educational resources, please do take the time to read the feature article.
I would support this. Here is the direct link to the feature article.
The task for this week was to create a content addressed resource. Although I found the Resources topic interesting, I failed to complete the task and discussed this in my last post. But, as I noted in the post, some of the course participants (those with more technical skills than me) have completed the task and found it quite straightforward.
Stephen himself completed the task declaring on Twitter: Downes @Downes
I hereby declare dat://502bdf152d00a35f9785f78d107b9037b5eca9354bcf593e7b4995f9be97a614/ (the NRC vision statement, illustrated by me) to be the first Content Addressable Resource for Education (CARE) #el30@nrc
The irony of this has not escaped my notice. Since I did not have the skills to install the Interplanetary File System or Beaker Browser, I am not able to access or see this first Content Addressable Resource for Education (CARE) – or experience this example of the distributed web in action. Effectively, this open resource is closed to me.
This has made me think about how the distributed web will be introduced to the population at large. Presumably there will be a period of time when access will not be equal, and open will actually mean closed for a proportion of the population.
Before Stephen declared the NRC vision statement to be the first Content Addressable Resource for Education, I noticed that he asked, on Twitter, whether anyone could check it for him. Matthias Melcher responded.
Anyone out there using Beaker Browser, could you test and see whether my first ‘Content Addressable Resource for Education’ (CARE) for #el30 is accessible? (Working form home with Bell’s tiny upload pipe) dat://502bdf152d00a35f9785f78d107b9037b5eca9354bcf593e7b4995f9be97a614/
Perfect, that’s what you should see (as well as another six slides in french from the welcome page)
I am now wondering what I am missing by not seeing these six slides. It has reminded me that when I was teaching in HE, in one of my classes there was a visually impaired student. In order for this student to follow the class we were required to make special provision for her, e.g. provide handouts and copies of all slides and notes we distributed in extra large font.
It has occurred to me that the move to E-Learning 3.0 may need to make similar provision for those who do not have the technical skills to access the distributed web, i.e. alternative provision is made at least as a temporary measure.
Update 27-11-18
With a bit of gentle pushing from Stephen, I have now succeeded installing Beaker Browser (it really was quite straight-forward when I overcame the mental block). I have also viewed Stephen’s slides, and created my own site (see comment to Stephen below). I would need to know more html to get much further! Is a good knowledge of html considered an essential digital literacy?
In this video, posted for the fifth week of the E-Learning 3.0 MOOC, Stephen Downes makes the case for open education. He claims that open education can change the world and is a kind of social literacy that can transform society, connect us across the globe, and enable each of us to believe we have the capacity to become an important person in society. Being open in such a society means being accepting of other people and being willing to share. It is about being in a conversation in a community.
Open educational resources in such a society are like the words in this conversation. We are forced to think about the words that are used; they can either block us or liberate us. Creating open educational resources is more than giving the resources we have created away for free. It also helps us to develop ourselves.
Of course there are challenges for education in taking this approach, in which it is expected that we will embrace the idea of open sharing of our resources and ourselves, and there have been, as you would expect, mistakes and failures. A criticism could be that it has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, but, as Stephen pointed out, the benefits to the poor can still be identified and it can make the poor richer more quickly. Another criticism that is often levelled at open education is that it has a colonising effect, propagating the voice of Western society, but Stephen also pointed out that if you create your own open educational resources, you can promote your own culture. Open online education, using open educational resources, can reach those who can’t access education in any other way. This is the promise of open education and open educational resources.
To date, open educational resources have been thought of as content (a product) which are stored on the web, often with creative commons licenses which may allow for free re-use and adaptation. But these resources have become increasingly locked down in content silos and behind paywalls. The distributed web, Web 3.0, is a kick-back against this. On the distributed web, new file-sharing systems, such as the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), do not rely on internet addresses to locate content. Instead they ‘use the hash of the data or content as an address, enabling the data to be distributed across the cloud’, thus creating a content addressable resource. In the traditional model the server is in the middle (see image below), but in this new model, a network of servers is geographically distributed, meaning that when you click on a website you will get content from the local server; it will be accessible from the nearest convenient source.
Gradually, but definitely, we are moving towards a distributed web. But I suspect we are some way off fully realising the dream of the distributed web. Cheryl Hodgkinson -Williams and Sukaina Walji, both from the University of Capetown, were Stephen’s guests this week.
Cheryl and Sukaina had their feet firmly on the ground as to what can realistically be achieved in the creation and sharing of OERs and the development of open educational practices at the present time. In conversation with Stephen they explored the topics of open educational resources and open practices, considered some of the challenges around re-use of OERs, and discussed the potential of new resource networks (like the distributed web) to address those challenges.
This was an interesting discussion. Cheryl and Sukaina shared information about the research project they have been working on, together with groups from across the global south, in which they have been investigating how OERs are being developed, shared and used, and also exploring new methods for distributing OERs using the distributed web. I appreciated their focus on process rather than product, i.e. on the practices surrounding the creation of OERS and the constraints associated with these practices. They were well aware of the differences between the ideological intent related to the creation of OERs and the practical steps needed to ensure an ethical approach. As Cheryl said they have to be pragmatic despite their intention to openly share their practice, process and product.
I also appreciated their recognition that many people, whilst able to create a resource, do not have the digital literacy skills to apply a CC license or upload the resource to a site or repository, nor the confidence to openly share their resource with the whole world. Cheryl asked, ‘At what point is something too difficult to get your head round?’ and went on to say that we need a really easy interface, that is more user-friendly. Technology needs to be an enabler. Technology on its own will not enable change.
These are important considerations in the further development of the distributed web. It is easy to see that something needs to be done to counter the tyranny of the centralized web and that the distributed web seems to be the way to go. As with all such developments, it will take time for these developments to become sufficiently user-friendly to be accessible to the average internet user.
The Learning Portal OER Toolkit
College Libraries Ontario, 2018/11/19
Have you heard about Open Educational Resources (OER) and want to know more? This module presents an overview of what they are, why they matter to post-secondary education, and how to get started on your OER journey.
OER World Map
2018/11/19
A couple years or so ago UNESCO launched an OER mapping project. It has now come to fruition. “Using local knowledge to describe the OER ecosystem, the OER World Map will visualize the world of OER and support a range of widgets and tools, including powerful statistical analysis.” Here’s the OER World Map blog.
Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources
Stephen Downes, OECD, 2018/11/19
It “seems clear that the sustainability of OERs – in a fashion that renders then at once both affordable and usable – requires that we think of OERs as only part of a larger picture, one that includes volunteers and incentives, community and partnerships, co-production and sharing, distributed management and control.
Dimensions of open research: critical reflections on openness in the ROER4D project
Thomas William King, Cheryl-Ann Hodgkinson-Williams, Michelle Willmers, Sukaina Walji, Open Praxis, 2018/11/21
Using the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project as an example, this paper attempts to demonstrate the interrelation between ideological, legal, technical and operational openness; the resources that conducting Open Research requires; and the benefits of an iterative, strategic approach to one’s own Open Research practice
Introducing the Dweb
Dietrich Ayala, Mozilla, 2018/11/20
What’s the “D” in Dweb?! The “d” in “dweb” usually stands for either decentralized or distributed. A few examples of decentralized or distributed projects that became household names are Napster, BitTorrent and Bitcoin. Some of these new dweb projects are decentralizing identity and social networking. Some are building distributed services in or on top of the existing centralized web, and others are distributed application protocols or platforms.
Beaker
2018/11/20
Beaker brings peer-to-peer publishing to the Web, turning the browser into a supercharged tool for sharing websites, files, apps, and more. Beaker adds support for a peer-to-peer protocol called Dat. It’s the Web you know and love, but instead of HTTP, websites and files are transported with Dat.
Inter Planetary File System
2018/11/20
IPFS is the Distributed Web, a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open. Each file and all of the blocks within it are given a unique fingerprint called a cryptographic hash. When looking up files, you’re asking the network to find nodes storing the content behind a unique hash. Every file can be found by human-readable names using a decentralized naming system called IPNS.
A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South
Cheryl Ann Hodgkinson-Williams, Henry Trotter, Journal of Learning for Development, 2018/11/22
In this paper, we endeavour to move beyond social change and social inclusion to develop a framework to make apparent the relationship between social justice and the adoption of OER and OEP. Drawing on examples from the ROER4D project, we propose a slightly adapted version of Fraser’s (2005) social justice framework as a way to map how and under what circumstances the adoption of OER and OEP by students and/or educators may counter economic inequalities, cultural inequities and political exclusions in education.
Try Dat
Dat Project, 2018/11/22
This is try-dat, a tutorial that teaches you how to work with datasets using dat. In this tutorial you will play around with data versioning and syncing workflows, and play with some awesome tools to publish or share data over the peer-to-peer web.
A bit more about Dat… Core pieces of the web shape how we communicate and organize. However, these pieces are increasingly controlled by large monopolies. In building Dat, we envision a future of community-driven tools backed by nonprofit organizations.
This is the title of a new paper, co-authored with Mariana Funes and published today in Learning Media and Technology, by Taylor & Francis Online.
Abstract
Open education aspires to democratize education, promote inclusion and effect change through social justice. These aspirations are difficult to realise in open, online environments, which enable multiple, and often conflicting, perspectives. This paper proposes a counter-narrative that surfaces certain operational norms of the internet and foregrounds their exclusionary nature. We offer an illustrative inventory of some social media interactional patterns to examine communication used in open online education communities. This examination leads us to conclude that language online is subject to a dialectical tension that both includes and excludes. We conclude that a different language is needed in open online educational environments; one that embraces exclusionary structures and strategic ambiguity, as well as the aspirations to further democratise education via digital means.
This paper is the culmination of 17 months’ work with Mariana and many long and wide ranging discussions. I have found the paper really interesting and thought-provoking to work on, and have particularly enjoyed collaborating with Mariana.
But in line with Taylor and Francis’ Green Open Access policy (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/sharing-your-work/) we are able to post here the ‘preprint’, i.e. the final, accepted version of the paper, before being formatted by Learning, Media and Technology. This is virtually identical (bar the formatting and some tightening of reference citations) to the published article.
We are very grateful to Stephen Downes, Lisa Lane and Carmen Tschofen for reviewing the paper for us before submission and making suggestions for improvement. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for further detailed feedback, which helped us arrive at the final version.
We would welcome any comments or dialogue about the paper.
The title of the MOOC led me to expect a broad discussion about Open Education and in my first post about the MOOC, I wrote:
My hope is that it will offer a fresh perspective and rekindle the enthusiasm I had for open education in the early days of the first MOOC in 2008, but which I have found increasingly difficult to sustain in the last couple of years.
It turned out that my hope was not realised. The MOOC focused on Open Education Resources, which I think is just one aspect of open education, and I have to say the aspect that is of least interest to me since I work independently of an institution and no longer teach, so although I come up against some of the issues presented in the course materials, they do not have the impact on me that they might have on others. This was the syllabus for the course.
Week 1: Why Open Matters
Week 2: Copyright, The Public Domain, and The Commons
Week 3: The 5R Activities and the Creative Commons Licenses
Week 4: Creating, Finding, and Using OER
Week 5: Research on the Impact of OER Adoption
Week 6: The Next Battles for Openness: Data, Algorithms, and Competency Mapping
Disappointingly for me there was little discussion of open pedagogy or open teaching. But I did stick with the MOOC. I found the videos of discussions between George Siemens and David Wiley interesting, as were the videos by Norman Bier and other resources provided, and I was particularly grateful for the alternative thought-provoking perspective of Stephen Downes. Did I learn a lot? I don’t think so. I think this was because OER isn’t of huge interest to me, but also because there was minimal discussion between participants. But I don’t feel negative about the MOOC, just that it didn’t rekindle my early enthusiasm for open education.
Rebecca Heiser has thrown down the gauntlet twice during the course and been largely ignored. First, at the end of the course she tweeted:
So will we get to see Open Analytics in #OpenEdMOOC? What were we clicking? What were our activity-levels? Hashtags generated? Most importantly what were our most discussed topics, was knowledge transferred? #OpenPL Did we form our own network? Will we continue the conversation?
I saw that Stephen Downes picked this up (I think in OLDaily), but otherwise no-one responded to these good and legitimate questions.
I can’t help but be critical of the #OpenEdMOOC, Introduction to Open Education, hosted by edX. With as much excitement that was generated by the Open Community prior to the start of the MOOC, I feel that we were let down by Week 3 of the course. Here’s a recap of my critique by week…
This time she received a response (notably not from George or David) and a few comments.
Geoff Cain commented:
This was pretty ironic for me. MOOCs are the only educational space where instructors and institutions are comfortable with the “Set It and Forget It” model of teaching. Despite everything that we have learned about what makes for a successful online class, all the rules change when it comes to MOOCs. As an instructor who has worked in developmental education and education support my whole life, that model seems like a huge step backwards.
This, and Rebecca and Lena Patterson’s comments, seems to me what we should have been discussing, i.e. some of the more difficult consequences of open education and the questions that remain unanswered.
Having participated in and completed a number of MOOCs, I was not surprised by the “Set It and Forget It” model of teaching that Geoff mentions. From the very first MOOC (CCK08) the idea has been that participants teach each other and take responsibility for doing this, because in a massive networked environment it is impossible for one person (the tutor) to interact with everything that is going on. But the complexity of this as a model for teaching and learning, and whether it is an effective model, has yet to be adequately researched.
Thank you to Rebecca for bravely raising these questions in an environment which is known to reward consensus and punish dissent!
I have been working independently, i.e. not in an educational institution, for the past 12 years, so my take on this week’s content of Week 3 of the openedMOOC is probably not typical.
Much of the discussion is about the re-use capabilities of open educational resources (OER). Stephen Downes has pointed out that this discussion pre-supposes that you have access to the OER in the first place, and we know that quite often the resource is only accessible if you pay for it. On a personal note, I am currently trying to decide whether to pay for a research paper a colleague and I are working on to be openly accessible in the journal we think is the best fit for the work! That could be a whole discussion in its own right.
But I have worked in a Higher Education institution and in schools in the past, so the issues being discussed this week feel familiar and, for those currently working in these environments, the course provides helpful resources to make sense of the difficulties associated with ownership of the materials produced when working for an institution. (See Week 3 in http://linkresearchlab.org/openedmooc/ ).
David Wiley has pointed out that the cost of textbooks in the US prohibits access for many students or causes them to drop out. Ideally students would not be required to invest in expensive textbooks, but instead use OER, which they can download, own and to which they can apply his 5R set of activities, which are:
Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
However, he points out that it is not possible to apply these 5Rs to resources you do not own, such as a textbook. So what is the incentive for University lecturers and teachers to create their own OER? What would be the incentive to write a textbook and then make it openly accessible, free and re-usable in terms of the 5Rs? At many institutions, this would require a cultural change and depend on the roles that lecturers play and the type of students that the institution attracts. If a lecturer’s role is to teach adequately, bring in funding and raise the prestige of the institution through high quality research publications, and if the institution serves upper middle class students, then there is little incentive to spend large amounts of your own time creating OER. There is much more incentive for lecturers in institutions where the students will struggle to pay for their education.
On top of this ownership of OER can be complicated and may not be worth the hassle for lecturers. Norman Bier acknowledges that it’s difficult to know who owns the work if a large team has worked on it (See https://youtu.be/o6FWfFPpPeY ). He advises that if you work in an institution and are keen to promote the use of OER, then you should look up your institution’s IP policies and ask yourself (and others) the following questions:
Are traditional rights still being protected at your institution?
How do online materials factor in?
Is your institution making investments in building better course materials?
How are faculty being ensured the right to continue to use the materials they have authored?
How is your institution ensuring that educators and learners can make continued use of resources?
What happens at your institution if multiple educators and development teams want to expand on and improve materials especially over and expanded time period, e.g. years?
How can an open approach simplify these concerns while also making a larger contribution to the commons?
David Wiley suggests that we need to pull together pockets of individual practice and collaborate on the creation of OER which could then be further developed by future teams of collaborators. This would reduce the workload for individual lecturers and also mean that lecturers don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. Of course, collaboration in itself is a sophisticated skill that doesn’t come easily to everyone.
I did wonder, whilst going through all the materials for this week, how much time David and George spent on creating these resources and how they managed to persuade edX to allow them to host them on an independent site. What’s in it for edX? And indeed what’s in it for them?
Why Does Open Matter? This is the key question for Week 1 of the Introduction to Open Education MOOC, being offered on edX by David Wiley and George Siemens.
This question has been asked of participants, but since David Wiley and George Siemens have both fully answered the question in a two-part video, I suppose the question for participants should really be, Why does open matter to you? And the assumption seems to be that we are talking about openness online as opposed to offline.
David Wiley believes open to be a value, like diversity and that openness is imperative for increasing access to, affordability and effectiveness of, engagement and vibrancy in education. He writes that “To be true to the deeper ethic of open we must be generous and open-hearted, feeling a sense of love, care, and responsibility for all humanity.”
George Siemens talks of the benefits of quick, frenzied, open knowledge generation.
Neither of these responses work particularly well for me. I have personally experienced the opposite of ‘love, care and responsibility for all humanity’ in the open environment. Openness online can encourage an ‘anything can be said’ attitude, presumably because the recipient of the comments cannot be seen. As Lisa Lane has written “…. we now have an appalling acceptance of unacceptable behavior and uncivil conduct, which in my country has now reached the highest levels of power.”
And quick, frenzied knowledge generation doesn’t work for me in terms of learning. I can understand the excitement generated which I acknowledge can be motivating, but for learning and knowledge production I personally need slow, quieter interaction, where everyone has an opportunity to be heard, not just the loudest voices.
But like Lisa, I am an advocate of open education and I am grateful to all those like David, George and Stephen Downes, who have done so much to promote it. As David said in one of the videos, open is beyond free. Even in countries, such as Germany, where education is free, open can unlock new pedagogies. David also said open matters because if we learn by ‘doing’ then anything that constrains that ‘doing’, e.g. copyright restrictions, prevents learning. For me that is a powerful argument in support of open education, but I would add, as mentioned above, that some online behaviours can be equally restrictive. This is the aspect of open education in which I am most interested, i.e. I am interested in both the rhetoric and the reality for individual learners, although I suspect, as Andy Lane (2016) has argued, that currently the reality does not measure up to the rhetoric.
However, in the meantime, I continue to benefit from open education; in fact my work as an independent researcher depends on it. In return, as I have written about before, I try to be an open practitioner, within the constraints of my own capabilities and personality!
David Wiley and George Siemens are offering a new 6 week MOOC – Introduction to Open Education – on EdX at the beginning of October.
There is already a Twitter hashtag – #openedMOOC – and you can enrol on the EdX website where you can also find the course syllabus:
Week 1: Why Open Matters
Week 2: Copyright, The Public Domain, and The Commons
Week 3: The 5R Activities and the Creative Commons Licenses
Week 4: Creating, Finding, and Using OER
Week 5: Research on the Impact of OER Adoption
Week 6: The Next Battles for Openness: Data, Algorithms, and Competency Mapping
I have signed up for the MOOC, mainly out of curiosity. My hope is that it will offer a fresh perspective and rekindle the enthusiasm I had for open education in the early days of the first MOOC in 2008, but which I have found increasingly difficult to sustain in the last couple of years.
Despite this, I remain an advocate of open education in the terms in which it was first offered. It would be difficult not to wish for a global democratic education system which offers free open access to all no matter what their circumstances – or is that an erroneous assumption? I am hoping this course will take a critical approach, encourage diverse perspectives and be willing to surface and challenge assumptions, such as the assumption that ‘open is good’, as implied by the header on the EdX course site.
In 2012 Stephen Brookfield wrote that “critical thinking involves three inter-related phases:
Discovering the assumptions that guide our decisions, actions and choices
Checking the accuracy of these assumptions by exploring as many different perspectives, viewpoints and sources as possible
Taking informed decisions that are based on these researched assumptions
(Informed decisions are based on evidence we can trust, can be explained to others and have a good chance of achieving the effects we want).”
It is getting increasingly difficult to recognise evidence we can trust. We know that over time ‘open’ has led to as many problems as solutions, not least the pursuit of ‘fame and glory beyond your wildest dreams. Or, at least, a few thousand views’ that David Wiley writes about in his blog post. Is this what we really want from open education? I have recently wondered whether one of the problems of ‘open’ in relation to networks is that it is so often discussed out of context, i.e. out of the context of the principles of networks expounded by Stephen Downes, who believes these to be autonomy, diversity, openness and connectivity. He has written about this many, many times over the years, but here is one reference.
I see these four principles as being interdependent, i.e. they should be thought about in relation to each other and the absence of one will have consequences for the others. For example, openness without diversity simply leads to echo chambers. In addition, autonomy is a key principle. An open network must respect personal autonomy. My perspective is that loss of diversity and lack of respect for autonomy is an increasing problem in open networks. Hopefully we will get to discuss some of these issues in the MOOC.
David and George on their blogs, have asked that we create a 3-5 minute video sharing our perspectives and experiences regarding one or more of the weekly topics. I have exercised my autonomy by deciding not to do that but to begin my thinking here on this blog. But I will point you to the videos Stephen Downes has created in response to this request. He is always a hard act to follow!
Here is the first one:
And here are the links to the others, one for each week
What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?
Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?
Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?
What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’?
These are interesting and pertinent questions from Viv Rolfe in the wake of her attendance at the Association for Learning Technology Conference this year. They prompted me to look back in this blog to see what I have written about openness in education and going open. I am surprised at just how many posts relate to this topic; this has been one of my main areas of interest since 2008 and before.
I can remember clearly the point at which I realised I was ‘in the open’. It was during CCK08 – the MOOC which coined the term MOOC and was convened by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. I started this blog for that MOOC and about a month later made a post in which I questioned the need to be online to be connected. At the time, because I was new to blogging, I thought I was fairly anonymous and invisible and it gave me a tremendous jolt when I saw that Stephen Downes had included this post in his blog aggregation. Since then I have often considered (for example in this blog post) how open I am or want to be, because the feeling of over exposure and discomfort has never completely gone away.
So as Viv asks – Why do I do it? For me Viv’s first question is easy to answer.
What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?
I work independently of an institution, and have done for 10 years, so any support that I do have comes from my network. The big question for me is ‘who do I want to be in my network?’ I am not interested in collecting numbers for the sake of it. When I get a friend request on Facebook, or a connection request on LinkedIn, or a follower on Twitter, I don’t automatically connect. If I don’t know the person or ‘of ‘ the person, I look them up (Google them etc.). If I think we have topics of interest in common, then I will connect. I am not looking for social connections, but for professional connections. Sometimes these overlap, but I don’t assume that they will or even want them to. I have found the increasing blurring between public and private, personal and professional, troubling and constantly find myself wavering about what the difference is. I use ‘open’ social media as an information source. If and when I share information online, it is in the hope that it will be useful to others – but I am never sure of whether it will be and whether it is a conceit to be sharing in this way. I am thinking this as I write this post.
Then Viv asks:
Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?
Again for me this is fairly straight-forward to answer. In my career I can’t remember ever sticking to the statutory hours. I have always done more hours and sometimes many, many more hours than in my contract. There have been various reasons for this, but I think the main reasons have been to do with wanting to learn more and to do a better job – not for any recognition, although it is great when this happens, but simply because that’s what I find fulfilling. Currently most of my work is voluntary, unpaid research, which I hope in some small way supports educational practice. I am committed to publishing in ‘open’ journals, although this isn’t necessarily what all my research collaborators want or need for their career advancement, so it doesn’t always work that way. Collaboration usually does involve some degree of compromise 🙂 and I value openness between friends and collaborators, far more than openness in the online network.
Viv’s next question was:
Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?
I have been doing this for the past 10 years. I try to physically attend one conference a year but I have to weigh up costs against gains. Sometimes it is interesting to meet people face-to-face, but I am looking much more for something that stimulates my thinking and sets me off in new directions. There is something about being physically present that can be much more powerful than attending virtually. For many people a conference is about networking and meeting people. For me, when I am paying for myself, that is a luxury. I need more than that. I need to be able to come away and feel that my thinking has changed in some way – and I need to know that I have invested my time and money wisely and that the costs will pay dividends in terms of my future work. What are the implications for the education sector? I think that in the years to come there will be many, many older people, like me, who are already drawing their pensions, who will want to attend conferences and contribute to presentations. Hopefully conference organisers will see these contributions as welcome, but also realise that current costs are often prohibitive. And it is usually the case that people who are paying for themselves can have higher expectations and be more demanding of processes 🙂 This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whose perspective you are taking!
Viv’s last question is the key one.
What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’?
I would describe my practice as one of ‘guarded openness’. I haven’t thrown myself out there and revealed all, as I see some people doing. I find it disturbing when people seem to ‘wash their dirty linen’ in the open. Some things are not meant to be discussed in the open, but should be reserved for private communication between the parties concerned. I also find that group think, constant self-affirmation and self-validation, either individually or as a group, that fails to stand back and look critically at this online behaviour, makes me feel equally uncomfortable. In the past year I have seen so much of these behaviours online. When I joined CCK08, I was really excited by the altruistic sharing of knowledge and learning behind the idea of ‘openness’, but recently it has seemed to me to be more about narcissism than altruism – about getting noticed and building up ‘numbers’ of followers, tweets etc.
So why am I still here? To be honest, I am no longer sure, but I am hanging on to Stephen Downes’ and George Siemens’ original and hopefully ongoing aspirations for open education. And I am not expecting any response to this post because what I have learned in the last year is that the internet favours consensus and punishes dissent. I should have paid more attention when Dave Snowden told us this in the Change 11 MOOC – another MOOC organised by Stephen Downes and George Siemens.
This week I have been reminded that I cannot assume that everyone working in education will have online access as and when they want it.
I live in a beautiful part of the UK – Southern Cumbria – a county filled with mountains and lakes and lushly green because of all the rain we get. I have never had any significant problems with getting an internet connection. Sometimes it has been slow and sometimes I have dropped out when making synchronous connections such as in a Google Hangout, but this has been minimal and has not interfered with my ability to work. This week even these minor difficulties have been removed as I now have a high speed fibre broadband connection for the first time and I can already see the difference.
British Telecom claimed a year ago that half of Cumbria was covered by faster, fibre broadband – but we have only just got it in our area in the South Lakes and many still don’t have it.
I only have to travel 20 minutes from my home, on the motorway going North, to get into a valley (this must be one of the most beautiful stretches of motorway in the country) where I lose signal. I know from my hill walking experience that it can be easier to get a signal on the top of a mountain than in the valleys.
Eventually everyone will have high speed broadband, but in the meantime this has implications for anyone working online, for rural businesses and particularly for schools and for students in further and higher education and their teachers.
This came home forcefully to me this week when testing Google Hangout and appear.in with a couple of colleagues. This worked fine for me, but was virtually impossible for one of my colleagues whose online connection depends on tethering her phone to her computer. My other colleague pointed out that she could only join the Hangout from her work base, as at home in rural Cumbria, she doesn’t have a mobile signal and even her telephone line isn’t working. She is investigating satellite broadband, but it is expensive and for students probably wouldn’t be an option.
This is the reality for many students and educators in the area I live in, which adds another perspective to the meaning of open online learning and how it can be promoted.
The good news is that the county council claims that 93% of homes and businesses will have access to superfast broadband by the end of the year so hopefully this will increase the potential for open online learning.
Jenny Connected 