Day: February 10, 2009

Researcher 2.0 part 2.0

Further liveblog notes from the Researcher 2.0 event (see also notes on part 1).

(Interesting meta issue about blog vs Cloudworks. I don’t want my notes behind a login/search wall, I want them on Google! But Gráinne is doing an excellent job liveblogging there too. And maybe my notes aren’t so useful on a blog. Comments welcome! UPDATE: I’d got this wrong, it’s due to a bug, Cloudworks is *supposed to be* readable by everyone, indexed, the lot – you only need a login to post. *but at the moment new Cloud/scapes come up login-only.)

(Another meta issue is the multiple channel management.  It seems I can do two, possibly three, but not four and definitely not all five – f2f, Elluminate, blog notes, Twitter, Cloudworks – and still stay sufficiently on top of things to follow it. Especially as Elluminate has the whiteboard, the audio stream, the chat, and the participant list all in one.)

Martyn Cooper – Research bids 2.0

Research bidding support – some same for experience and novice bidders (process support, consortium negotiations, budgets, reviews of drafts, internal sign-off); novice bidders get extra (advice, confidence).

OU process based around the RED form.

Process – idea, workplan, consortium, bid, negotiate roles, set budget (often iteratively), final draft, sign off, submission.

Relationship is formed during the bid process; you will work with these people for years after (if you succeeed.)

Communication types – peer to peer, document/spreadsheet exchange, negotiation, redrafting and commenting, electronic sign-off and submission.

Most researchers could get more successful bids and be able to run more projects if they had more and higher-quality administrative support. Web 2.0 technologies could have a role in providing that support. However to date we under-use them.

At what stage do you make bids open to the world? Is the web 2.0 attitude affecting this? Martyn very happy to do that – he always has ideas in his back pocket. Has seen ideas taken up by others, whether by coincidence or copying is hard to say. Commercial partners keener to protect foreground knowledge and IPR, so perhaps harder.  But would be happy to do whole process on a public wiki.

Shailey Minocha (Shailey Garfield in 2L) – Second life research

3D virtual world – http://gallery.me.com/shailey.minocha#100016

Much more human environment than a 2D one; a real sense of being there. No story to them, there’s not a game, you can design it yourself.

Students found it difficult to critique/peer review each other’s work. Attributed to a lack of socialisation, lack of knowing each other well enough. So decided to get them to use 2L to provide opportunities for that.

Not much about how you should design learning environments in 2L.

2L to support research: meetings, virtual collaborations, seminars, conferences and shared resources

2L as a platform for conducting research: conducting interviews, observations, evaluate prototypes of concepts and designs, bringing in real data and developing simulations.

PhD supervision meetings and research interviews – runs regular meetings in 2L.  Real sense of visual presence and a sense of place. Large pool of participants. Also can keep transcript & audio – no need to do transcription.

Sense of realism in 2L which is hard to match in other environments – BUT steep learning curve (vs Skype, Elluminate, Flash Meeting), and demanding system requirements.

Question: are there extra issues in finding particpants in 2L? Yes. Issues about the avatars; don’t know who is behind them. Let the person fill out a form through normal email process first.

Kim Issroff – Business models for OERs and Researching Web 2.0

Definitions

Business model – framework for creating value … or, it’s how you can generate revenue.

OSS business models: Chang, Mills & Newhouse, about how to make money. Stephen Downes models for sustainable Open Educational Resources – distinction between free at point of delivery and cost to create/distribute. Models: Endowment, membership, donations, conversion, contributor-pay, sponsorship, institutional, Government, partnerships/exchanges.Clarke 2007 – “not naive gift economies”.

Intuitively, go for resources are free but charge for assessment.

Grant applications increasingly ask for business models/sustainability/how you carry on afterwards.

Implications – for design, how to engage. Differences between OSS and OERs as models. What happens when we get to OER saturation point? (I suspect it doesn’t exist – too much out there already, but also still worth putting new stuff out.) Can we quantify the social value rather than the economic value?

Take a trainful of people, see what each person is doing in terms of access to technology, to get a handle on everyone, rather than a minority we over-research.

Two thoughts: how much difference does the business model make? Is a financial business model appropriate for an educational organisation?

(I see a strong link to Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free essay: eight things that are ‘better than free’.)

Can free things (end up) more expensive in the end?

Robert Schuwer from OUNL: their experience of subscription models, paying for extra support, books and so on. Inspired by mobile phone world, hope that once they have the payment every month set up, they forget to unsubscribe and keep up year on year – €25 a month.

Chris Pegler – OER beyond the OU

What OER offers: global opportunities, goodwill among researchers, IPR vanquished, unlimited reuse potential. Has highlighted Creative Commons – demolish IPR obstacles. Most funded repository projects flounder – or even fail – at some stage on IPR. But Creative Commons to the rescue!

Li Yuan whitepaper CETIS on OER is key. List of 18 current OER projects ‘out there’, from MIT Open CourseWare, GLOBE (includes MERLOT and ARIADNE etc), JorumOpen, etc. These are not quite what you’d envisage – some are e.g. mainly research-focused.

Interesting HEFCE/HEA/JISC call on OERs  £5.7m pilot, possibly £10m yoy in the future. Chris has £20k individual bid – making a 30pt course using web 2.0 tools around OERs. Also NTFS bid on RLOs and how we embed them in the academic practice courses at three institutions.

Questions around metadata – especially automatic metadata.

Patrick

Was more presentation-centric than perhaps ideal; but much captured on video, Twitter and Cloudworks. So next: small groups on producing a quick pitch for a bid about Research 2.0.

Researcher 2.0

Liveblog notes from Researcher 2.0 event – sponsored by the Technology Enhanced Learning research cluster (part of CREET) at the Open University, and the OLnet project.

Patrick McAndrew – intro

True Researcher 2.0s – weather not a barrier, see what technology to employ. So multiple channels. Elluminate, Twitter, Cloudworks. Video and audio capture. And face to face in the room!

The Cloudworks site for it, and remote people coming in via Elluminate –http://learn.open.ac.uk/site/elluminate-trial/ (if you are have an OU login, and then follow link Open Learning network trial ) OR http://elive-manager.open.ac.uk/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1232970332920 (if do not have an OU login). And Twitter using #olnet as a tag. Also professionals doing video, and amateurs with Flips and other videocams.  Hope to learn from this for future workshops.  Not fully planned out (but very 2.0/lazy planning stuff).

Patrick – Researcher 2.0: Research in an open world

Open world, many users, what does it mean? How does our technology link out to the many users? Came up for Patrick in the OER world, but true in many areas. Transform to world where there are many more options for what we can do, many more options.

How do we change to network with more people, network as researchers in a new way. Draw in people, use their willingness to co-operate. Gráinne opened up in a f2f workshop with a Twitter request for ideas to flow in, worked really well.

Also new ways to get data in – video, audio capture. But what to do with the data? Need to make it part of the routine. Who does the research? Distributed models.

Want to find out: What is Researcher 2.0, What are the big questions?

Researcher 2.0 – discussion about what it means.  Not a Microsoft product, like Web 2.0. Is snappy – new improved way of doing research, using better ways.

Discussion broke up, and went in to Cloudworks en masse to add comments. Many new clouds and comments and so on. Challenge of multiple channels a new technologies is clearly a challenge, even for this roomful of fairly-techie people.

Gráinne Conole – Exploring by doing: Being a researcher 2.0

Personal Digital Environment – like a PLE. Technologies used on a daily basis. Crosses boundaries of learning, work and research. Increasingly, if it’s not available on Google, it doesn’t exist – so what’s the point in putting it locked in to print-only?

Mentioned 2800 people signing up for online Connectivism conference – of whom 200 really active. Very lively, multiple channels. George and Stephen contacted people casually and asked for an hour-long session.

Changing landscape: a step-change over the last few years.

Reports which encapsulate things:

  • NSF Fostering Learning in the Networked World.
  • The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, Open Knowledge (Iyoshi and Kumar)
  • EU review Learning 2.0 Practices (ipts)
  • The Horizon Reports annually

Changing content. What does it mean to be more open? Distributed dialogue makes it harder to attribute ideas. Especially group consensus. Will need to change.

Mediation: co-evolution: Oral, symbols, technology-mediation.

Thinking differently: OU Learning Design initiative, Compendium/CompendiumLD/Cohere, Cloudworks, Pedagogy schema, OLnet.

The vision underpinning OLnet: analysing the cycle of OER development, and who’s involved. What tools and schemas do (could?) people use to select, design, use and evaluate open educational resources?

Discussion: How do information resources fit in? Issues of quality?  Need to develop new ways of digital literacy and competency. Not just using Google, how we use it. How do I make judgements about what you find?  Share practices.  Different in different disciplines? For computing, ACM Digital Library is the information repository for that community; Google is merely a nice addition.

Challenge for OU classic course-in-a-box; Tony Hirst’s uncourse model right up the radical opposite end. Martin Weller noting that his journal publishing has gone down as his blogging has increased. There’s major issues here about what we consider to be quality. How to blogs compare to articles? Depositing your articles in open access places increases citation count.  Not just communicating with the public – it’s more becoming part of communities that are attentive to things you’re saying, which gets your name/reputation recognised. Concern that it’s transient, forget it. Have to foster the skills of discernment in our students, particularly.

Martin Weller – Digital Scholarship

YouTube video of Guitar90 kid playing guitar … got 55m views.  We are all broadcasters now.  A fundamental change in society in general, and education too.

You can’t predict what will be useful to people.

iCasting – new coinage – simple stuff you can do from your desktop, you don’t have to be an expert. Anyone can create YouTube movies, blogs, slidecasts on SlideShare. Blog is the hub of all this: aggregate your content and share it with other people.

What about quality? Caravan – you have a certain amount of money to spend on a holiday.  One holiday in the Caribbean is about the same cost as 30 holidays in a caravan – trading quality for quantity.

The power of sharing – getting views in from Twitter.  Passed on ideas from one to the other – it’s the sort of resuse we always wanted from learning objects.

What is the fundamental aim when you publish something? We’ve lost that aim and started thinking it’s about getting RAE credits. But ultimately it’s about sharing ideas. Martin’s experience is you get much more feedback and benefit from sharing through the blogosphere and other online routes than from locking stuff away in a printed journal. Blog gets 1000 views, lucky if a journal article gets 20 readers.

The cost of sharing has disappeared, but we act as if it hasn’t. Example of mixtapes: you had to buy physical tape, spend ages with the buttons recording each song, then had to give the tape away. Now to share music you can do it via iTunes, share URLs through lots of services. No more time, effort to share.

What to do? Find your inner geek. You don’t need to go on a training course to learn how to use Flickr or Slideshare, just use it. (I’m starting to not be so sure about that for people in general, based on evidence at this meeting).

Have fun! YouTube video from JimGroom pretending to be an Ed Tech survivalist.

And Just Share – RSS, OPML, etc. Make sharing your default mode.  Currently writing a 10k article – instinct is to just post it on his blog to get more readers. But then no formal publisher will take it; and with REF credits want to get it there. So a tension between sharing and getting cash.

What can your university do for you? Provide support and guidance.

Danger of not doing it? Universities need to look relevant. Remember the Viz Pathetic Sharks, who couldn’t swim properly, were scared of water. Universities in danger of looking like that.

Current project: Year of Future Learning (on his blog) – a bottom-up way of trying to do distributed research. Anyone can join in. Multiple modes, multiple ways to contribute, support/facilitate discussions.

Is sharing the same as making public? Martin says share earlier in the process – at conceptual stage and then throughout, not just publishing at the end.

REF has implications for what we share as researchers, but also as teachers. What do we do? Easier when established; earlier in the career need to play the game a bit more to advance. And easier if you’re in the right domain (IET) where part of the day job is to explore this.  Critique on blogs is similar to expert peer review, but also different.  Issue of saving it for posterity – 25 years ago, paper document. Failing to leave a reliable paper trail if everything’s in blogs – not preserved in the same way. (!) Not saying burn all journals, but the peer review process ‘is over-rated’. You can publish anything on your blog, but if you’re trying to build up a serious reputation, you’ll be taken to task for what you put up. ‘Publication process is designed to remove anything interesting or engaging or challenging’ (not universal agreement). Example given by Giddens at his Pavis Lecture – Internet can be empowering, democratising versus trivialising.

Eileen Scanlon – Digital scholarship in science

Interest came up in MSc in Science Studies. Communicating Science course.  Gold standard community having radical shift in how they behave due to new tools. Main example of a transformatory tool is physicists’ pre-print repositories.

Interesting perspectives on peer review – Nature did an experiment on open peer review. So not just small scale journals.

Many recent articles in the June 2008 issue of Journal of Science Communnication. Open Science.  Eileen wrote a book with that title … which was about OU teaching practices, not this.

Recognition of e-science as a new way of doing things.

Zvivocic science blogger – commentary piece.  Predicted that journal paper of the future will be a work in progress, with collaborative development.  There are some very serious bloggers, based in major research institutes, discussing what’s happening. Tola science journalist – growth of blogging. Cozzini – e-scientist – massive investment in e-infrastructure (e.g. Grid computing), vast quantities of data for analysis. There are technical problems, and other challenges – but need some imagination to see new ways of working. This stuff is hard.

Proposal submitted to ESRC – understanding the changes in the communication and publication practices of academic resarchers in HE.  Christine Borgman book on Scholarship in the Digital Age. Two case studies: one team in an e-science area. How is the landscape changed, what do people do? Now at a stage to see what people are actually doing, not looking at the rhetoric.  Sub-questions about different forms of publication, how they relate to open peer review, how the i

Doug Clow on Scholarly Publishing 2.0 –

No blog notes from me! But the slides are on Slideshare. One point from my talk: big barrier to going all-open is perceived esteem of publishing in particular named journals with particular named publishers. Big money at stake. Also change in who might sign up for OU courses, given that currently they get access to all our journals while they’re registered.