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Open scholarship as resolution to the academic dilemma
There is something of a tension at the heart of the relationship between academics and the institutions that employ them. Institutions want to have academics with a high profile and external recognition. But they also want them to do work for them, as they're paying the wage. Academics want to have a high profile and external recognition, but also recognise that a good proportion of their work may need to be for the institution in roles that don't attract much of this. Usually this balance is fairly easy to maintain, but the problem is that much of the work involved in scholarship doesn't directly benefit the institution. Consider these examples:…
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MOOCs are your friends
<Image Giulia Forsythe http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8028605773/> (I know what you're thinking: "if only someone would write an opinion blog post on MOOCs, there just aren't any out there"). Reactions to MOOCs tend to fall into two camps. The first is the MOOC will conquer all group who see them as saviours of learning and destroyers of universities. See Clay Shirky's MP3 analogy for an example (and also David Kernohan's excellent response) although this month's MOOC hyperbole award goes to this techcrunch piece. The second camp are the dismissers. MOOCS are a fad, they aren't anything new, or they're so flawed they aren't worth considering. See for example, MOOCS fad and bubble . What I…
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Twitter is your IT support
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/> This post isn’t intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I’ve noticed from several others also. I’m running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It’ll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog. Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won’t go in to, I haven’t been able to get this done at the Open…
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Openness has won – now what?
As we start the new year and survey the open education landscape, it's hard not to conclude that openness has prevailed. The victory may not be absolute, but the trend is all one way now – we'll never go back to closed systems in academia anymore than we will return to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Whether it's open access publishing, open data, MOOCs, OERs, open source or open scholarship – the openness battle has largely been won. Time to rejoice! But, of course, it's never that simple. When it was simply open vs closed it was a clear distinction. Openness was good, closed was bad. As the victory bells sound though…
