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What sort of open do you want?
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/42386632@N00/8528725328/ > I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. What do…
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Earning the right to preach
I watched the tweets from the WISE13 conference with interest. One that caught my eye (and rather made it water) was Gordon Brown extolling the value of education and its benefits for society. You can see his talk below: It's a good talk, impassioned and well reasoned. I agree with everything he said. But I find it strange that he is saying it. Brown's record on international development is good, it's something he really believed in. But when he was Prime Minister, he abolished what's called ELQ funding in the UK. This meant that you couldn't get funding to study if you already had an equal or higher qualification. This…
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Open media and the new Stasi
"Trust me, I'm a journalist…" I came across a disturbing story last week, particularly for academics in the UK who use social media. A UK academic who blogs and tweets as Plashing Vole reported that a journalist from the Sun on Sunday had contacted him, telling him they were going to run an article about him. It concerned a few anti-government tweets he had made, in one jokingly making a Nazi comparison. An MP was calling for him to be sacked. In the end they didn't run the piece, but it must have been a stressful few days. This worries me on a number of levels. Firstly, I often encourage…
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MOOCs as 1st year undergrad replacement
For top-secret research I am undertaking, I'm looking at a range of MOOCs, both xMOOCs, cMOOCs and flavours inbetween (although, definitely not ridiculous variations such as SPOCs). Here's some breaking news – they are all pretty good. Take away all the hype, commercial bubble and rabid arguments on both sides and you are left with some good teaching material. As I've been going through them (admittedly not as thoroughly as a student), I've begun to think that a mix of them would probably represent a good grounding in a topic, equivalent to a 1st year of an undergrad degree. It wouldn't teach some of the other skills you develop, I'll…
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Autumn issue of JIME
In times of fake open access journals, and open access being used as a means of making even more money by publishers, it's nice to know that some things are true to the simple values of open access… yes, there is a new issue of JIME out. It may not have the bells and whistles of a funded journal, and maybe we can't give it as much time as we'd like, but it's free to publish, peer-reviewed and open to all. In this issue there is quite a range of papers, some have a 'design' theme, but it's not a themed issue. Here is the editorial, I'm sure there's something…
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The OA battle ground
In the battle for open, I'd say open access is probably the front which has been engaged the longest. It's worth looking at how the battle is going, as it exhibits many of the characteristics we're seeing in other areas. For example, the spoils are worth fighting for - Reed Elsevier reported revenue of over 6 billion GBP in 2012 of which over 2 billion was for the Science Technical and Medical publishing area. It's also an area where openness has 'won' – OA mandates abound, and a recent Wiley report found that 59% of authors had published in OA journals. It's not a minority pursuit any more. And yet at…
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Will killer robot dogs mean the end of universities?
The answer to this question is, probably no. But yet we don't see newspapers running articles about the potential threat of killer robot dogs to the status of universities. But we do see them about how MOOCs (sorry David) will destroy all higher education as we know it. For example here is a piece in Forbes. Or one from Nexttrends. Or one from Eduwire. Why does it always have to be the death of, the end of? I guess it's because 'Will MOOCs be a complementary part of a richer mix of educational offerings from universities?' isn't such a snappy title. I think we've been through the first wave of…
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The art of guerrilla research
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/idfonline/5981013497/> In my presentations on digital scholarship I often make the claim that we have the opportunity to rethink the form that research takes. We are accustomed in academia to thinking of research as being of a certain 'size'. Usually this means it is funded research or something with a traditional output (research paper or book). But digital, networked technologies allow us different ways of approaching research. As I am forever saying, this is not to say they supplant the existing methods, or are superior to them, just that we have a richer mix of options now. I've started calling the 'just do it' approach 'guerrilla research'. This term has…
