Open content
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Launching Meta EdTech Journal
The other day I was trying to find a list of Open Access journals. I found this very useful open list from George Veletsianos. While looking through the journals it occurred to me that what would be useful would be a regular review of these, or a kind of meta-journal. Not one that just lists all the papers, but rather a filtered view. I mentioned it on Twitter and Doug Belshaw pointed me at the new Google/Wordpress collaboration, Annotum – a WordPress theme for creating open access journals. So in the a spirit of DIY, I have created Meta EdTech Journal. The idea is simple – three times a year…
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Yeah, but who pays?
My colleague, Gill Kirkup, asks this question of digital scholarship, and it is a frequent refrain of Alan Cann's. It's a good question, and one I usually try to have an answer for. I don't think I am guilty of Gill's charge of hoping for the "internet equivalent of the tooth fairy". In fact, one of my complaints about the current academic publishing model is that it's a poor economic one. Now, one can make many arguments about open access that don't address the economics, for example around it being a public good, or a more effective way of working for instance, many of which are compelling in their own…
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A simple open vs closed tale
Science in the Sands reports how a US Professor, Dianne O'Leary, wrote to the publisher, Springer, asking for a PDF of her own paper. They refused and as her university doesn't subscribe to the journal, because it is prohibitively expensive, she couldn't get a final copy of her own article. A later update reveals that, she could get the copy, but you have to ask the right person. This is something I have often encountered – getting the definitive copy, as quite often the last version you hold on your machine is not one that has been through final edits. So even when she could get the copy, it took…
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Bridge 2 Success
This is the third in the what I'm up to at the OU posts. A while back we were part of a consortium that won a bid in the Next Generation Learning Challenges funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, & The Hewlett Foundation. The partners are us (IET at the OU), MIT, the Anne Arundel Community College and University of Maryland University College (UMUC) – the project is Bridge to Success. It's aim is to use OERs to help community college students who struggle with study skills, and math(s) in particular. So we've taken some OU courses and these have been adapted in the US, and made available through our OpenLearn labspace.…
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Digital Scholarship – the DJ set
I have a vague idea of maybe one day doing a keynote as a DJ set (I think Brian Lamb did this once), but of course, I have never done a DJ set, and it would be a painful affair. So in lieu of that, I decided to create a DJ set to accompany my book. I used Soundcloud, to produce the set below. Lots of tracks were disallowed because they had restricted rights, so my 30 odd track set came down to 12. I've added in a little explanation in between. My mic started dodgy and then packed up altogether, so the quality of these (both in technical and…
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Comparethejournal.com
A journal comparison site? Simples. This another post from the stable of 'Martin's great business ideas that never get taken up, and which he never progresses.' One of the themes in my digital scholarship book is that of alternatives – new technology driven approaches give us alternatives when previously we had none: we can join in a conference remotely, we can choose which medium we wish to convey our message in, we can make our outputs as detailed or as general as we like and we can chat about professional interests, sport, politics, film, or whatever we like all in the same space. Looking at academic publishing, it strikes me…
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What is the learner responsibility in open education?
I gave a presentation for George Siemens last night as part of CCK11 on, you've guessed it, digital scholarship. It was a bit rambling, but generally well received. I noticed a couple of comments on Twitter along the lines of 'how does this relate to the course content?' Having done a few such sessions this isn't the first time I've seen such queries. I don't mean to dismiss these, I think they raise an interesting issue for open education. Firstly, if a student is getting a course for free do they demand the same type of QA as one they've paid for? I really mean this, if MOOCs are…
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Let’s play OER Roulette!
(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney) This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts. For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way. I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed…
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The strange case of the unconnected conference
(An unexpected appearance by the Two Ronnies went some way to alleviate frustration about the lack of wifi at OpenEd 2010 – Richard Hall and Joss Winn in full flow). I was at the Open Ed 2010 conference last week. First off, I want to say that it was great to finally meet Brian Lamb and I really enjoyed presentations from Richard Hall, David Wiley, Erik Duval, Joss Winn and others. So this post is not a comment on the quality of the conference or the discussions I had there. The conference was held in the science museum CosmoCaixa. This is a great museum and my daughter loved it. It…
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An open Open University course on openness
[Update – see James' comment below, and to clarify this is a course produced as a result of a research project in a collaboration with many others: the Hellenic Management Association, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, SPI in Portugal, ELIG, and UNU Merit. As such it's not an OU course that has been through the normal course production process, nor does it carry OU credit] Like Tony I think the OU has been a bit slow to start creating truly open courses – I'm partly to blame since I suggested doing one a couple of years back and then didn't do anything. Before that…
