Open content
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For the last time – open access is not like stealing bread
The Times Higher ran a piece on ceviche cooking edupunk Brian Lamb's keynote at the recent JISC OER event in London. Brian makes his usual good points, but it was some of the comments that were revealing. In particular, one that states "We should also have 'open access' at Tesco: I should just be able to take from their shelves what I want without paying." I've heard this a lot in various guises over the years. I can't believe I'm still hearing it. I know that you know this is a dumb argument, but please, can we just put it to bed once and for all. Open access is not…
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The return on peer review
A while ago I took a decision to only publish in open access journals. I recently received two requests to review articles for journals. Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing. So it's something we all do, isn't…
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Project report as coffee table book
I've mentioned before I was part of the Sidecap project, which looked at OER use in Fiji, West Indies and Mauritius. The project has now finished and instead of producing the standard EU report (which, let's face it, no-one ever reads) Frank Rennie from UHI decided to create it as a book in Blurb. We all contributed sections and gathered photos from the duration of the project. My book turned up today: It's a small, and undoubtedly obvious point, but the glossiness of it and the approachability of the layout made me want to read it. In almost exactly opposite to the way I'd approach a normal project report.…
- broadcast, conference, content, digital scholarship, higher ed, Long tail, Open content, Presentation, web 2.0
Academic output as collateral damage
Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was…
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The Nessman Cometh
It comes to pass… Scott Leslie is coming to stay at the OU for a month under an OLNet fellowship. Scott is one of my long time blog/Twitter chums and his blog was one of the very first I started reading back when we used to say ‘blog is short for weblog’. As I commented in an earlier post, I don’t view online friendships as f2f ones waiting to happen, but even so it’ll be great to finally meet. So this is just to ask three sets of people if they fancy a meet-up with Scott while he’s here: OU people- I’ll try and get Scott to give a talk,…
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The future of ed – my contribution
George Siemens and Dave Cormier are running an open course on the Future of Education. They have asked for contributions on this topic, so my musical slideshare is below. As well as the various angles you might expect, I think the answer is the presentation itself – when you think about why have I created a presentation for two people I have never met, on a course I won’t teach on? The answers are because it’s easy, because I have a social connection, and because I think it’s fun (and there’s probably a bit of ego in there too). And as I say at the end, that we can do…
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Is public engagement an old media concept?
"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert…" The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought. In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave…
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Those OER issues
The final session of the Fiji workshop was an organized debate between two teams, one taking the pro-OER case and the other the anti one. I led the anti- team with Frank Rennie leading the pro case. I ought to say that I was asked to do this, I’m not an anti-OER person. I think most of the argument I’m going to put have been said elsewhere, so there’s nothing particularly new in this post for people who follow the OER movement, but having been through the process of collating the arguments, I thought I’d put them here too. So my main arguments were: Sustainability – this is the daddy…
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Aggregation not adaptation
Tony Bates gave a keynote at the Fijian workshop I was at. It was, as always, good value as he covered changes in technology and their implications. I was in broad agreement with him but one element had me questioning him afterwards. He repeatedly stated that if he were doing this presentation as a set of OERs he would chunk it up, stop at certain points and introduce a learning activity. He’d set it out with learning objectives at the start. In his advice he suggested that educators shouldn’t do it themselves (‘you’ll get hurt’, he joked) and should seek support from instructional designers and technical staff. These two things…
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Violinists and OERs
This is the first in a trio of OER related posts. I’m in Fiji currently, for the final meeting of the Sidecap project which has been looking at OER use in developing countries/regions (specifically in this project, Mauritius, West Indies and South Pacific). I’m sure many of you will know this story, it’s the kind of thing that gets passed around on email, but it was new to me (I checked and it’s true, not an urban myth). This is the common account, from Hoax Slayer: A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six…
