openness
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Open ed as the anti-disruption
I keynoted at the Research and Innovation in Distance Education Conference , which has the theme “Examining Disruptive Innovations in Distance Education”. I didn’t actually attend in the end, because I had a (completely normal for this time of year) cough, and didn’t want people panicking if I had a coughing fit on stage. My apologies to anyone who was hoping to see me there (I know, it’d be a select group) and thanks to the organisers for letting me give my keynote remotely. Now, you’ll know that disruption is not my thing. Initially I was asked to talk about how open ed (in different forms) may be disrupting higher…
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Questions about openness – the audience decides!
During my inaugural I made extensive use of PollEverywhere, in order to make it more interactive and gain feedback (I also had a sore throat so these parts gave me a chance to swig water, but let’s go with the pedagogic justification). Following on from the previous post detailing the theme of the inaugural, here are the responses to the questions, and some musings on what they mean. First of all, lots of lovely people came in from across the globe (disc if you’re a flat-earther) which in a way, demonstrated the point I was making about exploring openness. These were often people I have met via blogs, social media,…
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The bespoke licence
There was a bit of a hoo-ha the other day when the popular photography site Unsplash announced they were no longer using the CC0 licence but instead switching to their own one. Creative Commons’ Ryan Merkley wrote a blog post in which he claimed the new licence was revokable. This is a big no-no in open licences – imagine if you’ve used an openly licensed image in a book and then the licence changes – do you withdraw the book, pay a fee? For precisely this reason, CC licences are irrevokable – you can’t change it afterwards. After some twitter to and fro-ing Unsplash said their licence was always irrevokable…
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Annotation & the net conundrum
Annotation tools such as hypothes.is have gathered a lot of interest over the past year, and certainly have a lot of potential in education. It was at Open Ed last year that Jon Becker brought some of the ethical issues to my attention. These tools allow others to overlay annotation and commentary on any site, visible to anyone with that browser extension. It’s not on that site as such, so they don’t need permission to do that. This is great for annotating, say, an article in a newspaper, or a Governmental press release for example. But as Audrey Watters points out, less great if as an individual, you have been…
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Every decoding is another encoding
I was invited by the Virtually Connecting team to present with them at OER17, and I of course, jumped at the opportunity. I’m a VC advisory buddy and have done a few VC sessions at conference but the work Maha, Autumm, Rebecca and others put in to making it work is tiring just to observe. For those of you who don’t know VC, it started as away of those not present at conferences to feel part of the experience. This is often realised through an hour session with a keynote or two after their talk, with someone onsite facilitating and a group of online people joining a Google hangout (which…
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To the keepers of the flames
I’m late to all this, but I have recently started getting back into vinyl records. I got a cheapo turntable for my birthday (from me, I always know what I want). I’ve ben picking up the odd album since then. Mainly I’m restocking the albums I used to own – I gave these away in the mid-2000s because I hadn’t played them for about 17 years, and they were in the garage, getting warped and mouldy. “I’ll never play vinyl again” I thought, “my music consumption has shifted to digital. I’m not one of those muso nerds who goes on about the quality of the listening experience with vinyl.” And…
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The paradoxes of open scholarship
(Photo by Andrew Branch – CC0) I was asked to do a webinar presentation on open scholarship for the ExplOERer project. I started pulling together some slides from previous presentations but when I looked at them they just seemed from a different era. Over the years I have talked about blogging, digital scholarship, open practice, etc. My take on it has become gradually more nuanced – back in the mid-2000s it was all “OMG this stuff is awesome!” But I’ve balanced that with negatives and caveats as its gone on. But it has largely remained a pro-piece. However, in a post-truth context, in which aspects of openness have played a…
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The open licence gift to the future
One of those phrases that passes around on twitter is that “metadata is a love note to the future” (apparently coined by Jason Scott). A few recent news stories have made me reflect that an open licence is also a gift to future generations. In my Types of OER User piece I argued that there are groups of people who would benefit from OER who don’t know it yet, but that option may be closed off before they know OER is an option. Recently we’ve seen Elsevier attempt to patent the online peer review system. It’s unlikely to succeed because of prior art, and is regarded I think as a…
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The Open Flip
I wrote a piece for the Journal of Learning for Development recently, which expanded on an idea in a blog post, called the Open Flip. The basic idea is quite simple really (I’m a simple kinda guy) – it is that under certain conditions, there is an economic argument for shifting costs from purchasing copyrighted goods to producing openly licensed ones. Open Textbooks are an obvious example. This is a bit ‘no shit Sherlock’, but I think it’s worth exploring as a model in its own right. The paper only starts to do this really. My argument is that most of the digital economic models, theories and ideologies haven’t really…
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The open ed landscape
I gave a presentation for the Disruptive Media Learning Lab in Coventry last week. This year I’m trying to do new talks each time (I’ve another post on that), and was asked to give a talk to an audience who weren’t that aware of issues of openness in education. So I tried the metaphor of thinking of different places on a map. This gave me: Open access – a well developed, sustainable city with infrastructure OERs – a friendly, well populated town, that could expand into a city, or may just stay the way it is. Has nice schools. MOOCs – these are reminiscent of the ‘ghost cities‘ in countries…
