openness
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Should bid proposals be open access?
I was at a UNESCO OER meeting in Paris last week (impersonating an important person) and a topic that came up a couple of times was the waste of resource that we just accept. Someone highlighted all the EU funded projects which are difficult to search, or find outputs for. They were from an AI, machine learning background so they wanted access to this to discern patterns and create links between projects. In the Battle for Open I talk about how much effort is wasted in the current bid writing proposal: Some of the inherent waste in current practice often goes unnoticed, because it is accepted practice that academics have…
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Openness as feature
(going with the “if in doubt, use one of Alan’s pics” approach) Sorry, this is two ‘open’ posts in a row, I’ll blog something else soon (if you want something very different, I’ve started a film a week blog, it’s reassuringly uninformed). There have been a few announcements recently that made me reflect on the co-option of ‘open’ in a commercial sense. The first was Amazon’s Inspire announcement where they look to be getting into the OER game. Amazon & OER, that is big time and has Battle for Open written all over it. It could be amazing, it could miss the point of OERs altogether. Audrey Watters blogged her…
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Positive openness
I’ve been mulling around something on how openness ain’t what it used to be for a while. I’m not sure I’ve got it, but a few strands are converging. Firstly, the way openness is framed now is really as free. Tressie McMillan Cottom gave a good presentation at ICDE last year, in which she highlighted that the new forms of openness do not create the equality many had assumed. For instance, it is mainly elite universities that adopt open source LMSs, whereas poorer community colleges sign up with commercial providers. And both for OERs and MOOCs, the learners who use them most tend to be well educated already and from…
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Why open practice?
I gave a presentation recently trying to set out the arguments for engaging with open practice in higher education. I’ve shifted from the “because it’s awesome” argument to a more nuanced one. My starting point is that open practice is a smorgasbord of components from which one selects those parts that you feel most comfortable with and will most benefit your current role. For instance, an academic might be interested in developing a personal online profile, and also in open access. A librarian in open access, OER and an institutional profile. A researcher in open data, licenses and knowledge exchange, etc. However, a smorgasbord is a simplistic metaphor – it’s…
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Open Ed – All growed up
(Open ed is not about two teams battling it out. Plus – ice hockey!) Following on from my previous post, another reflection on the OpenEd conference. I went to two types of presentations – I’ll label them “hardcore research”, and “philosophy of open” to make distinctions, but I don’t mean to imply research is not involved in the second type. In the hardcore research group there were some excellent presentations from Rajiv, Tidewater college, and the Z-degree projects. I’ve labelled these hardcore research, because they did all those things you’d want to control for in examining the impact of OER. They tested pre-knowledge, controlled for demographic effects, compared across control…
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The ROI on open education
Increasingly in education one is asked to justify the time and resource allocated to projects. I’m not adverse to this, no matter what political belief you subscribe to, everything comes down to allocation of resources in the end, and so considering the best allocation for your intended aim is useful. But this type of justification is often rather crude and determined by simple return on investment. This is easier to do for some aspects of education than others, and I want to make a case for open education. You can view open education (in whatever form, MOOCs, OERs, podcasts, open access publishing) as a straightforward marketing and recruitment tool. There…
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The Open Flip
At the start of the digital, networked revolution there were lots of books about new business models. Most were, let’s face it, rubbish. But there were some salient points that came out amidst all the hyperbole. I think Weinberger’s concept of filtering on the way out instead of filtering on the way in, is a good example. Anyway, now that internet models have settled a bit I’ve been thinking that the next phase might be around what openness offers. I circulate in different overlapping communities: OERs, open access journals, MOOCs, open textbooks. I’ve noticed a common theme emerging which you could label the “open flip”. Briefly stated, it is that…
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Open by default
I’ve heard this phrase a few times, often in relation to open data eg. the open data charter. I think it’s a useful starting position for those in higher ed, across all aspects of practice. That is, assume you should be operating openly, and only if there are valid reasons not to, shift away from that, instead of the reverse situation as it is now. It is important to emphasise that there are perfectly valid reasons why you may not be open in a particular aspect, eg an online learning forum for new learners may be better conducted in what they feel is a safe space. So open by default…
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The iceberg model of OER engagement
I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to ever use the iceberg analogy… I've been pondering ways of thinking about open education awareness, and OER usage that might help shape OER policy. So here's one I want to try out. Open education in general, and OERs specifically, form a basis from which many other practices benefit, but often practitioners in those areas are unaware of OERs explicitly. It is likely that these secondary and tertiary levels of OER awareness represent a far greater audience, than the primary “OER-aware” one, so one can view the sizes of these audiences like the metaphorical iceberg, with increasing size as we push into these…
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Whadya mean “openness has won”?
In my Battle for Open book (and article) I make the claim that openness has been victorious in many respects, and reinforce this by examining the success of open access publishing, OERs, MOOCs and open scholarship. However, to many working in higher education, this would seem a rather overblown claim. They may work in contexts where open scholarship is not only not recognised but actively discouraged, where the mention of OERs would be met with blank expressions and any proposed change to take advantage of the opportunities of open education is actively resisted. Any notion that openness has won seems like the fancy of a privileged few, perhaps operating within…
