publications
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Emerging OER research discipline
The Primordial soup of OER… One of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is how the OER discipline emerges. Having lived through it, you get to see the field evolve. I’m not sure it counts as a field, subject, discipline, or whatever. Is it part of a new open education discipline? Is there a unifying field at all? These are general questions I have, but one I was also interested in, was what themes have emerged in research over the years? I set out to have a look at this, by examining publications in OER Knowledge Cloud from 2001. I did a content analysis of abstracts from 2007 (chosen…
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Digital resilience in Higher Ed
I've mentioned the idea of resilience before (thanks to Joss & Richard for linking it to open education and giving me the idea). When Terry Anderson from Athabasca visited us last year, I worked on a paper to explore the idea more fully with him. Resilience borrows the idea from ecosystems, pioneered by Holling, who described it as "‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables". In our paper we take the concept and use it as a means of thinking about how HE institutions can view the impact of digital…
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Digital scholarship, tenure & barometers
I use this blog as well as our university repository system to keep track (and shamelessly publicise) those journal article things that your grandad told you about. I have a new article out in RUSC (the open access journal from the University of Catalonia). It has the snappy title of "Digital scholarship and the tenure process as an indicator of change in universities". You can access the PDF here through our repository, or at RUSC here. It's an extension of some of the stuff I covered in the book, and I'm making the argument that how universities respond to the challenge of recognising digital scholarship can be taken as a…
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JIME relaunch
Last year I took on the role of co-editor of JIME (The Journal of Interactive Media in Education). JIME was founded in 1996 and was one of the first open access journals, and operated an innovative open peer review system. But it had been a bit neglected over the last few years, so we shifted it to OJS, worked through the backlog of review papers, tidied up the scope, reappointed an editorial board, and now I’m pleased to announce a new issue. This is a special issue focusing on OER, with guest editors Ester Ehiyazaryan and Alannah Fitzgerald. It’s a very good issue, even if I say so myself. It features…
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A pedagogy of abundance – the paper
I've given a couple of talks (and blogged) around a pedagogy of abundance. In these I was exploring what abundance in terms of content might mean for education, and whether we had appropriate pedagogies, when most of our learning theories have been built on an assumption of content-scarcity. For my digital scholarship book I made this the chapter that looks at the teaching element of Boyer's scholarly functions. I have now redone that chapter and published it as an article in the Spanish Journal of Pedagogy Note – the journal isn't open access, but I'm trying to explore the green, or self-archiving route of OA, so I got agreement to…
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Social networks and education
(This is a bit of blog tidying, and trying to make sure I gather my publications through my blog, but it's a good read, honest). I mentioned a while back that I edited a special edition of RUSC with George Siemens, on the use of social networks in education. We wrote an introductory piece, which can be found here. Abstract: The last decade has produced tremendous innovation in how people connect with one another online. Social networks have experienced a rapid increase in popularity, producing both concerns (privacy, content ownership) and opportunities. The articles in this journal can be viewed as attempts to answer the question: What should educators do about…
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It’s all about me
A quick round-up of some open stuff I'm doing. Firstly, a special edition of RUSC, edited by George Siemens and myself is available, which focuses on social networks in education. There is an intro from George and me, and then some articles that are actually worth reading (unless you speak Spanish, you'll need to change the language to English in the box over on the right). That Siemens character works you hard once you're in his network, so on Wednesday 26th Jan, I'm giving a talk on digital scholarship as part of his CCK11 course, at 7.30pm UK time. It'll be in Elluminate. Lastly, if you want to listen to…
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More brains! The perpetuation of the zombie scholar
With Jim Groom I'm writing a chapter for the Zombies in the Academy book. It's at an early draft stage, but thought I would share it in this wiki. My argument is that the context we have set up in education for all aspects of scholarship is like a contagion that works against innovation. This was an idea I explored in my researchers and new technology post and which forms a theme of my upcoming book (but with no zombies). There is an analogy here with the manner in which zombies turn all-comers into one of their own, which is exemplified by this clip from Dan O'Bannon's Return of the…
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Article on Digital Scholarship published
This is just because I like to keep track of 'traditional' publications here too. Along with some colleagues at the OU (the bulk of the writing was by Nick Pearce) I submitted an article, entitled Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work, to a special edition of In Education, edited by Alec Couros. It is (of course) open access, and has now been published (Technology & Social Media (Special Issue, Part 2), 2010, 16(1)). We took Boyer's framework of scholarship and reconsidered it in light of new technology, particularly with the lens 'openness' across each of the four components. It looks like a good edition overall, so…
