Research
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The research Hussites
[This is another from my catalogue of strained metaphors, and my grasp of religious history is rather tenuous, so I'm sure people who are better acquainted with the subtleties of Hussite history can point out lots of flaws with it. But take the surface points as of interest.] I've been giving a talk recently called "Digital Scholarship: 10 Lessons in 10 Videos". I'll blog these in detail later, but one of my lessons is that we should rethink research. By this I mean we have a certain attitude towards how research is conducted, which was shaped prior to the arrival of digital, networked and open technologies. Some of that attitude still…
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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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Ten digital scholarship questions for researchers
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/elycefeliz/3262326159/> In my talk the other day for the Change MOOC, and in my book, I argue that digital scholarship has the potential to alter the way we conduct research, or at least to add some new tools to the toolbox. Now checklists should be treated with even more caution than a finding that 3D improves learning, so take this as some things to think about rather than a definite checklist you can submit to your research funder. I'd be interested to hear of other suggestions, and also whether this is all stuff people are doing anyway. My feeling is that when it comes to writing research proposals we're all…
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A quick and dirty REF
I am currently engaged with working on the REF submission for my Institute. I fully understand why we do this, in cash strapped time in particular, research money will make a big difference. It is also almost impossible not to play the game if you want to be recognised as a research institution and attract staff. But it is a horrible, pernicious process that seems deliberately designed to kill innovation, perpetuate existing models, waste time, focus energy on gaming the system and keep publishers happy. If you wanted to design a process with the sole aim of restricting the adoption of new methods and technology, then you could do a…
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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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The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers
Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below: Research, technology & networks View more presentations from Martin Weller. I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.…
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OU conference – evaluation
Following on from the previous two posts looking at the OU conference, this final one in the trilogy looks at some evaluation. I am particularly indebted to Karen Cropper, Rebecca Ferguson and Juliette Culver for doing much of the analysis for this post. Evaluation took four main forms: A questionnaire of attendees in surveymonkey Statistics from cloudworks Analysis of twitter users adopting the #OUConf10 hashtag Analysis of the elluminate sessions Questionnaire There were 102 responses to the questionnaire. Below are some charts representing salient issues: Most attendees were central staff, but there was a significant audience that had no connection to the OU, and a mix across other categories.…
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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.…
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Do you have to do social media to get social media?
Christian, aka Documentally has a post entitled "Understand Social Technology Through Participation", in which he says: "How much can you understand from just watching and not participating? Last night I met a Professor who although used Facebook and other platforms seemed proud to state he did not use twitter. His job was to study social Technology and although obviously a very smart chap It made me wonder.. Is it possible to comprehend something as complex as social Technology by not participating in a platform like twitter. Can you glean just as much insight from only using sites like Facebook?.. All of my insights into Social Technology have come from my…
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The REF – a user’s guide
This is the first of two posts looking at the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Apologies to non-UK readers, this is a bit parochial. I needed to look through the REF in relation to the digital scholarship work I am doing. In the next post I will comment on it from a digital scholarship perspective, but having read it all, I thought I'd give an overview of the key points in this post, just to provide a quick review for those who can't be bothered to read the whole thing (ie, any sane person). So in this post I'm not commenting on the REF itself, either in detail, or as an…
