2. Overview
• Open scholarship
• Ethical perspective
• Ethics of obligation vs risks
• How open for students
• Open Access/Open data
• OERs
• New skills
• Learning analytics
• Conclusions
4. Open
scholarship
Weller (2011) open scholars are likely to:
• Have a distributed online identity
• Have a central place for their identity
• Have cultivated an online network of peers
• Have developed a personal learning environment from a range of
tools
• Engage with open publishing
• Create a range of informal outputs
• Try new technologies
• Mix personal and professional outputs
• Use new technologies to support teaching and research
• Automatically create and share outputs
6. What is teaching?
• Partly enculturation
• What if that culture has changed or is less
valid?
7. Competing set of ethical
considerations
• We should be
equipping students
with skills and
approaches that
will be relevant
Learning is a
vulnerable
process & risks
associated
9. H817Open
• Create own blog
• Aggregate together
• Some did behind password
• Others felt excluded
• Forcing people into open
10. Open Access
• Anything paid for by Govt funding should be
freely available
• But what about things paid for by student
fees?
• “Publishing science behind paywalls is
immoral” (Mike Taylor)
11. Open data
• G8 treaty on open data - all
government data will be
released openly by default
• Mandates that put data with
publications
• But what about ‘human’ data?
• Deanonymising data is not
difficult
• Date of birth, gender & zip
code is unique for 87% of the
population
• Ohm: ‘Data can be either
useful or perfectly anonymous
but never both.’
12. OERs
• Is there an ethical compulsion to release
teaching content?
• Is it unethical not to expose your students to
the best content?
13. Developing appropriate skills
• Networker
• Digital identity
• Engaging with the open net
• Are the academic skills we teach still relevant?
14. Should we be teaching our students
the art of guerrilla research?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/idfonline/
5981013497/
15. “what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s
genius could be embraced by half-a-billion
people within six years of its first being
launched, without (and here is the critical
bit) asking permission of anyone. The real
story is not the invention. It is the platform
that makes the invention sing.”
(Larry Lessig)
16. The manifesto
1. It can be done by one or two researchers and
does not require a team
2. It relies on existing open data, information
and tools
3. It is fairly quick to realise
4. It is disseminated via blogs and social media
5. It doesn’t require permission
17. More ethical?
12 days for a
conventional
proposal was the
average (RCUK 2006)
ESRC - only 17% of
bids were successful in
2009-10
RCUK = 2006 £196
million on
applications to the
8 UK research
councils
2800 bids submitted to
ESRC in 2009-10, an
increase in 33% from
2005-6
ESRC - 2000 failed
bids x 12 days per
bid = 65 years of
effort
18. Learning analytics
• Can be powerful tool to support students
• Ethical element of gathering data
• Predictive analytics – should we
encourage/discourage people who have little
chance of success?
19. James Boyle:
“We are very good at seeing the downsides
and the dangers of open systems, open
production systems, networks of openness.
.. Those dangers are real… we are not so
good at seeing the benefits and the
converse holds true for the closed system.”
20. Conclusions
• New tools & approaches offer new
possibilities
• Openness is key to many of these
• But bring new ethical considerations
• Ethics in NOT adopting as well as adopting
Hinweis der Redaktion
My interest is in digital scholarship and open education.
I’m going to talk about some of the new possibilities and ways of working and the ethical considerations these raise
So as well as digital can talk about open scholarship, defined by these types of characteristics
Do we teach students to have these kinds of skills and should we?
Can make argument for openness based on it being efficient
But there is also an ethical side, which I’ll focus on here
Start with big question – what is teaching (particularly in an HE context)?
It is about imparting knowledge, developing skills
But also about enculturation – the reason HE is seen as transformative experience is because we bring people into culture of higher ed and all that involves – critical thinking, evaluating arguments, reflection etc.
But there are also a set of values associated with online identity and networking which are important.
There is an ethical argument I think that we are obliged to teach these types of skills to our students also, and it is remiss of us not to do so.
I think there are a range of competing ethical considerations throughout this, so my argument is not just that ‘open is good’
For example -
Openness can really work for students in a teaching context, For instance these courses
Openness is at the heart and although challenging people come out having developed new skills and also reflected on ways of learning, their own identity, etc All things we used to do a lot if HE
My MOOC – had some of these benefits, but you tend to hear from the enthusiasts.
What about those who didn’t like it?
Broadening it out a bit, we also teach our students how to become researchers
And dissemination is part of that
There is a strong ethical argument to OA for Govt funded research, but what about now students are paying fees, scholarship that is effectively funded by them?
Open data reveals how what can seem quite straightforward ethically has implications.
This is often the type of research we get 3rd year undergrads to do for their dissertation. Is it ethical to get them to release it openly? Is it ethical NOT to?
Open educational resources
At the start mentioned developing new skills
Increasingly need to be well developed in these areas, but how many can say they really do this in an intensive manner?
Are we failing students if we don’t?
I want to take a slight detour as an example
The key element is permission I think, and this goes back to the architecture of the internet. This is Lessig’s review of the film The Social Network, and the point he stresses is that it was the removal of the barrier of permission that allowed facebook (and all those other start-ups) to flourish
It’s not really a manifesto, but let’s pretend
Some principles that characterise guerrilla research
We don’t see the waste in the current system because it’s accepted
But a guerrilla approach may be more efficient, produce more shareable stuff
Most of these rejected bids are lost
So should we be teaching this approach to research?