USPS® Forced Meter Migration - How to Know if Your Postage Meter Will Soon be...
What can openness do for teachers
1. The impact of open scholarship on
teaching and scholarly practice
Martin Weller
2. About me
• Prof at the Open
University
• Digital Scholarship book
bit.ly/digscholar
• OER Research Hub
oerresearchhub.org
• Blogger edtechie.net
• The Battle for Open
3. This talk
• What is open scholarship?
• What’s it got to do with me?
– Pedagogy
– OERs and teaching
– Open practice
• The battle for open
• Conclusions
5. 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
8. • Pedagogy of scarcity?
• Lecture – one to many
• Library
• Instructivism/didactic
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyfaller/8394194/
9. What would a pedagogy of abundance look like?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42903611@N00/387761039/
10. Assumptions
• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Sharing is easy
• Social based
• Connections are ‘lite’
• Crowdsourcing
• Network is valuable
16. 3 possible reactions
1. There is nothing in the pedagogy of abundance
2. We have enough theories just need to recast them
3. None of the existing theories quite captures new tech &
behaviour & new one is required
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cawley/894692611/
17. Open Educational Resources
teaching, learning, and research resources that reside
in the public domain or have been released under an
intellectual property licensethat permits their
free use and re-purposing by others.
Open educational resources include full courses,
course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming
videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials,
or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
(Hewlett Foundation n.d.)
18. OERs & the OER Research Hub
Oerresearchhub.org
19. OER improve student performance/satisfaction
• Educators believe this somewhat, learners more so
• Stronger for related factors, eg confidence, interest,
enthusiasm, experimentation
• Access to resources & ownership important
• “I went from being horrible in AP Biology … and went from a D
66% up to a A 90% so far.”
20. People use OER differently from other online
materials
• Adaptation is high – a continuum of practice
• Majority of educators think open licensing is important,
but only 12% share with CC
• Open licence less important than relevance &
reputation
• Openness as virus
• “It’s given me the desire to share more openly”
21. OER widen participation in education
– Students use OER to trial subjects
– Students use OER to supplement study
– Some use OER as replacement to formal study
– “It has allowed me to develop knowledge easily in
areas that I thought would be difficult to learn due
to the inability to buy an in-depth textbook.”
22. OER use leads educators to reflect on their
practice
• Strong evidence that educators:
• a broader range of teaching and learning methods;
• reflected more on the way that they teach;
• more frequently compare their own teaching with others
• get new ideas for teaching; prepare for teaching; to learn
about new topics; & to supplement lessons
• An under-reported benefit of OER
23. OER adoption brings financial benefits for
students/institutions
• Strong evidence for savings
• Mainly OpenTextbooks, not online OERs
• Continued access to current material more sig?
• “I think that it is highly beneficial to have a brand new
text to use, I would have been forced through
budgetary constraints to purchase other texts which are
5-10 years old”
24. OER Active
OER as facilitator
OER consumer
http://oerresearchhub.org/
engaged with issues around
open education, are aware
of open licenses and are
often advocates for OERs
have some awareness of OERs, or open
licenses, but they have a pragmatic
approach to them. OERs are of secondary
interest to their primary task
use OERs amongst a mix of
other media and often not
differentiate between them.
Awareness of licenses is low
and not a priority
Types of OER usage
https://flic.kr/p/dCB8ne
27. Some numbers
Blog (since
2006) – 500,000
views
Blipfoto - 155,000 views
over800 entries
Citations - 1,620
Slideshare - 250,000
views (7 years, 59
presentations)
Colored dice by sgs 1019:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/visionwi
thin/133942381/
28. Confession
• I don’t know what these numbers mean in
terms of impact!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ransomtech/9555643908/
I don’t know what these numbers mean in terms of impact
35. New routes for impact
2400 visitors
52,000 visitors
= 163 hits/month
= 1000 hits/day
Open Research Online
36. Do we need different skills to compete in an
attention economy?
37. • Video
• Networks
• Data visualisation
• Analytics
• Curation/filtering
• Writing for online
• Liveblogging
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5749192621/
New skills
38. Open scholarship example
Katy doing
MOOC, blogs
final assignment
Picked up by
Phil Hill at
eliterate
Becomes
defacto piece
on completion
rates
Invited to
submit proposal
for funding
Conference &
journal articles
follow
39. Who knows where it will end?
• Keynote invites
• Guardian events
• Book as staff development
• MOOCs
40. Challenges
• Open access is key, not always encouraged
• Takes investment to reach the pay-off
• “It’s not proper!”
• Not much of: stealing ideas, online abuse,
conflict with traditional role
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/5893328472/
41. Tips
• Get started!
• Find your voice/tool
• Give a bit of you
• Be a good networker
• Use a mix
• Don’t overplan
• Be open
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kamranmeyer/9399451939/
43. Perils of Open scholarship
• Trolls
• Job perils
• Promotion
44. “The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with
the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and
getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only
thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable
price.”
A means for tech to
undermine education
46. Lessons from the VLE
Rapid adoption &
mainstreaming
Outsourcing &
sedimentation
47. https://flic.kr/p/dNxyCd
The charges
Systems - privileges a
technology
management mindset
Silos – does not allow
for the benefits of
openness
Missed opportunities –
learners use a system
unlike anything outside
of education
Costs – drain the
financial and also the
human resources,
Confidence – ed techs
are required to manage
the system
(Groom J & Lamb B
(2014) ‘Reclaiming
Innovation’. EDUCAUSE
Review, vol. 49, no. 3
51. Some links:
• Digital Scholarship: bit.ly/digscholar
• Battle for Open book:
http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/det
ail/11/battle-for-open/
• Blog: http://blog.edtechie.net/
• Oerresearchhub.org
Hinweis der Redaktion
So this talk overlaps both books
People get hung up on definitions – when I use digital scholarship it’s really a shorthand for these 3 factors:
Digital content, distributed via global and social network, and mediated through open technologies and practices
We can think of many existing practices as embodying these principles of scarcity
If we have abundant content as our assumption, would our approach change?
Look at some contenders
RBL conceptualises learning as a process which foregrounds the importance of the resources available to learners and in so doing presupposes that the interaction between the learner(s) and the resources (which may include human resources) is the main structuring device of the learning situation
Characteristics of PBL are:Learning is driven by challenging, open-ended problems.Students work in small collaborative groups.Teachers take on the role as "facilitators" of learning
“Social constructivist scholars view learning as an active process where learners should learn to discover principles, concepts and facts for themselves, hence the importance of encouraging guesswork and intuitive thinking in learners (Brown et al.1989; Ackerman 1996). In fact, for the social constructivist, reality is not something that we can discover because it does not pre-exist prior to our social invention of it. Kukla (2000) argues that reality is constructed by our own activities and that people, together as members of a society, invent the properties of the world.”
describes a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession. It is in the process of sharing information and experiences in that group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally
See also situated learning, cognitive apprenticeship
Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
Decision-making is itself a learning process.
Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision
Show biz card
Blog – mainstay – longer posts,
Twitter – networking, connecting, discussing, sharing (two audiences overlap but not same)
Tumblr – there was a gap I hadn’t appreciated, things I never quite got around to blogging, use it as easy blogging, harvesting
(incidentally, would make good eportfolio tool)
2.7 comments per post – so don’t expect high ration of commenters to subscribers
Took good year to get going
Can’t predict what is a popular post
Run through it, (show Friendfeed)
Take Flickr photo
Use blip.fm
And my distribution will be different from others – any one of these could be your main identity, eg YouTube
Find new tools all the time
Also they impact on each other, twitter has changed blogging (lots of blogging was just sharing links, less need to do this now, also lot of discussion takes place in twitter, linking, etc)
Competing in an attention economy, you want stuff to be noticed.
Development of a slideshare style
We’re only at the beginning of this – all of these might be skills the new researcher will need, and which funders will increasingly want evidence for
Conflict with identity – online and institutional
Can be exposed – eg if you’re in climate change, middle eastern politics etc – if unis are encouraging you to be online, what is their responsibility?
Plashing Vole reported that a tabloid threatened to do a story on him because he criticised Govt.
Does it impede promotion, is it rewarded.
Screwed both ways