Doing a bit of thinking about passion communities in education after attending some talks on astronomy at the OU. I was sat next to an ‘astronomy widow’ – the wife of the speaker. As she travelled round the UK listening to him give talks, she met a lot of the astronomy community and so I chatted to her about the stereotypes, the mix of people and how informed they were. For her husband, site owner of http://unmannedspaceflight.com/ and space exploration junkie Doug Ellison, astromony was a hobby not a profession. He did a very convincing impression of being an expert. From my own experiences I’ve seen passion communities in local history and family history. But I wonder what other academic passion communities are out there?
I missed this presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo but it gave a few interesting examples.
TogetherLearn is in beta and while I haven’t got through the door it is looking interesting from the doormat. A “turn-key platform where knowledge workers can collaborate” it’s all about self service learning. Other buzz words include open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, and responsive. This is the brainchild of some pretty brainy people – Jay Cross, the man who coined the term ‘elearning’ and thinks blended learning is bull****, Jane Hart, social media and learning consultant, Clark Quinn, a cognitive design expert and Harold Jarche a consultant in Enterprise 2.0.
Jay advocates informal learning as the most effective form of learning and knowledge sharing. In a recent article ‘Informal learning is the future‘ he explains why they are charging for TogetherLearn – a radical concept in a world of free services and freemium business models.
“We had thought about giving this away but this means that business wouldn’t take it seriously. We spend three days with the user of this service to make sure it is properly supported with community champions and make sure it is kept alive. That is vital to make online learning communities work well.”
The mention of community champions suggests that providing support is critical to a ‘bottom-up’ informal learning platform, yet this isn’t the traditional support provided by tutors in an educational system. Jay says the role of the teacher is changing and the days of the ’sage on the stage’ are numbered. This is something that people working in Open Educational Resources have been musing on for some time, with The Open University’s Giselle Ferreira talking at Online Educa Berlin last week on Who Needs Teachers Anyway?. How is a world of free quality educational content and tools changing the role of the teacher?
Universities are increasingly opening up access to their course materials, but consider their teaching staff part of the premium service that paying ‘customers’ get access to. If access to education is going to become truely democratic and transformative, do technologies need to replicate the sense making and motivation a teacher provides to their students? Can they? (I’m thinking of an app that can replicate my favourite history teacher standing on a chair playing the role of Cromwell while a Blackadder video plays in the background).
Can communities provide volunteer mentors? Who is the mentor, the coach, the trainer, the teacher and the tutor? (I feel a joke or a Christmas carol coming on… three tutors marking, four forums facilitated, five gold stars).
There are numerous websites out there that are reliant on the tutor-student relationship. P2P University is about to launch in order to fill some of the support gaps that exist in use of Open Educational Resources, with some interesting approaches to payment and mentors. Beanbag Learning helps parents find tutors for their children. School of Everything is opening minds to the idea we all have something to teach and something to learn, a nod to the shift in hierarchy between student and teacher that is happening in a technology enabled world.
If it is generally accepted that tutors have a role, but that role is changing, what does it look like? In the future will we select teachers by their Teacherati rating? What skills will a teacher need to rise to the top of the search engines? Will learners best construct courses from a variety of freely available content and tools? Will our degrees be granted by an individual expert, cutting out the university as a middleman institution? And what can we learn from teacherpreneurs?
Ummm… maybe the answer is out there in a community forum? Or do I need an expert?
The Register article about plagiarism this week has fuelled a lot of discussion – 58 comments on the original article as I type. The OU student in question found that one of the papers used in the course included plagiarised content. The paper had come from the trusted IEEE journal who then looked into the complaint as reported here.
It’s no surprise that this issue has fuelled debate. If it wasn’t a Friday at 6pm I might write a longer post about the privileged position journals hold in academia and the Open Access movement but I’m sure someone else has already written it better than I.
The thing that most sprung to mind in relation to open content was that if you want to access the paper in question online you need to pay $29. However, the papers that the author let’s say, ‘drew on’, for his work are freely available. It’s very likely that if an informal learner was directing his own learning, relying on freely available work on the internet and judging the quality of the resource on how many times it had been socially bookmarked or rated by other people, the student may have found a better resource to work from than the one offered in the university course. If the course team had used these methods instead of relying on the journal, they might have chosen a different resource (speculation on my part I should add as I have nothing to do with course development at the OU). This is not to say the OU course is questionable. I should stress that the OU produces excellent results and satisfaction levels from its students. But it does raise issues of trust for both students and academics.
This may be an isolated case – I have no idea. But if it’s not, are there disgruntled students out there who are losing trust in the institutions that feed them knowledge? Are they instead using the power of ‘collective intelligence’ online to create their own learning journeys around the web? Will students continue to see academics/librarians as the trusted gatekeepers and signposters of knowledge? And will academics continue to place their trust in journal editors?
Everyone who I’m following since BathCamp this weekend seems to be tired. It was a really packed day on Saturday and many thanks to the organisers, especially Mike Ellis and jukesie for the beer bath.
One of the highlights for me was Brian Kelly’s talk on Web 2.0 – Just Do It? So refreshing to have someone stick a question mark on the end of that. Brian is an expert in using Web 2.0 in HE. He recognises that we need to move from advocacy to getting this stuff embedded within professional practice with the emphasis on the word ‘professional’.
Start-ups (like ice-skaters) make what they do look easy and that creates a misplaced envy in more staid workplaces such as universities. In my experience, innovators and early adopters in universities also tend to be anti-establishment, anti-marketing and anti-business (not all, but many). There is an increased likelihood that they take the ‘build it and they will come’ attitude (helped by the fact they haven’t remortgaged their house to build it in the first place so does it really matter if they don’t come?).
Start-ups may make it look easy (its all those beanbags and pizza) but the people working for them are working long hours (translate ‘beanbags’ to ‘bed’ and ‘pizza’ to ‘dinner at your desk’) and are incredibly good at what they do. They are often people who’ve learnt from mistakes made during the dot com boom and bust. In HE I still experience ‘throw it over the wall’ management and a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude with the emphasis on ‘Just Do It’ than ‘Do It Well’. So while I think ‘Just Do It’ has it’s [essential] time and place, I also want HE to grow up and do these things well, if not better than everyone else, given the huge resources available to it for innovation.
And congratulations to vblogger of the month, Casey Leaver, for getting the most views in the video blog series on “What YouTube taught me” for Getting abreast of your health.
Wonder why videos with sperm and breasts in the title got the most attention?
More genius YouTube clips come from The University of Nottingham with their Periodic table of Chemistry videos.
Also thanks to twittervlog for his interactive hyper-videoblog story which is a fantastic use of annotation in YouTube. Help him decide whether to work or make a cup of tea – very addictive.
OU guru Robin Mason, Professor of Educational Technology, has been interviewed on how social software in higher education could change the ways teachers and learners interact. Read her words of wisdom…
Wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, microblogging, discussion forums, literacy over tools…
I’ve just seen Howard Rheingold’s vblog on the Social Media Classroom/ Co-Laboratory which is one to watch. There are so many social media/learning sites launching every week at the moment, but Howard isn’t bad at what he does IMHO so looking forward to having a tinker.
Yes, we have launched it: OUView. It’s been a bit of a hard graft these last few days but we have a site and some content. Just waiting for the friends, subscribers, comments, outrage from senior management, applause, fans and fame now. For those of you who want to get straight to it see: www.youtube.com/ou. Learning materials are at: www.youtube.com/oulearn. Community stuff is at: www.youtube.com/oulife (watch this space a bit more here as the idea of launching a community space is that our community get involved, but you do get some vblogs from OU folks talking about what they’ve learnt in YouTube and some Big Brother style student vblogs from the Graduation video booth.)
My favourite clip is still uploading as I type so here’s my second favourite.
To those who want a deep and full understanding of what we are doing, read on… or if you are OU staff check out the online services intranet site. Back last year sometime Cathy Casserly suggested we talk to Google/YouTube about getting a bit more professional with our YouTube presence. For the last year or so YouTube have been working with a number of universities to get educational video online. So (after checking a few strategy documents and rereading our mission statement to check we could have some legitimate fun) we got in touch and they gave us a free branded channel, because as Google always say making the web a more useful place is good for business.
And we are, to steal a Hirst phrase, very OUseful. Not only do we have a long standing relationship with the BBC making educational programmes, but we also create tons of video for our distance learning materials. Here’s a fact for you… At the OU library in Milton Keynes, the archive of scripts for the tens of thousands of OU course-related programmes ever made measures 92 metres, the length of a football pitch. On top of that our students and staff often use video conferencing to contact each other since they are all over the Uk and some in other parts of the world. So we’ve been fondly known for many years as the “University of the Air”. But then came the Interweb and IPTV, narrow casting, web streaming and power to the people producers… so new opportunities.
There are tons of video sites now from Seesmic for conversation, to Qik for live streaming and many like The Big Think and TED which have an educational focus. So why YouTube? Well it’s a good place to start – according to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube is the 6th largest internet destination. So reaching more people and opening up access to education should be within our grasp.
Oh and if you have any suggestions for new straplines for the YouTube banner (where it says Watch and learn) please comment them here… we aim to change this regularly. Otherwise, visit us, add us, comment on us, subscribe to us and tell the world how ace we are. For me. Pretty please. I am tired and I want to go home.
My friend Jose from thinkjose.com just started a thread on seesmic.com from the MIT Enterprise Forum Entrepreneurs Organisation Entrepreneurial Masters Programme (pause for breath) on ‘What would you tell 60 entrepreneurs about new media’. This guy gave a response that I wasn’t expecting but that makes sense in our Just Do It world.
OU Corporate & Employer Services have recently released a Fact of the Day iGoogle widget. Add it to your iGoogle homepage and benefit from a snippet of knowledge and a link to an OpenLearn study unit every day. Employers love bite-sized learning that their employees can do on the job. Its a good way to keep people aware of what knowledge is available to them on OpenLearn as well as providing those all important small talk facts for business lunches. Did you know..? Soon, everyone, everywhere will be small talking about OpenLearn… there are already a few hundred people using it.
One satisfied, albeit anonymous user states:
It’s really a free course of the day! Really liked this – rather than just a fact you can go on and learn about the topic for free (downloadable courses, materials etc.). The Open University has a very good reputation for quality content so fair play for releasing this – thanks!
Once again the Hirst proves to be a pioneer having launched OpenLearn daily back in the day. This offers daily chunks of learning rather than a daily fact but a similar idea.
