At The Open University we use open source technologies in projects that can be replicated by schools, colleges and other universities. Teachers can – and do – take our university course content, change it and use it freely with their students, republish their changes online and share their expertise beyond their classroom with an online global community of millions. When we launched the OpenLearn website back in 2006 to enable this, we chose to use the open source virtual learning environment, Moodle. Of the teachers reading this, I predict half stopped reading at the word Moodle if not before. Teachers either love or hate Moodle, and indeed technology.
For those of us who spend every day at a computer screen, it is easy to forget that not all professions are ruled by email, Twitter and Google. I try to remember this every time a teacher friend of mine insists that “The Interweb is broken” when she has a problem accessing a website. Yet there is a growing army of ‘teacherpreneurs’ who are recognising the impact of technology on their teaching practise and their students. You’ll find them in networks like Classroom 2.0, on Teacher Tube and the Ning group Web 2.0 for teachers . These ‘teacherpreneurs’ often recognise change in the way their students learn because of their access to technology. Critically, they are excited by it.
Michael Wesch is one of those academics to recognise a fundamental shift in the way people are learning. Students no longer study in a world of structure and scarcity, but in a messy and rich world of information, interaction and choice. His video “A vision of students today”, gives an insight into how this influences university students’ attitudes to education, engagement and (heck) the world. The video has inspired over 8000 comments on the impact digital technology is having on human psychology.
The Generation Y – or Net Generation – students in the video are able to articulate the change that the internet has brought about. Anyone below the age of 8 – most children in primary education – are much more likely to see the internet as something the world comes with. It is no more radical to them than landline telephones are to the rest of us, but does mean they are likely to grow up with radically different attitudes and expectations. Some of these are explored in a take-off of the Wesch video, A Vision of K-12 Students Today.
So what does this mean for teaching? One thing is sure. To both meet and usefully challenge the expectations of the next generation, we’ll need teachers to want to get past the first paragraph of this post. The Open University is looking into what higher education must do to prepare itself – taking lessons from open source software and communities. Backstage’s Open Lab project will support the ideas of imaginative teachers who may have no technical knowledge but have a curiosity about what technology can enable. And ‘teacherpreneurs’ are shaping the future of learning in their use of Web 2.0 technologies to collaborate and create. We’re on our way and it’s an exciting, if somewhat tangled route ahead.
I went to Open Everything in London yesterday, an event to discuss everything about openness, participation and self-organisation from open technology, media, education, workplace design, philanthropy, public policy and politics.
Glyn Moody’s talk was called ‘Openness: An Idea whose time has come?’ He put forth the case that the world started open, became enclosed (land, intellectual property etc) and is now perhaps shifting back towards an open state where we understand that true growth and innovation comes from being able to build things collaboratively and openly based on what has gone before. Resource: Brian Martin’s Against Intellectual Property
Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation gave a talk on the Value of Openness which gave some great economic examples. Hopefully the presentation will be up soon. He also talked about the Dictator and the Anarchist in relation to how many community projects need a benevolent dictator to achieve anything. The definition of open in this case seemed to be the freedom to take all the information and leave if you didn’t share the views of the dictator.
Charles Leadbeater talked about the comments on his YouTube video promoting his new book We Think. People are split between being inspired by a utopian vision and needing to know how this all works in the real world where we need to pay the bills. If concepts such as communities = mass innovation, “we think therefore we are” and “you are what you share” are becoming more common, then what about issues of quality, skills and trade? Not everything can or should be open (open digestive system anyone?). Even though something is open, it doesn’t mean everyone can use it – they may be constrained by lack of prior knowledge for example. But perhaps we should aim for open knowledge, access, communication and decision making.
Some companies are embracing an ‘Open In’ attitude like the Dell IdeaStorm, designed to crowdsource customer ideas to help improve their business as opposed to ‘Open Out’ companies like Wikipedia who use technology to enable people to help each other. I don’t think what they are doing is so different but their motivations for embracing openness are certainly different. Some people view openness as a cause, almost a religion, where as others see it as a function, perhaps to improve efficiency.
Openness was defined as the capacity to use the freedom available to you (freedom of speech, movement, knowledge, skills, the freedom to leave/ ability to fork a project). There was general agreement that openness was only important if it led to action and enabled something of value. Do we know why people want knowledge? What do they do with it that changes their lives and society? Sometimes openness might prevent things of value happening, so new processes and possibly a new social capitalism needs to be developed if we are to understand how to get the best from open approaches. We also need to accept the limitations – an open approach doesn’t mean that barriers like time, energy and attention disappear even if technology does enable people to do many things quicker and better. And well intentioned projects can fail their users and lead to cynicism. One comment about the No 10 petition site was “We petition, you ignore us”.
The Brave New Collaboration project has been interviewing people about emerging forms of online collaboration towards common goals. Combined with Social Source Commons, a site whose community provides links to toolkits for acheiving certain goals, you can see how the web is becoming useful to people in ways that they define. When the web is useful it is easier to see social/academic/financial credit as a bonus of action, not the purpose. And sometimes to make it useful, you have to take every possibility and narrow these down into acheiveable goals. PledgeBank tells its user to “keep their ambitions modest”. Tom Steinberg from mysociety said “If you can’t say how it helps someone in 10 words, then you probably can’t say how it helps someone in any number of words”. Reduce your elevator pitches, people.
The event generated a lot more thoughts that will no doubt filter through in posts over the coming weeks.
EDUCAUSE – “a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology” has recently announced the formation of a new Constituent Group on Openness. Anyone can join the community of practice to discuss how distributed models based on openness are challenging higher education’s traditional approaches. Topics include free and open source software, open content, open educational resources, open courseware, open standards, and management practices such as agile methods open business and enterprise 2.0.
A recent discussion on a UNESCO mailing list focussed on the concept of open – what does it mean? The UNESCO OER community started to collate a variety of meanings for the concept of Openness:
Creating proper channels to access information.
Classifying information with universal standards so they can be found through search.
Transparency.
Open to permanent changes within disruptive environments.
Open to changing roles beyond the one of teacher and student.
Open to give away a certain degree of power and control.
Inclusive – the educational commons.
The freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it.
The freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it.
The freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression.
The freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh’s cooking pots. This paper argues, there is a very tangible market dynamics to the free economy of the Internet, and rational economic decisions are at work. This is the “cooking-pot” market: an implicit barter economy with assymetric transactions. See also this presentation.
Some interesting questions were raised about whether all these criteria would need to be met for work to be considered truely open.
It is useful to see these different types of “openness” being explicitly listed. This makes me wonder if a system can be considered open if only some of these are true or do all of them have to be true?
For example, if commercial software was used to produce a system that was gratis, interoperable and exposed resources with freedom of use would that not be considered open?
Or if a system satisfied all these conditions but did not allow derivatives to be created would that be open?
The OLCOS roadmap 2007 suggests that for now many initiatives considered as Open may not meet all of the criteria.
“When defining Open Educational Resources (OER) one discovers that an authoritatively accredited definition does not yet exist. However, experts who understand OER as a means of leveraging educational practices and outcomes will propose definitions of OER based on the following core attributes:
that access to open content (including metadata) is provided free of
charge for educational institutions, content services, and the end-users such as teachers, students and lifelong learners;
that the content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational
activities, favourably free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content; consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed;
that for educational systems/tools software is used for which the
source code is available (i.e. Open Source software) and that there are open Application Programming Interfaces (open APIs) and authorisations to re-use Web-based services as well as resources (e.g. for educational content RSS feeds).
It was recognised that many educational resources developed in the spirit of open access/ open content don’t meet these demanding criteria but remain educationally relevant. But then can a real culture change happen in education without demanding criteria being set?
I was speaking to chief strategist Alberto at UnLtdWorld today about the upcoming release of their API for the ResearchLab. The Lab currently gives a pretty static view on their members data showing the interests, locations and services of the social entrepreneurs in their network but it’s about to get better.
UnLtdWorld say:
The UnLtdWorld Research Lab is the world’s first dynamic mapping and graphing of social entrepreneurship, and of social and environmental issues. The Research Lab will also operate as an open platform allowing any individual or organisation to access and use the metadata for external projects, and for partners to inform targeted applications that interact with relevant segments of the network, both on UnLtdWorld and beyond.
Alberto has been concentrating on data visualisation and making the data open for mash-ups so, for example, it’s easy to see the effect of project work on social issues in a particular location.
Cal’s talk went down a storm with everyone talking about it the next day – very funny guy and naturally he used loads of great images in his presentations. My favourite aprt from the robots was the guy holding a fish – supposed to illustrate ‘Release management’
Some of my favourite lines: “Flickr’s feature request list is kitten driven.” “Customers are only known as ‘users’ to web developers and drug pushers.” “Wikis are where you put all your shared crap when you don’t work in the same office and so can’t write it on a whiteboard”. “Robots – use them before they use you”.
The developers spend about ½ day a week working on tools to make the other 4.5 days of the week more efficient (I don’t believe any of the innovators here work only 5 days a week – these are pizza at 2am guys).
Cal talks about the importance of continuous production with short deploy cycles – you’ll have to see the image to see how Cal managed to make this the talking point of the conference. Carsonfied, the organisers of the conference are giving the ‘conference in a box’ away for free (which makes me love them more than I already did) so watch this space… or theirspace.
They use RRD (Round Robin database) and Ganglia – a scalable monitoring system.
Kevin starts with a useful slide of the launch dates of many social sites. Email is dead to young people – they only use it to “talk to the man”. Web is oxygen to kids, they talk to friends through apps and use handlers or URL’s as their digital ID rather than email addresses. The Social Graph API indexes websites that are people and shows the relationships between people. Supports open XFN and FOAF standards and is the work of a Google crawler.
Kevin shows a map of online communities, with countries of the world as web apps. There is a move from “everyone comes to me” to “I go to where everyone else is”.
If you are building a website collect personal data using the fields that are most commonly collected across social sites to enable better indexing in the social cloud. Or use OpenID. Both OpenID and developing apps that sit inside other people’s sites should prevent the fall off many sites get at the point of registration since the user has already supplied the data. As the user can manage their data from a single point it should also mean that data is maintained and so communicating with users becomes less problematic.
Kevin shows a social cloud that includes someone working on an OU project. This pings off an idea in my head – I wonder if anyone has created the early adopter app, based on the date people joined up to various services. This would be a badge that a lot of people would want to wear on their digital identities.
He tells the story of the Live Journal founder who wrote a programme to find people that were on his friends lists but not on his, just to find it return a list of all his ex girlfriends! The story illustrates the facts that simple connections between people can’t yet represent the depth of the real-world relationship. Working out who you can trust is a big part of what are brains are trained to do, so trust is essential in online relationships. Yet who we trust may be different between the online and offline worlds. For example, he may trust his Mum/Mom in the real world but not in the online world since she doesn’t know what a chain spam mail looks like.
The Social Cloud will expose your multiple online personas, so tagging identities with personal and professional metadata will be even more important. You should also be careful not to link between identities that you want to keep separate or use the same login data. Some argue that the Social Cloud will make everything transparent and we will have to give up more control and accept there is nowhere to hide. Some sites are starting to remove ‘search by email address’ options from their sites as it is not great for user privacy and tinkerers have also found that keeping private projects out of the search engines can be a problem.
Google say they have developed the Social Cloud app to make the web better. The better it is, the more users they will have. In a way this is similar to the opencourseware movement – preparing students and practitioners for social learning and encouraging richer educational experiences to develop.
Elonex are about to launch a £99 laptop that uses Linux. I had some problems with the way the $100 laptop had been marketed (although hey it’s £50 cheaper at the current exchange rate!) so I had to smile when I read this has been called The One. “It’s The One for me”, “At last… I’ve been searching for The One all my life”. I got excited about the USB wristband – tough and durable and perfect for kids who lose everything (and Communications Managers who waste at least ten minutes a day searching handbag for USB key). Surely this is something that should adorn my fashion forward wrist? Alas not if it looks like this one. Anyone seen the new wristband, presumably designed to get props (yes I really am down with the kids)? They are only a tenner so if they pass the fashion police, I might even get some logo-ed up for OpenLearn.
Donald Clark of blog Plan B has recently condemned OpenLearn as an expensive document store, saying that it isn’t great e-learning. Borrowing from a favourite phrase of our former technical director – who knew? I’m scratching my head to think where Donald got the idea we were supposed to be delivering e-learning. Certainly wasn’t from anything we’ve said. Donald – if you had accepted the launch invite I would have told you that isn’t what the project is about.
Anyone who knows anything about elearning – and probably many who don’t know a thing – know that OpenLearn isn’t well crafted elearning. Anyone who’s worked in elearning (see me on LinkedIn folks) knows it takes a lot more money than we’ve spent on the content production to create over 12,000 learning hours of elearning content.
Donald’s posting reveals the the common misconception that the Open University is an online university and we can just switch a button to make our materials open to the world. It’s something we are moving closer toward with our VLE for registered students but we aren’t there yet. We won’t be until the day elearning and access to the internet have developed enough for it to be the major mode of delivery for our courses.
Colleagues at the OU in The Problem with OpenLearn and Martin Weller In defence of openlearn have been quicker than me to respond to this, but have responded in detail so I will try not to be repetitive. Having said that, I have I few things to say so forgive me for the text heavy blog (guilty as charged).
In an ideal world (maybe in our OpenLearn SecondLife ) we would have crafted elearning materials from scratch. Instead we chose to publish standalone segments of content from the courses we offer our registered students. These had already been authored, tested and quality assured, saving us costs in these areas and allowing us to move towards sustaining the production of open educational resources in the future (by making them part of our normal course production processes). As we move towards more digitised course delivery we are likely to demonstrate our elearning capabilities to the outside world, but at the moment, the OU is not prodominently an elearning university.
To take the example Donald gave, ‘Brighton Pavilion’ on OpenLearn is not a course but a study unit. This means it is a section of a course developed for our registered students, selected by the academic team as suitable as a standalone study unit for ‘open’ learners. We’ve developed criteria to help our academics select materials for an ‘open’ audience. It is clear that we cannot include uses of proprietary software, third party materials that are too expensive to clear for public use and material that could be dangerous if used without supervision (such as the experiments we have traditionally undertaken in our Chemistry summer schools). There is no doubt that the experience of studying at The Open University as a registered student and studying using OpenLearn materials is very different, and is one of the things we are trying to understand (formal vs informal learners). While OpenLearn units must be structured learning experiences in their own right, including learning outcomes, we recognised from the beginning they couldn’t compare to the supported open learning experience our registered students enjoy. But again, they weren’t meant to be.
So what is OpenLearn meant to be? Many have said a radical and brave move towards equalising access to educational materials for all. With that aim in mind we’ve given priority to the amount of content and the freedom for it to be used and reused in a number of different platforms. With 8 download formats, a Creative Commons license and almost 12,000 learning hours of content online, we’ve come a long way from where we started in 2006.
It was also meant to help the world understand better how learners form informal learning communities, providing peer support and sense making collaboratively – hence the tools which aren’t ‘on top’ but closely related to the content so learners and educators can publish their own learning in video or knowledge mapping formats and connect with others studying the same material online. It’s not about executing elearning as we know how best to do it now, but investigating new models for teaching and learning that might give us all an insight to how people learn in the future.
Rather than being ‘the UK’s answer to MIT’s OpenCourseWare’ we’re a ’second generation’ OER website that offers study materials designed for distance learning, alongside a range of peer support and sensemaking tools, integrated into an open source virtual learning environment – a pretty big attempt to do something different than what has gone before.
The materials are delivered online to extend the reach of our materials to the widest audience possible, not necessarily intended for online study (the print button came a little late but it’s there). The materials are published under a Creative Commons license for people to take away, amend and use on or offline as best fits their purpose. The purpose of spending a large amount of the budget on clearing the rights for the material to be used in this way, means that educators can do what they want with it – including using chunks of content within their own crafted elearning modules.
So I hope Donald demonstrates the best of elearning and the best of OpenLearn by taking our materials, creating some elearning and sharing that for free with the world. Go on D, I dare ya. I’ll be down in Brighton this week and next if you want to chat in person and that is an invitation you really shouldn’t refuse
In between putting up banners and welcoming the first guests at reception, I thought I should write a quick blog… (ok I’m going to copy and paste from my press article because registration opens today and it’s a little bit hectic)…
(Q: Do I have to use quotation marks if I’m quoting myself? Jo help!)… A year since the launch of OpenLearn, The Open University are hosting a conference to share research in the area of open educational resources. OpenLearn 2007: researching open content in education opens today and welcomes 150 researchers from around the world. Focussing on the research agenda, sustainability, user experience and software and tools, over 30 presentations will be given during the 2 day conference. Keynote speeches will be given by John Seeley Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Dr Cathy Casserly of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Research panels focus on Opening Up Education: Removing Barriers, Fostering Participation, and Promoting Sustainability and The future of open content. Papers include Embracing Web2.0: Online Video – Beyond Entertainment, From Africa through Germany to the UK and back again: the potential of Open Educational resources, Feeding From OpenLearn – Exploring the Potential of OpenLearn RSS Feeds, Learning about learning in Wikiversity through action research and Video conferencing in open learning. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education.
Conference papers have been made publicly available and live blogging will be aggregated and published at the OCHRE blog. A webcast of John Seeley Brown’s keynote speech will be available following the conference along with audio recordings (if we can get good enough quality from our variety of mp3 recorders!).
) we would have crafted elearning materials from scratch. Instead we chose to publish standalone segments of content from the courses we offer our registered students. These had already been authored, tested and quality assured, saving us costs in these areas and allowing us to move towards sustaining the production of open educational resources in the future (by making them part of our normal course production processes). As we move towards more digitised course delivery we are likely to demonstrate our elearning capabilities to the outside world, but at the moment, the OU is not prodominently an elearning university. 
