I switched over from Batfink this morning to see Jon Chase, a student studying an MSc in Communicating Science, rapping about Astrobiology on BBC One. He’s been commissioned by NASA to get the message across that science is cool and he’s more credible in this space (no pun intended) than the CERN scientists. Check it (check it) out:
Love this. I’ve always wanted to do an edu-mix of Mos Def’s Mathematics. I’m a big fan of Native Tongue hip-hop and slam poetry so props given where props are due
There’s been a LOT of discussion about academic quality vs user generated content, the role of the expert vs the power of many great minds thinking alike. So seeing some scientists rapping about a major science experiment has reignited the debate (at least among YouTubers). Is it a good way to engage the public in science (1,759,033 views on YouTube and counting) or is it dumbing down science? Should intellectuals make fools of themselves? Are we more interested in their work if they show us their human side? Or is it just concerning that our future could be in the hands of people with (shock, horror) a sense of humour? Surely mad scientists should stay in the comic books? I think the more serious you are, the more you can get away with it and the more interesting it will be to people – let’s face it the reputation of CERN scientists is not going to be doubted because they go a bit reality TV on us.
Whatever your opinion, there will always be one guy who thinks this is a waste of tax payers money (despite the fact they would have to pay a fortune to get this kind of attention through traditional advertising and part of the point of this is to encourage people to donate some of their computer’s downtime to process the data, so potentially saving money).
Some academics get nervous about the idea of ‘dumbing down’ to communicate what they do to the masses. The Open University create programmes with the BBC that are for the general public and not for our students, so the content has to be easily accessible. Some of our academics are more interested in the material that is cut out in the edit than the final programme. So do we see them turning to YouTube and Seesmic to get their academic ideas across in their own way? Some academics embrace technologies that allow them to get across ideas quickly and with great effect, even if they aren’t polished in production terms but it’s still early days.
Someone once questioned me when I said a blog wasn’t just for communicating to others. Today I’m going to use it as a public scrapbook. I just unsubscribed from a newsletter since it was from a hairdresser in a country that I no longer live in. The likelihood of me crossing the Atlantic to get my hair cut is not altogether out of the question but I’m not going to be persuaded to jump on that flight by their monthly sales pitch. I was prepared to feel some satisfaction at finally getting round to this (I left the US in 2005), but I liked their reaction to my rejection of them so much I almost re-subscribed.
This inspired me to wonder how we might improve the How To Guides on OpenLearn (which frankly isn’t the biggest challenge I’ve ever set myself) and YouTube kindly suggested to me that I might like this. Which I did. I might contact the producers CommonCraft since they “make complex ideas easy to understand using short, simple videos”. BINGO. Hmmm… University for Dummies might not quite work as a title…
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.
Yeah, groovy baby. The most dramatic things always happen when I’m on leave. Like yesterday when a link from Digg sent over 11,000 people to the LearningSpace and got 908 diggs and 54 comments. The conversation ranged from accusations that the link was spam – instead of finding the free study units on OpenLearn the user must have found their way to the paid-for courses The Open University offers. Then the usual comments of ‘what is the point of this unless you can get a degree for free?” and the misunderstandings about what The Open University/OpenLearn is. And some complaints about the site being down (database issue, not the volume of traffic so says the tech team). Also, thankfully, our fans bigging up the OU. Special thanks must go to the person who raised a smile with: “I can now partake in the crucible of knowledge without having to put on my pants and briefs.”
And will someone write an app that takes three pieces of data – where a blogger is based geographically, what the weather is like at that location and how many posts they make – and reveal them to me in a way that means I can feel less guilty about spending a day in my garden instead of at my desk. Frankly the blog will suffer if we get anymore good weather here.
Judy Breck has been writing a blog for several months which has just come onto my radar in that “surely I should have known about this before?” way. Shame on me, but you’re only as good as the networks you’re in – and keep track of (thanks Brown for the tip-off on this one. )
So Learnodes is a blog that takes OERs at micro level and makes blog posts from them. I hear you saying, hasn’t this been done before? In the past people have pulled OpenLearn content into WordPress. The Learnodes approach takes small chunks of content from across many OER providers and provides these as regular blog posts. They act as a tease to go and find out more – an open learning node a day keeps the loony bin at bay. The posts drive “pedagogical traffic” to OER sites and help to raise awareness of OER’s. It’s similar to what I started out doing on the OpenLearn MySpace blog but gave up due to the time it took to nurture…
I love what Judy says on the site:
Nodes of what is to be learned must connect for emergent learning to occur. That is why education resources closed off by having to be paid for and/or locked behind ivy walls will soon wither. The new learning of the 21st century is connective and emergent. Educational resources that are not open to participate in these processes do not participate in the openness of the global knowledge commons.
Judith gives advice on how others could do the same, encouraging academics to create blogs of subject specific OER’s, pointing their students to quality resources to increase their utilisation and so hopefully keeping them free and open.
There are links to OpenLearn materials on the site which is good to see… LearnOUdes anyone?
Yahoo are about to announce support for a number of semantic web standards, like RDF and mcioformats, so says TechCrunch… So search is about to get a bit more clever and a bit more useful. Except at OpenLearn where we have been managing with a pretty basic and often unhelpful search facility for some time, inspiring others to do it better. Work in progress, my friends.
I’ve just been in a Google webinar and discovered there is a newly launched benchmarking service, discussed on the Google Analytics blog. If you share your data anonymously, you’ll be able to benchmark it against other industry verticals. Being able to set targets for OpenLearn was difficult when we started out. We had some great data from MIT to go on, and of course our traffic figures to other OU sites, plus predictions we could make based on planned communications activity, but there are a lot of factors to take into account when comparing results. I suspect many of the OER sites are using different software to collate data and different software gives different results. For a number of reasons, on OpenLearn we use three different packages to collect data and they all give different figures!
So I wonder whether we can use this service to share OER data and create benchmarks? The analysis and conversation around this data is still important, but perhaps data sharing in this way would help generate debate. This is happening in OER research and evaluation circles, but I’m thinking of something that could be shared more widely and easily than several annual reports. See my lonely comment in the OCWC forum on Comparing success of OERs.
I’m not sure if you select an industry vertical from a set list or whether you can specify the vertical but I suspect Google provides a list. So perhaps we won’t be able to compare OER data but data from educational sites. I would take a look but I got to this screen and got scared…
I know its all anonymous and protected by Google but while I advocate the sharing (and mashing up of data) I have been indoctrinated to feel fear… I am visualising the headlines if the data was exploited or the faces of the people on the ‘Ethics Committee’ (who I’ve never met but are made to sound formidable by university researchers). So I didn’t press the button.
Maybe Google will start encouraging people by saying ‘So and So’s data is in here’, even if they don’t match up the provider with the exact data.
I’ve come across a lot of articles recently about cleaning up your online reputation. There are companies like the heroically named Reputation Defender who are being paid by clients to do some search engine trickery, essentially optimising their good press to get it returned higher than their bad press. It can be difficult to sue for libel online, and anyway the damage has already been done, so famous people and brands are paying between $4-10,000 a month for their virtual dry cleaning. I wonder if Dr Ziggy Macdonald, responsible for the review of 24 hour licensing laws in the UK, will be cleaning up his Facebook profile after newspapers revealed he ‘enjoys Manhattan cocktails’ (SHOCK, HORROR! Wouldn’t it be more concerning if he was a tea totaller?).
I think a lot about the importance of online attention and reputation for academics (The OU Cellar Bar YouTube video will be out soon ) and am interested in how some are creating their online personas.
The Open University’s Grainne Conole has written today on her experience of being both a teacher and a learner at the OU. Interesting comments, given how in the online world we strive to understand our ‘users’. Often we do this best if we share their experiences. From Grainne’s Tweats today I get the feeling she has posted this with a certain amount of trepidation… don’t worry, Grainne, if it raises a few too many eyebrows, there’s always the dry cleaners
Battery power was a bit of a problem (note to self to take extension leads to conferences) so following blogs are all a bit out of order but come from notes taken at FOWA Miami.
@BarCamp
Interesting discussion on how much support to give your users. Acknowledged that you have to calculate your customer acquisition cost and the lifetime value of the customer and set your support levels accordingly. Analyze your support costs and reduce support on free services. Give more features on an advanced version that people will choose to pay more for. But do handhold all customers. So when they sign up to your service send them several email newsletters in the first month – getting less frequent throughout the month – and suggest things they might like to do to get deeper into the product’s features as they get more comfortable with the basics. Use questions from your FAQ’s in these emails to provide answers to problems commonly found by your users when learning the product. Preview things that can extend the service for them at a cost – “If you like this, you might like to register for this service because…”. Offer upgrades at appropriate points for conversion. Good support enables your user to move from a freemium to a premium service user – if they don’t get past the basics of a complex process, they won’t want any extra services later. They referred to the Get satisfaction company and ClixConnect who they use for outsourced support. Make it easy for your customer to leave and encourage paying customers who leave to continue using your free service.
“Customer service” has been an issue on OpenLearn since the beginning mainly due to it being an externally funded pilot that couldn’t be embedded into the support processes of the University before we learnt some lessons and also due to concerns about financially sustaining support for a free service past the pilot. There was also some concern that we wouldn’t really be able to research what independent and informal learners do, if we were providing the support our registered students get (and pay for).
What we have done is QuickStart guides and FAQ’s but these are not as well crafted as they might be because support was always an add-on to the project spec and not considered from the outset when the budget was set.
This also sets out some lessons for conversion that we have understood and discussed but again due to the pilot nature of the project, the idea of conversion of informal learners and adding ‘extension’ services using a micro payment system to monetize OER’s have not developed very far. As we embed OER’s into our mainstream production processes, we must also embed OERs into our marketing and support systems to guarantee success.
) and am interested in how some are creating their online personas. 