Launched on 2 June, the exhibition is a six month touring exhibition by Scotland’s universities and forms an important part of the Homecoming Scotland events programme which celebrates Scotland’s great contributions to the world. OpenLearn is one of 40 innovations captured by award winning Sunday Herald photographer Kirsty Anderson, under the title “Tomorrow: We will have free access to world-class learning”.
The accompanying text states:
The Open University is the first UK University to provide free access to course materials with the launch of OpenLearn, an open educational resources website. Featuring written, video and audio resources, OpenLearn offers a full range of subject areas, from access courses to postgraduate study, with over 5,400 learning hours of content available online. Now, in harmony with Homecoming Scotland 2009, The Open University has developed OpenLearn Scotland, a new collection of free online learning resources designed specifically for Scotland. This innovative programme offers an interactive learning facility which aims to take Scottish society, culture and history to the wider world.
The Open University features twice in the exhibition, also getting a mention for its dedication to provide high quality educational video and audio content from its courses on iTunes U.
Details of the exhibition and all the images can be found on the where tomorrow begins website.
An odd title for a blog that promotes free access to content but the issue of sustainability is ever more urgent. For years people have been trying to work out how to make money off the back of free access to digital content and services. A global credit crunch may be a good time to admit defeat and say if we haven’t found a solution yet, we probably won’t in the next five years. Obituaries are being written for the death of the freemium model, no longer to be bank rolled by rich VC’s. But it’s hardly a good time to tell the consumer that you’re going to start charging for things you’ve previously given away for free. They might nod in sympathy but they won’t pay. We could all rely on getting a cut of advertising monies that are going largely to online (scaring the hell out of TV and print people) but doesn’t most ad budget online go to Google? The rest of us might get enough so the bailiff can have milk in his tea when he calls.
Working business models seem to be few and far between or secrets of success not to be shared. In a recent conference I attended a panel session on monetising media. One of the speakers later asked me what I thought. I had to admit I’d heard nothing new. He thought for a second and replied that, yes, indeed he should have shared some examples about what worked because there were plenty out there. Then he exited left.
So it’s good to see that in these times of financial crisis there is still support for innovation. The current climate will certainly provide the necessary focus.
The Technology Strategy Board currently has £5 million to give to UK based companies and research organisations to develop applications or tools which help rights holders commercially exploit digital content. Expressions of interest need to be in one month from now on the 23rd April so if you are interested check out Accessing and Commercialising Content in a Digitally Networked World.
The Technology Strategy Board are interested in:
Development of new business models, business processes, consumer experiences and approaches to deriving commercial benefit from IP.
Applications that make it easier for rights holders to efficiently and effectively collect revenue from their content/services.
Solutions to broaden the market access of digital content services; this could include the development of new platforms designed to deliver scale to small businesses, or solutions to support multiplatform distribution of content based services.
Applications to help provide intelligent access to context relevant content, e.g. driven by individual consumer behaviours, habits, preferences or device selection.
Development of intuitive tools and applications to increase participation and extend democratisation of the Web for generating and interacting with content and networks.
Applications or tools to support the emergence of new value chains.
An interesting starting point would be the Guardian newspaper’s Open Platform which enables commercial applications to be built on their Content API and their Data Store. I love this column by Emily Bell from 2006, where she talks about how originators and aggregators need to provide value for each other. Certainly the Guardian should attract more advertising revenue if its content and data is as valuable to third parties as they suspect it will be. So is everyone a winner? Everyone with stacks of good content and data and a current advertising model perhaps.
Social Innovation Camp – match-making people with ideas that can change the world with geeks who can make it happen – is open again for proposals. They have to be in by the 7th November. Use the cute viral to spread the word:
Was great to read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on ‘Five Ways to Use Social Media to Reach People Who Don’t Use Social Media‘. Thank you Marshall for the recognition that not everyone uses social media. It’s easy to get tech-blinkers and think the whole world is using the latest geek toy. In fact the reason many social media tools take off is because geeks love being the first to get their hands on something. The latest thing might only allow them to do one simple thing, but that’s cool because they already have 672 user accounts for the other tools they need. And they are tolerant when it breaks – the fail whale has become an inside joke. The rest of the population are waiting for something to come along that works and allows them to do lots of things in one place. Sensible late majority that they are.
I used to work on a project where I had to reach people who probably didn’t own a computer. They might have had public access to a computer in a library, job centre or at work but let’s face it, they weren’t spending time on twitter. And yet many people on the project insisted the best way to reach them (at no cost and minimum effort naturally) was through social networking. Hmm… I said. Or something like that. But now I see I have been using the technologies I love to reach the non believers in a round about way and there is more still to do…
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.
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.
With six ISP’s signed up to a UK Government drive to stamp out illegal music downloads everyone is looking for the next big thing in legitimate file-sharing. I met the Grooveshark team earlier in the year when they were in beta. They had a plan to entice users by giving them a share of profits. If you upload music to Grooveshark and someone buys the track, you get a cut (probably tiny but gift horse, mouth). P2P advertising that keeps the publishers happy.
CNET have said:
In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other’s fins for dominance, there’s at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark.
Free streaming. Social networking. Music discovery. Oh, and reimbursement for sharing when somebody buys a song that you’ve uploaded to the collective.
And Wired magazine wrote:
If you’re looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you’re depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help.
Publishers who own the third party material on OpenLearn have suggested we do a similar thing. If they could find out more about who is interested in their materials and see some resulting sales, they might make more of their materials freely available on OpenLearn.
As the OpenLearn “Stage 2″ phase draws to a close and many of the team who set the project up move onto pastures new, its good to see the innovation continue. Back in the early days we knew there were two features that would make the site more appealing to users:
1. Something that recognised learners efforts and time on the site;
2. An easy way to edit OpenLearn study units in the LabSpace.
And so now I proudly present the latest version of OpenLearn which offers both.
Firstly, the “Statement of Activity” is a printable report that shows what a learner has viewed on the site. It’s accessed from the learner’s myLearningSpace and looks like this:
Ok, so if you can read it, you’ll see I’m a lazy OpenLearner but if my links are working hopefully you’ve got the picture
I think this could have several uses – as a motivation to keep studying (if like me you love to see your name in print), as a way to see how far you are through a study unit and as evidence to mentors/employers of your informal study. So it’s not a degree certificate, or even abuse proof (you can click on a page, go make a cup of tea, come back and file your nails and the report will look the same as if you sat there for 10 minutes studying) but its something. In the next release we’ll develop this so when you return to the site you can jump straight back to the last point you were at in a study unit.
Secondly and most impressive, is the new editing interface – our way of making amends for having launched a site that made it difficult to make amends to our content. We want you to edit and change our content but can you use XML please, we said, batting our eyelashes and looking meek. The answer was a resounding “No!” and we listened.
From today it’s easy as pie to change Open University course materials to suit you.
If you want to make a change to a study unit on the LabSpace all you have to do is:
1. Enter the study unit
2. Make a copy of the unit for revising
3. Turn editing on
4. Get going in a WYSIWYG editing interface (or switch to HTML view)
Look out for this:
And soon you’ll be laughing manically, looking for your swivel chair and a cat to stroke as you take over the OUniverse with the super simple editing interface:
Once you’ve saved your changes a ‘Revise this unit’ button appears on the page. If other people want to make changes they can click on this, agree to a scary notice that they will not abuse the power bestowed upon them (”I promise to take over the OUniverse responsibly while laughing manically and stroking my evil cat”), and then make edits themselves.
And so we are one more step closer to the vision of Dr Marshall Smith of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation who said at the OpenLearn launch in 2006,
“The legacy of this wonderful gift by the OU-UK to the world will be not only be extraordinary original content – it will also be the many future generations of derivative content developed and tested and retested by untold numbers of students, teachers and others around the world.”
Channel 4 have started to invest in start-up companies, hoping to get a better view on where their industry is going in the next 25 years as they move from traditional broadcasting towards new platforms. See the interview with Matt Locke from minibar. Notice how about 4 minutes through someone must have mentioned minibar was looking too male oriented and ushered in the girls
