The ivory towers are crumbling

Intellectual property is a strange and difficult concept. It's also increasingly anachronistic. The Law journal has this definition of IP: "Intellectual property (IP) is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which property rights are recognised - and the corresponding fields of law". Some academics are aggressively protective of their so called intellectual property and many others jealously guard their course notes, slides, and other content. When their work is published, authors sign a contract which means that the publisher then holds the copyright of the material, and can sue anyone who infringes that copyright. In essence, they are 'protecting' the content of the academic, whilst at the same time making a lot of money out of it.

A blog post I read recently reported that one US professor is now considering preventing his students from making notes during his lectures, because this action infringes his intellectual property! How ridiculous. What do their course fees entitle them to then? A glimpse of him on the stage every so often and the chance to sit occasionally at his feet to hear the pearls of wisdom? It never ceases to amaze me how arrogant and remote some academics can make themselves. Fortunately, most of those I encounter are open, generous and eager to share their ideas with anyone who is interested. And that is where the social media come in. Increasingly academics are making their ideas freely available on blogs, social networks and other sharing sites. Don't misundertand me. I'm not against intellectual property. People are entitled to be acknowledged for their contribution to knowledge. What I am opposed to is the idea that knowledge can be traded as a commodity. Times are changing and the foundations of the ivory towers are being eroded. Here are just some of the movements that are threatening to destabilise them and open up higher education for all:

I have already enthused several times in the last year about online publishing and open scholarship, so I won't labour those points here again. I will say this though: Online and open access journals are gaining ground, and just about anything that has ever been published is now out there somewhere and available if you search long enough and smart enough for it. What will this mean to the arrogant, protectionist academics who jealously guard their ideas? Copyleft is another movement that is threatening to bring down the ivory towers of the academic world. In effect it finds ways to enable readers to adapt and otherwise modify existing works without infringing copyright law. Some academics won't like that very much. Another threat is Creative Commons which has an entire range of licencing agreements which variously enable users to modify, extend and share versions of the original work. Does this offer a threat to IP? For the purists, of course it does. Finally, Google Books, Scholar and other web based services are undermining the foundations of the elite knowledge brokers.

The bottom line is this: If students find that an important text is protected, or even closed off, due to copyright restrictions (or even, perish the thought, pay walls), they will simply go elsewhere. It will be a fitting epitaph for the ivory tower brigade, that they are increasingly irrelevant in a modern, web enabled academic world, whilst the stars of the show will be those scholars who openly share their work, and who will listen to feedback. IP is not threatened. Academics will still own their ideas. What is threatened is the protectionist, exclusionist ideology that has prevailed for so long in the learned society. What is threatened is the idea that knowledge should ever have been made into a commodity. We may yet see the ivory towers come crashing down.

Image source


The ivory towers are crumbling by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 3: Blogging

I continue my series on the tools I can't do without, and today, I want to talk about blogging, and the platform I use for Learning with 'e's: Blogger.

This is Blogger. What you are reading now is on a blog hosted by Blogger. It's probably one of the simplest 'free' tools you will find anywhere on the web for creating your own blog. I find blogging very valuable, because it allows me to post up my ideas, reflections, questions and fun content so that I can share it with the world. Having a blog is like owning your own publishing house or personal radio station. I have complete editorial control over my content, and once I have written and posted it, it's there for the entire world to look at, should they wish to. But I can also come back to it and add, delete or modify the content any time I want.

I first started blogging at the end of 2006, and have continued to do so regularly ever since. I have already posted up my reasons for blogging (Why do I bother?), and I have also given my opinions on what ingredients there should be in a good blog post. There has also been a lot written by others about the pedagogical and personal benefits of blogging, but I won't try to summarise it or repeat what has already been said. I will simply give my personal view, because that's what this blog is all about! Blogging has transformed my professional practice (teaching and researching) because it has enabled me to write down and present my ideas in a way which is coherent to my wider community of practice. OK, so I could publish in a peer reviewed journal and often do, but that takes time (read Publish and be jammed and you'll see what I mean). Blogging is different - it has immediacy - it's almost instantaneous, so I now use it as my preferred weapon of mass instruction. In doing so, I have had to articulate myself clearly, separate out fact from fiction, and have also needed to adopt a creative approach to the way I represent my ideas. Doing all of this has made me better at writing, better at speaking, and ultimately has given me a springboard from which I can launch into developing my ideas and theories further afield. I gain very valuable feedback from people who comment on my posts, and in doing so, I can reflect critically, strengthen my ideas further, modify and adapt them to make them more workable, and even gain some new insight as I blog. In the act of writing, it has been said, we are written. As I write, edit and then post my content on this blog, I make my ideas available to the world, and wait for the world to make its feedback available to me. It's a two way street that brings a lot of personal and professional benefits.

Image source (Joyce Seitzinger)

Web feats 3: Blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Why do I bother?

Reading Tom Barrett's post 'Why Bother Blogging?' got me thinking about my own reasons for blogging. It can be hard work, but it can also be very rewarding. Some readers have remarked that they wish they were as prolific as me when it comes to blogging, and other have asked me where I get all my ideas from to blog about. Well, I'm not half as prolific as I would like to be, and others out there in the Blogosphere write a lot more than I do and on a more regular basis too. It is difficult to find material to write coherently about, but that is probably one of my main reasons for blogging:

1) I blog because it keeps me on my toes intellectually, thinking up ways to express what I know about how learning technology is progressing, how my ideas are being challenged by new methods and emerging technologies, how my own practice is being enhanced, my skills extended and how my students are finding new ways to learn through emerging media and devices. Thinking about the content of my next blog post often prompts me to read a lot, interact online and face to face more, and generally encourages me to reflect critically on what I believe.

2) I also blog because during the process of thinking and reflecting on my own professional practice and what is happening around me, I need somewhere to keep a record of these impressions. Blogging gives me a chronological record of my own thoughts, dated and time stamped, complete with hyperlinks to useful related online resources and materials, and images I have selected which have evoked an emotional response in me. All of these features combine to provide me with a digital artefact that captures a moment of my thoughts in time.

3) I blog because it attracts feedback from readers on my ideas and views, and the comments box can sometimes overflow with excellent responses from readers of my posts. I value greatly the comments of all those who take the time to respond to my posts, and I learn a lot from them. Many the time someone has commented on one of my posts and this has led me to either modify my own ideas, or to confirm to me that I am on the right track in my reasoning.

4) Blogging helps me to make concrete all the ideas I have, and reifies the thoughts I want to keep. Somehow, putting down these ideas in a manner that makes them publicly accessible, makes me strive even harder to articulate my ideas in a coherent way. In writing I am written, and blogging is more than just a part of my personal learning environment. It has become a key part of my professional development and practice.

5) Another reason I blog is to share my ideas and thereby contribute to the intellectual wellbeing of the community of interest I belong to on the Web and add to the shared knowledge we rely upon. Others share their ideas freely, and I want to reciprocate. This frank exchange of ideas and content is what makes my community of interest such a wonderful thing, and enriches all of us who claim to belong to it.

6) It's a creative process, and can be great fun. I often lace my posts with humour or irony, and enjoy the way my posts come together. Dreaming up pithy titles for these posts is also great fun, and it is surprising how many people make encouraging comments and give positive feedback on these little additions. It's a great exercise for my mind and keeps me from getting bored.

7) Being able to publish my ideas instantly to the world is a great asset. Knowing that more and more people are reading my posts, following regularly, and responding too - is both a pressure and a pleasure. It's a little like owning your own newspaper, but potentially a lot more powerful, because posts can be updated, enhanced and linked on the fly, and they enable interaction between the writer and the audience.

There are probably other reasons why people blog, but those are my personal 'magnificent seven'. Now tell me ... what are your reasons for blogging?

Image source (edited)


Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Down to a 't'

Google Scholar is a very useful tool if you are in the business of research. It's also a nice surprise when you put your own name in and up come your own publications with all the citations listed beneath them. I was very pleased to see that one of the papers I co-wrote with Maged Boulos in 2007 has been cited 77 times. The paper was entitled The Emerging Web 2.0 Social Software and was published in Health Information and Libraries Journal. So I went through a few of the citations just to see what other researchers were saying about our article.

To my amusement, one author had cited me as Wheelert, S. Well, that's me all right, but I had never seen my surname spelt with a 't' on the end. My amusement turned to irritation however, when time after time, other citations also used the same spelling of my surname - Wheelert. In all Google showed 17 incidences of my name being remixed.

So I checked my birth certificate. No, I was born Wheeler. I checked my marriage certificate - something must have happened in the act of getting wed that changed my surname without my knowledge perhaps? No, that happened to my wife instead, so I was still Wheeler. Must have been the article then. No, in the original article we published, our names were spelt correctly too. So ..... it was obvious what had happened. Someone had cited my article and misspelled my name with an extra letter in it by mistake. Then others had come along, without reading my original article and simply lifted the quotation out from the secondary article and had requoted the error in their own article. The error has spread virally. I'm not going to name and shame all the authors here, because that would be churlish - but you can check it out for yourself if you care to. Simply paste this reference into Google and you will see what I mean:

Boulos, K. & Wheelert, S. (2007) The emerging web 2.0 social software

Perhaps I should simply be happy that other people are quoting my publications, I hear you ask? Well, there is a deeper problem here, I retort. If this is happening to my work, how much more endemic is this practice out in the world of academia? How much of this copying and pasting gets past the reviewers? How potentially damaging is this practice to a) the integrity of academic research and b) the veracity and accuracy of what we read in academic journals?

Let me ask a question here. How many of us have actually read the work of Lev Vygotsky directly? And how many of us have quoted from his Mind in Society book without reading it? I did this once or twice myself, I must admit, before I realised my error. Are academic researchers becoming lazy in their literature reviews? And if this copying and pasting is a widespread practice, which I suspect it is, how can we without being hypocrites, expect our students to be more diligent than us? I guess that's academia down to a 't'.

(Image source: www.education.asu.edu)

Published ...and unjammed

Very pleased to see that our article on Second Life for medical education has finally been published today in Health Information and Libraries Journal. Seductively entitled 'Second Life: An overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health education', it was co-written with Maged Kamel Boulos (my mate from the Faculty of Health and Social Work, here at the University of Plymouth) and one of our graduated students Lee Hetherington, whose VNEC (Virtual Neurological Education Centre) project features heavily in the article. We also discuss the learning and teaching potential of SL and how it can be harnessed by medical and health educators (and indeed any other teachers) who want to give it a bash. One thing we didn't mention in the paper is our Second Life sexual health project, which is going from strength to strength, but was born too late to feature. That project will be discussed in future papers - (promise).

I hadn't expected the paper to be published until next month, but that's the beauty of online publishing, as I said in my previous blog 'publish and be jammed'.

I have several other e-learning articles on the boil, but it will be a long time before some of them see the light of day, as they will probably be published on printed paper and take an absolute age to appear... Ah well, I guess if there's a world wide power outage, people will still be able to read the articles ... if they are in daylight. Gets me thinking ... what does my avatar do in SL when I'm not there to keep him in check??

Publish and be jammed

I might be wrong, but I think the days of the paper based academic journal could be numbered....

At the EARLI 2004 conference in Cyprus delegates were invited to a 'meet the editors' session, where we could quiz 15 or so editors about their journals. I was first on my hind legs to ask a question which was later echoed by several other delegates. How could editors justify the long lead in times between acceptance of papers to publication - as academics, we want our ideas to be in the public domain as quickly as possible, before they grow hairs on their chins. Satisfactory answer came there none.

One of the worst culprits is Computers and Education. A long long time ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth (alright, 26 November 2004), my colleagues Sue Waite, Carolyn Bromfield and I received confirmation that our article 'Our Flexible Friend' had been accepted for publication in the journal. More than two years later, our article still isn't in print, but we can expect it to be published around summer 2007!

Last year my colleagues Maged Boulos, Cito Maramba and I submitted our paper 'Wikis Blogs and Podcasts' to the online medical journal BMC Medical Education. When our manuscript was accepted, we were pleasantly surprised that it was published online the same day! Since then, in only four months, it has recorded over 5,500 viewings on the BMC site alone. It is mirrored on other sites around the globe including Pub Med Central, so this figure can be at least doubled. Our ideas and theories have been disseminated well and in a timely manner, to the extent that other articles and blogs have already appeared online reviewing, commenting and challenging us. Here are a few notable ones:

• British Medical Journal Online (BMJ.com)
• Drugscope Blog
• Clinical Evidence Blog
• Informaticopia (Rod Space)
• Stuart Glendinning Hall
• a-brest.net (France)
• Medinfo.net
• e-Learning at UWC (South Africa)
• Cases Blog
• OLDaily (Canada)

I know where a lot of my work will be published in the future... what do you think?