Be open

In Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf deliberated and wrestled long and hard to open the doors to the mines of Moria. In the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, the mouth of the cave was opened by uttering the phrase iftaḥ ya simsim - 'Open Sesame'. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ healed a deaf girl by uttering the word 'Ephratha' - meaning 'be opened'. All through our history and popular culture we hear stories about difficult problems or barriers being solved or overcome. There are many, many problems in the world, some of which are impossible to solve. Others appear to be impossible to solve until someone comes up with a solution, and then we all say - ah yes, I can see the answer now. 

One problem we face in the 21st Century is how to educate everyone. If we believe education is a fundamental human right, then we go all out to provide good, affordable, accessible opportunities to learn the important things we will need to survive in an uncertain world. And yet, 500 million children remain outside of education because they cannot afford to attend. We have enough money to make it happen. But it stays the same old problem. In the speech below, which I gave at the Solstice Conference in June 2012 at Edge Hill University, I argue that we need to be more open about our content and tools, ownership of learning, intellectual property and even the very practices we participate in on a daily basis - open scholarship if you will. I talk about Creative Commons, open source software, open access journals, open educational resources, community led initiatives such as MOOCs and the whole idea about being open and sharing your learning. These ideas may not fully address the problem of how to educate everyone, but at least we will make a start by making learning more accessible.

Knowledge is like love. You can give it away as much as you like, but you never lose it. The more we give away our knowledge, the more we are educating our world. So be open. You know you want to.





Be open by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web 2.0 culture

In previous posts I argued that as teachers, we should be prepared to give our content away for free. There are two reasons for this. One is to benefit those learners worldwide who wish to learn from you and need to see your content. Secondly, it is so you can reap the exponential rewards the social web offers. In Giving it all away I showed how offering free online access to your ideas and works actually increases your audience size. Licensing your content under a Creative Commons agreement that allows for repurposing or remixing provides an opportunity and invitation for others to translate your slides or blogposts into another language. Several of my posts and slideshows have been translated into Spanish, which opens up vast new audiences in South America I can share my ideas with, with no extra effort.

Look at the photograph. There were several images I could have used to illustrate this post, but all were protected by a copyright licence. In doing so those photographers lose the opportunity for their work to be amplified to a larger audience. The image I chose was licenced for free use and remix with attribution, so Noel Hidalgo gets the prize and receives a larger audience for his fabulous picture.  But the ethos of sharing on the social web goes deeper than the act of sharing content. It's also the adoption of a new mindset and a new culture for many professionals - the culture of Web 2.0. By way of explanation, here's an adapted extract from a book I published a couple of years ago:

The introduction of wikis into conservative environments such as classrooms requires all participants to adopt a new culture - one of co-operation and sharing. When they understand they can actually create and share content on a global stage, students can be both excited and daunted. Many of those who welcome the experience are probably in some way already connected into the culture of Web 2.0 and will probably already have accounts on social networking sites such as Facebook. They may be familiar with other media sharing sites such as YouTube or Flickr, and aware of the protocols that are active within these micro-cultures.


Those who are reluctant to share or co-operate, or anxious in some way about posting their content up on the web for all to see, may need to work a little harder to assimilate the culture of Web 2.0. It is only later, when they are more immersed into the Web 2.0 culture, and they have begun to develop the specialist digital literacies which gain them full access into it, that these students begin to understand the power and potential of sharing, co-operation and collaboration. Some never make the transition, and steadfastly refuse to allow their work to be edited by others, preferring instead to protect their ideas and maintain sole ownership over their content.

Canadian academic Brian Lamb once declared that during times of economic challenge, when so many people need access to learning, it seems preverse to hoard knowledge in any form. And yet, in schools, colleges and universities around the globe, there are many teachers and academics who jealously guard their content, as if by doing so they will benefit in some way from their protectionism. They may receive some financial reward, but will they have the satisfaction of knowing that in some way they have also helped other people, without cost? I have a message for such professionals. Change your mind. Choose to share your content openly and freely - it is only through giving it away that you will begin to reap the full rewards of the Social Web. Knowledge is like love. You can give as much away as you like, but you still get to keep it.

Adapted from Wheeler S. (Ed: 2009) Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures: Cybercultures in Online Learning. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. (p. 9).

Image by Noel Hidalgo


Web 2.0 culture by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Identity play

I have just spent a very interesting two hours with members of staff and researchers of the Open University of Catalonia today here in beautiful Barcelona. Tomorrow I will be giving the opening keynote at the 8th International Seminar on Teacher Training, but as a precursor, I was invited to meet some of the OUC team. And so I sat and talked in a relaxed but thoughtful atmosphere with some impressive young academics earlier today. We discussed a lot of issues related to distance education and technology mediated learning, including digital identity, social media and open scholarship. Many of the ensuing discussion and questions kept me on my toes, and provoked us all to reconsider our roles as educators in the digital age. It was digital identity though, that most of the group were interested in, and kept returning to talk about.

One of the things the group wanted to discuss was this blog and the way I use it to not only disseminate my ideas, but also as a tool for research. We talked about taking risks, and playing with digital identity. Do we present ourselves differently online to real space? What do we share on the web and what should we keep private? We analysed why I had posted yesterdays story about my Silver Wedding Anniversary, and what were the potential issues with such a public performance of a personal celebration. Someone also wanted to know why I displayed badges on my blog. I responded that it is a measure of peer esteem, which may help some readers to determine whether a site is trustworthy or not. Alternatively, I display them because I am grateful to my own academic community for the way they continue to support this blog (and others) by continually returning to read more. When they vote for my blog as one of the best (and competition is very stiff now, with many excellent e-learning blogs out there), then I feel my work and effort has been worth something.

So, when I returned to my hotel just now and found another award badge waiting for me to display on my blog - this time from the e-Learning Council - it was a welcome addition to the peer reviews I have already received. Thank you to everyone who voted to place me among such an illustrious company. Here's the full list of the top ten (it's actually a top 11).

1. Jane Hart
2. Elliott Masie
3. Cathy Moore
4. (tie) Harold Jarche
4. (tie) Jane Bozarth
5. Steve Wheeler
6. Tom Kuhlmann and Dave Anderson
7. Clark Quinn
8. Clive Shepherd
9. David Kelly
10. Tony Karrer

Perhaps the display of these badges adds something to my digital identity? Who knows...


Identity play by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The open case

Today, more than ever, academics and professionals need to question the value of publishing in closed journals. Forget for a moment the ludicrous prices many publishers charge for personal and institutional subscriptions. Think about the audience. Just how many people will actually read an article in a closed journal? 10? 20? 50? 100? The answer for most closed journals is - not very many. Conversely, publishing in an open access journals can increase the audience dramatically. Essentially, because they are free and online, open access journals are read more widely.

Online open access journals trump paper based journals every time in terms of amplification of ideas too. Often open access journals provide online forums for discussion of the articles presented. This kind of dialogue is invaluable both for the readers and authors. Many open access journals also provide reader metrics. Authors can see at a glance how many people have downloaded their abstract, or full paper, and some also track where the readership is located around the globe. This simply cannot be achieved with paper based journals. All you can know for certain is how many subscribers there are for each issue sold. I have already written about sharp practice - the cynical manner in which some publishing houses exploit the goodwill and free labour of academics, and then make huge profits selling on journal subscriptions back to the academic community, so I won't revisit this point.

What is worse though, is the fact that much of the academic establishment continues to frown upon open access publications as though they were second class citizens in the publishing world. There are a number of elite journals (largely rated on the basis that their published works are cited more widely than those of other similar publications, and also tacitly on the reputation of the editorial board) that academic managers encourage their researchers to target. If researchers can secure publications in any of these elite closed journals, they will be well placed when it comes to the official research assessments that come along periodically, where governments award money for further research. Those top universities that demonstrate the best research outputs (that is, the most prestigious) and publication track records receive most of the cash. Those who don't can pretty much forget it for another round. It's an inward looking, self-feeding, self congratulatory 'old boys' club, and it is entirely unjust at so many levels. It's a hierarchy that rarely changes. No wonder many people despise the ivory tower brigade and their academic snobbery.

There has to be a better way to disseminate research. There are many high quality open access journals in existence, and several that are highly recommended in the field of learning technology and distance education. Some of these are listed as links below. If you know of others, please send me the links and I will include them on this blogpost. There is also a large list of links available to open access and hybrid education related journals. One that is not listed yet on the list is Research in Learning Technology (formerly ALT-J) which will be converting to open access in January 2012. Other closed journals should, and probably will follow suit. Open access is not synonymous with poor quality. In fact many online open access journals work twice as hard to prove that they are high quality. What open access does mean is larger readerships for the published research. That has to be worth something in anyone's book.

Australasian Journal of Educational Technology
Digital Culture and Education
e-Learning Papers
EDUCAUSE Review
European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning
Future Internet
International Review of Research in Open Distance Learning
The Journal of Distance Education
Journal of Interactive Online Learning
Journal of Technology Education


The open case by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Educate the world, don't just feed it

Some of my Twitter buddies have reminded me today of the torrid picture that was taken of me jokingly emulating Edupunk Poster Boy Jim Groom. There's an image of me floating around the web with 'PUNK IT UP' on my knuckles. I guess it's timely, because I travel to Hamburg tomorrow to keynote the German Moodlemoot conference (#mootDE11n) on Thursday, and one of the key themes of my speech will be 'do it yourself' education, the ethos of edupunk. My title is 'The Road Ahead is Open', and I will cover a spectrum of open approaches, including open learning, open educational resources, and the open bricollage approach espoused by Levi Strauss. Ultimately, the entire speech will boil down to a plea for people to adopt an open scholarship approach to their learning and teaching.

Open Scholarship, as I have previously suggested, is much more than a term denoting open practices. Open Scholarship is a way of life, based on the belief that to share your ideas is much better than to hoard them. It's also about opening yourself and your ideas up for constructive criticism, so that in receiving feedback from your PLN, you will learn and grow together. Let me ask you this: What possible purpose is there to hide knowledge away from people who need it to survive and make their lives better? Stephen Heppell, in the 2011 Plymouth e-Learning Conference stunned us all by declaring that around half a billion children in the world (like the ones in the picture above) are outside of education, and don't have a hope of even seeing the inside of textbook, let alone a classroom. And yet all it would take to educate the lot of them would be 5 billion US dollars. It got me thinking. There are a few super-rich people in the world who have this kind of money, and more, in their personal fortunes. Certainly, many of the banks or corporations around the world are rich enough to have this kind of cash to spare. But how many of them would be willing to stump some up to educate our world?

Several years ago, we all gave money to a world wide appeal to feed the starving of the world. The 'Feed the World' campaign was a triumph of compassionate fund raising, but it simply solved a problem in the there and then. Poverty and starvation still exist and although we can't cure it, we can educate people who are in poverty if we simply share the wealth and knowledge about.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you show him how to fish you feed him for life. In many cultures, if you educate a man, he is self sufficient. Yet if you educate a woman, you educate an entire family. How are we going to meet the challenge of this century? The challenge to educate people out of poverty? Open scholarship will go a long way to resolving that one, because if everyone shares what they know, and we don't greedily hoard that knowledge away, or capilulate to the invasion of the edubusinesses, the world will be a far more equitable place.

Educate the world, don't just feed it by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Open educational practices

I made a video recording for Core Ed while I was at the Ulearn conference in New Zealand last month. They sat me in front of two cameras, and asked me to talk off the cuff, no script, about something that I was passionate about. It didn't take me long to think up what I wanted to say and I'm pleased that I did it in one take (Core Ed were pleased too, because minimal studio time and editing were needed!). I spoke about Open Educational Practices, (including Open Educational Resources and Open Scholarship) a subject which I am learning more about all the time as the movement grows and gains traction. You see, the idea behind open practices is that anyone can gain access for free, at any time and in any place - courses, software, ideas, knowledge, people... OEP requires everything to be open - for access, scrutiny and repurposing. So whether it's licensing agreements such as Copyleft or Creative Commons, or open access journals, or even massively online open courses, the open educational practices are gaining ground and influence in the academic world.



It's not going to be easy to change a model where knowledge has become a commodity though. Too many powerful people and organisations stand to lose a lot if everything becomes 'free' and open. But things are changing slowly. The publishing houses who once had a strangle hold on academic journals are beginning to lose their grip. Some are having to change their business models. Google Reader and Google Books for example, are giving us all more than a glimpse of the pages of just about every book that has ever been published. And open access journals are opening up knowledge for all without payment. So when a student comes up against a paywall - what will they do? They will go elsewhere of course - to the free versions that are out there on the web. I know many colleagues who now refuse to publish their research in traditional journals - only open access will do for them. Traditional journals can be slow to publish, there is often a backlog of journals articles and too few issues to put them in, and citation frequency from open access journals can be more rewarding. These refusnik colleagues are growing in numbers too, and so are the open access journals to accommodate them. Is this the start of the end for traditional academic publishing? Watch the video and then tell me whether you think I'm on the right track about OEP, or whether I'm barking up the wrong tree. After all, that's exactly what open scholarship is all about....


Open educational practices by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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.

Giving it all away

How much do you freely share on the Web? If you are a user of any Web 2.0 tools, it's likely that you give away your stuff for free, and in doing so, you make a digital footprint for yourself. My digital footprint grows each time I post new content, whether it's on this blog, one of my Flickr accounts, or YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Slideshare. The killer apps for me though, have to be Delicious and Twitter - both give me the ability to make my content highly visible to anyone who might be interested.

Look, as altruistic as it may seem to give away all your content, ideas, lecture notes, videos, slides and even articles and books, for those who actually opt to do so, there are also excellent rewards. Give your content away, and you don't lose it - but you do get some great benefits. I have given away a lot of my content on the web - see for example my Slideshare collection of slideshows and published articles. My reward for doing this is multi-faceted. Not only do I get the pleasure of having thousands of interested people from all over the world viewing my slides, they may also favourite them, comment on them, or give me valuable constructive feedback which can I learn from. Some also embed my slideshows into their own websites and blogs, which disseminates my ideas even further afield. I couldn't pay for that kind of distribution. And as if that isn't enough reward, I sometimes get some really nice invitations to speak at events, or participate in really interesting projects, as a direct result of some content I have created on the web. Web 2.0 tools have that affordance - they make your content very visible to people who are interested.

Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: 'Good artists borrow, great artists steal'. So OK, 'steal' is an emotive word, which we probably don't want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be 'derivative' - and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here's my point: I don't mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don't make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have - some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I'm an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.

Image source

Giving it all away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Movements for change

The learning technology landscape is changing and many questions are being asked. Why should teachers give away their resources, and why should they share their hard work with other teachers? What is Creative Commons and how does it work? What is open scholarship and what does it have to offer me? Will the 'giants' in the publishing world take notice of the Open Educational Resource movement? How did Web 2.0 come about? How do movements for change emerge and gain impetus? Does change come best from a top-down or a bottom-up approach? And where can we find the useful open educational resources we need?

I gave my responses to these and many other questions during a 30 minute interview today with Alastair Creelman (Linneuniversitet, Sweden) on Adobe Connect. We discuss the future of organisations like Becta, and how universities like my own institution are planning for the future of education supported through new learning technologies, and open educational resources. We cover issues such as language, intellectual property and ownership in our half hour conversation. Even my teenage son puts in a cameo appearance! The link to the interview is here, and I would be interested in your comments on what was discussed. Alastair is doing an entire series of interviews with internatioanl experts in the area of open educational resources, and I think his interviews should be more widely publicised.

And my soundbite from the interview: 'Knowledge is like love. You give it away, but you still keep it...'

Image source

Movements for change by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

A drastic ban?

I was somewhat surprised - no, gobsmacked - this weekend to read in a blog post by Abel Pharmboy that one conference in the USA - the American Society of Cell Biology Annual Meeting (sounds full of life) - has expressly forbidden its delegates from tweeting during presentations. They were also banned from audio recording or taking photographs of presenters' slides. Here's the strident message sent out to all delegates from the organisers:

"Use of cameras and all other recording devices (this includes digital, film, and cell phone cameras, as well as audio recordings) are strictly prohibited in all session rooms, in the Exhibit Hall, and in all poster and oral presentation sessions. Twittering (see above) and other forms of communication involving replication of data are strictly prohibited at the Annual Meeting or before publication, whether data presented are in the Exhibit Hall, poster area, poster sessions, or invited talks, without the express permission and approval of the authors. Persons caught taking photos, video, or audio recordings with any device or transmitting such information with any device will be escorted out of the hall or rooms and not be allowed room re-entry. Repeat offenders will have their meeting badge(s) revoked and will not be allowed to continue to attend the meeting. This policy is necessary to respect the willingness of presenters to share their data at the meeting as well as their publication opportunities."

Wow. What do you think about that? Makes you wonder why they took such a decision and took such a threatening stance. I wonder what the delegates felt? Did they feel welcome and relaxed at the conference? If it was Twitter alone that was jumped on, we might point to some of the harshtags and Twitter lynchings of speakers that has been reported recently at other conferences as the spur. But no - it's all digital devices. Even the airlines aren't that strict. I know that conference organisers have a duty of care to ensure that everything is conducted decently and in order, but I am left wondering... is this all just a little over the top?

I'm only speculating but the reason behind this stance might be something a little more prosaic. It is highly likely that given the highly scientific nature of this conference, many of the presenters at the conference are presenting new research and wish to protect their intellectual property from their peers until their work has been published. This may sound like a reasonable idea at face value, but I ask you - why do we go to conferences in the first place? People have many reasons, but an aggregation of these reasons might be to meet other people interested in the same subject, to hear expert commentary and reports of research in your specialist areas, and to discuss and learn. In my recent experience, the beauty of digital media is that it can include those who cannot attend a conference physically, but who can still participate remotely. I have done this with both Online Educa Berlin and ASCILITE in Auckland this last week.

So the organisers of this conference have banned the use of digital media. Exactly what will the conference police ban next? Chatting to each other over coffee? Writing down notes on a pad? Will there be 'thought crimes' too (Bless you George). Will we all need to sign non-disclosure agreements before we can register for such events? I'm just saying.

Look. I assure everyone who attends the Plymouth e-Learning Conference in April next year that there will be no such bans on any image capture, backchannelling or any other form of dissemination of what you have learned. In fact it will be positively encouraged. Those who come to present at my event do so on the understanding that their ideas will be 'out there' and shared with all who are interested as quickly as possible. I agree with Terry Anderson's sentiments which he aired at this year's ALT-C conference in Manchester. Open Scholarship, he said, is not only about sharing your work free to your peers, it is also about being open to constructive criticism from them. Here's to open scholarship, and also to open conferences!

Postscript

To be fair on the conference organisers, I draw your attention to a note of clarification from the conference chair Rex Chisholm who writes:

"I serve as chair of the ASCB public information committee and have discussed this with the executive director of the ASCB. The prohibition as written is being interpreted (...although I can see why) too restrictively. The real goal is to limit specific tweeting of prepublication data, not the general concepts, the enthusiasm (or not) for an idea heard at the meeting, or comments about the meeting itself. The ASCB enthusiastically endorses spreading of exciting stories from its members and encourages an open discussion about the meeting. After all, science is about debate and discussion. On the other hand it is important to respect authors presenting data prior to publication. Hence the policy against cameras and against tweeting of SPECIFIC data elements. I am working the the ASCB leadership to "officially" modify the policy on the ASCB website. But I want to assure all meeting attendees that as long as the rights of the authors to not have specific data widely disseminated without their permission, we would like to encourage sharing about the meeting."

So I was correct in my assumption that the ban was intended to protect authors/researchers who had not yet published their findings. Fair enough. But the wording of the edict could, as has been admitted, have been a little better phrased. This little episode serves to highlight the growing gulf between traditional academic values and the insurgent social media practices that are engulfing education. I'm sure we will see similar issues arising as culture clashes continue over the next few years.

Related posts:

The dark side of digital backchannels (Joe McCarthy)

Tweeting expressly prohibited (Abel Pharmboy)

What do you mean I can't Twitter? (Steven W. Anderson)

Banning electronic devices from conferences (Open Education News)

Image source (edited)