I am in Salzburg speaking at the 3rd Interdisciplinary EduMedia Conference ‘Open Education enhanced by Web 2.0!?! Open Educational Practices and Resources for Lifelong Learning’.

I have good friends working for salzburg Research who have organised the conference and salzburg is one of my favourite cities, so I readily agreed to speak at the confernce. then as sometimes happens, I didn’t get my act together to tell them the topic I wanted to talk on. So Diana Bischof, the very capable conference organiser, seems to have allocated me a title. Fair enough. So I am speaking on – wait for it – ‘Open content in the internet as link between learning, knowledge and development’. Or something like that.

Anyway what I am really speaking on is a subject that I have been thinking much on lately – the direction, momentum and impact of the Open Educational Resources movement.

My general conclusion is that whilst the OER movement has been successful in raising the conciousness of both institutions and teachers about sharing resources, the reality is that there is very limited use and still less reuse or repurposing of OERs. The major issue is that OERs are largely seen as teaching materials. Many of the projects funded by Hewlett – and the EU – have essentially funded large universities to support their staff in posting their teaching materials on the internet. That is very much to be welcomed but it does little for learning. If we want to support learning and that is the openness I am interested in – then we need to provide learners with tools to learn – regardless of whether they are registered with an educational institution. At the same time we need to recognise learning which takes place outside the institutions. Recognition means what it says – it is not a synonym for accreditation. So we are back to Personal Learning Environments – a theme any regular reader to thsi column will be quite familiar with. The problem is that institutions have no interest in supporting learning outside the walls – indeed if learning was to be so open why will anyone pay fees to attend universities.

Finally I am getting to think about the different ways in which we might use social software as a medium for accessing Open Educational Resources – more on this later in the week.

My presentation is available on slideshare – though I am not sure how much sense it makes without the words to go with it.

I am in Houston, Texas for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 2007 Open Educational resources Grantees meeting.

Central to the event is a presentation by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond, of their 

Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities.

It is a substantial report with many interesting asides and well worth a read.

They identify the following ‘key enablers’ as driving the OER movement:

• “open source code, open multimedia content and the community or institutional structures that produce or enable them;
• the growth of what we are calling participatory systems architecture; Our notion of architecture includes both technical and social dimensions.
• the continuing improvement in performance and access to the underlying information and communication technology (ICT);
• increasing availability and use of rich media, virtual environments, and gaming; and
• the emerging deeper basic insights into human learning (both individual and community) that can informed and validated by pilot projects and action-based research.”

Central to the report is the call for the development of an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) (which is not a long way form what Ray Elferink and I have been advocating in the form of an Architecture of Participation. The authors “believe that the Hewlett Foundation can play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement; the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode, multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning infrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning.”

They go on to say that “the proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that:  (1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning.” The OPLI can be envisaged as “a dream space for participatory learning that enables students anywhere to engage in experimenting, exploring, building, tinkering and reflecting in a way that makes learning by doing and productive inquiry a seamless process.”

This is good stuff indeed – visionary but not beyond the realms of what can be achieved. Particularly welcome is the weving together of technical and social objectives. My only reservation is the continued stress on the role of higher education institutions – but maybe this is a reflection of the objectives of the Hewlett Foundation.

More tomorrow – I’ll try and post a couple of live blogs from the conference. In the meantime I’m off to the Longneck Reception and the Good Company Barbecue Dinner.

Wow – this is brilliant.

From a press release from JISC:

Worldwide call for free and open access to European research results

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles.  In particular, the first recommendation called for ‘Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication’.

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to convey the overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC study.Â

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: ‘Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.’Â

One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: “Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don’t know where the cutting edge is?”

The petition is available at: www.ec-petition.eu/

Great gig last week at the danish Knowledge Laboratory. Thanks to Niels Henrik Helms for inviting me – thanks to everyone else for interesting discussions. It really is good to be in the Nordic countries – the understanding of links between knowledge development and learning in communities of practice is stunning. I think it is in these countries that we will start to see more generalised movements away for Learning management Systems towards Personal Learning Environments. I can remember six years ago being in Tampere University in Finland and be stunned to see the students accessing their email on open access computers using the Unix command line!

And whilst it is no longer trendy to talk about Action Research, that tradition still exists albeit in rarified forms.

The one thing I left out of my presentation was licenses. talking to people at lunch time, they were concerned about the licensing mess but had not heard of Creative Commons. Its a mistake to assume that just because the people on the Ed Tech speaking and conference all use CC licenses the rest of the world knows about them too,. We need to continue to show and explain how Creative Commons works.

Anyway – for any of you reading this blog who were at the conference last week – here – as promised – is the link to Creative Commons.

Technorati Tags: Copyright

The Open Content Community is going from strength to strength. On Thursday, Patrick Mc Andrew presented the new UK Open University open content site – OpenLearn at the OECD project seminar on Open Educational Resources . The site had been launched the previous evening.

On Friday, before the meeting had ended, I received an email from
Tony Hirst

‘Hi Graham’, he said ‘this may interest you – proof of concept openlearn content via rss – string’n’glue learning environment. Go to learning materials, living with the internet (rss derivation described in passing here).’

Interest me it certainly does and impress me also. OK – so Tony probably sat up half the night making this. But in a previous post
I was impressed that the OU were making tools available to help remising. But this mash up shows the real potential for repurposing and reusing open resources in new ways. I love it!

Technorati Tags: e-learning, multimedia, OER, opencontent

I am still at the OECD meeting on Open Educational Resources.

There is a recurring discourse on quality. How do we ‘measure’ or represent quality. Many of the initiatives presented here are from higher education. Higher Education has a tradition of peer review and projects such as the Merlot repository are working to extend the peer review process to Open Resources.

In vocational education this would be a non starter. We do not have the resources, infrastructure or traditions and cultures for such a process to work. But even in Higher Education I am unsure such a process really can work. Who chooses the ‘expert’ reviewers? On what basis? What are the criteria for review?

More fundamentally the quality of materials depends to a considerable extent on the context of use. What is of high quality for me may not be for another user. Surely we need to find some way of representing users in any quality mechanism. That could be as simple as star rating systems. However, I think we need a more sophisticated mechanism which can capture the context of use as well as a quality rating – and ways of displaying such distributed metadata.

In other words – we need to build / adapt social social software for developing, sharing and re-purposing open educational resources. If you are interested in this work, please get in touch.

Technorati Tags: OER, open_content, social software

Great Bazaar seminar – ‘Hey Dude, Where’s my Data’ in Barcelona yesterday. No time now to write a longer piece as I am at an OECD ‘expert meeting’ on Open Educational Resources (ironically invite only). I will try to write up my first thoughts at the weekend and of course will write a fuller account on the Bazaar project wiki. In the meantime you can read blog posts from the meeting by Ismael Pena Lopez on his ICTlogy blog.

Now live from the OECD meeting. Shigagawa Miyagawa from MIT talked about the MIT Open Courseware initiative as a social initiative to counter the “huge social cost if we let the dot coms take over’. He acknowledged the need to develop sustainability models. He talked about access and that in many African Universities despite poor internet access, there were excellent Local Area Networks. Therefore the is copying open courseware onto external hard drives for physical installation of university LANs.

Patrick McAndrew from the UK Open University presented the OpenLearn initiative, launched by the University yesterday. Looks extremely interesting, especially as through their OpenLab they are trying to make it easy for users to remix materials. We are going to hear a lot more about this in the future. Patrick presented OpenLearn as an experiment, saying the OU is not as brave as MIT. However he feels it impossible for the OU to reverse the direction they have taken, although he is still concerned at the costs of development.

The materials are available in XML and he feels the experience of this is of value to the university as a whole.

There is a continuing debate (which also came up at the Bazaar meeting) running over quality and whether universities should have a role in accrediting materials.

Patrick feels we are looking at futures – University 2.0 – and said there are many unknowns. We do even know if people learn using open content.

Technorati Tags: OER, open_content, social software

As promised – a downloadable copy of the paper on ‘The new pedagogy of open content: bringing together production, knowledge development and learning’. For those of you who do not want to read the full paper I will run a couple of excerpts highlighting parts I think are important in next two weeks.

See the ‘download’ link above…

Technorati Tags: e-learning

The Bazaar project, in which I am a partner, is organising a seminar next week on the theme of ‘Hey, Dude, Where’s my Data?’.

This text, taken form the introductory flyer explains some of the themes of the seminar.

“Seminar Theme: Hey Dude, Where’s My Data?”

With Web 2.0, more and more people have their documents, products, personal details and photos stashed all over the internet – what issues does this raise for education?

The rise of commercial services

With the use of free, commercial, centrally hosted, social software services growing in education, some important issues arise; Who controls this data? Do users care that commercial services are mining their usage patterns and selling this to marketing companies? Is the nature of these ‘free’ services understood – yes, users can come in and use the base system for free but often, in return, they are bombarded with advertising and their details/usage habits are sold. However, does anyone really care? Perhaps the convenience of service outweighs the perceived downsides.”

We have asked the participants to prepare a short position paper. This is mine.

The issue of how data is stored, what is shared, who has access to it and who provides services is becoming an urgent question for education. That it has received little attention is probably a reflection of the limited understanding just what is going on by policy makers and educational managers. In some ways this is understandable. Firstly, the growth of distributed on-lien services is a recent phenomenon. Secondly, there is a digital divide in that it is younger generation who are making most use of these services.

The knee-jerk reaction of policy makers, where they have acted, is to ban such services. This is unfortunate and unsustainable. Banning access to such sites as YouTube and MySpace form schools and colleges will not make them go away. Indeed it could be seen as a dereliction of the so called ‘duty of care’ in failing to provide learners with the new and changing skills and knowledge of digital literacy.

What are the issues regarding distributed data and services?

1. Longevity.

Will it be there in the future? Internet companies come and go – especially at the moment. Services which are presently free may not be in the future. Even where services do continue it is easy to eradicate your own data. I was accessing my Google account on a new computer and was (stupidly) using a Spanish language interface. Instead of ticking to agree to the conditions, I clicked not to agree. Google instantly wiped my previously uploaded videos from their server. Of course I could upload them again but now they have new urls meaning all previous links are broken.

2. Security.

Other contributers to the Bazaar seminar have already said much on this so I will be brief. It is fairly obvious that service providers are struggling to provide secure services and ass the services grow it may be that security will be difficult to maintain.

3. Ethics.

Once more other contributers have pointed out the potential clash of ethics between education and learning and the shareholder / venture capitalist driven interest of many of the commercial service providers.

Of course it would be easy to say that the answer lies in only using locally installed services and blocking access for education institutions to the commercial services and social community sites. However the point and great attraction of many of these services is that they are social and community sites. Moreover it is through the user base and access to data form other users that they acquire their utility. Even blogging loses much of its attractions in a walled community.

What are the potential answers?

1. Some form of regulation or code of practice for service providers. The problem here is that the web has proved notoriously difficult to regulate. However it could be possible to provide some kind of kitemarking for approved sites if they adopt approved practices. This has happened to some extent with self policing by the internet chat providers. However, it is difficult to see how the regulation could be extended given the border free nature of the internet.
2. The provision of national services for education as a service infrastructure. But this would be expensive, large scale internet projects are prone to failure and it could become as much an infringement on privacy as privately provided services. National services may lack the agility of the present explosion in web 2.0 services.
3. The provision of services through more localized public infrastructure – for instance local education organisations or the public library infrastructure. This already exists to some extent and has some attractions – I will return to this idea further on in the position paper.
4. Learners taking more responsibility for their data through the provision of an extended portfolio or Personal Learning Environment. Learners would remain free to use external services accessed through their PLE. However important data would be held on local repository.

This is my preferred solution. The extent of the present problem suggests to me that we need to speed up the implementation of portfolios and PLEs. In some countries this is happening rapidly but in others it lags behind.

Of course it still begs the question of where data is held. I would suggest that all education institutions should install a lightweight standards compliant repository. Standards will, be important for allowing data to be transferred between different institutional providers. The systems should also allow users to download and store their own data – preferably on a potable memory device.

Also standards will be important for allowing federated search between institutions and allowing communities to be developed between different institutions and applications. Whilst the data storage is local if users wish, they should be capable of sharing that data outside institutional boundaries.

This still leaves open the question of provision for those not engaged in education. What happens when a student finishes at university, for example? Some universities are already proposing to continue providing services but to charge for them. I do not believe this is the right answer. There is a strong case for Adult Education providers to have a new role in providing an PLE / Portfolio service for all adults within their geographical area. This would obviously require funding but could be of immense benefit in stimulating lifelong learning.

Regardless of what answer is adopted, perhaps the most urgent issue to to extend the idea of digital literacy to include the issue of data. Learners will have to take more responsibility for their own data in future. We should be assisting them in judging what to disclose, to who, in what contexts and how to use services sensibly. That in turn require further professional development for teachers and trainers.

Technorati Tags: bazaar

I am taking part at the moment in an on-line conference organised by the UNESCO IIEP Community of Interest in Open Educational Resources. Although I don’t really like the format of these email conferences, it is lively with a lot of cultural interchange. And I just received this wonderful post from K. C. Sabu from Bhopal, India. He or she says in one short story more than I have ever managed to say in long convoluted papers!

“Women Hand Pump Care Takers

In one of the Water and Sanitation Projects in South India, during the 90s women were to be trained to be hand pump care takers. Due to some reason the training was delayed – and the authorities distributed the tool kits to the suggested women in the remote rural areas.

Surprisingly after about 6 months when we visited the areas, we found that the women were actually functioning as Hand Pump care takers though they were not trained to be. Through trial and error they learned the ‘Engineering’ of hand pump. The factors behind the learning include access to the tools, the need – for water – and the natural determination? Learning is mostly demand driven, self organized and self paced. Opportunity and access are important factors in the process of learning.

It is very much true that the children find schooling to be boring. A more active involvement of the user – students – in specifying the content and curriculum may make a difference in this scenario. Teachers need to recognize that there cannot be any teaching if there is no learning. There is need for teachers to realise the fact that the learners are able to construct knowledge. Once this is realized, the teachers will naturally grow above their level of delivering the content, to higher levels like that of becoming partners and facilitators in the process of constructing knowledge.”

Technorati Tags: creativity, Open content, storytelling