I got back from the Alt-C confernce in Manchetser late last night and have spent today catching up with the urgent stuff. Now I have a lttle time to write up a quick reflection on the week’s events. So – in no particular order –

The People

The people are always the most important part of any conference. Alt-C brings together a wide cross section of the educational technology community in the UK and it was great to catch up with old and new friends alike.  The best ‘people bit’ for me was F-Alt – in providing spaces for like minded folks to share ideas in an informal atmosphere.

The Keynotes

I usually skip keynotes but this year went to all three – with Michael Wesch, Martin Bean and Terry Anderson (for recordings of keynotes and invited speakers see – http://elluminate.alt.ac.uk/recordings.html).  I greatly enjoyed Michael Wesch but am not sure he said anything new. Great style, great use of multi media, but I fear he is slipping into the ‘digital natives’ school of which I am highly sceptical. Twitterers (including me) were a bit hard on him, I think.

Martin Bean is the Vice Chancellor (designate) of the UK Open University. He jumped on the stage in a burst of energy and fairly wowed the audience. High points – explicit support for Open Learn and the forthcoming Social Learn platforms and services. Curious omissions – no mention of the OU Moodle platform or anything to do with assessment or business models.

For me the best of the three was Terry Anderson. OK – he does not have the same presentation charisma. But Terry is a great researcher and I particuarly liked his ideas about open researchers.

The programme

I have to say I was a little disappointed with the programme. Although the Crowdvine site makes it easier to find out what is going on when, I still found it quite difficult to make decisions what sessions to go to. Traditional conference abstracts do not really help much. It is not really Alt’s fault ,but I think the strand titles (and conference themes) could be more transparent. One problem is that in such a big conference people naturally have different levels of experience and different interests. Although many of the sessions I went to were well presented, from some I did not really learn anything new.

The technology

Being an ed-tech conference, the tech being used is always interesting. Alt-C had a much bigger online presence this year, allowing people to follow even if not physically present. Alt-c used Crowdvine for the second year, Cloudworks also set up an online confernce site and Manchester University provided a reliable and reasonably fast wireless service. But of course it was Twitter which dominated the event with hundreds of posts tagged with #AltC2009. How much did Twitter add to the conference? I am not sure – it is a great communication channel but I still have my doubts as to its value for reflective discourse.

Themes and Memes

This is going to be somewhat impressionistic, being based meainly on things I was involved in or things I talked to others about.

Open Educational Resources

The idea of Open Educational Resources seems to have mainstreamed, being seen by many institutions as teh best way to develop repositories and license resources.Whilst it was hgard to see any new busniness models for OER drvelopment, many institutions seem to be adopting OERs as a strategic reponse ot present economic and social challenges and pressures.

How important is the technology?

An old argument which just won’t go away. Personally I think technology is important and is socially shaped. As Martin Weller says “Alternatively, from my perspective the technology isn’t important argument is used as a justification to disregard anything technologically driven and hopefully carry on as we’ve always done. In this context suggesting that technology isn’t important is irresponsible.”

Blogging and Twittering

I got caught up in this one when Josie Fraser pursuaded me into a F-Alt Edubloggers meet up stand up debate on teh subject, Josie’s position is that Twitter is just another form of blogging, I say it is different in that the 140 character limit prevents the exploration of subjects in depth and does not really allow reflection on learning. At the end of the day we probably largely agree and most of teh audience abstained in the wrap up vote!. However, the meme is still running – see twtpoll by Matt Lingard and new cloudworks page entitled  “Is twitter killing blogging?”

The Future of The VLE

The VLE is dead debate organised by James Clay, ably chaired by Josie Fraser and with short inputs from James, Steve Wheeler, Nick Sharratt and myself was well attended F2F and via a stream. It has certainly caused lots of discussion. Pretty obviously despite all the interest in social software and PLes, VLEs are alive and kicking. Personally I would have liked to see more discussion on how the benefits of educational technology can be extended to lifelong learning and to those outside the institution but maybe Alt-C is just not that kind of conference! Great fun and may the debate continue.

Post Digital

This was the subject of a great pre-conference F-Alt kick off session led by Dave White and Rich Hall. To quote Dave’s excellent follow up blog post :

The post-technical then does not put technology second or first, it simply liberates the debate from those who build/code/provide the technology and puts it into the hands of those who appropriate it, the users, or ‘people’ as I like to call them, who write essays and poetry in Word, transform images in Photoshop, sustain friendships in Facebook, learn stuff by reading Wikipedia and express opinions in blogs.

The perspectives we are currently using, to come to an understanding of the cultural/educational influence of digital technologies and the opportunities therein, need to be reconsidered. I’m not sure yet if the answer lies in post-digital or post-technical approaches but I’m looking forward to tending these ideas over the next few months and seeing if something beautiful grows.”

A meme to watch for the future, I think.

Mobile and ambient technologies

Several excellent sessions around mobile technologies. I was also lucky to see a pre release demo of the forthcoming Doop augmented reality iPhone app mashing up with Twitter and Google myMaps. Very cool – will post more on this once it is ready.

More – much more

I greatly enjoyed Frances Bell at al’s Digital Identity session. Mark van Harmelen demoed the forthcoming mPLE. I loved Joss Winn’s session on WordPress goodness….more tomorrow when I wake up remembering all the great chats I have forgotten now.

Open educational Resources

This coming week is the annual Alt-C conference. And, as is becoming standard for conferences these days, many of the sessions will be freely available on line. Alt-C themselves are broadcasting the keynote sessions through Elluminate.

The keynote speaker schedule (all times UK) is:

• Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Tuesday 8 September, 09.25 to 10.25 ;
• Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor Designate of the Open University, Wednesday 9 September, 11.55 to 12.55;
• Terry Anderson, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Distance Education at Athabasca University, Canada – Canada’s Open University, Thursday 10 September, 11.55 to 12.55.

Just head over to http://elluminate.alt.ac.uk/ to access these sessions.

But it is not just the keynote sessions that can be followed online. Many other session organisers are planning some form of on-line participation.

Tuesday, 8 Steptember, 1340 – 1500 UK time sees a debate on the future of Virtual Learning Environments, entitled “The VLE is dead” with short (and lively!) contributions from James Clay, Steve Wheeler, Nick Sharratt and Graham Attwell.  The event will be broadcast on Ustream. Deatils to follow.

Wednesday sees a Jisc Emerge symposium on Institutional Change entitled “Emerging practice and institutional change symposium: a user-centred, learning technology R&D support-community network“. Speakers include George Roberts, Isobel Falconer, Josie Fraser and Graham Attwell. The symposium runs from 9.00 to 10.20 UK time. You can watch the Ustream for this session on the Emerge portal and of course contribute through Twitter.

For those of you living near Manchester but not enrolled for the conference, the wonderful fringe programme organised by F-Alt is open to all. Check out the programme on the F-Alt wiki (hash tag #falt09).

And of course, many other sessions can be followed on line. More details on the official conference Croudvine site or follow on Twitter on the #Altc2009 hash tag.

The Evolve network seminars are back. We have planned a series of open seminars for the autumn in conjunction with the upcoming Educamp Event (November 6-7, in Austria). As the blurb says:

“Once again, the online sessions will be supported by the JISC sponsored EVOLVE Community. Graham Attwell and Cristina Costa, two of the co-founders of EVOLVE, will co-moderate the online events. Together with Martin Ebner they will organise these events. Three sessions will be offered prior to the face to face event in Graz, Austria.

The themes under discussion and the guest speakers of each event are listed below.

• Event #1
  Theme: Open Content
  Speakers: Martin Weller / Martin Lindner
  Date / Time : September 14, 2009 / 19.00 (BST) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time)
  Link to Venue: Elluminate
  Add to calender: Link

• Event #2
  Theme: PLEs (Personal Learning Environments)
  Speakers: Ralf Klamma / Erik Duval
  Date / Time: October 8, 2009 / 19.00 (BST) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time)
  Link to Venue: Elluminate
  Add to Calender: Link

• Event #3
  Theme: Mobile Learning
  Speackers: TBC
  Date / Time: October 29, 2009 / 19.00 (BST) / 20.00 (CEST) (check your local time)
  Link to Venue: Elluminate
  Add to Calender: Link

The online round tables will be in English and are open for the ‘worldwide’ audience. Elluminate will be the online conference platform used. (A tutorial on how to join the session is available here). The recording of the sessions will be made available afterwards on this website.

Further information about each session and speakers will be published one week prior to event to take place. So check this place often, and also follow the Evolve network on Facebook.

We look forward to the interesting discussions. Stay tuned and help us spread the word about it (when mentioning it on twitter, blogposts, your social networks, etc please use the following tags: #ecg09 #educamp09 #EduCampGraz #ort09).”

The end of September sees the annual European Conference on Educational Research in Vienna (ECER). For many years now, I have supported the Vocational Education and Training Network (VETNET) which forms a constituent section of the European Educational Research Association, the organisers of ECER.

Whilst VETNET has been extremely successful in organising around the conference, its attempts to form a stronger community of practice have been hampered by the lack of activities between conferences. One long discussed aim is to launch a research journal. Many hours of work have been taken up in drawing up proposals and negotiating with publishers, with little result. For some years now, I have been arguing for a web based open journal. Whilst some have seen the potential of such a development, the majority of researchers within the vocational and education training community have remained wedded to the traditional publisher led model, mainly, I think, feeling that the academic standing of a journal can only be secured through publisher involvement.

In that regard, I am delighted to read in OLDaily (welcome back from holidays, Stephen) of  the launch of AISHE-J (The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) which has just launched volume 1 number 1. “It is an open-access, peer-reviewed, journal of scholarly research into Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.” Here’s the RSS Feed. The first issue includes an article from Phil Race on assessment as learning and Kate Day on learning environments.

Open Journal do not imply any less quality than traditional closed print journals. The more examples there are of such journals, the more the sceptics will be convinced. VETNET take note!

Along with John Cook and Andrew Ravenscroft from London Metropoliatn University, I have submitted a paper to the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009) to be held in Crete in September. Our paper, entitled ‘Appropriating technologies for contextual knowledge: Mobile Personal Learning Environments’, looks at the potential of what we call a Work Oriented MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE). The abstract goes like this:

“The development of Technology Enhanced Learning has been dominated by the education paradigm. However social software and new forms of knowledge development and collaborative meaning making are challenging such domination. Technology is increasingly being used to mediate the development of work process knowledge and these processes are leading to the evolution of rhizomatic forms of community based knowledge development. Technologies can support different forms of contextual knowledge development through Personal Learning Environments. The appropriation or shaping of technologies to develop Personal Learning Environments may be seen as an outcome of learning in itself. Mobile devices have the potential to support situated and context based learning, as exemplified in projects undertaken at London Metropolitan University. This work provides the basis for the development of a Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE).”

Below is the key section of the paper explaining about the environment. And I am also attaching a word file if you wish to download the full paper. As always I would be very interested in any feedback.

“Educational technology has been developed within the paradigm of educational systems and institutions and is primarily based on acquiring formal academic and expert sanctioned knowledge.
However business applications and social software have been widely appropriated outside the education systems for informal learning and for knowledge development, through social learning in communities of practice.
Is it possible to reconcile these two different worlds and to develop or facilitate the mediation of technologies for investigative and learning and developing developmental competence and the ability to reflect and act on the environment?
Based on the ideas of collaborative learning and social networks within communities of practice, the notion of Personal Learning Environments is being put forward as a new approach to the development of e-learning tools [25,26]. In contrast to Virtual Learning environments, PLEs are made-up of a collection of loosely coupled tools, including Web 2.0 technologies, used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others. PLEs can be seen as the spaces in which people interact and communicate and whose ultimate result is learning and the development of collective know-how. A PLE can use social software for informal learning which is learner driven, problem-based and motivated by interest – not as a process triggered by a single learning provider, but as a continuing activity. The ‘Learning in Process’ project [27] and the APOSDLE project [28] have attempted to develop embedded, or work-integrated, learning support where learning opportunities (learning objects, documents, checklists and also colleagues) are recommended based on a virtual understanding of the learner’s context. While these development activities acknowledge the importance of collaboration, community engagement and of embedding learning into working and living processes, they have not so far addressed the linkage of individual learning processes and the further development of both individual and collective understanding as the knowledge and learning processes mature [29]. In order to achieve that transition (to what we term a ‘community of innovation’), processes of reflection and formative assessment have a critical role to play.
John Cook [30] has suggested that Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environments (Womble) could play a key role in such a process. He points out “around 4 billion users around the world are already appropriating mobile devices in their every day lives, sometimes with increasingly sophisticated practices, spawned through their own agency and personal/collective interests.”
However, in line with Jenkins at al [31] it is not just the material and functional character of the technologies which is important but the potential of the use of mobile devices to contribute to a new “participatory culture.” They define such a culture as one “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices… Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.”
The specific skills that Jenkins and his coauthors describe as arising through involvement of “average consumers” in this “participatory culture” include ludic forms of problem solving, identity construction, multitasking, “distributed cognition,” and “transmedial navigation.”
Importantly modern mobile devices can easily be user customized, including the appearance, operation and applications. Wild, Mödritscher and Sigurdarson [32] suggest that “establishing a learning environment, i.e. a network of people, artefacts, and tools (consciously or unconsciously) involved in learning activities, is part of the learning outcomes, not an instructional condition.” They go on to say: “Considering the learning environment not only a condition for but also an outcome of learning, moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform which is personalisable or customisable by learners (‘easy to use’) and heading towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artefacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilisable by learners within their learning activities (‘easy to develop’). ”
Critically, mobile devices can facilitate the recognition of context as a key factor in work related and social learning processes.  Cook [33] proposes that new digital media can be regarded as cultural resources for learning and can enable the bringing together of the informal learning contexts in the world outside the institution with those processes and contexts that are valued inside the intuitions.
He suggests that informal learning in social networks is not enabling the “critical, creative and reflective learning that we value in formal education.”
Instead he argues for the scaffolding of learning in a new context for learning through learning activities that take place outside formal institutions and on platforms that are selected by learners.
Cook [30] describes two experimental learning activities for mobile devices developed through projects at London Metropolitan University. In the first, targeted at trainee teachers an urban area close to London Metropolitan University, from 1850 to the present day, is being used to explore how schools are signifiers of both urban change and continuity of educational policy and practice.
The aim of this project is to provide a contextualised, social and historical account of urban education, focusing on systems and beliefs that contribute to the construction of the surrounding discourses. A second aim is to scaffold the trainee teachers’ understanding of what is possible with mobile learning in terms of field trips. In an evaluation of the project, 91% of participants thought the mobile device enhanced the learning experience. Furthermore, they considered the information easy to assimilate allowing more time to concentrate on tasks and said the application allowed instant reflection in situ and promoted “active learning” through triggering their own thoughts and encouraging them to think more about the area
In the second project, archaeology students were provided with a tour of context aware objects triggered by different artifacts in the remains of a Cistercian abbey in Yorkshire. The objects allowed learners to expire not only the physical entity of the reconstructed abbey through the virtual representation, but also to examine different aspects including social and cultural history and the construction methods deployed. According to Cook [30] “the gap between physical world (what is left of Cistercian), virtual world on mobile is inhabited by the shared cognition of the students for deep learning.”
The use of the mobile technology allowed the development and exploration of boundary objects transcending the physical and virtual worlds. Boundary objects have been defined as “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.” [33].  The creation and management of boundary objects which can be explored through mobile devices can allow the interlinking of formal and academic knowledge to practical and work process knowledge.
Practically, if we consider models for personalized and highly communicative learning interaction in concert with mobile devices, whilst employing context aware techniques, startling possibilities can arise. For example, we can combine the immediacy of mobile interaction with an emergent need for a collaborative problem solving dialogue, in vivo, during everyday working practices, where the contextual dimensions can constrain and structure (through semantic operations) the choices about a suitable problem solving partner or the type of contextualised knowledge that will support the problem solving. In brief, combining dialogue design, social software techniques, mobility and context sensitivity means we have greater opportunities for learning rich dialogues in situations where they are needed – to address concrete and emergent problems or opportunities at work.
Such approaches to work oriented mobile learning also supports Levi Strauss’s idea of bricolage [34]. The concept of bricolage refers to the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. Bricolage involves a process of resignification by which cultural signs with established meanings are re-organised into new codes of meaning. In such a pedagogic approach the task of educators is to help co-shape the learning environment.
Of course, such approaches are possible using social software on desktop and lap top computers. The key to the mobile environment is in facilitating the use of context. This is particularly important as traditional elearning, focused on academic learning, has failed to support the context based learning inherent in informal and work based environments.
Whilst the use of context is limited in the experiments undertaken by London Metropolitan University, being mainly based on location specific and temporal factors, it is not difficult to imagine that applications could be developed which seek to build on wider contextual factors. These might include tasks being undertaken, the nature of any given social network, competences being deployed, individual learner preferences and identities and of course the semantic relations involved.”

You can download the full paper here

Yesterday we held the first of a series of online conferences for the Jisc SSBR project which supports the 40 odd projects presently being funded under the Jisc Institutional Innovation programme.

We gad about 70 attending the confernce which used Elluminate as the main platform. I have organised and participated in a lot of on-line events over the past 18 months and though we have much experience in organising such events by now we are still, I think, in a learning curve. Therefore it is worth a  few reflections on what works, what doesn’t and what might be improved.

First something (short) about my main role in the event. We ‘wrapped’ the conference in an internet radio show, broadcasting before the conference opened, at the coffee, lunch and tea breaks and with a  follow up evening programme. the daytime broadcasts were also streamed into Elluminate and we continued on internet radio in the morning to allow those not registered for the conference to listen to John Cook’s keynote speech on ‘Surfing the Moble Wave’ (podcast available here shortly). I think this worked well. To get the stream into Elluminate is easy – we merely hijacked the feed as a microphone in Elluminate. Although the sound quality in Elluminate is not great, from what people tell me the radio provided continuity to the conference.

In the main event the presentations went well. we are well rehearsed in organising and moderating these by now. The one thing we were most nervous about was moving people into breakout groups in the afternoon. Somewhat surprisingly this worked well at a technical level. However people felt that these sessions were too short. And one session in the morning where we invited people to give short reports to the whole room was not so successful. Overtly the problem was technical, with sound breaking up and poor quality audio at other times. I am not quite sure what the problem was. It may be lack of bandwidth from participants although elluminate claims to work on low bandwidth. More likely I suspect, was poor quality headsets. The quality of the microphone seems to make a huge difference for online presenters. I also think that 70 is too many people to organise a high degree of interaction in online events. Merely managing so many provides problems. If we want to organise interaction, participation and discussion in large online conferences, it is probably better to divide into groups with feedback in short plenaries.

As always in such conferences when technical problems occur, people were extolling the virtue of various different platforms. I am unconvinced that any are better than Elluminate. However some rethinking of the user interfaces would be helpful. especially to make groups management easier (allowing people to move themselves int0 a group would be good – anyone listening at Elluminate? – and also a larger chat box).

At the end of the day, organising and managing online confernces is not that different form face to face events. But there are some significant differences and we still need to keep thinking how we can best facilaite interaction in online events.

Yesterday afternoon I blogged about our forthcoming handbook about the use of Web 2.0 and social software in the classroom. The handbook is being produced by the EU Taccle project. I asked people to email me if they were interested in receiving free copies. Little did I anticipate the response. When I returned from a quick trip to the shops I already had received some 15 emails. Panic!

I produced a very quick Google form (whatever you think about Google, their forms application is awesome, embedded it in a WordPress page on this site and edited the blog to point to the form.

By now, some 75 people have requested copies of the book from about 15 countries. If nothing else, Web 2.0 and social software make dissemination easy. On the form I asked if anyone was interested in translating the handbook into other languages, given that it is to be published under a Creative Commons liscence. And to date I have had expressions of interest in translating the handbook into Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese, Arabic, Welsh and Catalan. Many thanks to you all – it just shows the power of Social software and Creative Commons working together.

I attended a workshop on ‘Pedagogical innovations in new ICT-facilitated learning communities’ organised by the IPTS in Seville earlier this week. And very interesting it was too.

Sadly, though, the IPTS had nots et up a dynamic site for the workshop. No problem. We qyuickly agreed on #ipts as the hash tag for the five or six of us addicted to Twitter.

And Grainne Conole hacked together a site on the UK Open University’s alpha Cloudworks software in about ten minutes (I am very impressed with Cloudworks – if you haven’t already, give it a look).

There were extremely interesting presentations by Kirsti Ala-Mutka and Etienne Wenger. I am not great at taking notes at meetings (and was busy twittering anyway). But Grainne put together this excellent summary of Etienne’s presnetation, taken from the Cloudworks site.

Learning in practice – a social perspective, Wenger’s Community of Practice (CoP) theory. Four aspects

1. Community – Where do we belong?
2. Identity – Who are we becoming?
3. Meaning – What is our experience?
4. Practice – What are we doing?

Who are our students and how do they know who they are and how they are placed in society?

Original communities of practice theory was developed before the emergence of the web

Meaning and meanfulness are a key component of the theory BUT its about developing meaning making in the real world, situated nature of learning is crucial

There is a real issue in terms of educational systems validating informal learning – there is a real tension between vertical vs. horizontal learning. This tension is not resolvable – we need to live with it and understand the paradoxes and contradictions.

Complex inter-relationship between: space, time, locality, practice, boundary crossings between different practices. For example trainee doctor in the hospital in one practice, translation of this experience into ‘evidence for assessment purposes’ needs to then be ‘validated’ by auditors in another community of practice.

One of the trends in the perfect storm of web 2.0, communities in the 21st century which emerged around the time that CoP was developed was that organisations in the nineties were struggling with what it means to be a knowledge organisation? Some looked to CoP theory as a means of trying to address this.

At this time knowledge management was 10% technology 90% people, but much of the discourse was on the technologies but it was harder to understand the human dimensions and what this meant in terms of connections, collective understanding, etc.

Core and boundary learning
What are the implications of a theory like this for professional educational?

Think of a body of knowledge as a curriculum whereas in reality it is a system of inter-connected practices, have a set of different practices which are producing the body of knowledge which define what ‘teaching’, ‘nursing’, ‘mathematics’ is.

Therefore ideally the education for a nurse or teacher would be to find your place in that landscape of practices, to find your identity. If we think along these lines we will need to rethink our educational practice – we put too much emphasis on the mechanics of learning rather than on the development of meaning making.

A complex landscape – modes of identification
Process of identity formation

1. Imagination – how do we imagine ourselves? Imagination as an image of the world such as it makes sense of who I am
2. Engagement –
3. Alignment – way you express your belonging to the community, what you do and don’t do as part of belonging to a community
4. How does learning exist as an experience of being in the world?

First storm was organisations (both businesses and governments) trying to create horizontal communities so that they can learn from each other etc

Second storm – emergence of the web and its potential impact, but this was very much aligned with the CoP practices – a Perfect storm – peer to peer interactions, development of practices etc. The web has changed the landscape for understanding community and identity

Trends shaping technology and community – a learning agenda

• Fabric of connectivity – always on, virtual presence
• Modes of engagement – generalised self-expression, mass collaboration, creative re-appropriation
• Active medium – social computing, semantic web,, digital footprint
• Reconfigured geographies – homesteading of the web, individualisation of orientation
• Modulating polarities – togetherness and separation, interacting and publishing, individual and group
• Dealing with multiplicity – competing services, multi-membership, thin connections
• New communities – multi-space, multi-scale, dynamic boundaries, social learning spaces

I am ever more excited by the possibilities of ebook and emedia readers linked to open access publications. I think we are on the cusp of a big change in access to learning. Recently I produced a short consultancy report on the potential for a new journal. The major technical considerations in the publication of a journal, I said, was if it was to be open or closed and what media should the journal deploy? Below is an excerpt from the report.

Open or Closed Access

There has been much recent discussion about Open Access journals. Much of this stems from the Budapest Open Access Initiative launched by the  Open Society Institute (OSI)  to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The  Budapest Open Access Initiative is intended as a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment and has been signed by a growing number of individuals and organizations from around the world who represent researchers, universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals, publishers, learned societies. Signatories include the University of Hamburg.

Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available to the reader “without financial or other barrier other than access to the internet itself.” Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. Subsidized journals are financed by an academic institution or a government information centre; those requiring payment are typically financed by money made available to researchers for the purpose from a public or private funding agency, as part of a research grant. There have also been several modifications of open access journals that have considerably different natures: hybrid open access journals and delayed open access journals.

Open access journals may be considered to be:

• Journals entirely open access
• Journals with research articles open access (hybrid open access journals)
• Journals with some research articles open access (hybrid open access journals)
• Journals with some articles open access and the other delayed access
• Journals with delayed open access (delayed open access journals)
• Journals permitting self-archiving of articles

It should be noted that many of the hybrid journals maintain both an open access or delayed access online version alongside a paid for print version.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/), maintained by the University of Malmo, and  which covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals and aims to cover all subjects and languages currently lists 3786 journals in the directory. 1330 journals are searchable at article level and at the time of writing 240714 articles are included in the DOAJ service. 258 of the journals are in the field of education and 50 in technology. A list of these education related journals is included in Appendix 2. it should be noted few, if any are in the filed of vocational education and training.

Th advantages of open access journals is obviously their accessibility. A number of extensive studies have shown that articles in open access journals are much more likely to be cited than those in closed access journals.

It has also been argued that open access journal will promote innovation, facilitate collaboration between researchers and that the results of research funded by public money should be published in the public domain. It is interesting to note that there appears no difference in status or scholarly reputation of journals between those with open and those with closed access.

Open Access on-line journals are particularly popular for allowing access to doctoral research. For example Educate (http://www.educatejournal.org/index.php?journal=educate) is published twice a year in June and December under the auspices of the Doctoral School at the Institute of Education, University of London. The journal aims to provide:

• opportunities for the dissemination of the work of current post-graduate researchers at any stage of their research, and recent doctoral graduates, on any aspect of education or related areas
• opportunities for the dissemination of “work in progress” to the academic community
• a resource for professionals involved in educational enquiry and research

Educate articles are peer reviewed by both an established academic and a current post-graduate researcher. Articles are further reviewed by the editorial board as a whole.

The obvious argument against is financial. Doubts have been raised over the viability of the journal publishers if Open Access becomes the norm (although these questions are also raised by the move to online journals). There is a further issue that payments by researchers for publishing will disadvantage those without access to substantial research grants.

Media – print, online or both and what about publishers?

There is a growing trend towards on-line journals. Indeed, all journals today would appear to have some form of web presence.

However there is a basic divide between those journals which are only available online and those which are also available through a print edition. For those which also maintain a print edition, varying levels of access may be provided to the online content as noted above. It should also be noted that those journals with restricted public access to online content, may often allow that access if the researchers institution has a subscription to the journal. This is under the so called Athens Access Management System. There is also a growing number of online journals that require a subscription for access to full articles.

Many of the major journal publishers – for instance Blackwells – are currently launching enhanced on-line platforms. Additional a number of university libraries are exploring providing only online access to journals. This is likely to be accelerated by the move to digitalise texts and by developments in mobile devices and book readers able to access the internet.

There are obviously advantages for on-line publications in terms of accessibility.

If a publication is only available through the internet there are major advantages in terms of cost. Put quite simply, it is possible to by-pass publishers who represent a considerable hurdle in launching any new journal. Publishers want to be sure there will be a financially viable market for a journal and in a relatively small research area such as VET are understandably cautious. Furthermore, the long lead in time in negotiating with publishers can dissipate effort and lessen initial enthusiasm. In addition there is access to relatively powerful Open Source journal software such as Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs) which claims to be running 1400 journals in ten languages in March 2008. There is some evidence to suggest it may be possible to shorten submission to publication turn around times using online journals.

So what are the disadvantages? Put quite simply, it  is one of prestige. Articles published by renowned academic journals have been seen as having higher prestige than those that are published online. This is not just a matter of prejudice. Many countries, including the Netherlands and UK, have a rating system for journals. And be it online or print, those backed by publishers have tended to have a higher research rating. Individual researchers may also feel that more traditional and often older professors do not value online publications.

This may be about to change. In the field of Technology Enhanced Learning, an area which would be expected to be in the forefront of any move to online publications, there are increasingly prestigious publications which are only available on line. Examples include the long established, peer review journal, First Monday, focused on the Internet, which since its launch in May 1996 has published 953 papers in 150 issues; these papers were written by 1,195 different authors. Equally prestigious is Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/?view=about), an open-access, peer-reviewed, online periodical  published bimonthly by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University in Canada. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology to enhance education and training in academic, commercial, and governmental settings.

It should also be noted that the  LOCKSS system (http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home) allows a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of a journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

One probable future trend is the merger of different media. Video is increasingly of importance with many educational projects and initiatives publishing videos on public access sites such as Youtube (http://www.youtube.com). Blogging is an increasingly important way of publishing on work in progress. Online seminars are now freely available on all manner of topics. It is likely that journals will increasingly embrace such media with text publications accompanied by video material, slidecasts (audio and slide presentations) and by online seminars to present papers and discuss issues arising from the work.

There is another option between the idea of an online ‘self published’ journal and a print journal provided by a publisher. Some universities have themselves published journals. This is not particularly technically difficult. The major problem is distribution. Most university published journals tend to come from those universities with an associated publishing house, like the University of London Press or the University of Oxford Press, who in effect operate in little different a way than commercial publishers. Recently technical innovation has led to the development of printing on demand. Although there are different financial models, typically printers charge a flat fee per print edition and an extra fee per copy. The cover price is determined by those commissioning the printing. The printers will often distribute copies themselves. Individuals can order online and the book or journal will be printed when ordered and despatched by post. It is then possible to offer both an online version for free or a hard copy for those who would prefer to have
a print volume. The economic of this require further exploration but it is a rapidly growing market. It is interesting to note that in addition to a number of commercial printers in north Germany, Hamburg University Press (http://cmslib.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/hamburg-up/content/home.xml) is now offering printing on demand. There are also technical developments in machines which allow printing of books or newspapers on demand in a bookshop or kiosk.

It is the season of predictions for 2009. Here is mine – 2009 will be the year of Open Education. Seminars, workshops, lectures, courses – all available on line and for free. I am not sere I trust my  star-gazing ability – or my ability to predict technology development trends for that matter – so we are doing our best to make sure it comes true by organising a series of events ourselves.

Over the next few days I will be posting details of a whole series of different events. First up, here is the spring Open Seminar series being organised by the JISC Evolve network in collaboration with the German Educamp Network who are staging a series of conferences around Web2.0 social software and elearning. is organising the third EduCamp in Germany.

Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar Live

26 January 1900 CET, 1800 UK time – Dragons Den special – Learning and Multi user Virtual Environments

23 February 1900 CET, 1800 UK time – The reality of communities

March 2009 – time and date ot be announced – LIVE broadcast from JISC Emerge conference.

You can listen live to all the programmes by going to http://tinyurl.com/6df6ar in your web browser. This will open the live stream in your MP3 player of choice.

Emerging Mondays Seminars

The open online seminars will take place on the Elluminate platform. We will announce the address for the events shortly, together with the final line line up of presenters. Each seminar will feature tow short introductions with most time being given over to discussion.

PLEs and E-Portfolios – is this the future of education?
January, 19th 2009, 1900 CET, 1800 UK time. Click here for access to Elluminate.
Speakers: Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu
Moderators: Thomas Bernhardt and Marcel Kirchner

• What does a PLE look like?
• What is PLE? A technical concept or a pedagogic method?
• How can we use e-Portfolios and PLEs in practice?What is the difference between a PLE and an E-Portfolio?
• Is the PLE the future of education?

Careers and the Internet – how does Web 2.0 impact on our Online Reputation and Identity
February, 16th 2009 – 1900 CET, 1800 UK time. Click here for access to Elluminate.
Speakers: Steven Warburton, Kings College, Eduserve funded Rhizomes project
Moderators: Cristina Costa and Marcel Kirchner

• How can we use E-Portfolios and other tools for applying for jobs and building identities
• The risks and opportunities in developing a web identity
• Privacy 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 – the potential of Social Software for learning in enterprises
March, 16th 2009 – 1900 CET, 1800 UK time. Click here for access to Elluminate.
Speakers: Timothy Hall, University of Limerick, Ireland
Moderators: Cristina Costa and Steffen Büffel

• How is social software being used for learning in enterprises
• Can social software support communities of practice
• How can social software support informal learning

Edupunk – Free the educational system
April, 6th 2009 1900 CET, 1800 UK time
Speakers: Dr. Martin Ebner and Steven Wheeler, University of Plymouth
Moderators: Thomas Bernhardt, Marcel Kirchner and Cristina Costa

• Edupunk – hype or reality
• Does e-teaching need a pedagogical apprenticeship?
• Why and how far students should be involved in the developing process of courses?

ThoughtFest 09

5-6 March, Salford, Manchester, UK
Thought Fest is a two-day event being organized by Pontydysgu with the support of the JISC Evolve network and
the European Mature-IP project.

The event will bring together researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning in an open forum to debate the current issues surrounding educational technologies and discuss how and where research impacts on practice and where practice drives research.

Whilst there will be keynotes by Graham Attwell and Steven Warburton, Thought Fest is a user driven workshop and we welcome ideas for sessions, demontsrations activities. Accomodation and food for free – you juts have to pay for your travel.

More details here or sign up on this page.

Educamp
April 17th – 19th
Venue: Ilmenau, Thuringia, Germnay
What is the EduCamp all about?
The EduCamp-Network (http://educamp.mixxt.de/) is organising the third EduCamp in Germany. This will also be the first international EduCamp. The event will take place from the 17th to the 19th of April, 2009 in Ilmenau, Thuringia. Details of previous EduCamps can be found at http://educamp.mixxt.de.

There will be some initial structure for the programme, but after the panel discussion on Friday, the EduCamp will be organized as a barcamp. Sessions and workshops will be organised by participants at the beginning of the event. On Sunday the topic under discussion is “EduOpenSpace” (OpenSpace?). Participants will form clusters to discuss some of the related topics.

Topics
The issue of how we can use social software, such as weblogs, podcasts, wikis, micro-blogging, VoIP in education in schools, universities and companies is a subject attracting much interest. Developing connections to other people and joining learning networks is central to the Information society. Mulitple knowledge resources all access to the exchange of experiences and the construction of knowledge.

The last EduCamps meeting discussed ‘Teaching and Learning 2.0’. This meeting will continue those discussions.

EduCamp is an open event and everyone interested in welcome to attend. It will take place at the Humboldtbau at the Technical University of Ilmenau.

The main topics for the EduCamp are Corporate Learning 2.0 and e-learning in schools or universities. Other topics include the use of E-Portfolios, Digital games and virtual worlds in education. In line with the idea of barcamp, everyone is invited to propose their own topics for discussion.