OER, bootstrapping a culture of change

Its always heartening to hear that you have a paper accepted, especially when its by an IEEE trans!

We are really proud of the progress we are making with the EdShare repository of educational resources, and its kid sib language learning repository called Faroes. This paper is looking at organisational learning rather than the nuts and bolts of repositories. It ties in nicely with previous work we have done on barriers and drivers for change. Apart from anything else, if we are going to continue to invest in technology enhanced learning, then we had better find a way from learning on the way about the processes and sharing lessons learnt - for good and for ill!

Big thanks are due to Hugh Davis who led the insights, corralled us into order, and got this paper off the stocks. Les Carr, aka repository man as ever injects shed loads of energy into our work, and Jessie Hey (now more of a lady of leisure) really had a whole load of experience to share. But (perhaps the secret of our success?) it really was a team effort.

I wrote a little bit about the context and the background of the paper in a previous post, you may want to take a look at that, and then probably best if I point you to the actual publication.

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

Davis, H., Carr, L., Hey, J., Howard, Y., Millard, D., Morris, D. and White, S. (2009) Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies . (In Press)

Hiding Our/Their information

Just been working on an Open Educational Resources bid which is designed to establish a greater culture of sharing and change across our academic communities. As is often the case I observe some synchronicity in my experiences (actually an artefact, created by the focus of my attention, but here you go... )

Now I am someone who despairs at how off the shelf systems steer us to hiding information away. Let me give you a few examples...

Those who know me will remember that I believe that BlackBoard ( and indeed all such learning environments) is the tool of the devil.
Now I admit that part of this idea could come from blind prejudice, but

• my experience as a tutor setting information up,
• my experience as a user who gets frustrated using the system

so let's identify a few problems...

1) successive levels of indirection act as a barrier to use

• its like sending students an extra long way round the campus to get to their lecture
• its like making the academics spend an extra 15 minutes of admin each time they begin teaching

2) consistent look and feel is a barrier

• its like making all the corridors and all the lecture theatres look identical,
  
• we get confused, we get lost

3) dynamically allocating a different url to each instance of a document is a barrier

• its like never letting anyone save their paperwork in their own folder to take home,
  
• but forcing them to go to a special room whenever they want to take a look
  
• ( oh and then making them go through some bizarre ritual before you hand the document over)

4 ) and did I mention that you can only look at a course if you are registered

• you can't go back to look at a course notes for something you studied last year
• a teacher can't go and take a look at colleagues notes
• a student can't go and sit through a class which they are not actually registered for

its all a bit closed....

and then there is the university portal.. using that portal triggered this post.
I began of the arcane route which I had to take to find some notes for a special interest group.

• login (annoyed already because they force you to change your password every six months)
• got the the groups section (another click)
• select the group (another click) - and the system decides to pop up a new window (when I want a new tab!)
• another click neeeded to select my activity

but.... this is for the group only, and if I want to make my activities/information visible to the rest of the world

• I have to create another copy, in another place, using another system
• so any effort invested in the group site, and in the learning site, will have to be replicated for every different use

is there any sense in that?

• its not findable by general engines
• great for secret societies
• not so good for things which benefit from being in the public domain)

compare the open systems I use, EPrints and EdShare.

• OK, depositing information into the system is a bit arcane and could involve a few more steps than listed above
• but don't begin to get me on the rigmarole of putting documents and information into Blackboard

once it is there

• anyone can find it
• it is indexed, findable and public

OK I can hear you thinking, so where is the synchronicity?

first off, I had been following a link on twitter this morning about user experience and found some insightful words on the A List Apart blog titled Look at it another way talking about how we should take the user perspective when designing systems.

and then, as I cycled home from work to catch up on my sleep after having submitted my bid JISC OER bid, what should I hear on the radio but James Boyle from Duke University being interviewed by Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed on the topic of copyright, digital commons, and all things open. Boyle is based at the Centre for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University, and has just published a new book titled The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.

There were a lot of fabulous ideas touched upon during this short interview, and you can get a sense of the breadth of what's covered by following up a few search result on for James Boyle book commons copyright duke university on google (like I did)

Inevitably I found myself muttering to Laurie, ' if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, copyright is like homosexuality. Ultimately, mass law breaking will lead to a change in the law'. It would be a miracle if publishers (of all types of media) did not try to defend their hegemony, but it does not mean that they will win.

But Boyle is a man who has made a career out of this study, and my trite comment is not backed up by his insight and understanding of the labrynthine realities of the law. In fact Boyle's title The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is rather chilling, especially for us in the UK, who see how little of the commons persist, and observe how little of the commons' right have survived.

And his message was chilling too, for he argues that the exercise of ownership is a dead hand on creativity. ( ...and I think... and for post industrial societies, destroying our creativity is surely a route to our ultimate demise? )

And it is this reference to the blight on creativity which chimes most strongly with me when I think about what we do as academcs by locking up our intellectual resources. As an educationalist I think it is irresponsible not to make available to the widest possible community the outputs of my educational activities. Many times those resources may be fragments, better understood when they are situated with their context, the class, the duscourse. But they may have value, and surely I am being wasteful if I do not make them freely available.

Bootstrapping the culture of sharing: refining our understanding of learning objects

or oooer as I like to think about it....

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources, Davis, H., Carr, L., Hey, J., Howard, Y., Millard, D., Morris, D. and White, S. (2009) Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies . (In Press)

We have been working on a paper for the IEEE Trans on Learning Technologies on some of the cultural change aspects of our experiences of working with repositories. Its about our experience of developing EdShare, but also reflects a rather richer back catalogue of experiences of establishing and using repositories, plus a few insights into the heady world of technology enhanded learning.

We are really proud of the progress we are making with the EdShare repository of educational resources, and its kid sib language learning repository called Faroes.

Thanks to shed loads of hard work on scholarly repositories led by Stevan Harnad and Les Carr from right here in ECS at the University of Southampton, we have built ourselves a real track record in that very important area.



EPrints is an open source repository which has blossomed thanks to the the hard working EPrints team with support from JISC. Our paper is not concerned with the technical aspects of the software, but more importantly about the organisational learning which we have derived from our intense usage of EPrints respoitories - probably most importantly because, compared to other well know repositories, we observe that EPrints users not only install their repository, they actually populate it.

Here at Southampton we have EPrints repositories for academic publications in ECS, and across the whole institution (University of Southampton). We are also using EPrints to drive our eTheses repository, and our EdShare repository of resources used educationally for teaching and the support of learning.

We not only have ground level experience of installing and running the repositories, but we are also getting increasingly sophisticated in our understanding of the most effective organisational drivers which can not only get the repository established but also get it used.

Many different colleagues have identified advantages from using the repositories, each individual will have a personal priority list. Findability figures big on the list. People like to be able to find their own stuff irrespective of moving on to new machines, or new institutions. We also like the fact that items in the repository are findable - classic search engines index the repository, and even if the paper is not world visible, will provide a pointer to its existence, often resulting in individual approaches for further information - thereby enhancing and enriching the scholarly knowledge network.

well that's enough of me blowing our trumpet, take a look at the paper if you want a little more information, oh and why don't you take a look at EPrints....

Potential users can find out more about the system and set in train further contactvia the software site hosted at eprints.org