CETIS Repositories and Open Web Position Paper

Here at Southampton we have been doing 'stuff' with 'stuff' to make it shared for a long while :-) EPrints has become established for archiving, publishing and revealing research collections, and the use of EPrints has been embedded into university processes (particularly those related to promotions and academic progression). It seemed obvious to the researchers in our group ( Learning Societies Lab) that a learning from web 2.0 behaviours and taking resources associated with learning and teaching into the world of public and shared information was a natural progression for contemporary academic practice.

Below is a position paper from the EdShare team which is to be presented at the CETIS repositories and open web group meeting in late April 2010

The EdShare Approach: Web 2.0 from the Ground Up

JISC CETIS Repositories and The Open Web
April 2010

Background


At Southampton University we have been involved in repositories for teaching and learning for many years. Our first repository in 2005 was called CLARe, a simple EPrints installation with a Learning Object schema, deployed for the Language teaching community. Our evaluations of CLARe showed that people were disappointed with the plain repository interface, and described the experience as ‘flat’ (it was hard to navigate and nothing was interlinked) and ‘dead’ (there was no information on how people had used resources, or what they thought of them). It was clear that the Web 2.0 systems that were appearing at the time (such as Flick’r and YouTube) were changing people’s expectations of what a repository should offer.

We ran a follow up project called CLARe Tools (CLAReT) in 2007 that tried to address these issues with a more modern interface. However, in our evaluation workshops we found that while the superficial problems had been addressed, deeper issues emerged. It became clear to us that the problem wasn’t just an interface issue, it concerned long held assumptions about the way in which teachers thought about their digital teaching materials. Web 2.0 features were not sufficient, what was required was a rethink of the whole approach.
In the light of our experience, we turned to popular Web 2.0 sharing sites in order to try and analyse what has made them successful. Why are people keen to upload photos to Flick’r, but not to upload handouts to a teaching repository? The result of our rethinking has been a family of projects and repositories built around a common set of EPrints extensions called EdShare, which between them over the last two years have made thousands of new resources available online.

The EdShare Approach

Going into our projects we were conscious of the predominant practice of all kinds of people across Universities (both teachers and specialist staff), who support learning, for re-using small parts, elements and ideas from their own as well as colleagues’ and other collaborators’ materials. It was clear that there were materials that could be shared.

We wanted to rethink our approach to teaching and learning repositories by learning from successful Web 2.0 sharing sites – not by copying their user interface elements in a facile way, but by re-examining the core purpose and focus of the system itself.

We came to believe that a good way to understand the difference is to look at what services the sites offered their users. Research repositories succeed because the service they offer is one of Archiving, recording research outputs for posterity. The problem is that no one wants to archive their teaching resources.
In comparison, the popular Web 2.0 sites offer a different set of services:

• Hosting: storing digital content online, and making it public via a page with its own URL.

• Organisation: allowing the creation of composite structures (such as channels or albums), which are also available via a page with its own URL.

• Community: creating awareness of the site’s community, through comments, recommendations and explicit profiles that give users their own public page.

This resulted in number of key extensions to EPrints that together transform a static repository into a living community site. Inline previews ensure that resource pages are focused on the resource and not on metadata, collections allow users to gather together useful resources regardless of whether they were the original depositors, comments and usage stats create automatic attention information that helps with quality assessment, reveals activity and motivates user engagement, profile pages foster a sense of authorial identity and community, and remix tools encourage the reuse and reinvention of materials.

Fostering engagement

In on-going JISC-funded initiatives based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, we have worked with our community of teachers and subject specialists to develop a different approach to the organisation, sharing and collaboration of the everyday teaching resources. We have drawn on the success of Web 2.0 applications such as Flick’r and YouTube; we have learned from the observed popularity of placing content to the fore, collaborating with known individuals, small communities; ease for providing comments, preference for low-threshold barriers to adding content, the importance of the search experience, interest in metrics (especially of views) as well as the attractions of personalisation and profile sharing.

We have deployed a number of sites using the EdShare extensions, including EdShare Southampton (www.edshare.soton.ac.uk) our institutional learning and teaching repository; HumBox (www.humbox.ac.uk), a share for use by the HEAcademy Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies Subject Centre’s Open Educational Resources Project; LORO (a repository for the Department of Languages at the Open University); and WBLR (a new repository for the University of Worcester).


EdShare Southampton Example


In the first year of operation for EdShare Southampton, we worked with a collaborative, co-design approach, seeking to link with our community both to understand concerns and motivations, as well as to build alliances to maximise our capacity to influence and support sharing and increased collaboration across the institution.

Supporting sharers in adding minimal metadata, we have added as much useful automatically generated metadata as feasible. We know the institutional affiliation of people as well as their name. EdShare Southampton has also been integrated with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) management system of the University from the outset. Everyone who has a University login identity is able to add content to EdShare.

We have found that our work of developing the infrastructure to support sharing educational resources across the University has complemented work to develop a culture for sharing acros the institution.

Hugh Davis,
Seb Francois,
Yvonne Howard,
Patrick McSweeney,
Dave Millard,
Debra Morris,
Marcus Ramsden,
and
Su White

Education and Web2.0

Working with EdShare and OneShare building resource collections for use in education brings up a whole variety of discussion topics about the nature of Web2.0, the social web, and the role of sharing and repositories in UK Higher Education.

Our project ran a very interesting workshop on this topic early in November 2009. Below is a collection of notes and observations, plus a few photos, which capture something of the day.

we made lots of time for group discussions, folk here are considering issues around metadata ( or does it matter data as I like to think of it).

As you might imagine there is space for a variety of views between the hard line, information scientist formal categorisation

and the more pragmatic what can be generate automatically,

and do we need that information anyway, lets just get it tagged by users, kind of approach.

Ali Dickens from the subject centre for Language, Linguistics and Ares Studies (LASS) is involved in Language Box (for Linguists), and Humbox (for humanities).

She is planning to run a full day session on copyright on December 14 2009. At our workshop she led a session where she asked folk to do a risk analysis on issues around copyright.

Its a topic which attracts a lot of interest, and we like to call our interactions with the lawyers on this one poking the dragon. You can see from the flipcharts what we might poke the dragon for.

the final session of the day was another practical task, using post it notes to look at our favourite web2.0 applications, and think about the technology affordances within those categorisations.

Seminar on iTunesU

The debate ranged from whether iTunesU was a tool for education as well as marketing, to issues about committing to a platform which can be seen to exclude some users. ITuneU isof  particular  interest for two  the ECS research groups (IAM and LSL).  ECS-TV was spawned in IAM (Intelligence Agents and Multimedia) and current projects include work to find effective ways of capturing and accessing video resources in our EdShare institutional learning and teaching repository.  EdShare is hosted in LSL (Learning Societies Lab) and we are working hard to extend and develop its functionality in a way that suits the working lives of academics and students at University.

Lawrence Stephenson from Apple's iTunesU came down to Southampton today to give us a seminar covering recent development from Apple, and the logistics and details of how - a man who is passionate about education :-) Lawrence is driving the iTunesU initiative in the UK

Lawrence gave us an overview of the Universities who have so far committed to appearing on iTunesU, to date there are 10 UK universities already on iTunesU, with more than a hundred institutions lined up to be online via the portal in the near future.

Discussions which arose from the presentation included

• User generated content
  
• Populating the site
  
• Relationship between EdShare and any future initiative
  
• The role of ECS-TV in as a role model
  
• New modes of teaching and interactions 

Unfortunately, because of intellectual property constraints we were not able to record this seminar, so if you want to hear what Lawrence was saying you will have to invite him to a seminar of your own!

sign up process:
there are a series of steps/requirements to be met in order to have a presence on iTunesU these include:

• High level of institutional commitment
  
• Looking for 200 pieces of digital content
  
• Process of populating the digital content (Ultimately the institution is responsible for its own content)
  
• Formal agreement
  
• Launch on a TUESDAY
  

NOTE: the quickest it has been done is three months

Notes and Links:

Apple's overview of iTunesU
Open University's evaluation of impact
Current UK presence include
University of Oxford, Open University, Warwick, UCL

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