Personal Blogs

Weller, M (2011) The Digital Scholar. How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury

This OU profs new book 'The Digital Scholar' deliberately had a Creative Commons licence allowing all kinds of things to be done to it.

All I've done is read it cover to cover, type up notes and my thoughts along e way and then posted up ALL of this. See Below or use the 'search this blog facility.'

The Digital Scholar Martin Weller

Chapter 10

Network Weather

Adam Greenfield (2010) Networked Weather

He talks of Foursquare and a night out, Weller talks of the academic conference.

· Knowledge sharing

· Validation

· Networking

· Recognition

· Socialising

· Remote participation

· Twitter backchannel

· Amplified events

· Socialisation

Twitter hashtags

Blogging

Live blogging

Video

Flickr

Cloudworks and Friendfeed

50% networking

75% content

In 25% of the time

75% greener

Participants not an audience

Backchannel adds another layer, but can be a negative experience for the speaker (Boyd, 2009)

Amplification of the conference

Archive of multimedia, range of tone.

Preservation and curation of such a record

Brian Kelly (2008)

Amplification of:

· Audience's voice

· Speaker's talk

· Across time

· Of slides

· Of feedback

· Collective memory of the event

· Of the learning

· Of the long term conference outputs

Experimentation with:

· Micro-presentations

· Nan-presentations

· Random selection of speakers

· Backchannel

Used to be a choice of attending or not, now there are many alternatives (JV least attending more than one conference at the same time).

2010 Martin Weller ran Openness in Education over two days using Elluminate and Cloudworks.

Four sessions all recorded and made available through Cloudworks.

Sessions chinned and released as podcasts

Also used:

· Twitter

· SurveyMonkey

· Blogs

· YouTube

· slideShare

· Animoto

· Xtranormal

· Pre conference

· And video before and during

Speakers, including Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.

287 attended synchronous Elluminate sessions

3,500 viewed in CloudWorks

From 14 countries

48% would not have attended in person

Cost 2,500 rather than 30,000

They have a legitimacy deficit to some.

· Attendees not given time from the workplace to attend virtually and readily interrupted.

· Doesn't command as much attention

· Don't plan ahead, so may drop out.

· Technical problems on the day are too late to resolve.

'The Camelot comparison - accentuating the positives of the entrenched practice'.

Hard to compare as they do things differently (and can be blended)

Chapter 11 Reward and Tenure

If it isn't recognised then it isn't recognised when it comes to getting promotion.

Research (more equal than the others)

Teaching

Service or management

Contribution to society

Academic esteem

A conservative value and reward system

'Assessing quality in a reliable and transparent manner is a significant problem in the recognition of digital scholarship, and its intangibility and complexity are enough to make many give up and fall back on the practices they know and trust.

· Recreating the existing model

· Finding digital equivalents

· Generating guidelines that include digital scholarship

· Using metrics (500 views, 4 embeds and a keynote too simplistic)

· Peer review

· Micro-credit

· Developing alternative methods

Keynote speech and reputation

Metrics can be cheated (Hirsh 2005) and gamed (Ealagas and Alexiou 2008)

REF Research Excellence Framework

'A digital scholar is likely to have a distributed online identity, all of which can be seen to represent factors such as reputation, impact, influence and productivity'.

'We continually make the error of subjugating technology to our present practice rather than allowing it to free us from the tyranny of past mistakes'. Stephen Heppell (2001)

'Many if the characteristics which would be frowned upon in scholarly articles, such as subjectivity, humour, and personal opinion, are vital elements in developing a dialogue in blogs'.

· Towards the portfolio approach:

· A range of digital outputs demonstrating impact

· Commendations from the community

· Recognised experts

· Overarching narrative making the case for the work as a whole.

· Peer review = reliability and authority.

· Which could also strangle innovation. (Fitzpatrick 2009)

Chapter 12 Publishing

· Research

· Authoring

· Submission

· Rejection/modification

· Publication

· Dissemination

WHY?

· Accepted practice

· Academic respectability

· Reward and tenure

· Dissemination

· Curation

NB Bellow's Law

'Once the journal has been liberated from the printed format, a number of related assumptions begin to unravel and lead to more fundamental questions.'

22,000 peer reviewed journals from 9,900 publishers.

Questioning the scholarly communication process ... Often the current model does not stand up to scrutiny.

The trucker's deal Wiley 2009b

McGuigan and Russell (2008) Deutsche Bank on how 7,000 people in academic publishing add value to justify 40% margins - they don't.

Advantages of open access publishing Harnad (2005)

· Early advantage

· Arxiv advantage

· Quality bias

· Quality advantage

· Competitive advantage

· Usage advantage

Weller's POV

· Citation advantage

· Time lag to publication

· Copyright

· Alternative publishing methods

Desire for greatest impact and widest dissemination (without compromising its quality or findings).

VS. Time to publication due to peer review and a print mentality that restricts number of items in a journal and how often it is published.

Creative commons keeps rights with the author.

Alternative methods for communication, publishing and debate which are more rewarding.

The traditional article begins to seem remote and dry in comparison.

Google knol web-based authoring.

PLoS hubs

New forms of representation and communication.

Shift from filtering on the way into filtering on the way out. Weinberger (2007)

As they are the product of public funding they should be out there.

We're at a transition state, and Weller gives in ten years for the change to occur. I see it differently as one of the early aeronauts looking out across at English Channel wanting to cross as soon as the weather permits knowing that I may just make it, wait ten years and others will be looking to cross the Atlantic.

Ware (2008) reasons to peer review (for free)

· To play your part as a member of the academic community

· To enjoy being able to improve the paper

· To enjoy seeing Newquay work ahead of publication

· To reciprocate the benefit when others review your postings.

Towards the 'approbation of discerning readers'. Martin Rees (2010)

Chapter 13

Skimming and skipping about instead of deep reading. Easily distracted, or persuasively detracted. But the overall tenure will be rearing to you hear the narrative.

· British Library Google Generation study (Rowlands et al. 2008)

· Has the need to learn by rote diminished?

· Outsourcing mundane memory to Google.

· Skittish bouncing behaviour Wijekumar et al. (2006)

· Web 2.0 and the 'mass democratisation of expression'.

NB 'low quality individual items because of their obvious ease of production, can be seen as an invitation to participate'. Weller

'If the intention is to encourage engagement then low-quality routes may be more fruitful than seeking to produce professional broadcast material'. Weller

'Amateurs' often create content which addresses subjects that academics may nit and also in a manner which differs from traditional teaching', Weller

A facial truism.. Any time you learn anything your brain is 'rewired' at a synaptic level. VS. The pronouncements of the likes of Carr and Greenfield.

Vague and ill-founded arguments.

Plasticity is as true of playing a computer game, or from my experience, coaching swimmers. Adaptation is desirable, ditto for touch-typing, drawing, sight reading when playing a musical instrument even driving a car.

... Based on supposition and anecdote.

'The Internet hasn't changed the way we think any more than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food'. Joshua Greene.

Also see Gerschenfeld (2010)

... VS pseudo-scientific explanations to back up prejudices will not help us address the issues. Weller

CF Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger (2009)

Idea of giving internet content a shelf-life. I disagree. Once rain water flows from a river into the ocean it is there, for potentially consigned to the depths, for ever.

Bug successes, something going viral, is not the norm.

For success, choice of tools and their perceived relevance to the main area of study are crucial elements. See Cann and Badge (2010).

VS. Creepy tree house syndrome (Stein 2008)

VS an LMS that is 'organisationally controlled, bland and singular in focus'.

NB how to do it? 'By making mistakes' with each iteration generating an improvement (Hilbert space et al. 2000/2001)

Experience is required to understand what approaches are suitable.

It also requires a reasonable mass of contributions to work, a motivation for those contributions and an easy means to contribute.

Just as with the initial dot.com. Hubble, the fact that there is hype doesn't mean the overall direction isn't correct. A technology may not completely change the world in the next 18 months, but it may significantly change practice in the next decade'. Weller (2001)

Roy Amara: we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. In Weller (2011)

It will never go back to the way it was.

The people best placed to understand it and adapt to it will be those who have immersed themselves in the current technological climate.

A willingness to experiment with new approaches and to explore the tensions between new possibilities and established practice is essential. Weller 2011

Chapter 14 Digital Resilience

Current scholars - anxieties, scepticism and resistance should be replaced with engagement and reflection.

Just as Clay Shirky looks at 20 years ahead.

QWERTY has been too entrenched to over through.

When distribution becomes abundant, rather than scare, open and shared rather than rivalrous, 'whole industries begin to look weak'.

We are learning what role those new tools play in our lives, and there will inevitably be mistakes, misapplication, overuse and correction'. Weller (2011)

CF Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory (1979) and our feelings about loss and gain.

The world my daughter will inhabit ...

Rather grand-parents and great-grandparents with cars, planes, cinema, radio and TV and for someone born in 1896 who died in 1993 two world wars, the atomic bomb, men on the moon, the Pill, higher education for all, loss of Empire and a video player that allowed him to see his favourite films from Charlie Chaplin to 'All Quiet on the Western Front'.

'This is a period of transition for scholarship, as significant as any other in its history, from the founding of universities to the establishment of peer review and the scientific method. It is also a period that holds tension and even some paradoxes: it is both business as usual and yet a time for considerable change; individual scholars are being highly innovative and yet the overall picture is one of reluctance; technology is creating new opportunities while simultaneously generating new concerns and problems'. Weller (2011)

Research, Application, Integration and Teaching to Engagement, Experimentation, Reflection and Sharing

If Boyer's four main scholarly functions were research, application, integration and teaching, then I would propose that those of the digital scholar are engagement, experimentation, reflection and sharing'. Weller (2011).

There's no reason why information and knowledge cannot be shared in a way that is attractive, memorable, comprehensible and fun.

Some academic papers, taking years to come to publication due to a protracted process are not only stultifying dull, but they are out of date (6 months ago is history if you are talking about e-learning, let alone anything Web related, what is more, the review process of these papers is akin to colleagues around the world patting each-other on the back).

No wonder they wouldn't gain much credence in the commercial world where decisions have to be made based on the bests facts TODAY about what may happen TOMORROW.

Dion Hinchcliffe Social Business Ecosystem Chart

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dionh/5653961068/in/photostream/

I find thinkers/authors straddle the worlds of commerce and academia reasonably well. The experts of course are advising hedge fund managers who have an uncanny ability to know what is about to happen.

Alerted by a Tweat, I bought the book in minutes.

There's never a better time than 'Now'.

Purchase your copy here.

Unwell, so having it read to me on the Kindle, while taking notes on an iPad.

When I wander off I pick up the thread on the iPhone.

It's surprising how much can be read while the kettle boils.

In due course and I'll have my very own 3,000 word interpretation of this 50,000+ worder, far more once I've added my notes, thoughts additional references and illustrations.

My web 2.0 sensibilities are for the online equivalent of the Illustrated, hardback coffee-table book, with video and podcasts, interactivity and links.

I'd have Dion Hinchcliffe's graphic designer do some colour diagrams, Steven Appleby provide some cartoons, while I would interview the author for YouTube and set it all to something suitably camp like Mike Oldfield with a Roger Dean poster decorating the set.

When do we get the webinar?

And I pre-emptivelly wrote a review in Amazon on the basis of the first two chapters, hearing the author debate and speak the subject and reading his blog (as well as his earlier book that he brings up as a way of looking at how things have changed since 2006).

P.S. Buy you e-book version now then return here to discuss, or find you in Linked in or Google+ ...

Or for some blended learning if you live near Lewes, East Sussex, over at the Needlemakers for a coffee.

My 'take-aways' so far:

• Digital, Networked, Open.
• Fast, cheap and out of control.
• Why students choose one university over another.
• The 'good enough' revolution. Wired (2009)
• The unpredicatable use of technology.
• (and Martin Weller's daughter, he writes on page one, didn't think, based on his 'ellevator pitch' that the book would do very well. This, with a bit of 'airplay' on the blogosphere, need not be the case. Get to work tweeting, noting, sharing, putting into Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Xing and Viadeo. I can't see a movie in it though).

Settling down to some H800 reading at the end of an extraowrdinary week.

Monday 'attended, livestream conference from the Institue of Educational Technology.

Tweated through-out and got one question in either to Martin Weller or Andrew Laws.

Screen grabs and bllog notes all the way through.

Yet to digest but gripped by Weller's growing view that page views, links and friends for a stream of online writing may be gathered in time as evidence of scholarqship.

Also informed by Tony Hirst and the meaning behind Goodhart's Law in relation to analytics that cease to be a measure as we become skilled at warping/twisting the means by which the stats are generated.

Informed too by the notion of Open Learn content, understandably, as having a commercial as well as a public remit, to inform, but also translate into people signing up for courses.

If there was a Coast course I'd do it. All I've ever had is a fancy booklet.

That was Monday.

This is turnng into one of those weblog things. Now why am I not into all that reverse chronology posting thing? Its having something to say and the desire to say it.

Four entries one day, none for a while.

That's fine too.

P.S. Now that all this stuff is public facing and broadcast should there not be a dress code.

I find myself watching an event taking place in 2011 and being reminded of an OU Physics Lecture of the 1970s. (I often watched this stuff as a boy in the middle of the night. Hippy, beard, denim jacket, flaired-trousers and sandals.)

Learners’ experiences of blended learning environments in a practice-based context (PB-LXP)

see http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/workspace.cfm?wpid=7174 ,

and

Student attitudes towards and use of ICT in course study, work and social activity: a technology acceptance model approach

http://oro.open.ac.uk/26467/

For anyone this you can ask subject specific question to your OU community on 'OU Platform'

For MAODERs sign up through the 'Your Subject' link and then Education - OU Community Online

Picking up on the 2007 presentation by Grainne Conole of research carried out by the Institute of Educational Technology (OU) I was keen to learn of outcomes from the follow up research they promised on practice-based learning.

Like anyone with an insatiable curiosity the desire to chase several references or to pursue a topic to the Nth degree doing so online can be overwhelming; it is too easy to find references, even more so when they have a URL.

Time was as an undergraduate such searches meant a walk or bike road across town, the nature of Geography (in the first year at least) touching on both human and physical topics, ranging from zoology, politics and history on the one hand to geology and climatology on the other keep me on my feet and toes.

Studying online the only part of your body that is exercised are your fingers and you’re always a click away from a maelstrom of information.

Increasingly I find I want to stick to a brand I know and a name I know.

The brand might be an institution or publisher (often the same thing): Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Open University presses … and the authors whose writing I can trust, both for the quality of the content and how it is expressed:

Gráinne Conole – uber e-learning

Martin Weller - e-learning professor

Gilly Salmon - all things 'e'

Denise Kirkpatrick - OU Pro-Vice Chancellor

Chris Pegler - In open resources

Agnes Kukulska-Hulme - Master of the M-Learning Universe

For example …

Do add MAODE names I ought to add here (this is just a starting list from the top of my head).

Fig. 1. The Open University Library

It would be an exaggeration to say that were I a practising Christian (Catholic) I feel as if I had just visited St. Peter's, Rome but there was a sense that 14 months into an MA course with the OU that by going to the OU Library, Milton Keynes, I had just done this. The OU library represents the hub, the knowledge; from here it branches out through people into departments, up stairwells, through offices and meetings rooms, forming itself into online and distance learning courses.

I haven't met Conole, Kirkpatrick, Weller or Pegler, but I saw their books on the shelf, which is a step further than reading extracts online, or chapters in an e-book.

Is not taking a laptop into a library an early form of mobile E-learning despite the situation?

I was judgmental on Martin Weller quoting himself in H807 ... but I have just bought the book and buy into.

So why do I feel so uncomfortable about Weller or any other 'academic' quoting themselves.

Surely there are standards and expectations?

Who are we to quote ourselves, just because we got into print or had our words used in a piece of academic study to then cite ourselves and in so doing award ourselves additional recognition?

Imagine Simon Cowell deciding to get up and sing ... and then judging his own performance and deciding to award himself credibility?

Is there some etiquette regarding this kind of thing?

(Must be, academia has rules for everything, no wonder it's so dull)

Academically stimulating, but hardly a Caravagio.

At what point do you become 'self-quotable?

Did Churchill quote himself?

As Churchill said ... (he says) ...

(Or by writing your own speeches you are quoting yourself? Ditto lectures)

Can I quote myself as if this has some value ... things I posted online in 1999? Or put in a dairy in 1985? Or even wrote in a History essay on the Reformation in 1977? (Files saved, in a trunk, in an attic, in a room, in a building ... and could just as well be scanned and banged up online

Or is this lacks credibility then short films broadcast on mainstream TV?

Or things I said to important people ?

Look up the correct use of disinterested Mr Weller – (do you have an editor or proof reader?) It does NOT mean ‘no interested it means ‘not committed to one or other point of view, rather as a judge should be in a trial i.e. interested, but not taking sides.’

Odd how the pinnacle of my irritation is indicative of my reaching a tipping point

This is a watershed, where my opinions are expressed in increasingly frustrated ways until I find myself screwing up my face, then edging down the other side, won over to the opposing view, having convinced myself that black is now white. That ‘they’ are right and I am wrong ... I become evangelical on their behalf, whether they want it or not, before coming to some grey compromise.

I’ve just about read enough on learning theory to be able to categorise my approach to learning.

It is ?

This comes from reading ‘Contemporary Perspectives in E-Learning Research. 2007. Edited by Grainne Conole and Martin Oliver.

The turning point, the ‘flip’ came with looking up a reference for Martin Oliver ... and deciding that I needed to see fourteen points of reference. His book, his privilege. He’d wrong-foot himself did he not refer back to previously published papers.

I've got Martin Weller in box too, bought the book.