OUJISCO - Digital Scholarship at the OU
Yesterday I attended one of the current JISC eResearch Roadshows at the OU in lovely Milton Keynes with the great hashtag #oujisco. It was an interesting day with talks from David Ferguson from NeSC and Graham Pryor from DCC both speaking but my real reason for attending was to find out more about the work that the Open University is doing around Digital Scholarship.
[For a general report on the day Doug Clow liveblogged the event.]
The Digital Scholarship project at the OU is led by Professor Martin Weller and Dr Nick Pearce and is focused on researching just what Digital Scholarship is but also promoting the uptake of Digital Scholarship within the OU. This obviously leads to a slightly schizophrenic project as on one hand they need to be slightly sceptical about things whereas on the other they are acting as cheerleaders. That said it seemed to me that the two of them were a good balance in this respect as martin was obviously a committed cheerleader whereas Nick demonstrated a little more scepticism!
The main aim of Digital Scholarship is to find a way to give academic activity on the open web the same weight as outputs in more traditional scholarly outputs (book chapters, conference speaking, journal articles etc). In order to do this it is closely following the principles of Boyers Scholarship - 2MB PDF here and mapping digital activity against them.
- Discovery
Integration
Application
Teaching
A standard issue that they have been facing with the evangelism element of the project is that there remains a lack of trust in the stability and sustainability of many of the social web tools. Will they be around in a month, year, decade, longer. I think in alot of ways this argument isn’t quite as relevant these days - there is rarely any need for a single point of failure. A presentation has every chance of getting considerably more views on Slideshare but that doesn’t mean that for preservation reasons it might not be best to have a version in another location (i.e. an institutional respository). One of the strengths of the UKOER programme was the insistence that OERs were released to a minimum of two locations - one of which had to be JorumOpen. This allowed projects to release resources out into the wilds of the open web if they wanted - greatly increasing the possibility of takeup but also having the peace of mind that the resources would be properly preserved (though perhaps digital preservation is more of a preoccupation for JISC than the creator of the resources.) Currently this does increase the workload for staff tasked with depositing resources and maintaining them but tools that allow deposit in multiple locations via one interface are now more than possible and hopefully just around the corner.
A case for the speed of digital outputs against the slower processes of traditional publishing methods was made when Nick discussed the fact that he research the use of technology (particularly web tools) by academics in 2007 and he has a paper due to be published based on that work later this year. However the original research does not feature one mention of Twitter as it was barely a blip at the time of the research whereas now it has a much higher profile. That fact will immediately date the paper.
There are alot of parallels between this activity and many of the ideals of openness that JISC supports across our work. It certainly seems to be close to both the Open Access and Open Education agendas. [I actually like the idea of the Open Scholar as defined in this quote.]
“the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it–at any stage of its development.”
http://www.academicevolution.com/2009/08/the-open-scholar.html
The OU is seeking to build this kind of concept into the ‘personality’ it portrays externally. It has already taken the (unusual?) step of adding participation in the open web to the promotion criteria for academics alongside more traditional measures (though they admitted they were still working on appropriate measures for this kind of activity.)
Currently they are working hard on developing appropriate metrics for contributions to the social web and are asking questions like:
- What makes a good blog?
Can you map traditional scholarly outputs against digital work? (i.e. Podcast vs Keynote)
How can a young academic at the start of their career make an impact in the digital space?
How can this work make an impact if the REF does not currently even acknowledge it?
It was briefly mentioned that perhaps what was needed is something like the famous Google 20% time (or the less famous BBC Radio Labs 10% time ) that allowed academics the time to participate and experiment on the open web to find their voices and their communities.
Alot of the talk around creating metrics and perhaps build up an ‘online reputation’ score (despite fears that this could be ‘gamed’) made me think of some of the work around ‘whuffie’ that Cory Doctorow wrote about and the upcoming book from O’Reilly. It is an interesting and hugely difficult area of work that many people are trying to crack for different reasons on the web (in a previous job it was a constant topic of conversation in the office). Finding a reliable way of doing this for the academic community would be really very impressive and potentially important. Again I think it is the sort of thing that would be of equal interest to the OER community as the digital scholarship one. Recognition and reputation should never be underestimated as a driver for contributing to the open web.
It was pointed out that one side-effect of a high profile in the world of digital scholarship was increased opportunities to take part in more traditional scholarship activities! Well respected bloggers are often invited to speak at leading conferences and contribute to books & journals.
Not surprisingly Micheal Wesch was pointed to as the poster child for Digital Scholarship. The success of his YouTube videos has been amazing and massively enhanced not only his own reputation but also that of Kanses State. To some extent though this is a dangerous comparison as the huge success of Wesch is unlikely to be something that can replicated any time soon.
Throughout the presentation(s) a list kept popping up that covered the most common issues/barriers that the project had identified for academics to really make the jump to digital scholarship. One of the things that immediate struck me was that it could be exactly the same issue for anyone looking to take part in the OER movement - or in fact just become an active participant on the web with any kind of work related focus. None of these issues are insurmountable and for many of them the perception is a bigger problem than the reality but they do continue to be identified as obstacles time after time;
- Recognition
Rights
Skills
Plagarism
Time
Quality
Exposure
Sustainability
This brought to mind the work Forrester did around identifying how and what people actually contributed to the web and actually how few of them were actually creators rather than consumers.
I found it to be an interesting day that left me with a great deal to think about - not to mention a couple more blogs to read. I’ll be following this work closely in the months to come particularly looking out for opportunities to join it up with both OER and open access work.
OER: Metadata Now
At the JISCCETIS08 conference session on Open Educational Content/Resources (OEC/OER), we had a really useful discussion about what “minimal tagging” might mean in terms of OEC today. It was part of my presentation on technical infrastructure for the JISC/HEA OEC Programme. By infrastructure, I think I mean Paul Walk’s soft definition of infrastructure
The discussion made me reflect on all the assumptions that surrounds the term “metadata”, and the history that got us to where we are now, primarily around digital learning materials.
For the purposes of description, let’s abstract workflows down to two: creation to curation (authors), and discovery to delivery (finders). Metadata standardisation has always been about supporting the flow of content between people and systems, both for C2C and D2D. We’ve always known that if information about content is useful (and used) we should expect to find it somewhere in the workflow already. The vision has never been for users to have to fill in forms: that is just a step on the way to embedded interoperability, “metadata under the bonnet”.
One of the use cases which drove the adoption of schemas such as UK LOM was the assumption of complex objects in expert systems (VLEs) being transferred to other expert systems, with even search/browse services offering complex presentation options, displaying information on “semantic density” for the finders delectation. I think I would argue that now that is only a niche use case as far as open educational resources are concerned.
So when we’re talking about a “discovery to delivery infrastructure” for OEC, from granular assets such as word documents, slide presentations, through to packaged learning objects (with capital Ls and Os!), to online courseware, perhaps the place to start is: what information is already used in creation to curation tools/systems/platforms that could usefully flow through to help find and use content. This has always been the aim of standardised metadata for interoperability: embedding it into the system and making it invisible to the user.
Now there are so many C2C tools to consider, and even more D2D options, that its not effective to concentrate on any particular suite of tools. Thats why so many developers are interested in APIs, widgets and “eduglue” to stitch together what people are using, in an almost infinite combination.
And yet there’s also a renewed interest in community metadata particular for describing the contents of the content: tagging , folksonomies, linking resources together in the web2.0 world. Metadata may not be cool, but “tags” can be, and the network effect of community tagging is enabling navigation between content. As many people have commented, bottom-up or top-down, its still metadata. We don’t have to call it that, but we do count it as part of the infrastructure.
And thats where we always hoped to get to, isn’t it? We need to keep reviewing our primary use cases so that development effort is directed at the most useful interactions between tools/systems/platforms.
It goes without saying that there are huge parallels with thinking in other areas: resource discovery, open access repositories … but whilst we should aim for a common language, we still need to champion the use cases that are central to each endeavour. For OEC, I recommend joining the CETIS Educational Content SIG.
Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.