Congratulations!

Posted on by

sheilaI was very disappointed that I couldn’t go to ALT-C last week, but alas lack of funding meant I was unable to get to the conference this year. ALT-C is always a great networking event and an excellent opportunity to take the pulse of the education technology community in the UK F/HE sector. However the main reason I was so disappointed to miss ALT-C this year was that I wasn’t there to see my former Cetis colleague Sheila MacNeill win the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year award. So since I wasn’t there to congratulate Sheila in person, I’m going to do so now instead!

Having worked closely with Sheila for almost ten years I know just how much she deserved this award and I’m delighted to have been able to contribute to the application that Cetis’ Christina Smart and I sneakily submitted on her behalf. Sheila has made a huge contribution to learning technology innovation in the UK and it’s been a real pleasure working with her over the years. She has always been an inspiring and supportive colleague and a very good friend. And of course, as everyone knows, she has great shoes!

In her lovely blog post on winning the award, Sheila very generously acknowledged the contribution made by all her Cetis colleagues.

“In many ways this is a team award and recognition of the work of everyone at Cetis.”

Of course I may be biased, but think it’s really positive to see ALT recognising the important contribution made to the sector by colleagues who may not have followed a traditional academic or learning technology career path. These are the people who drive innovation forward and whose input we need now more than ever.

Since the closure of Cetis at the University of Strathclyde, our careers will be taking different paths, tbh I’m not entirely sure what path mine will be taking yet! However I hope that I will have many opportunities to continue working with Sheila and I wish her all the very best for the future.

Viewpoints Methodology Workshop

Posted on by

Earlier today I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a Viewpoints Methodology workshop organised by Heather Gibson of QAA Scotland and facilitated by Alan Masson of the University of Ulster.

It was great to be able to attend the workshop as I’ve followed the development of Viewpoints since it was first funded by Jisc, as my former Cetis colleague Sheila MacNeill was responsible for supporting the Jisc Curriculum Design Programme and also sat on the project steering group.

Alan Mason began the workshop by introducing Viewpoints Curriculum Design process and tools.

“Viewpoints created themed workshops and reflective resources to inform, inspire and help teachers, support staff and learners plan effective curriculum designs. These resources are focused around four main areas: assessment and feedback, information skills, learner engagement and creativity in the curriculum. Each theme is underpinned by well-established pedagogical approaches and has been designed to help teams build ideas towards a more learner centred curriculum design model. They provide a series of simple, user friendly reflective tools and prompts that promote a creative and effective approach to the curriculum design process and help practitioners think about important stages for their students at different points on the learner timeline”

http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/Viewpoints/microsoft-word-viewpoints-institutionalstoryoctober12/1

Our activities today were centred on a couple of hypothetical course design scenarios and made use of resource cards based on my former CAPLE colleague, David Nicol’s REAP assessment and feedback principals. The Viewpoints methodology is centred on collaborative brainstorming and the process focuses on story boarding to encourage a dynamic creative process. Rather than creating specific outputs, Viewpoints workshops focus on facilitating transition and creating collaborative agreements.

IMG_3505

For the first task I joined a group that chose to explore college – university articulation and the objective we agreed to address was to design a course that would:

“Enable effective educational and social integration to facilitate better social / peer learning experiences in the context of college / university articulation”

IMG_3503

The whole process was really engaging and it didn’t take us long to create an innovative design that we all agreed on.

IMG_3500

Meanwhile, the other group chose to focus on Masters students and articulated their objective as follows.

“How do we get students to Masters level being / working?”

IMG_3506

For the second task I switched groups and joined the Masters group whose task was to explore how the learner attributes of “Masterness” (autonomy, depth, abstraction, complexity, research, unpredictability, professionalism) mapped on to the design structure.

IMG_3509

Although we spent the afternoon working on hypothetical scenarios, all participants agreed that the Viewpoints methodology has great potential and we were able to suggest many different scenarios where the methodology could be employed in addition to curriculum design. These included developing institutional strategy, project planning and aligning courses to UK PSF descriptors. All in all it was a really valuable workshop, so many thanks to Heather and Alan for organizing and facilitating it!

You can find out more about Viewpoints from the project blog here: http://viewpointsproject.blogspot.co.uk/ and the Curriculum Design Workshop resources are available here: http://wiki.ulster.ac.uk/display/VPR/Home 

Oh and one last thing, extra brownie points to the Viewpoints team for ensuring that all their resources are clearly marked with a Creative Commons licence!

Open Knowledge Foundation Glasgow Meeting

Posted on by

Last night Sheila and I went along to the first meeting of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Glasgow. The meeting was hosted by the Electron Club and the room was packed to the gunnels with over thirty enthusiastic open data geeks. The event was introduced by Edinburgh University’s Ewan Klein, who has already been instrumental in helping to facilitate a successful series of Open Knowledge Foundation events in Edinburgh.

opendatagla

There were six fascinating lightning talks on a wide range of open data topics:

Glynn Staples introduced the Glasgow Future Cities Demonstrator project, which Sheila, Martin Hawksey and I have already had a little involvement with, when we presented a worksop on social media engagement strategies earlier in the year.

Lizzie Brotherston gave a presentation on the Learner Journey Data Jam which took place in Edinburgh in April, and which featured the work of Cetis’ very own Wilbert Kraan 🙂 It was interesting listening to Lizzie talking about the value of events such as the data jam, and reflecting back on the DevCSI hackdays and the earlier Cetis CodeBashes which ran between 2002 and 2007. We were ahead of our time!

Graham Steel’s presentation was called “Publishing research without data is advertising, not science” and to prove his point, he provided us with lots of useful links which you can find on his prezi here.

Bill Roberts, from linked data company Swirrl, reminded us about the importance of presenting Open Data for multiple audiences and introduced a sort of typology of data users which featured “hard core spaqrl junkies” at the bottom!

Neil Logan, of Amor Group, introduced the SFC innovation centres initiative and the Data Science Innovation Centre proposal. You can read more about Neil’s presentation on his own blog here. One of the points that Neil made was that “academics talk to industry because they want money for research”, which I suspect is true, but it did rather make me wonder about whether industry could also offer any investment in teaching and learning?

The final presentation of the evening was by Peter Winstanley of the Scottish Government who talked about the Cabinet Office’s Open Standards Hub. Peter also presented one of the most robust justifications for the adoption of open standards, including persistent resolvable identifiers, that I’ve hear in a long time. If I hadn’t been precariously perched on the edge of a rather high table, I’d have stood up and applauded!

All in all it was a really lively and thought provoking evening and judging by the energy in the room and the many positive comments on twitter, there seems to be real enthusiasm for future Open Knowledge Foundation meetings to take place in Glasgow, so here’s looking forward to the next one!

If you’re intereted in learning more about the first #OpenDataGla event I’ve posted a Storify here and Martin Hawksey has archived all the tweets here.

Open Scotland Follow Up

Posted on by

Yesterday Sheila and I met with colleagues from the ALT Scotland SIG, Jisc RSC Scotland and Cetis to start taking forward some of the actions we discussed at the Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh at the end of June. I’d provide a link to my Cetis blog post summarising the event and outlining the deliverables and actions but unfortunately the Cetis blog server is down right now so you’ll have to trust me that I can remember what the actions were :} I’ll post the link as soon as the server gets rebooted. The Cetis blogs have now been restored and you can find the Open Scotland Summit Report and Actions here: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2013/07/04/open-scotland-report-and-actions/

One of the key actions was to establish a working group, similar to Wales and the Nordic countries, that can stimulate research in the area of open education and hopefully inform future Government initiatives. As several of the delegates who attended the Summit in June expressed an interest in on-going participation, there seems to be a real appetite for taking this forward. In the first instance we’ve agreed to set up an Open Scotland blog to provide the group with an identity and a platform to publish information, articles and commentary on all aspects of openness in education. We’ll also use the blog to link to other related groups, lists and initiatives e.g. the Open Knowledge Foundation, OER-Discuss, the Scottish Open Badges Group, etc. Unfortunately someone is sitting on the openscotland.wordpress.com domain so we’ve had to settle for openscot.wordpress.com. There’s nothing to see there at present, but we hope to have the site up and running by the end of September. Several colleagues have already offered to contribute posts on different aspects of openness and how these relate to education and education policy in Scotland. We also discussed setting up a mailing list to disseminate information but as there was some concern about the proliferation of mailing lists we thought we would try setting up a google group instead.

The second key action from the June summit was to draft a position paper providing evidence of the benefits of openness with examples of how these can impact on Government priorities. As a starting point for this activity we’ve agreed to look at the Scottish Funding Council’s Outcome Agreements for 2013 – 2014 and to highlight areas where different aspect of openness could have a positive impact on the outcome agreement criteria. Once we’ve done a first pass through the Outcome Agreement criteria, we’ll post the resulting draft in a public document that everyone will be welcome to comment on and contribute to. Hopefully this will help us to focus on real tangible benefits of open education policies and practices and demonstrate how these can help to address current strategic priorities and challenges.

Another activity we discussed is to take the 2012 OER Paris Declaration and to start identifying examples of practice, from Scotland and neighbouring countries, that address the ten key points outlined in the Declaration document. I’m also keen to develop some case studies about institutions that have developed open education policies, but that’s an activity that would require rather more resources than we have at our disposal at present.

We also discussed the possibility of future Open Scotland events and hope to be able to build on the success of the June Summit to broaden the debate further. In the short term we have a couple of dissemination opportunities coming up; Joe Wilson of SQA and I will be doing a short presentation on Open Scotland and the work of the ALT Scotland SIG at the Jisc RSC Scotland Joint Forum event on the 31st of October, and earlier in the month we’ll we presenting a paper “Open Scotland – Policies and strategies for opening up education in Scotland” at the Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Paris on the 24th- 25th October. (When I say “we” that means that we’re not sure who’ll actually be going along to do the presentation yet!)

If you’re interested in keeping up to date with Open Scotland, keep and eye on the #openscot hashtag and this blog in the interim, or feel free to contact any of those involved.

Phil Barker phil.barker@hw.ac.uk
Lorna M. Campbell lorna.m.campbell@icloud.com
Linda Creanor l.creanor@gcal.ac.uk
Sheila MacNeill sheilamacneill@me.com
Celeste McLaughlin celeste.mclaughlin@glasgow.ac.uk
Joe Wilson joe.wilson@sqa.org.uk

Annual Fringe Outing

Posted on by

Yesterday we had our annual (not)Cetis Scotland outing to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We’ve been having a get together at the Fringe for a number of years now and it’s always great fun. Sometimes partners and children come along, sometimes we book a show in advance, sometimes we pick one on a whim, more often than not we just bimble up the Royal Mile enjoying the Fringe chaos. (Open entertainment?!) There’s always good food involved, often from the Nile Valley Cafe, which is still one of my favourite places to eat in Edinburgh. Last year we were entertained by the Horrible Histories stage show and a man wearing underpants balancing on top of a ladder juggling knives. This year it was a different man balanced on top of a unicycle juggling flaming torches, assisted by a small child. Class!
fringe_2013_2

“The Mark of World Class Institutions”

Posted on by

This week saw the launch of two admirable projects that stand to make a significant contribution to global access to open educational resources. In the USA the Getty Trust announced their Open Content Programme, and in India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development launched their National Repository of Open Educational Resources.

The aim of the Getty Open Content Programme is to make available, free of charge

all digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.

In the first instance almost five thousand images from the J. Paul Getty Museum have been made available, with plans to add images from the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute in the future. There are also plans to open access to the Getty Vocabularies and outputs of the Conservation Institute’s field projects.
In an article in The Getty Iris titled Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come, the Getty’s CEO, James Cuno, explained the motivation for the Open Content Programme:
getty_ocp_banner

The Getty was founded on the conviction that understanding art makes the world a better place, and sharing our digital resources is the natural extension of that belief. This move is also an educational imperative. Artists, students, teachers, writers, and countless others rely on artwork images to learn, tell stories, exchange ideas, and feed their own creativity.

Cuno goes on to refer to the discussion of open content in the Horizon Report, Museum Edition which stated

it is now the mark—and social responsibility—of world-class institutions to develop and share free cultural and educational resources.

Adding “I agree wholeheartedly.” And so do I!

The approach adopted by the Getty Open Content Programme is interesting as they make no attempt to restrict access to their resources on the basis of how they will be used. Unlike the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum in the UK, who will only allow their images to be used free of charge for non-commercial purposes, there are no restrictions on using Getty images commercially.

When downloading an image users are presented with a simple form which requires them to select their status (private individual, not-for-profit organization, for-profit company, other) and how they intend to use the resrource (publication, personal, non-commercial, commercial, other). Submission of this information is compulsory in order to access the image, however the form states that the information is being collected so that “so that we may continue to improve access to our content.”

getty_download

There are a few conditions placed on the use of images, though it’s debatable whether these can be regarded as “restrictions” in any sense of the word:

Users are requested to use the following source credit when reproducing an image, Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

When using open content images, you should not suggest or imply that the Getty endorses, approves of, or participated in your projects.

The small print of the Open Content Images Terms of Use states that:

Some images may include people or objects for which a third party may claim rights such as trademark, copyright, privacy, or publicity rights. The Getty does not warrant that all of the images designated for downloading are free from rights claimed by third parties. As the user, it is your responsibility to ensure that there are no restrictions based on third party rights. The Getty assumes no liability for your use of these images if a third party makes an infringement claim.

And finally:

Getty would appreciate a gratis copy of any scholarly publications in which the images are reproduced in order to maintain the collection bibliography.

It’s also interesting to note that Getty have completely bypassed Creative Commons, and in fact their OCP images don’t appear to carry any licence at all! I’m very curious as to why this particular approach was taken and what the potential pros can cons are of releasing images without any obvious licence. That coda aside, I think this is a hugely admirable project and I hope other heritage institutions around the world are encouraged to consider opening access to the wealth of resources they hold.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development announced the launch of the National Repository of Open Educational Resources. The aim of the repository, which is build on a platform developed by Gnowledge Labs, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, is to:

bring together all digital and digitisable resources for the school system – for all classes, for all subjects and in all languages.

And it’s objectives are to:

• To enhance the quality of teaching-learning
• To facilitate teachers to create and share contextualized teaching learning resources
• To celebrate innovations in resource creation

india_oer

Although I haven’t had a chance to explore the collections in any great detail, far less to investigate the platform, one interesting facet of the project is that the repository uses a growing map of semantic concepts to group and organise resources.  The press release states that:

The concept map itself is a learning resource for teachers, providing an opportunity for critically assessing the curriculum and aiding the construction of their own unique learning themes for their classrooms. The digital resources – documents, audio-visuals, interactive objects, images are mapped to the concepts. This enables access to a library from which teachers can choose appropriate resources.

india_oer_concept

It’s an interesting approach and, if the repository really takes off, it will be fascinating to see how this works at scale.

The repository and all its materials carry a CC BY SA licence and while there are no conditions or restrictions placed on  downloading resources, users must complete a captcha before adding comments to resources held in the repository.

Although the repository already contains an impressive collection of content, the metadata is, dare I say it, a little thin at present. For example, images are accompanied by topic tags and the date and the name of the person who contributed them, however very little information is provided about the provenance of the image, where or when it was taken, and who the creator was. Hopefully this is information that will be added as the repository develops.

It’s great to see two high profile open content initiatives being launched within the same week and I very much hope they will encourage others to follow suit.

OER and the Only Solution

Posted on by

Thanks to Cable Green of Creative Commons for flagging up a recent speech by Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, which highlighted the potential value of Open Educational Resources in helping to provide global access to education. The speech, Education is the Only Solution, which was addressed to the US Agency for International Development Global Education Summit, focused on the need to address global poverty and inequality to provide high quality education for all. A need that Duncan referred to as:

“a moral imperative, as well as a civic and economic necessity.”

Taking as his inspiration Malala Yousafzai’s address to the United Nations last month, Duncan acknowledged the role of “nations, multilateral organizations, NGOs and other partners” in working to make a better educated, safer, healthier world a reality by helping children, and girls in particular, gain the fundamental skills they need for success.

Duncan also reflected on the role of “game-changing” education technology

“that can help teachers personalize learning, and connect students and teachers with the best content the world has to offer, no matter where they live.”

And this is where Open Educational Resources come in:

“the fast-evolving field of education technology—from cloud computing to personal learning devices to Open Education Resources like the Khan Academy, which my two young children enjoy—has huge potential to transform education.”

Furthermore…

“Open Education Resources and other communication tools can help improve and expand teacher training and professional development—a huge opportunity in countries grappling with large teacher shortages and under-educated teachers.”

I know nothing about the political background and context of Duncan’s speech, but it’s hard to argue with the sentiments. (Though I found some of the language rather hard to parse – “Today’s global economy is not a zero-sum game. Instead, education is the new currency by which nations keep competitive and grow the pie for all.” – eh?!) And although I would caution against regarding open educational resources as a panacea for the world’s educational ills, it’s encouraging to see their potential benefits being highlighted at this level. And to be fair to Duncan, he did stress that:

“It’s important always to start with the education challenge, and then determine which technology, if any, meets the need and adds value to other solutions. It’s tempting to make it about new, glamorous gadgets—but that can distract from simpler and more effective approaches.”

Amen to that.

I was also interested to note that Duncan announced:

“we’re poised to make the first free, U.S. government-funded digital learning materials—designed to improve postsecondary training in high-demand careers—available for use and improvement.”

Does anyone know anything about this initiative? I don’t think I’ve heard anything about it before.

While the educational challenges that face the UK in general, and Scotland in particular, are quite different from those facing developing nations and the US itself, there are undeniably some commonalities. To quote Duncan again:

“Worldwide, just as in the U.S., we also need to focus on educational quality, attainment and completion.”

Quality, attainment and completion were among the issues discussed earlier this summer during the Open Scotland Summit in Edinburgh that set out to explore the potential of open policies to develop Scotland’s unique education offering, support social inclusion, inter-institutional collaboration and sharing and enhance quality and sustainability. I can’t help hoping that one day, in the not too distant future, we’ll hear an education minister on this side of the pond acknowledging the potential of open educational resources, and open education more widely, to achieve these goals.

PS I thought it was interesting that Duncan flagged up Khan Academy as an inspiring OER initiative, given that Kahn Academy content is released under the relatively restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, however that’s a discussion for another blog post :}

That was the week that was

Posted on by

It’s the end of what’s been a rather strange week. After sixteen years, my contract at the University of Strathclyde came to an end as the university’s relationship with Cetis “reached it’s conclusion”. I’m not going to repeat what I’ve already written over at my old Cetis blog here – In The Meantime, but I just wanted to say huge thanks for all the best wishes from everyone on twitter and across the ed tech world. We all really appreciated your support. Thanks also to Amber Thomas and Brian Kelly for their linked in endorsements and to Audrey Watters for her kind words here. And last but by no means least, thanks to the indomitable Aileen Wilson, formerly of CAPLE, for her highly entertaining and very appropriate leaving gift Dance First Think Later, and to my BFF for the beautiful flowers.

Thank you

Everything is still rather up in the air at the moment but, as Sheila has already said, hopefully this is a brief sideways step and we hope to resume our relationship with Cetis at some point in the not to distant future.

THE Best University Workplace Survey

Posted on by

The Best University WorkplaceTimes Higher Education is currently in the process of undertaking a Best University Workplace Survey. The survey, which invites staff to “Tell us what you love (or loathe) about your institution”, aims to:

…find out which UK universities excel when it comes to keeping employees content – from pay levels to recognition of the extra hours staff put in. We also want to know how the experience of working in a university differs according to role, discipline, level of seniority, age, gender, terms of contract and other variables.

In an article about the survey THE editor John Gill is quoted as saying

“There are often reports and analyses on individual aspects of the working lives of university staff, but valuable though these are, they do not give the full picture, our aim for the THE Best University Workplace survey is to get a broad picture of what it is like to work in a UK university in 2013, but also to allow us to dig down into the data and assess how individual factors affect the experience of university staff at all levels and in all roles.”

Having just been made redundant by a higher education institution after sixteen years service, and having watched that institution comprehensively dismantle a highly rated and internationally recognised academic practice department, I think it’s fair to say that I was rather keen on contributing to the survey. Sadly, when I went to complete the survey I discovered that it’s restricted to current academic staff with a .ac.uk email address. No .ac.uk mail address, no submission, and ironically my institutional address had been shut down earlier that afternoon. Not only are ex-academic staff who no longer have a .ac.uk e-mail address prevented from responding, the survey is also constructed in such a way that respondents are encouraged submit data that relates to their current institution, rather than previous institutions they may have worked for. Although I can understand why THE has restricted the survey in this way, it’s a relatively simple way to authenticate submissions, I do think they are rather missing a trick. Given the amount of flux in the sector at present, I think it would be invaluable to record the experiences of staff who have been made redundant, jumped before they were pushed, or simply moved on to greener pastures.

THE have always proved to be very responsive on twitter, so I tweeted this suggestion to @timeshighered last night and was gratified to have an almost immediate response from THE journalist Chris Parr. Thanks also to Dr Cathryn Pearce for joining the debate.

THE_survey

I hope THE Best University Workplace survey is sufficiently successful for an updated version to run in subsequent years. Setting these quibbles aside, I think the survey is an excellent idea, and I’ll certainly be very interested to see the results. I’d also encourage colleagues to take a few minutes to complete the survey. Go on, you know you really want to tell THE how much you love, or loathe, your institution!

Welcome to Open World

Posted on by

Hello and welcome to my new blog which I’ll be using to post thoughts and reflections on all kinds of issues relating to open education, technology and innovation. For more years than I can recall, I’ve maintained a Cetis blog, however recent contractual changes, which are explained here, mean that there will be a bit of a hiatus in my work with Cetis. So, like my colleague Sheila MacNeill, I thought it would be useful to set up a new blog.

I’m also hoping to use this space to comment on more general topics and issues that interest me, and to link to other research I’m doing in the area of late 18th century social and naval history. (Yes really!)

As for the title of this blog, Open World, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it refers to the various open education initiatives I’ve been involved in over the years, and in some ways it does. However the title is actually lifted from the collected poems of Kenneth White, chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne and a writer for whom openness is an enduring and inspiring theme.