A short list….

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….but an illustrious one! For Ada Lovelace day a list of all the women I’ve worked with in the domain of educational technology since 1997, all of them inspiring in their own unique way.

Julie Allinson, Helen Beetham, Kerry Blinco, Rachel Bruce, Joanna Bull, Gayle Calverley, Jackie Carter, Lisa Corley, Sarah Currier, Jenny Delasalle, Susan, Eales, Suzanne Hardy, Rachel Harris, Rachel Heery, Nancy Hobelheinrich, Sarah Hollyfield, Allison Littlejohn, Sheila MacNeill, Sue Manuel, Moira Masey, Lisa Mattson, Mhairi McApline, Sarah McConnell, Lou McGill, Celeste McLaughlan, Liddy Neville, Solvig Norman, Chris Pegler, Sharon Perry, Sarah Porter, Jean Ritchie, Tish Roberts, Laura Shaw, Christina Smart, Amber Thomas, Rowin Young, Li Yuan, Kamala Velayutham, Su White, Lara Whitelaw, Heather Williamson, Vashti Zarach, Linn van der Zanden.

Apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone!

More on #jiscbids

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My colleague Sarah Holyfield has already flagged up today’s twitter discussion on advice for JISC bidders which was sparked by a tweet from Grainne Conole, however I can’t resist mentioning it again. The advice came from a wide range of twitterers including JISC Programme managers, JISC service staff and private consultants. The one thing all these people have in common is that they all mark JISC calls so potential bidders would do well to take note. Such was the frenzy of advice that at one point #jiscbids achieve twitter trend status, (so it must be important!)

Advice ranged from the obvious:

Make sure you read the call. sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many bidders don’t!

We’ve all done it – it’s simply not fun, and risky, sending proposal on deadline day. Get into mindset of deadline is week before.

Provide *all* info asked for – such a shame to mark down a bid because it didn’t include risk assessment for example

10 page limit means 10 page limit. Do not put your budget on page 11.

Read the circular. Then read it again. Then do what it asks.

To the astute:

Don’t underbid to be competitive if this means your project will run out of money before the end.

Your background/intro section is too long. Ditch half of it and write a really good use case scenario instead.

Make it clear what funding your proposal would do for the wider community.

To the obscure:

A project with an acronym that alludes to bodily functions or sexual practises will (almost) always remain an unfunded project.

To see all those tweets in their full glory go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23jiscbids

With thanks to @lastkaled, @morageyrie, @dkernohan, @Joe_Librarian, @hwillimason and many more.

OER Programme Technical Requirements

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Following the experimental nature of the HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources call JISC are adopting a somewhat experimental approach to technical infrastructure for this programme. Although the ultimate aim of the OER Programme is to change process and practice at the institutional level the catalyst for making this happen is opening access to educational resources. Or in other words, getting content out onto the open web.

Metadata

Although JISC will provide projects with technical advice and guidelines the OER Programme will not mandate the use of one single platform to disseminate resources and one single metadata application profile to describe content. However projects will need to ensure that content released through the programme can be found, used, analysed, aggregated and tagged. In order to facilitate this, content will have to be accompanied by some form of metadata. In this instance metadata doesn’t necessarily mean de jure standards, application profiles, formal structured records, cataloging rules, subject classifications, controlled vocabularies and web forms. Metadata can also take the form of tags added to resources in applications such as flickr and YouTube, time and date information automatically added by services such as slideshare, and author name, affiliation and other details added from user profiles when resources are uploaded. Consequently the OER Programme will only mandate the following “metadata”:

  • Programme tag ukoer
  • Title
  • Author / owner / contributor (from user profile)
  • Date
  • URL
  • Technical info – file format, name & size

The first two will have to be created manually but projects are strongly encouraged to use platforms and systems that can generate or accommodate the rest.

Projects are also encouraged to think about providing additional information that will help people to find and access resources. For example:

  • Language information
  • Subject classifications
  • Keywords
  • Tags
  • Comments
  • Descriptions

Delivery Platforms

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. However all projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen. In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources e.g. YouTube channels. Although this programme is not about technical development projects are encouraged to make the most of the functionality provided by their chosen delivery platforms.

Content Standards

The OER Programme is expected to generate a wide range of content types so mandating specific content standards is impractical. However Projects should consider using appropriate standards for sharing complex objects e.g. IMS Content Packaging IMS Common Cartridge and IMS QTI for assessment items. OAI ORE may also be of value although I’m not aware of any previous implementations focused specifically on teaching and learning materials, please correct me if I’m wrong however!

What We Hope To Learn

As this is a pilot programme there are many areas where we are seeking to learn more about approaches are likely to be beneficial to the community. These include:

  • Improving institutional and individual workflows for managing content
  • Limitations and benefits of different file formats for OERs
  • Limitations and benefits of different platforms for OER sharing
  • Search engine optimisation and resource discovery mechanisms such as bookmarking and tagging
  • Persistent identifiers and version-handling for OERs. See Phil Barker’s excellent recent post on this particularly thorny topic.
  • How to track usage and impact of OERs

The OER Programme hopes to encourage projects to share their successes, failures, ideas, requirements, opportunities and good practices, and above all to be bold, innovative and experimental!

This post is based on a presentation written and presented by Amber Thomas of JISC and I at the recent HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources Community Briefing day. The original presentation is available from the JISC IE Repository at http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/280/

Open Educational Resources Programme Briefing Day

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A rather belated summary of last week’s HEFCE / Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources Community Briefing* meeting. This meeting pretty much did what it said on the tin – it provided the community with additional information on the OER Programme call and an opportunity to put questions to JISC and HEA representatives.

Malcolm Read and of the JISC and David Sadler of the Academy opened the meeting with a general introduction to the aims and objectives of the call – to link together a corpus of open educational resources at national level and to promote cultural change at institutional level.

David Kernohan then went on to discuss the pilot programme in a little more detail before introducing the JISC and Academy representatives with responsibility for each of the three programme strands:

  • Subject strand – David Sadler and Joanne Masterson, Academy
  • Institutional Strand – Heather Williamson, JISC
  • Individual Strand – Sharon Waller & Ellie Spilman, Academy

David stressed the ground breaking nature of this pilot project which, if it’s successful, will help to increase the range and quality of educational resources available in the public domain, facilitate re-use, build capacity and expertise across the sector adn act as a catalyst for institutional change. All projects are encouraged to include a range of content and to attempt to embed the practice of opening access to educational resources within their institutions beyond funded phase of the programme. Sustainability is key.

Next it was over to Amber Thomas to outline the technical requirements of the programme, which I’ll cover in a separate post, followed by an excellent presentation from Liam Earney of the CASPER Project on the realities of addressing legal considerations based on the experiences of the RePRODUCE Programme. Liam stressed that “open” means the ability to download and modify resources, not just to read them, but added that many institutions have contradictory policies on what can be done with educational materials. The main lesson projects must learn is to allow lots and lots of time for rights clearance and to allocate sufficient resources and budget to this task.

Unsurprisingly Liam’s presentation on legal issues set the tone for much of the following discussion with many of the questions relating to the practicalities of rights clearance across project consortia. Many of the other questions focused on the logistics of constructing bids, the practicalities of putting together consortia agreements, and what constitutes match funding. A somewhat opportunistic question that surfaced more than once was given that educational content represents a valuable asset from the institutional perspective can JISC funding be used to effectively buy out this content? Malcolm Read quickly pointed out that HEFCE are not offering money to “buy” content and that the commitment they are looking for from institutions is sustainability.

For a fuller record of the day’s discussions, and in particular the question and answer session see http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23oerday However to my utter, utter, shame I used the programme tag #ukoer rather than the briefing day tag #oerday for the earlier part of the day so see also http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ukoer

Presentations from the day are available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/briefingday.aspx

* I was told that JISC no longer use the term town meeting but no one was able to tell me why!

Live blogging on twitter. A cautionary tale…

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Following the apparent success of live blogging at last year’s CETIS conference, #cetis08, I agreed to live blog the recent CETIS Eduserv “Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning” meeting, otherwise known as #cevw09. I should really have set up a CoveritLive client as Andy Powell did for cetis08 however I didn’t get round to it so I opted for twitter instead.

Now clearly there are pros and cons to using twitter as a live blogging tool, one of the biggest cons being that you end up spamming all those followers who may not be interested in the particular meeting you’re covering. However the feedback I got on the day was wholly positive so I carried on tweeting, and tweeting, and tweeting until 15.30 when up popped the following message:

“Wow, that’s a lot of Twittering! You have reached your limit of updates for the hour. Try again later.”

Sheila gamely took over the live blogging until 16.00 when sure enough, I was able to post again.

I wasn’t aware that there was a maximum allowable number of tweets per hour, and nor was anyone else I spoke to, but a bit of googling turned up plenty of discussions on twitter limits. I couldn’t find a definitive list of limits at twitter.com but blogger Sugree lists twitter’s limits as follows:

* 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices
* 250 total direct messages per day, on any and devices
* 100 API requests per hour
* Maximum number of follow attempts in a day

I’m surprised I exceeded any of these limits at #cevw09 but not at #cetis08 but I guess I must have done. Next time I’ll either have to use a different application or exercise bit more editorial control!

Twitter Fail Whale

The creative potential of openness

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“Our assumption is that we need high degrees of control. We’re frightened by openness and we tend to underestimate the amount of creative potential it can unlock.”

This assertion was made on the Radio 4 In Business programme by James Boyle, Professor of Law at Duke University, North Carolina and Chair of the Creative Commons Board. The theme of this week’s edition, titled Free for All, was open business models and copyright regimes. The programme, which also includes an extensive interview with Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame, provided a good general overview in non-technical terms to many of the key issues relating to business models based on open source software and the provision of “free” content and services. Details of the programme are available from the In Business home page and the podcast can be downloaded here.

Open world

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During the recent meeting of the JISC eLearning Team, the JISC eLearning Consultants and the CETIS Management Team discussion inevitably turned, as it does, to the forthcoming JISC OER call and the issue of open educational resources more generally. At one stage someone began a question with:

So in this open world…

Open World happens to be the title of the collected poems of one of my favourite writers Kenneth White founder of the Institute of Geopoetics. Openness is a theme that recurs throughout his work.

A High Blue Day in Scalpay

This is the summit of contemplation
and no art can touch it
blue, so blue, the far out archipelago
and the sea shimmering, shimmering
no art can touch it, the mind can only
try to become attuned to it
to become quiet, and space itself out, to
become open and still, unworlded
knowing itself in the diamond country, in
the ultimate unlettered light.

And here is a high blue day on Scalpay (actually this is taken from Carriegreich on the other side of Kyles Scalpay.)

End of the jetty

Challenges of managing teaching and learning resources

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Learning resources have not been served well by the Open Access Institutional Repositories debate, a problem that has been recognised and discussed by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group however there are still significant issues that need to be address. This was one of the topics discussed at a recent meeting of the JISC eLearning Team, the JISC eLearning Consultants and the CETIS Management Team. Rather than focusing on a single specific technology, i.e. repositories, we should attempt to address the wider aim i.e. improved learning resource management across the sector. Repositories will have a role to play in achieving this aim, as will other technologies and solutions. The ultimate goals should be to improve teaching and learning practice.

In order to address the issue of resource management effectively we need to understand more about current working practices. It’s also important to identify institutional drivers for prioritising resource management. The JISC OER Programme is likely to have considerable impact in this area and the centrifugal force of this initiative is already apparent. There are many “Big Issues” to resolve in terms of improving the management of and opening access to educational resources. These include issues relating to policy e.g. what is the relationship between institutions, teachers, learners and the resources they create; practice e.g. how do teachers and learners create, use and interact with resources on a daily basis; and technology e.g. how can we manage large distributed collections of open educational resources, tracking, identifiers, rich metadata etc.

These are big challenges however there areas where discrete interventions could have a significant impact:

  • A landscape study of academics working practices and how they interact with educational content.
  • Widget and toolbar technologies along the lines of SWORD and FeedForward. Developing a range of tailored tools and widgets to help facilitate content creation and management workflows.
  • Search engine optimisation for teaching and learning materials.
  • Technologies to draw together distributed rich metadata to add value to existing content. E.g. drawing together comments and recommendations from applications such as flickr, youtube delicious etc.
  • Tracking technologies to monitor how open educational resources are used.

These and other related issues will continue to be debated into the new year so watch this space!

Open Educational Resources Discussion at CETIS08

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Here, somewhat belatedly, is a summary of the discussions that followed the presentations at the Open Educational Resources session at CETIS 08.

Much of the discussion focused on technical issues such as infrastructure, the role of standards (or not), granularity of resources, metadata and tagging.

There appeared to be considerable support for the idea of enabling projects to make use of existing services and applications such as flickr, youtube, slideshare, etc while at the same time mandating deposit in JorumOpen. However this did lead some participants to question the role of standards in this programme and in the sector more widely. If we say that content can be released in any format and hosted by multiple applications does this mean that we are implicitly stating that open educational standards such as IMS Content Packaging are no longer relevant? Of course this is not the case at all, the real goal here is interoperability and standards still play an important role in facilitating interoperability. However there is no point in mandating the use of standards where they are inappropriate e.g. IMS CP for video of lectures. Andy Powell also made the valid point that:

…the Flickrs of this world are not devoid of standards – e.g. support for RSS “ its just that they aren’t necessarily the same standards that we have recommended for the last few years.

The role of JorumOpen was also explored and John Casey for the Jorum team gave a brief potted history of the Jorum service. John explained that, typically of the education sector more generally, Jorum has been very risk averse in the past, however JorumOpen will see a significant shift towards a more user centric approach based on Creative Commons licensing.

Despite being at pains to avoid the œM word issues relating to metadata occupied a large part of the discussion. It was generally agreed that the programme should take a light weight approach to metadata and that the focus should be on tagging rather than on the creation of formal structured metadata records. There was some support for a minimal set of tags but much less agreement as to what these should be: title, author date, institution, course, subject?? Also is it meaningful to mandate a single set of programme level tags when resources will be scattered across multiple applications such as youtube, slideshare, etc, each of while have their own tagging and metadata conventions?

This also led to a very interesting discussion on the nature of attribution, reputation and digital and academic identity. Pat Parslow, following the discussions remotely via the wonderful eFoundations live-blog suggested:

Contributing materials, and formulating correct tags/metadata helps build your Digital Identity and thus reputation. Should be a major interest for academics, surely?

Heather Williamson of JISC noted some initial findings from the current RePRODUCE programme that suggest that building online presence is an important driver for people to share resources. My colleague John Robertson has already written an excellent blog post on open educational resources, metadata and self description which I highly recommend.

Throughout these discussions David Kernohan and Amber Thomas of JISC reminded us that this programme has two goals: changing attitudes and practice and getting content out into the open. The real aim of the JISC OER programme is to change the culture around content sharing and as such it should be viewed as a œmilestone on a journey.

Patrick McAndrew of the Open Universitys OpenLearn project agreed and cautioned against letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. Fear of œnot doing it right shouldnt be a barrier preventing people from opening access to their content. We can all learn as we go along.

As Andy Powell has already pointed out in his blog post on the CETIS 08 Conference the OER session generated

…a good level of debate that could have gone on significantly longer than the time allowed.

In order to enable these discussions to continue we would like to invite colleagues to use the CETIS Educational Content SIG mailing list, cetis-ecsig@jiscmail.ac.uk as a forum to raise issues, comments and questions relating to the JISC OER call specifically and open educational content issues more generally.

And last but not least here’s the wordle generated from the session’s tweets.

cetis08oer wordle