Damn few and they’re aw deid!
Famous deid people namechecked at #cetis09
Charles Darwin
Clarence Darrow
Marshall McLuhan (second year running!)
Les Dawson
Aldous Huxley
William Shakespeare
Joseph Schumpeter
Stieg Larsson
Famous deid programmes….
The MAC Initiative
And a couple of deid bands…
The Clash
Lindisfarne (thanks Oleg!)
Only four days to go until the CETIS Conference and we’re already starting to draw up a list of issues to explore at the OER Technical Roundtable. The aim of this session is to give OER Projects techies and other interested folk an opportunity to come together to discuss technical issues that they have anticipated, encountered and possibly even resolved.
Issues we expect to turn up include:
The Steeple Project have already raised some additional issues:
We want to know what works for you and what doesn’t? What technical problems have you banging your head on the desk in frustration? Or have you discovered an elegant technical solution to a thorny problem that you’re willing to share?
Members of JISC, CETIS and other community experts will be on hand to offer advice and explore potential solutions.
We would welcome more suggestions of issues you’ve encountered so please add your comments here and we’ll add these to the list of topics to discuss.
Conference tag #cetis09
Session tag #cetis09oer
A tweet from @FindingAda this week brought my attention to a blog post by Cate Sevilla of WITsend asking “Are Women in Tech Their Own Worst Enemy?” Cate summarises the lot of women in technology neatly and with some accuracy before going on to bemoan:
….another little ingredient to add to the recipe of female-tech-doom: petty, ridiculous cattiness amongst other women in tech.
She then goes on to ask:
Have each of us done all we can (within reason) to help and encourage our female peers in tech? Or are we fiercely and unnecessarily competitive? If there’s a younger women that’s asking for what tech events you go to to meet new contacts, do you tell her? Bring her along? Or at least point her in the right direction?
@FindingAda described the post as being:
….fabulous, and brave, …. something I’ve seen too much of myself.
While I can identify with being:
….a woman standing in a sea of men at a tech conference….
I can genuinely say that in the domain of educational technology and interoperability standards I have never experienced the kind of attitudes from female colleagues described by Cate and @FindingAda. I have certainly had plenty of arguments and differences of opinion with lots of colleagues regardless of gender, however I really and truly and never experienced this kind of bitchiness.
As evidence of this I’d like to point you to some of the posts that have appeared online to commemorate Rachel Heery.
Sarah Currier commented in response to my own blog post:
I always looked forward to seeing Rachel at meetings. You always knew you had an ally- not an ally in the back-room handshake sense, but in the cut-the-crap, ‘let’s work out what’s best’ sense. She was fun and funny and an excellent role model for younger women coming through.
To which Lorcan Dempsey responded:
….(Rachel) was also very conscious of being a woman in a male-dominated, often techie, environment. I think she would have been very pleased by Sarah Currier’s remark on Lorna Campbell’s blog entry.
This has been my over whelming experience of working with other women in educational technology and other related domains. They may not give you any easy breaks but they are endlessly supportive and encouraging, even while questioning your opinions and picking your argument to pieces!
The completion of the Repositories and Preservation Programme earlier this year also brought an end to what may have been one of JISC’s longest running support projects, the Repositories Research Team (RRT), formerly the Digital Repositories Programme Support Project (DRPSP). DRPSP / RRT, which ran from 2005 – 2009 is notable in that it was the first JIIE support project delivered collaboratively by two JISC services (now innovation support centres): UKOLN and CETIS. Dedicated support staff were funded at both CETIS and UKOLN and the project was managed by UKOLN’s Rachel Heery from 2005 until her retirement in 2007 and by myself and Phil from 2008 – 2009.
Digital Repositories Programme Support Project
In its initial incarnation from 2005 – 2007 DRPSP focused primarily on project support with team members supporting individual projects through thematic clusters. This allowed the team to become familiar with project activities, giving them a detailed overview of the programme as a whole and enabling them to provide advice to projects on relevant related work. In addition to two project support officers at UKOLN a project officer was funded at CETIS to support teaching and learning focused repository projects. This was particularly beneficial in the early stages of the programme as there is a tendency for issues relating specifically to the management of educational resources and the role of repositories in the teaching and learning domain to become subsumed by the open access / scholarly works / institutional repositories agendas.
During this period DRPSP also ran a number of support workshops focused on complex objects, using UML, writing scenarios and usecases and developing service usage models.
SWAP and SWORD
The team also played a significant role in incubating a number of high profile technical developments, most notably the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP ) and the Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) Protocol. SWORD is particularly interesting as it originated from a discussion on repository service-orientation at the 2005 CETIS Conference. This discussion identified “deposit” as the most important repository function for which there was no single, obvious standard for implementation as a web service. DRPSP carried out introductory research, held a series of meetings and gathered use cases and feedback from the repository development community to help incubate work on a common API for repository deposit. This working group ultimately gave rise to the SWORD project which developed a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol as a deposit API.
Repositories Research Team
When DRPSP morphed into RRT in 2007 the direct project support and institutional advocacy remit passed to the recently established Repository Support Project. This enabled RRT to concentrate on providing support to JISC at a more strategic level. Notable outputs from this period include the programme level synthesis and the repository ecology work.
Programme Synthesis and Evaluation
The objective of this activity was to identify evidence produced by projects that would be relevant to a planned thematic evaluation and synthesis of the Repositories and Preservation Programme. The actual evaluation and synthesis was undertaken by external consultants and the relevant themes were identified by JISC programme managers. In order to facilitate this work the team used a shared blog where they posted evidence tagged by theme that they had trawled from project outputs. This resulted in a blog that effectively acted as a public annotated index of project outputs tagged against themes. The blog platform provided useful functionality in that it allowed the distributed team to work together on a collection of documents, it provided a useful over-view for the JISC programme managers and a starting point and invaluable programme summary for the consultants commissioned to carry through the evaluation and synthesis.
Repository Ecology
The Repository Ecology activity was originally inspired by Neil Maclean’s EDCL 2004 keynote in The Ecology of Repository Services: A Cosmic View! and evolved into a major initiative to investigate models of repository and service interaction and to consider the strengths and limitations of different approaches to articulating or modelling their relationships. The biological study of ecology examined as a potential metaphor to provide new ways to represent the complex multi-faceted environments in which repositories exist and interact. The report and case studies, which are available from the IE Repository, were highlighted by Dorothea Salo on her Caveat Lector blog in a post entitled “JISC is so much win”
On reflection
Running a cross service support project with a significant advisory, synthesis and incubation remit was not without its challenges and it is fitting testament to Rachel Heery’s considerable expertise as a project manager that the team overcame the obstacles of physical and administrative distance to produce such varied and valuable outputs. When Rachel retired her departure had an immediate impact on the team and it’s fair to say that Neil Jacobs of JISC, Phil Barker and I had quite a job picking up where she left off.
Despite the challenges of managing such a long running cross service support project we believe that funding dedicated staff in existing services and innovation support centres and bringing them together to form a coherent project is generally a good model for programme support. This enables the support team to leverage the resources and expertise of the host service or centre. In addition the services and innovation support centres are also in a good position to synthesise issues arising from the programme, relate them to broader strategic issues and feed them back to JISC.
DRSPS / RRT was a relatively long-lived project that spanned a number of programmes and whose remit changed considerably throughout its lifetime. The project was fortunate to employ a number of dedicated and motivated staff who rose to the challenge and who, despite the challenges, viewed their time with the DRSPS / RRT project as being extremely positive and productive both professionally and personally.
In the words of one team member:
“I gained an awful lot. I gained a broad knowledge of repositories and projects and what was going on in repositories area. I gained skills in standards development, application profiling…. I made tons of contacts and had opportunities to travel. It was a fantastic job really.”
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the following staff and thank them for their input to DRPSP / RRT: Julie Allinson (formerly UKOLN, now University of York), Sarah Currier (formerly CETIS, now Sarah Currier Consultancy), Michael Day (UKOLN), Mahendra Mahey (UKOLN), R. John Robertson (CETIS), Adrian Stevenson (UKOLN).
A number of JISC programme managers and consultants also made a significant contribution to this project over its lifespan including Neil Jacobs (who stepped into the breach as project manager in 2007), Andy MacGregor, Rachel Bruce, Amber Thomas, Balviar Notay and Tom Franklin.
In particular we would like to acknowledge the invaluable personal and professional contribution made to this and many other projects by Rachel Heery, Assistant Director for Research and Development at UKOLN, until her retirement in 2007.
Thanks!
Phil Barker and Lorna M. Campbell
A few brief notes from the first day of the Repository Fringe (#rf09) event in Edinburgh. A lot of the presentations were somewhat orthogonal (can’t use that word without thinking of the late great Claude Ostyn!) to my main areas of interest. There were one or two mentions of using repositories to manage teaching and learning materials (two to be precise) but the main focus of the majority of the presentations was squarely on institutional repositories of scholarly works and the research publication workflow and lifecycle.
Having said that, Sally Rumsey and Ben O’Steen’s opening keynote raised some interesting general points which I’ve noted randomly below:
“Sir Thomas Bodely built an “ark to save learning from deluge” and instigated a “republic of lettered men”. Are we building the digital equivalent of the Bodleian?”
“Repository staff act as catalysts for community building.”
“The most successful repository is the internet. How can we make institutional repositories more like the internet? Adding urls to resources for example.”
“People search for “things” not documents. Things have names in real life, however not everything on the web has a name. We can give things names? We can certainly give them urls. It is key to know how a document relates to the thing. The real power comes from the relating of things.”
“We’ve reinvented too many wheels. We need to use the defacto standards of the web, they work, don’t fight them.”
“Almost anything can be regarded as a repository (e.g. flickr, youtube, eprints, etc) but these things don’t have much in common.”
“We need to cut the complexity and aim for one click deposit. We need a solution to the multiple repository deposit regime (MuRDeR) problem.”
“Preservation is useless without access. We should rename preservation – assured secure storage and permanent access.”
“Disproportionate feedback loop – the perception that a small effort brings enormous benefit. The ultimate feedback for the academic is peer review.” (I though that this particular disproportionate feedback loop sounded rather like harnessing the power of professional vanity to fill repositories.)
“Print on demand is going to be huge.” (Oh really??)
A few other notable, and in some cases questionable, quotes from the day:
“…..of course if we’re talking about people a strings….”
“Linked data is going to take over the world.”
“The Semantic Web isn’t just about better search, it’s about aggregation.”
“Institutional repositories are ultimately marketing tools really.”
One of the mentions of learning resources came from Richard Jones of Simplectic who said they were involved in a project that was developing a learning object repository based DSpace augmented with Mahara to facilitate communities of practice.
One last thing, one of the “novel” aspects of the Repository Fringe was the Pecha Kucha sessions. Some of these were notably more successful than others. Les Carr was excellent of course, as were William Nixon and his colleague from Glasgow University’s Enrich and Enlighten projects. However I couldn’t help being reminded of Alt-C panel sessions with three or four short rushed powerpoint presentations with very little time or inclination for comments at the end. More opportunity for discussion would have been greatly appreciated! As one of my colleagues diplomatically put it:
“….the message was somewhat hampered by the medium.”
I decided against attending the second day of the conference but was very sorry to miss Cliff Lynch’s closing keynote. Hopefully It’ll appear online sooner rather than later.
We have all been deeply saddened to hear of the death of Rachel Heery, Assistant Director of Research and Development at UKOLN until her retirement in 2007. Some of us in CETIS, particularly Phil Barker, R John Robertson, Sarah Currier and I worked closely with Rachel on a number of JISC projects and initiatives over the years including the IE Metadata Schema Registry, the Repositories Programme Advisory Group, the Jorum Steering Group, the Digital Repositories Programme Support Project and the Repositories Research Team.
I first came across Rachel at a UK Metadata for Education Group Meeting in 2001. As usual she made quite an impression with her astute and forthright views and I made a mental note never to get into an argument with that woman. However I quickly learned that Rachel was an excellent person to get into an argument with. She was authoritative and insightful and always seemed willing to discuss alternative perspectives from outwith her immediate domain, as was the case with CETIS. I got the impression that she didn’t suffer fools gladly and never hesitated to question accepted orthodoxies when necessary.
It was invaluable for CETIS to have such a strong ally at UKOLN and Rachel’s open-mindedness proved over and over again that the two JISC innovation support centres could work productively together with a minimum of fuss. I remember attending one particularly tedious and unproductive “coordination” meeting in London where we made more progress in the fifteen-minute tube journey across the city with Rachel (and Pete Johnston) than during the whole day long meeting.
Of the projects mentioned above DRSPS / RRT is notable in that it was the first JIIE programme support project delivered collaboratively by two JISC services (now innovation support centres): UKOLN and CETIS. Rachel managed the project from 2005 until her retirement in 2007 and when she left her departure had an enormous impact. It’s ironic that Phil and I are in the process of putting the finishing touches to the RRT Final and Completion reports and had planned to send them to her this week in case she cared to take time out from her retirement to comment. We tried hard to get across in the reports the irreplaceable contribution she made to the project at both the strategic and personal level.
I always used to look forward to meetings Rachel was attending as you could usually guarantee a sparky and thought provoking discussion. Her professional integrity always commanded respect. Personally I will miss her enormously as a colleague and a friend.
Our thoughts are with her family.
Most JISC Programmes accrue a fair amount of myth and misunderstanding during their lifetime however the OER Programme seems to me garnering myths faster than most. So we at CETIS bring you this handy OER Programme myth busting service!
The OER Programme will produce lots of free courseware.
The programme call states that projects should release:
“…the equivalent of one complete undergraduate course worth of materials (360 credits)…”
It’s likely that the programme will release some “courseware” i.e. complete online courses. However in reality we expect a disparate range of many types of resources from a wide range of subjects and domains.
Open educational resources are just for distance learning.
Resources produced by this programme may be used for distance learning but it is probable that a large proportion will originally have been designed for blended teaching and learning.
The OER Programme will produce lots of free content for students.
A significant portion of the resources released are likely to be aimed at students but some my also be designed for use by staff.
This is just another programme about reusable learning objects.
Hopefully OER programme resources will be reusable, some of them may even be learning objects (See Courseware myth above) however the OER Programme is also attempting to change
“institutional policies and processes, with the aim of making open resources release an expected part of the educational resources creation cycle.”
It’s TLTP all over again.
Hopefully not!
It’s just about copying the OU and MIT.
Both OU and MIT are pioneers in the field of OER and we can learn a lot from their experiences however they have their own unique business models and workflows that are unlikely to be immediately transferable to other institutions. See also Business Models myth below.
It’s not sustainable.
Allocating this degree of funding to OER on an annual basis is unlikely to be sustainable however projects have been specifically asked to:
“demonstrate a long term commitment to the release of OER resources. Projects will work towards the sustainability of long term open resources release via the adoption of appropriate business models to support this. Supporting actions should include modifications to institutional policies and processes, with the aim of making open resources release an expected part of the educational resources creation cycle.”
No thought has been given to business models.
See above. The OER Programme call specifically states:
“Bidders should outline their proposed business model for the sustained release of learning resources from the institution, individual or consortium. This call does not mandate a specific business model, but suggests that bidders refer to a report commissioned by JISC from Intrallect, entitled ‘Good Intentions’ .”
It’s a waste of money.
This is a pilot programme. Whether the OER Programme is successful or not in achieving its primary aims and objectives this should be a learning experience for JISC, HEFCE and the Academy. As long as the OER Programme is appropriately evaluated and lessons are learned that inform future decisions the OER Progamme will not be a waste of money.
The OER Programme will transform HE beyond recognition.
Erm ….probably not in the short term. However we hope that the programme will act as a catalyst for institutional and sectoral change in the longer term (see Reusable Learning Objects myth above)
Anyone, anywhere in the world, will be able to freely use and re-purpose the OER Programme resources.
Sounds incredible but yes, this one is actually true!
During last weeks JISC Repositories & Preservation Programme meeting I sat in on a discussion forum on repositories for learning materials that was as interesting as it was short. I didn’t count the number of people who participated, (30 perhaps?), but it was notable that real live honest-to-goodness learning object repository managers outnumbered dubious “experts” (like me). That has to be progress! This informal session was facilitated by JISC’s Amber Thomas and liveblogged by R. John Robertson (#rpmeetb).
Given that most of the participants were speaking from experience I think it’s important to acknowledge the issues they raised….
Quality Assurance
QA is still a big issue. One participant noted that staff at their institution don’t want “three crummy powerpoints” in the same repository as their open access research papers as this will reflect badly on the quality of their scholarly works. A few thought that all teaching and learning materials should be QA’d as this would make them more attractive for reuse. Others, rightly in my opinion, pointed out that context is critical for teaching and learning materials and it makes no sense to QA resources out of context. A straw pole of participants showed that the majority of repository managers present have chosen not to QA teaching and learning materials.
Reuse or Management
There is still some ambiguity regarding the primary role of learning resource repositories. Are they there to facilitate the asset management of resources within the institution or to facilitate the reuse of resources by staff, and indeed students, outwith the institution? It appeared to me that the focus is still very much on using repositories to facilitate reuse but that it is not at all clear who the primary stakeholders are who might reuse these resources.
One Box or Many
Several of the repository managers present reported that they faced a dilemma regarding whether to accommodate the full range of institutional resources (scholarly works, teaching and learning materials, etheses, etc) in a single institutional repository or in multiple resource specific repositories. This was summarised as “one box or many”. One participant noted that senior management would not support multiple institutional repositories, their line of reasoning being “there’s only one institutional library, why should there be more than one repository?” Clearly there are technical solutions to this particular problem, however at root this is an institutional policy issue.
The VLE as Repository
Worryingly more than a few participants reported that it was still common practice for staff to use the institutional VLE to store teaching and learning materials used on a daily basis. This despite the fact that it’s widely known that “you can’t get anything out again”. It’s not clear whether these resources were deemed “not good enough” to be uploaded to a repository or whether it is simply easier to store them in a VLE. It appears that academics draw a distinction between teaching resources created for their own use and “learning objects” created for reuse.
The Myth of Reuse
Tom Franklin pointed out, as he has done many times before, that in his experience no lecturers reuse teaching materials that are more than ten years old so is there really any point in promoting the reuse of teaching and learning materials? This is a valid point. However I would argue that there are many lecturers that would probably like to reuse resources they created themselves a couple of years ago if only they could find them! To my mind the real value of repositories is that they can help teaching practitioners, and the institution more generally, manage their resources over the short to medium term.
So, is there any underlying commonality between teaching and learning materials and scholarly works? Unlike scholarly works, there is no clearly defined workflow for the production, use, management and distribution of teaching and learning materials. As a result it is difficult to articulate the role that repositories can play. In addition teaching and learning materials and their intended use differ vastly across subject domains. Several participants suggested that disciplinary based approaches to resource management may be more productive than the institutional approach. As John reported in his twitter feed
Conceptually Learning Material and Research repositories are very different services with fundamentally different goals, not just different metadata and workflows. Learning Material repositories are much more about asset management and possibly have closer parallel with research data than scholarly works, although not in terms of preservation.
So no stunning conclusions but a lot of food for though raised in just 30 minutes. It was genuinely enlightening to hear the experiences of so many colleagues who are actually managing learning material repositories. Kudos to the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme.
Several people have already picked up on this on twitter. Meet della from Dell for all you girlies needing to “simplify your life with technology”.
“Tech tips” include:
Get healthier: Use your mini to track calories, carbs and protein with ease, watch online fitness videos, map your running routes and more.
Eat better: Find recipes online, store and organize them, and watch cooking videos.
Chill out: Stressed? Your mini can be your meditation buddy as you take mini-breaks throughout your day (schedule them, with reminders, on your calendar). You can find free guided meditations, download meditation podcasts, watch yoga videos, create soothing slideshows of images and music and even bliss out to Visible Earth images courtesy of NASA.
Travel smarter: …. entertain you in airports, trains and buses.
All is not in vain though, here’s the science:
Stay in the clouds: “Cloud computing” is a buzzword for what your mini does best: save money and time by using free online apps for everything you need-meaning you don’t need to buy, install or update a bunch of space- and memory-hogging applications on your computer itself. No matter what operating system you have, it’s easy to find free and low-cost streaming media and online apps. Any time you need to transfer data to or from your mini, you can stream it, port it via removable SD cards or USB flash drives or plug in an external drive.
Words fail me. Ada Lovelace must be spinning in her grave.
Following the HEFCE / JISC / Academy OER Programme Community Briefing day at the end of January I blogged about the programme’s technical and metadata requirements. The successful OER projects haven’t even been announced yet and we’re already receiving enquiries asking for clarification on the resource description requirements briefly outlined.
In line with the innovative pilot nature of the OER Programme JISC have decided to take a new approach to metadata. Rather than mandating a formal application profile based on a single open standard we are instead identifying the type of information that projects must record for the resources they create without mandating how this should be done. Hopefully this will give projects considerably greater flexibility as to how they describe their resources and ultimately we hope that this will result in richer descriptions that are of value to end users. However we do recognise that this freer approach is likely to have some impact on interoperability. We hope to learn a lot from this pilot regarding what works and what doesn’t and where the balance between formal and informal metadata lies.
We can’t provide definitive answers to all the questions that are likely to arise but here are some draft guidelines as a starting point.
Mandatory Metadata
All mandated metadata relates to the resource being described and not to the description of the resource.
Programme tag ukoer
All resources produced as a result of the HEFCE/Academy/JISC OER Programme must be tagged ukoer. Many applications provide a mechanism for adding such tags, however we need to consider how this tag may also be accommodated within LOM and DC metadata.
Title
The title of the resource being described.
Author / owner / contributor (from user profile)
Most systems, be they repositories, vles or applications such as SlideShare, YouTube, etc allow registered users to create a user profile detailing their name and other relevant details. When a user uploads a resource to such a system these details are usually associated with the resource.
Date
This is difficult to define in the context of open educational resources which have no formal publication date. Most applications are likely to record the date a resource is uploaded but it will also be important to record date of creation so users can judge the currency of a resource.
URL
Metadata must include a url that locates the resource being described. This is not as straightforward as it sounds as there are likely to be multiple copies of resources in multiple locations.
Technical Information
Includes file format, file size and other relevant information. Many applications will generate this information automatically.
Recommended Metadata
Language
The language of the resource.
Subject classifications
JISC will not mandate the use of specific subject classifications for the OER Programme. However projects are recommended to use subject classifications that are already being used by their subject and domain communities. JACS is one such example of a subject classification that is widely used in the UK F/HE community. It is not recommended that projects attempt to create new subject classification vocabularies. Further guidance on working with vocabularies will be provided.
Keywords
May be selected from controlled vocabularies or may be free text.
Tags
Tags are similar to keywords. They may be entered by the creator /publisher of a resource and by users of the resource and they are normally free text. Many applications such as flickr, SlideShare and YouTube support the use of tags.
Comments
Are usually generated by users of a resource and may describe how that resource has been used, in what context and whether it’s use was successful or otherwise.
Description
In contrast to comments, descriptions are usually generated by the creator/ publisher of a resource and tend to be more authoritative. Descriptions may provide a wide range of additional information about a resource including information on how it may be used or repurposed.
These guidelines are likely to change and develop as the OER Programme progresses and we learn more about issues specifically relating to the description of open educational resources in distributed environments. If you have any comments on these draft guidelines please feel free to comment here or va the CETIS Metadata SIG list at cetis-metadata@jiscmail.ac.uk.