Fragments of Amber

goodbye ... and hello

This blogging platform has served me well, but I'm moving on.

You can now find me at Fragments of Amber (wordpress).

I've just published a post on "Eco Lessons on Open"

... so follow me there!

goodbye and hello

This blogging platform has served me well, but I'm moving on.

You can now find me at Fragments of Amber (wordpress).

I've just published a post on "Eco Lessons on Open"

... so follow me there!

IWD Thoughts on Unpaid Work

It's International Women's Day.

One of the most important concepts I learned in my Sociology A Level at South Notts College was from Ann Oakley in "the Sociology of Housework" (1974). It is the concept of unpaid work.

I've been thinking about that a lot recently.

In the UK we've had news stories around internships, unpaid enforced labour for jobseekers. Underlying the concept of the Big Society is a reliance of volunteers. My own cousin is doing fantastic work with charities and NGOs, but largely unpaid. Her career is a different sort of world entirely from the one I had at her age.

Meanwhile in the sectors I work in: education and technology, we have concepts like cognitive surplus , we have a culture of overtime, of knowledge economy work that crosses the boundaries between personal and professional. We all bring our work home with us in our heads.

While I'm at work supporting this world, my children are looked after by a childminder (one is full time, the other is with her outside of school hours). From my salary, I pay another woman to look after my children. Quite a few women in my position rely on their mothers to play that role, and usually without payment. For very good reasons, that would not be a suitable solution for me. But it does make we wonder about the real economics of childcare.

And thinking ahead ... with women of my generation having babies later and later ... and having to work to a late retirement ... will I ever be able to help with caring for my own grandchildren? I doubt it very much. So I'm guessing that will we see a big change in women's the pattern of work, semi-retirement and old age. For every well paid "career woman" (whatever that means) there will be a woman (or man) paid to look after her children. It's a strange economy.

But then I stop and remember that salaried labour is a very recent invention in human history. For most societies that have existed, people have roles, they work, they barter, they live, and the question of salary, income and wages doesn't come into it so much.

So what am I saying?

Be mindful to the possibility that some of the directions we are going in are propped up by unpaid labour. We can't play the game of costs/benefits, balance sheets and economic growth without recognising that a lot of the work that is taking place is not counted as jobs. It's too easy to have only a partial view of "work". That goes for health and social care, education, technology ... the nature of work has changed over history, and we would do well to remember that.

That's it really. Just a plea to remember that.

 

openedspace

It’s Open Education Week, so I last week I worked with my colleague David Kernohan to describe the way JISC-funded work is contributing to developing this space. I started by looking for a definition of open education and was surprised to find that most of the definitions are really about open educational resources. It wasn't what I expected: surely there is a lot more to the concept of open education than that? And fundamentally, I thought we’d got past a content-centric view of learning? Content is important to learning: it reflects practice, enables practice, it feeds practice and is produced by practice: this much I was trying to say in a blog post about process and product. But content is just part of learning and teaching, surely? If so much of the interest around content is its relation to practice and new learning opportunities, where is the clear articulation of this as the focus of open education?

Luckily, one of the few good definitions is on the open education week website:

"Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education.  It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.).  Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire." (source URL)

What's not to like?

That's the question, really. My picture of the space is that it is full of tensions and risks. The definition doesn't quite capture the space as I see it: the vision is lovely, but the reality might be bloodier. Feedback suggests that my Story of (O)pen (a blog post on my team's work blog) doesn't surface the difficulties of open, or explore the ways in which open approaches might challenge the status quo. That's very true, so perhaps I should share a more nuanced view of openness. It's very much in my mind that open isn't always easy, and perhaps I should try to state that more clearly. It’s the new business models for providing learning opportunities that concerned me in a previous post: Why Open Education is Dangerous. Are the ideals of open education a trojan horse for commercial interests to undermine publicly funded institutions? What is driving the interest, is it on the inside or the outside of "education"? Am I a reactionary for wanting to preserve some of the strengths of a public education system? In other words, I see there are opportunities, but what are the threats? Is education on the edge of the abyss, or the edge of a reformation? If the castle of "education as we know it" is under seige, is “openness” in education the dragon or the knight in shining armour?

I wanted to share these questions with other people this week. I like visuals and diagrams and infographics so I sat down to draw my own picture of the open education space.

Here is my first attempt:

openedspace ambrouk 1

It takes as its starting point that the digital era changes the time and place that learning happens and that learning providers are having to adjust. It's the adjusting, redesigning, reorchestrating that is important here.

I shared it with David, who then pointed out that whilst mine told one kind of story, it didn’t show the changed experience of the learner. So he developed his own picture.

And then David and I decided there might be something useful we could do here, so I sent both our pictures to another colleague, Lawrie Phipps. And then, while Lawrie was thinking, I made another picture that built on David’s.

openedspace ambrouk 2

This tried to more explictly show the economic angle: when money changes hands between learners, providers and educational employers. And it starts to hint at the issues that concern me around of unpaid labour, volunteering and moonlighting educationalists ... though I would need to do a lot more to draw that out. Perhaps that's another picture.

In the meantime, Lawrie made his own picture. It bore some uncanny resemblences to my reworking of David's picture, like blurring the distinction between resources and connectivity.

This was getting interesting now. It seems we three do see the open education space in a similar way, but have differences about the important features and what the story is worth telling. We all discussed our pictures on skype. I realised from Lawrie that my first image wasn’t specifically about open education, it tells the story of the changes in education, and mentions of openness could be left out at this stage. And I was still thinking about what David had raised about what difference this makes to the learners.

So I revised my first picture again to be more explicit about what I mean, and particularly to draw out that I think there are threats as well as opportunities in this space.

openedspace ambrouk 3

It doesn't have the learner at the heart, but I realised that is not where I see the tensions. I think the learner benefits from the openness, and indvidual educators have choices in how they react. The area of most difficulty is in how established educational institutions respond to the opportunities and threats in this space. In fact, that is the subject of four new case studies I have overseen on institutional approaches to openness. Now I feel I'm getting to a picture that really expresses how I see the open education space.

So ...

Apparently the phrase “eat your own dogfood” is not a good advert for practising what you preach, so my colleague Josh tells me, these days it’s all about drinking your own champagne.

This photo is (c) Lawrie Phipps.

The hand apparently belongs to Simon Ball. Not sure of the brand of champagne. Sure looks good though.

* * *

Would you like to join us in our toast to the benefits of thinking in the open, by joining in? Make your own picture of openedspace and blog and tweet it!

If you want to reuse any of my pictures please do! You would make me a very happy lady, after all, I am excitable about being citeable

* * *

#openeducationwk #openedspace

Images are Creative Commons BY. You can cite me as ambrouk

and they are on flickr: 1, 2, 3 or your can Download the files here: Openedspace_ambrouk_123

Why I blog

 

It is probably a rite of passage for people who blog to blog about why they blog. I confess I never read those posts before I became a blogger myself. What navel-gazing! Yawn. But now I understand a little more why it is useful to reflect and I think its time. You are under no obligation to read this.

This post is intended for a wide readership - you don't need to know about blogging or technical stuff to read it, I've tried to link to any specialist terms in it. I've been thinking I'd like to write more about technology in common sense language so would love your feedback on how far off I am!

Open Practice and Blogging

Hopefully My Story of O(pen) will help give a sense of what "open practice" means. Its a phrase that me and some of the folk I work with have started using as an umbrella term that covers a lot. Trust your instinct about what you think it might mean. This quote from Lou McGill sums it up well: "By Open practices I mean a broad range of practices which have an ‘open’ philosophy, intention or approach [...] Informal and formal open practice takes place within wider societal contexts which are evolving rapidly. Open practices take place in, and are enabled by, a highly connected socially networked environment" (see Lou McGill's original post).

I am not a teacher, not an academic, not a software developer. I work with programmes, projects and policy. But I have always felt that open practices apply to me. I have always been quite collaborative in the way I develop papers, presentations etc. Colleagues would testify that I send an awful lots of emails about ideas, potential leads, parallels, things I've read. Some would say too many. Ahem.

Going back several years I have been involved in decisions about encouraging projects and services to work more openly. see Brian Kelly's post from February 2009 on should projects be required to have blogs?. I definitely see blogging as part of open practice and that applies to me too.

In 2010 I returned from maternity leave and was really keen to start blogging properly for work. I had encouragement early on, particularly from David Kernohan, and from Tony Hirst who kindly read through my Rethinking the O in OER Post. That post was well received, so I've been tried hard during 2011 to develop my blogging practice at work, which has also given me confidence to build my personal blogging.

Several years on, project blogging is much more common, and Brian Kelly is now encouraging more openness about blog stats,  Also Doug Belshaw has recently surveyed his readers and shared the results. They are both in a different league to me, and have very different styles, but I watch and learn.

So this is my dogfood post.

(image sourced and stamped with licence information by Xpert Attribution Tool free, easy, try it!)

Who cares who reads my posts? I do!

Its easy to mock myself for caring if people read my posts, but you know what? I do care if people read my posts.I love watching my free bitly account tracker creep upwards. I love getting RTd on twitter. I love being scooped and paperli-d. I am informed that these days everyone is verbing nouns, so I am trying to keep up here ;-) As I've said before, I am excited about being citable.

Call it vanity analytics "vanalytics", personal impact "pimpact". (I made them up, can I trademark them?) It makes me feel uncomfortable to admit it, its not very ... fashionable ... but here goes anyway.

• One of my favourite posts on my work team blog, the OER Turn post (2011/09) had 664 page views of which 546 were unique. My highlight stat here is average time on the page: 6 minutes 17 seconds. The Topsy Report records 28 related tweets. A quick read through them made me grin with satisfaction, some "yes!" and a number of tweets from people far outside my usual circles.

Snigger into your flat whites. This is openness, folks. I've read enough website stats over the past 15 years to know that there is an awful lot of smoke and mirrors around web analytics. Now I'm in the web publishing business myself, in my own tiny way, I would like to know how I compare, in terms of reads and shares and responses. So how about my personal blog?

• I've only just hooked up google analytics to this blog, so don't have much info about usage yet. I do know that I've done 39 posts, had 32 comments, and that in the whole blog's lifetime (only the last year in earnest), I've had 2914 page views. For my most recent post about Frictionless Sharing and the Filter Bubble and Differentiation the Topsy Report lists 11 responses (of course some of that was my pimping!).

I know I am a dwarf compared to the giants, but most of us are dwarves and I'm ok with that. I don't aim to be a "guru" (can anyone point me to the recent new year post about things the blogger hoped to see the end of in 2012? educational technology guru was on the list, rightly so!). I just want to be an active participant on the web.

Behind the statistics is where the human interest stories are, where blogging and social networking really is about being part of a network. Some of my stories ...

• When I prepared some slides for an event, I made them live in slideshare on my organisation's slideshare channel. (Slides: benefits of content sharing and re-use). Without any "pimping" from me, I got 1,000 views in 24 hours. How gratifying is that! As I write, it is up to 2,000 views. Not a blog post, but evidence of the power of publishing to the right channel.
• When I blogged an extract of a funding Call I'd released (Post: OER Rapid Innovation Extract) I unleashed the power of trackbacks. The director of a project in the US contacted me to correct an error. Not only did he see a reference to his project that would otherwise have been locked inside a PDF, but he was able to correct an error within an hours of the post going live. And now I follow him on twitter.
• When I was pulling together my thoughts on openness, I wrote a quick paper and circulated it to some colleagues for feedback. One colleague, Lawrie Phipps in fact, encouraged me to publish it as a blog post, get it out there. So I did. (Post: Story of O(pen)). I won't lie, it made the point to my communications colleagues that I am interested in open issues, and won me a bit more internal attention to influence that agenda
• I had been wondering about whether there is something drawing philosophy graduates into technology jobs, that gave me something to share with a Philosophy Foundation group just setting on on Facebook. I have something to say, something to ask. That has helped my sense of identity, reminded me of my roots and I have had lots of interesting conversations around it.
• added 2012/02/04 ... the comment I got that said "I think this is the first time that I've ever commented on a blog, but I am because I agree with you and I worry about precisely the same things you do. Well written and said." (here)
• added 2012/02/04 ... the tweet I got in response to my question about whether a work update post I did was helpful: "we loved it!".

And that, readers, is why I blog.

This quiz on What Kind of Blogger Are You? from Warwick University caught my eye today, and I recommend it. I was very clearly two types of blogger: social, and profile building. Considering I have these two blogs, and my work blog is to increase awareness of the work we do, I'm happy with that!

 

POSTSCRIPT

Frances Bell's comment below makes me realise I forgot to add some points that are obvious to me but I should have said them:

• composing a post helps me think
• thinking out loud helps me refine my thinking
• I like to have a record of the way my thoughts develop, and how they are influenced by other people

and Anne Marie Cunningham's comment makes me think maybe I should push my stuff a bit harder to get even more benefit.

 

 

Amber

aka @ambrouk

 

One final thing. I would really like feedback, whether you've only just read this post or have been reading my work posts or my personal posts. What should I do less of or more of? What would make my posts better? (Except please, no-one say spellcheck my personal posts, I am quite happy editing a live post, I don't aim to be polished). Aside from that ... let me know what you think!

Frictionless Sharing, the Filter Bubble, and Differentiation

 

In a lovely exchange of blogging recently, my work blog post on process and product in sharing learning materials prompted Brian Kelly to research the term frictionless sharing which led to levels of friction by Martin Weller and now frictionless sharing is good for you or at least for me Erik Duval. The comments on Erik's post is really what triggered this blog post.

I'm thinking about technology, specifically the web, and the importance of choice. This post is a bit of a mash of concepts around frictionless sharing, the filter bubble, and the privilege of choice.

I have mixed feelings on all of this.

(image embedded attribution via http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution/ )

Firstly, the blurring of personal and professional activity online is a problem to me. Do I want my work contacts to know I've been researching nappy rash and reading my horoscopes? (Clearly, they are
hypothetical examples. ahem). But the convenience of doing things through my fb/twitter/google identities is hard to resist, especially now I purchase apps and content online through google apps and amazon.

To my work contacts all this activity is just noise, as Alan says in the comments on Erik's post. And really not helpful to them. The only people it helps are people building profiles of what a person like me does. I don't mind them knowing what a person like me does, and I don't mind them marketing at me through emails and ads.

I resent the marketing through search though, as Tony Hirst has been flagging up on his blog. I don't want to see familiar faces in my search results, actually. I trust the people who have done the sharing but I want to search for myself. Even for choosing my holiday this year I have got very frustrating with the filter bubble narrowing my view onto the world. And now everywhere I go online I see holiday cottages and scottish castles being reflected back at me. Its claustrophobic.

I don't even know the effect that has on my work browsing/searching habits. Am I being trapped into a filter bubble? I have a theory that we each of us likes to see ourselves as living in a long tail. A meaningful experience to me is a personal, specialised, unique one.

I want my experience online to be personal, not personalised.

And yet ... when it comes to the realworld economics of the web, I'm torn.

Obviously, free needs paying for. all of these commercial content providers and platforms and tools can't live on fresh air, people need paying. Even open source software developers need to eat.

So how to make it pay? As John Naughton says "Attention is now the really scarce resource in our information economy" (Observer Sunday 2012/01/15) My colleague David Kernohan suggests this might be a user data bubble. I think what I think is that in this post modern economy, value need never be realised into actual cash for it to be real - all it needs to be realised into is confidence, enough confidence for investors to invest. Business models on the web seem to often be about grow the user base, promise wonders, sell it for a fortune, let someone else work out how to make money from it. The question, as David says, is how long this will enable money to change hands.

In the meantime the reality is that us little people are being mined for information. The issue is whether that matters. I'm still not sure what I think.

In order to create this rich social browse to feed the marketers data, will services like google and facebookn maintain a controlled window onto the world? Will the majority of web users experience the web like the Chinese do, except controlled not by the state but by Facebook? It looks that way.

Can you pay your way to a premium web? I can afford to pay small subscriptions to experience the wild web, to go on safari into the outer reaches. Will that become the priviledge of the technially skilled or financially able minority?

If I could choose between everyone getting a free open web and a second class corporatised web, I'd obviously choose the former.

But I won't get to choose for everyone else, just for me. And I have a sneaking suspicion ... is all this just the technosavvy middle classes just upping the ante?
... Oh, you have facebook on your smartphone? How sweet. We have deleted our accounts.
... Oh, you have foursquare to share your wherabouts with your friends? How niave. You know they will sell on your data and fill your inbox with junkmail.
It's like we always have to keep a distance from the proles. Whats so different from:
... Oh, you have an internet connection now? We have broadband.
... Oh, you have a laptop? We have a tablet.
Strangely It always feels a bit like food snobbery to me.
... Oh. you have strawberries from tesco in january? we only eat food in season.
... Oh, you have steak? we only eat organic.

Isn't it a good enough thing that people can connect online, keep in touch with their family and friends without having to pay money to do it, look up all sorts of information and do all sorts of things. Isn't it good that they are valued enough by content providers to get free services online? After all, we've been dealing with being heavily marketed at for nearly a century and a half now. You could say our marketing literacy skills are more developed than our digital literacy skills.

I am the twittering classes. I am the 1%. What are my first principles here? Purity or equality? Opportunity or quality? Me saying the facegoogletube web is not real enough seems a little smug. It's like a game of constant differentiation. Which sounds very much like playing into the hands of market segmentation to me. What really matters here?

#confused

Philosopher Technologists

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my philosophy degree has shaped my thinking, and how many people I meet in my workworld that have philosophy degrees. In fact I was discussing that with David Mossley  just recently.

I’ve been forming a little theory about why that is, and this evening I just read a post by Professor Peter Bradley, a philosopher about why there are not very many visible philosophers in the “digital humanities” field. It didn't quite match my perception of the digital space, so I got to thinking I might write this post after all.

Way back I heard an episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Radio 4, where they were debating philosophers vs scientists. It struck me as rather a “what did the philosophers ever do for us”? question.

In everyday language, philosophy is seen as:

• Complacent: being philosophical about it = accepting your lot
• Pointless: philosophising in the pub = thinking too much without intending to act

OK, yes, academic philosophy can have a bit of that about it. But put that to one side and think about what philosophy is not the perception of what philosophy is as a job. (And let's face it, most academic jobs look like that from the outside).

I think philosophy is growing a set of methods, just like science is a set of methods. It creates a body of knowledge, but the act of philosophy is the act of applying the methods. And that’s no coincidence! Hello Aristotle! Philosophy and founder of the sciences. Science branched off.

Likewise you see the way that philosophy branches off into particular areas of enquiry that become physics, study of art, history, maths ... philosophy grows new disciplines. This was Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigmatic shifts. We see philosophical method in artificial intelligence / consciousness, cosmology, quantum physics ... areas of science that we still need thought experiments and mental constructs to help shape the discipline. And I've been hearinfg a lot more recently that philosophy needs to come back in to management to give more thorough grounding for theories about behaviour, motivation, control, ethics and so on.

Looking at other way round, what does it mean when people with philosophy training start clustering somewhere? I think it means the thing they are focusing around is being birthed into something more solid.

I haven’t been closely following Web Science but it seems to me that its explicit interdisciplinarity is a sign of exactly this: it is on the verge of a new discipline. (Useful background from by CETIS 2008 (!)  And I’d bet my pennies that there are a lot of philosophers helping to define and test the boundaries of the emerging discipline.

Am I saying that philosophers are web coders? No. Though there are a lot of coders who have migrated from non-computing backgrounds into it. Google’s statement that it values humanities and social sciences is strong evidence that being a technologist doesn’t only mean being a computing sciences graduate.

And what does being a technologist mean? Well the automotive industry is multiprofessional: designers, engineers, marketers, manufacturers, safety experts, sales people, mechanics. Technology is a multiprofessional industry.

So, a quick twitpoll ...

2 questions: do you have a philosophy background, and do you consider yourself a technologist? 1 MINUTE OF YOUR TIME!

Its not scientific, but its something I've been curious about for a while, so this is a first step to find out if I'm on to something. If anyone wants to do something more methodologically sound I'd love to help!

Poll closes this Sunday night 27^th November.

My mad idea: OpenTag

Supporting the ecosystem of open content content through a shared tag tool

This is an idea that has been buzzing about in the back of my head. Based on many many conversations with clever colleagues who will, no doubt, see the flaw in my plan. But here it is anyway. This will make little sense to people outside of educational technology.

We have a problem to solve:

In order to share educational resources more effectively, providers and users need a richer exchange of pedagogical and contextual metadata.

As I understand it, most repositories deal with Dublin Core metadata, some with variants on the richer IEEE LOM, such as UK LOM. The fields exist in the software. But just because a field exists doesn’t mean it has any information in it, or that the information is meaningful, or that the information is consistent with other repositories. The logic of what metadata should be shared is mostly agreed, but the extent to which each field is filled in, and with what vocabularies, is where the decisions are.

The question is about the consistency of the information collected about the resource, and how far other services can rely on there being that information in the metadata record.

For open content for education (OER if you want to call it that), I suggest there are several dimensions. Catherine Bruen from NDLR and myself sketched this out at the Oriole Retreat:

This diagram is DELIBERATELY not a definition of openness. It is a representation of the dimensions against which we judge “open”.. I deliberately include cost and access because as some readers might know, I wouldn’t rule out an ecosystem of resources free at the point of use, via oath, so that providers can have tracking information. Or a ubiquitous micropayments system that keeps costs down by providing usage data back to providers.  It’s not that these things are desirable compared to pure open. It’s that they might happen. I’m interested in what might happen as well as what we would like to happen. Reality is usually a compromise between vision and constraints.

I am thinking that the ideal is on the far edges, so that a very open OER has a larger image than a partly open one. So ...  a resource might score highly on one, low on another.  We’ll come back to that in a minute.

Where is the information to map the resource against these dimensions? Well, the metadata is sometimes available from the depositor, though if the requirements are too onerous, the benefit of deposit vs the effort required can tip towards not depositing. Various solutions are being explored. For example, mandatory deposit (removing the element of choice), though often that reduces the metadata requirements on the depositor. Being able to incorporate metadata post-deposit helps, whether from the originator, from cataloguers and creators, or from re-users. The Learning Registry aims to derive metadata from multiple systems, aggregate it, and feed it back to the resource. SWORD makes deposit easier.

There is then, a question of what metadata is really required to meet the use cases (as explored in October 2010 http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Event:_what_metadata_is_really_required ) in a way that gets a balance between depositor effort and user benefit. (Its that “reality is usually a compromise between vision and constraints” point again).

Services that do collect and display rich metadata often find that the richness gets lost on export. Because aggregators and other sorts third party services have not been able to rely on the metadata being there, so they haven’t built any functionality around it. It makes perfect sense: you don’t want a set of filters or icons that remain blank for most of the content in your service. You need, maybe, 50% completion for it to be useful to users rather than annoying.

To make the effort worth it you need:

• A use case to build metadata for
• Enough other services planning to use the same metadata
• Enough content depositors willing to see the benefit in providing richer metadata

I think we have clearer use cases now than a few years ago

• Use Case for End Use: OERu course authors
• Use Case for Discovery: Learning Registry
• Use Case for Deposit: into and between repository services such as Jorum and Connexions

In terms of enough services and enough depositors understanding the benefit of more consistent and complete metadata... I think we are getting there. The Learning Registry could potentially provide a driver for services starting to trust that they can rely on metadata being there. In fact have been thinking that this space is maturing quite fast. In November 2011. Kathi Fletcher’s OER roadmap work articulates this opportunity really well, and she’s working on OERPub which is like SWORD for OER.

So is this metadata issue worth another look?

Is there space for a shared solution to tagging open content for education with more consistent metadata?

The way tagging works is mostly like this:

You might even do a look up to an external authority file rather than create it yourself - this is the way Names works, for example.

So using that sort of model, what abouttaking some of the tagging job and creating a shared service for it? A service that accepts that different vocabularies will change at different speeds? That coordinates the provision of authority files in those areas that are key to educational content? That shares the work of creating more attractive tagging interfaces for different devices and third party systems? That gives third party developers information in one place about the extent of metadata they can expect to build for?

This is the sort of development taking place in the open access repositories space, and I think we should think whether we are ready to do that for open content for education yet.

I’m pretty sure this would work with SWORD and with the learning registry. It’s another piece of the puzzle.

It is not a standard. It is not a vocabulary. It is a vocabulary service provider. It doesn't mandate, it doesn't validate (though validation tools could be built around it).

It can support the work of advocates of accessibility, open licensing, etc by giving them vocabularies they can build tools and validators around. They can build all sorts of "how open are you" tools. And they can use the vocabularies of self classification as collections/filter criteria, to include only those resources that meet their requirements.

It can support the work of third party providers by letting them see what they can expect from content providers. It brokers between provision and use of metadata.

The working groups might already exist - the vocabularies might already exist - for example the OER Commons Evaluation Tool for pedagogy, Creative Commons tools for licensing, and this sort of guidance. I would love to see a shared global subject vocabulary tool. Even just for the top 20-50 categories. Imagine what that could do for subject-based services! (It would need much more tagging than, obviously,  but it would help developers and intermediaries focus in on relevant collections from around the world).

Now to go back to the use cases. The same sorts of interfaces that are built to support tagging could also be used to provide filtering. So if the content HAS to be editable using free software, or it HAS to be for group teaching, or it HAS to be renderable to screen readers, there is a focus for where that use case gets articulated, and the arguments for meeting it get pushed around the network of content providers. Enhancements to consistent metadata would be use case driven.

Am I mad? Perhaps I'm feeling overly optimistic today.

Feedback very welcome ... I don't know the "how", I just know the "what" and "why" and some of the "who".

 

Sheriff's Story: life in open country

On wednesday this week I was in the "Open Country" symposium at ALT-C that I trailed in a previous post. I think video will be available of the whole session, including the much more articulate and evidence-informed colleagues Dave White and Helen Beetham. And of course, David Kernohan preachin and playing the banjo ;-)

But I can't wait for the video before I share my career-limiting escapade.

Below are the words I delivered in the character of a Sheriff. Picture a third rate Reese Witherspoon who's eaten too many pies. There's a rough audio recording here too, thanks to Lou McGill, who also supplied the banjo. My character's speech comes first and is about 3 minutes long, after which I seem to have stepped back from the mic!

James Clay recorded an ALT-C beta interview with us afterwards.

David Kernohan's reflections are here (including a photo, yes). I'm still chewing over a better way to articulate my thoughts that sustainable infrastructure comes out of compromises, that the interactivity of the content is not really what's important to OER: its more about a trading balance between what people want to produce and what people want to use. One thing I feel strongly about is that its important for purists to preach their vision, but the real adoption of new practices is the story of the pragmatists. Unlike some, I don't find that depressing at all. I see it as social history vs the great men theory of history. Deep change takes time and its worth waiting for, but it also requires lots of compromises along the way.

 

Sheriff's Story

Howdy folks.

I’m the sheriff of this town. The keeper of law‘n’order. The boss.

There are two surprising things about me one is that I'm a lady sheriff the other is that my accent wonders all around the Americas like a stray dawg so I'll try to keep it a o k.

Anyhows, I'm here to tell y'all a bit about life in the wild west All you’ll mainly hear about are the outlaws and the cowboys. The heroes, the explorers, the ones who head off on their horses into the mountains armed only with a rifle. They come back with their stories, their reputations. They get the glory. I was a pioneer once. I shared their dreams. I’ve seen a lot of people lose their way, I’ve seen ambushes, I’ve seen in-fighting.

What I want now is stability and sustainability. You can’t build a community without compromise.

Stability. A stable town means somewhere people can live and work. We came here, following the promises of the gold rush, the oil prospectors, the preachers, in search of a better life And we find ourselves thousands of miles from home, from anything familiar. We create communities, we nurture our children, we raise oir cattle. We can’t all chase the gold rush. Only the strong and the brave have the appetite for adventure. Where would we be without our elders advising caution or our women keeping the children safe?

Sustainability. They head off into the open, seeking riches. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, who ensures the gloryboys families don’t starve over the winter? Who’s left to till the fields and mill the flour? The novelty wears off after the first failed harvest. The townspeople, that’s who. we learn again how to plant and harvest and cook in this barren land. There is a world to be built, and I’m here to keep the peace, to keep our fragile community safe within these foreign hills.

So, what do we need to keep Law n order?

I have to have a notion of the public good. Individuals will often want more than our little community can give them. There will be conflict, there will be deserters. Sometimes they will take people with them, I will let them go.

The goldrush is over. I have to manage the community. Their fighting. Their stealing. And I have to be thinking towards the future. I have to think about food production, trade and railroads.

I'll leave the outlaws and preachers to their work.

I have my own problems to deal with.

 

Are we in Open Country?

Tomorrow I head up into Open Country. Well, Yorkshire. Leeds to be precise. It's ALT-C - the time of year that learning technology types meet up and share ideas and experiences.

People that know me on twitter as @ambrouk will know that I am very interested in "open": open educational resources, open access, open scholarship, open source ... all the opens. What I'm finding the most interesting is the tensions that take place between the idea of change and the mainstream adoption/adaption to it. It involves struggles between purism and pragmatism, a balance between innovation and implementation.

So I am really looking forward to speaking at a symposium on Wednesday with Helen Beetham, David Kernohan, and Dave White, where we will be asking "Are we in Open Country?"

Trailer, courtesy of David Kernohan

As part of my preparation I'm also planning to join the Paradox of Openness: the High Costs of Giving Online symposium on Tuesday, as I suspect there will be strong links between what they are exploring and what we want to look at.

If you're wondering what what my excuse is for The Hat (thank you Smiffys!) ... lets just say I'm going to step in the spurred leather boots of a sheriff to explore how to move beyond the occasional expedition into Open Country into how to make life in the wild west stable and sustainable.