Cormac’s blog

A major theme for me in the development of Wikiversity is the dynamic between the social and the personal. Just today, Juan initiated a discussion (need to remember to update link when archived) with an observation from Daan that “on Wikiversity, there are too many startups of only one person who is waiting for others to join.” There are several themes within and implied by just this single comment. One is the fact of people ‘needing’ other people to learn with – or at least being motivated to learn in a social setting. Another is the ‘waiting’ – a fairly disempowered stance, requiring someone else to find a resource you are interested in and initiate some sort of learning agenda. (It’s also been pointed out to me that ‘waiting’ is a strong characteristic of Wikiversity participants thus far – waiting for a learning model to emerge.) Another theme perhaps is the implied distaste for gung-ho individualism – on any other wiki, people will develop content, and invite comments and contributions from others along the way; while Wikiversity seems to foster a fundamentally different stance amongst (some of) its participants. (Despite, as McCormack points out, that most content development is done individually.) This seems intrinsically linked with the need to learn collaboratively. (Is this a personal need, or a need imposed by the wiki?) It also seems to be the reason why (some) people are waiting.

So, Juan has raised discussion about how people can see what projects they could join in with – either in developing content, or in joining a collective learning ‘path’. So we might extend the ‘collaboration of the week/month’ idea (that Wikipedia and others use) to accommodate ‘learning projects requiring learners’. It seems like a fairly obvious extension for Wikiversity to make. Though there might be a need for better tools to facilitate deeper searching and matching, as has also been previously discussed.

But there are massive questions left hanging here. Do people need to learn collaboratively in a wiki; can people learn individually in a wiki? How can wiki and other technology be harnessed to align personal needs with those of others? How are personal needs mediated within a wiki context? Is a wiki fundamentally social or personal – or should we even ask that question? I’m looking forward to addressing these in my PhD – and they are just some of the questions raised by the social/personal dynamic. (For example, does a wiki’s collectivism eschew the capitalist system it fits into in the context of the rest of our lives..?) For further discussion, see Wikiversity as a Personal Learning Environment

Despite my photographic background (my undergraduate course was a three year diploma in photography), I don’t keep it up much any more - though I have been slightly more active since buying a nice digital SLR last year. Even still, I didn’t feel I had a lot to learn by uploading photos to Commons or Flickr (as per week 6 of the oercourse) - which wouldn’t exactly be new to me. Instead, I concentrated on doing some digging around other resources (more on which in my next blog post), and working on Wikiversity’s “help” pages around uploading and using images - mainly this one.

Images can cause problems on Wikiversity. For example, there was much activity recently by a group of students in a face to face group, who had been tasked with writing educational materials on “Design for the environment” as part of their coursework. They developed a lot of good resources - but, as I pointed out on the talk page, they also uploaded a large number of copyright violations. Some students were clearly aware of copyright issues, and used free content photos from Commons and Flickr (though sometimes these images were not free enough for Wikiversity); some students uploaded copyrighted work and illegally placed it under a free licence; and some others uploaded copyrighted work claiming that, since it is to be used in educational contexts, it falls under “fair use”. Whatever was done “wrongly” (with respect to Wikiversity’s free content principles) was not done out of malice, but simply a lack of awareness either of copyright itself, and how it works, or of Wikiversity’s position on copyright. And copyright - as I’ve said before, and as anyone in the free culture movement knows - is a mind-bogglingly complex arena.

Images on wikis can be a real headache - Commons is not Flickr - and there’s a reason why most people use Flickr in preference to Commons, even amongst the free content heads. Mediawiki’s syntax is clunky and sometimes completely counter-intuitive (as with storing sound files in the “Image” namespace!) - and then there is the complexity of learning about Wikimedia’s pretty ‘hardcore’ stance on copyright (which, IMO, is a good thing). However, when you’ve traversed the learning curve somewhat, it does work, and make sense. I haven’t gone through the blogs of the people in this course to see what experiences people have had with images on Commons/Wikiversity, but I would imagine that there were some frustrations (or will be, when they find their images deleted by zealous Commons admins!).

All of which brings us back to, yep, education. We, as part of the free culture movement need to educate people about not just the need for open content, but the process by which people can make content free. We, on free content projects like Wikiversity, have to develop robust but clearly understandable resources for doing so - targeting people from absolute zero knowledge to people with specific queries. Commons does this to some extent - though its guidelines are probably actively offputting for rank beginners - and so I think Wikiversity could complement this in a very significant way. If anyone has any experiences of wikis and images they’d like to share, I’d love to hear them to be able to develop resources or learning spaces to make images more workable in a wiki context.

Wikipedia has already created a new type of academic community - one in which people can freely contribute as much or as little as they like in their own time, and about subjects they are passionate about. Furthermore, I think contributing to Wikipedia is itself a learning process - for various people this can include: how to find and cite sources; improving literacy and proficiency in a language; how to deal with copyright issues; and how to collaborate with other people, some of whom you may deeply disagree with.

This is Wikipedia as a process rather than as a resource - I’ve written a resource that could be used to educate people about what happens “Inside Wikipedia” (see also slides I previously uploaded to LeMill), and I think more needs to be done in this regard, especially since people are increasingly visiting Wikipedia for information, and because it affords so much in raising awareness about information and media literacy. In order to understand and validate Wikipedia as a resource, we need to understand the process by which it is constructed. This does not simply mean we need to be wary of Wikipedia (we need to be critical of any piece of information) - and indeed, some of the material on Wikipedia is of a higher quality than anything else of its kind out there precisely because of its radically open model.

My dream has always been that Wikiversity would take up and expand this model. Wikiversity’s scope is far bigger than Wikipedia’s - and it suffers in some ways precisely because of this. I’ve heard people saying that Wikipedia is easy to understand because we know what an encyclopedia generally looks like (even though Wikipedia, of course, redefines or expands the definition of an encyclopedia), but that Wikiversity is too vaguely defined. This does bother me, but I also see it as an opportunity (and I always have done) - to remain open to new models, forms and ways of learning that are not simply of the format: develop resource; read resource; answer/discuss questions. I think there is still much work to do in understanding how open, connected and collaborative work can be embedded within educational practice - though, obviously there is already a huge amount of foundational and related work done across many academic fields.

In short, to summarise how I see Wikimedia and the free culture movement impacting on education, it involves:

* Giving people access to spaces in which they can share, discuss, and question their knowledge
* Developing open peer review models around this knowledge
* Improving awareness about how knowledge is constructed
* Framing and critiquing knowledge in a learning context (and giving people access to this open learning context)
* Developing peer review models around these learning contexts
* Improving awareness about how learning works

Wikipedia is already opening the world’s eyes to the first three; my hope is that Wikiversity (and others) will do likewise for the last three.

(Some more thoughts on issues in this post are in my two Wikimania papers, “Wikipedia as a learning community”, and “Learning and learning about learning in Wikiversity”.)

Copyright is something that makes my head hurt quite badly - both in my general lacking of legal understanding of it, and, with things that I do understand, in my incomprehension at how it can actually work like that. (For example, according to Commons, a photograph of a Mickey Mouse figure is copyrighted, and therefore ineligible for use in OER.)

I very much enjoyed Larry Lessig’s talk at OLCON 2002. I have been lucky enough to see Lessig talk in the flesh - and I can honestly say I had tingles up and down my spine for a large portion of it. This ‘open/free’ world we live in is a passionate domain - the OER movement is an umbrella for enthusiasts of many interests and affiliations (and even calling it a “movement”, as Dan Atkins and John Seely Brown did in their report to Hewlett’s gathering in 2007, moulds, consolidates, and even transforms it somewhat). Lessig (and a few others) are beacons for raising awareness of how modern copyright stifles creativity and cuts off access for the majority of the world’s people. OER, open source, and other free-culture initiatives are providing a framework for doing something about it - as Lessig continually exhorts us to do.

However, in their article, Ahrash Bissell and James Boyle are quite right to point out the danger in the free culture movement’s response to copyright - which is to create a range of licences permitting various certain freedoms of use of content - many of which are completely incompatible with each other. “Licence proliferation” may indeed result in “scattered islands of incompatible and mutually incomprehensible content” and “a pedagogical Tower of Babel” (though there may indeed be other reasons for their lack of connectivity or interoperability). I have heard some people say we need another licence - just for educational use - but this clearly simply adds to the problem of licence proliferation. What we need is greater interoperability between licences, and for content to be made progressively more free, in order to enable the greatest possible use of resources, including in ways that their creators had never thought about. CC-Learn is a commendable operation in this regard - but I would advocate that this is a global learning project that goes beyond simply allowing a certain organisation to “do the thinking”. I deal with some of these issues as part of my everyday work in Wikiversity, and I have been privy to many intense debates in my time, but perhaps if I was involved in a wider and more systematic discussion around copyright, copyleft, and education, my head wouldn’t hurt so much…

Dunno what happened, but I think my old “theme” (in other words, what makes the site look the way it does) just broke - so I’ve temporarily replaced it with the default wordpress theme, in the hope of making the whole thing better when I have some time. (I have been wanting for ages to integrate my blog and wiki better, add a set of personal pages, and just generally improve this website to make it more useful, so perhaps this will give me the motivation I need.) But I also need to find that time, which i don’t have now - as I’m running out the door after I add my next post, which is coming right up…

I was taken by the Wikipedia article on popular education (I had actually never properly read it before), with its mentioning of a number of initiatives, such as Ciph, an open university founded by Jacques Derrida and others, to be explicitly “liberated” from the government or “the university”. I don’t know exactly what “the university” means in this context - my experience of universities is to have a largely independent, and often provocative role within the state structure (even though they are of course dependent on funding), and that individuals within universities are similarly free to pursue their own agendas, as long as they continue to publish articles, and show that their students meet required standards. Yes, there are a lot of constraining features in that model, but I would argue that it is naive to imagine that there will never be any constraining features within a given social context (for example, there will always be inherent issues of power and participation). However, what “the university” is may be being redefined, and it was in this light that I reread Teemu’s paper for Wikimania last year: Wikiversity:Free education and free school? I now want to explore more of these initiatives - for example Summerhill in the UK, or even the Irish hedge schools, set up illegally under British rule. (In fact, it’s very interesting to reflect on the conditions under which various alternative public models of education have evolved.)

So, to the enlightenment, which gave us, amongst other things, the scientific method - to base our theories on empirical observation, and to make transparent the process by which we make these observations and develop these theories. It is transparency which is so vital in research - to be able to see how the research is constructed, in order to enable others to critique it from a particular perspective, or critique a particular part of its methodology. Similarly, I think it is transparency which is so important to the development of such a learning context (or perhaps “meta-university”) as Wikiversity. This is truly “open source education” - making the process explicit, in order to see how learning is constructed, in just the same way as open source code is readable, and modifiable.

In the OER movement, we have set ourselves the challenge of creating multiple and distributed repositories of free content, which people can not only access, but modify, adapt, recontextualise, redistribute. I know it’s too early for this to be an actual problem yet, but I do think that sheer quantity will actually pose a threat to this movement - unless it is made findable and meaningful through processes like social tagging. This is where I think Google scholar’s use of the slogan “stand on the shoulders of giants” is a tad on the arrogant and misleading side - my own personal experience of Google scholar is often to “drown in the grey literature of academic hopefuls” (”grey literature” being typically non-peer reviewed papers). The more we enable wide and meaningful searching of OERs, the more flexibility people will have in taking ‘a bit of this, and a bit of that’ for their own needs. Because, at the end of the day, we cannot simply hand someone a proscribed class to download and print off - everyone learns and teaches in their own particular way.

Since I know my way around Wikiversity fairly well , I decided that for this exploratory session, I would be better off exploring LeMill, which I’m much less familiar with.

I’ve been looking through Teemu’s resource “Brief History of New Media”. It’s got some good basic foundational ideas/players in the development of new media - and I learnt quite a few things. I like the way that some sections are explicitly labelled “not ready”.

One instantly appealing quality of LeMill is its clean layout; looking at another of Teemu’s resources, “Future Learning Models and the Impact of Visual Culture”, I like the way the slides are presented, with the audio clip at the top, in a clean, uncluttered window. And even better - I then discover the slideshow view - nifty, and again, very clean (and something I’ve been wanting for Wikiversity for some time). And when I go into the edit view, the interface is self-explanatory and very user-friendly - and I’m surprised that I could delete images from slideshows if I wanted to! (Does LeMill give more trust to users than Wikimedia projects? If so, is this because of a smaller or more dedicated userbase?)

(In another session), I want to find out more of the community aspect, so I click on the “community” hyperlink from the main page - there are “featured people” (something we’ve discussed in Wikiversity), and “recent discussions in my groups” (so far, I’ve only joined the History of New Media group - though how/when I don’t actually know!). I note that “recent discussions” don’t need to be so recent - “recent” comments listed from August 2007, October 2006 on my main page. This is no bad thing - on Wikiversity (and many other wikis), it is quite easy for developments/comments to be missed or forgotten amidst the reams of recent changes, and even on individuals’ watchlists. I like the idea of a longer “now” in these asynchronous worlds…

However, I feel like seeing what is happening right now to get a sense of overall activity, so I go to find an overall site “recent changes”, which I find from “what’s going on” on the main page. Again, the look and feel (and even naming) of these things seems a lot more friendly than the wiki environment (though perhaps the ‘crammed’ layout of a wiki’s recent changes is more appropriate to a busy environment, and better for giving a sense of the nature of the edit, and flagging possible vandalism). One thing I’m struck by is that all the changes (apart from people creating accounts) are to content pages - I don’t see any activity on discussion pages, nor messages to other users. Perhaps user messages are done via other means - or perhaps other media…

In LeMill’s recent changes, I see an edit I made the other day - uploading a presentation I gave recently on wikis. The resource is in “draft stage”, as I left the edit when it seemed to freeze on uploading the ppt (Powerpoint) file. I try this again and get an error value: “FileUpload instance has no attribute ‘isalnum’”. Well, that probably means something to somebody, but not to me! But when I return to the edit page (and as I suspected), I see that I need to upload an image file, not a ppt file. I open my ppt file, thinking I’ll save it as a whole pdf, but then I find I can save a powerpoint presentation as a series of individual PNGs. I’ve learned something new here - nice! Then LeMill’s slide uploader script takes me through the process - straightforward (one-by-one) uploading of the slide images, and afterwards, adding captions. Then I’m taken to a metadata page with a number of things to do - adding tags, assigning to a group, specifying subject areas, and target group levels. This is really good to have as an inherent part of adding content - and, even though I’m not sure of some of these (I create a “wikis in education” group, without knowing if one exists or being able to find out), I know that it can all be changed later. So, here it is - my first LeMill content!: “Wikis: an introduction”, or see the slideshow view (I’ve even been so audacious as to “publish” it.)

Overall - to myself, a mediawiki user - there are certain things missing here, but which are outnumbered by very nice variations and additions. Overall, it’s a very (user-)friendly process (though I’ve yet to get stuck in with other members of the community - or figure out how). So yes, as a start, I’m impressed - no “trouble at (Le)Mill”

I followed a link this morning, posted to Facebook, about ‘creativity in education’ – which resonates with a talk I went to yesterday by John Smyth, a visiting professor to the uni, about social justice in schools and education in general, and who also talked about the need for rethinking and revaluing creativity. I’ll perhaps write about that later – but the link turned out to be to a TED talk (I’m increasingly seeing links to TED talks) by Ken Robinson on “Do schools kill creativity?”. It’s a brilliant talk – full of humour and passion AND (not but) a profound desire for the reclamation of human creativity as a central value of education. He says, in our society, we cultivate a fear of mistakes, a fear of being wrong, which means that our capacity for creativity is stymied – since, as he says: “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”. He says: “we don’t grow into creativity - we grow out of it; or rather we get educated out of it”. Video is below - watch it. (or follow link)

Two more quotes:
* “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy - and we should treat it with the same status.”
* “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology - one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.”

Wikiversity is one of many sites devoted to open educational resources. MIT’s OpenCourseWare was (I think) the first large initiative to create open educational resources - it’s a fantastic initiative and resource - the only drawback being that its content is released under a “non-commercial” (NC) Creative Commons licence (meaning that it can never be used in Wikimedia projects, which explicitly require this freedom). However, its work has sparked a movement, and this has begun to involve many other universities - under the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Some of this content is released under NC licences, but many of it is being made more free. In fact, I’ve discussed this with Andy Lane of the UK Open University’s OpenLearn project, who described the process as a ‘wedge-like’ device for getting university academic staff to think about making their content more available. Content can be made progressively more free - so something that is released under a non-commercial licence can be relicenced with more freedoms (eg, in licence-speak, CC-NC-BY can be relicenced as CC-BY).

I’ve also met Richard Baraniuk, and other members of the Connexions project (in fact, I’ve had a tour of their offices!) - and I have to say they’re inspiring people behind an inspiring project. In their quest of making educational content freely accessible, Connexions also has a really powerful technical structure behind the idea. This is largely driven by XML - which, as Richard says in his TED talk, “turn(s) pages [of books] into lego blocks”, allowing people to build books “on demand”, according to their own needs, and perhaps to see connections between books and subjects (I’m sure the pun is intended). From our meeting, there was a collaboration between Connexions and Wikiversity in the offing, but which unfortunately stalled in the planning/funding phase. However, I’d still like to revive it at some stage…

LeMill is another good example of a repository of resources - findable, remixable etc - but what’s really nice is their separation between learning: content, methods and tools. LeMill is trying to make explicit the different ways in which a subject can be taught and learned, and what tools (eg software) can be used to do so. I think this is an important aspect of all this work - that we try to avoid the notion of ‘handing down content to the world’ (a form of “cultural imperialism”, according to Richard Baraniuk), and that we also recognise the multitude of ways in which we learn (and teach).

All of the above sites have well-organised means of searching and tagging materials - but this is somewhere that Wikiversity is seriously lacking. The search within MediaWiki has long been lamented (Mayflower on Commons is an improvement, but not at all fully functional), and our only way of tagging and structuring material is through categorising pages, and manually creating structuring pages and templates, requiring a lot of dogwork, and still not creating anything like as powerful as what other sites offer. Perhaps Wikiversity can make use of semantic mediawiki and/or other tools - and I’m currently thinking and trying to develop discussion about Wikiversity’s technical needs and how they could be addressed. This is something that I would like to get some feedback from Wikimedia/Mediawiki developers - a community who, even though we are all part of the same ‘meta-community’, I feel we are at arm’s length from in Wikiversity. This is a serious advantage of other sites - in that they have dedicated staff to carry out specific tasks - and this is just not the case in a voluntary community/organisation like Wikimedia. However, I’d like to start addressing this issue as a ‘meta-community’ and form a closer dialogue around technical needs and technical solutions. Any input would be very much appreciated - perhaps on Wikiversity:Technical needs.

Reading Ilkka Tuomi’s report on Open Educational Resources (OER) to the OECD…

I didn’t know the concept of OER was developed in 2002 at a UNESCO-organised forum (report here) - I thought it was a more recent concept. Tuomi cites a useful list of interpretations of OER from Johnstone (2005), which includes the usual things like courseware and teaching tools - but I’m interested that it also includes “online learning communities”. I think this is crucial in the concept of OER (and largely absent from the discussions and drives behind and around OER) - we talk about resources mainly in terms of *content*, but not in terms of the *human support* that is a central aspect of a learning process. I’ve always seen Wikiversity in terms of not only a repository of open educational content, but also an open educational *space* - one where people can learn collaboratively - in an environment where people have differing levels of expertise, and which acknowledges different people’s experiences, interests, and needs as central resources in and of themselves. I know that it’s often held as dehumanising to talk about “human resources”, but what I’m trying to point out here is the place of the human in this environment and discourse - and ask: is it enough to have educational materials when you don’t have anyone to discuss them with?

Tuomi says that these resources “are made widely accessible across the globe with low and no cost” (p3). It’s true that any such costs are massively distributed, and in many cases, content is given entirely voluntarily - but I think there is a challenge when we think of ourselves as resources (when I say “ourselves”, I mean people, like Wikiversity participants, who are trying to develop OER spaces). Not only are we giving our time in creating resources, but we are also setting ourselves up for further requests for help from people accessing our materials - as TWFred, author of technical writing materials, is struggling with, and has raised on the Colloquium. This has implications both at the personal level, but also at the organisational level - should Wikiversity allow people to make money directly from their educational content? How to protect against spam if so?

I like Tuomi’s framing of open educational resources “in a new economic context where resource scarcity is not the limiting factor, and where artificial scarcities may carry social costs.” (p4) And furthermore, he says, OERs will “enable qualitatively new practices and new approaches in organizing education and learning.” (p4) This is all well and good. But I baulked at the claim that “(c)ognitive technologies will be used to repair defects in learning styles and to compensate the effects of aging.” (p5) Yikes! “Repair defects in learning styles”? Sounds like we are moving from ‘new contexts’ to something more like a Brave New World. However, he seems to counteract this cognitivist, determinist point of view when he introduces (and seemingly endorses) a constructivist view on OER - and so I’m left unsure of his stance with respect to the impact of OER.

More clearly delineated are his justifications for OER. He defines four types of resources: private, common pool, public good and open fountain - the latter (open fountain) is where the value of a good increases as its use increases. (Examples are open source software and public scientific knowledge - and on p33 he explicitly mentions Wikipedia as such a resource.) He goes on to cite Paul David (2003) in critiquing ‘the privatisation of the public domain’ (my paraphrasing) - and, in particular, creation of an artificial scarcity of knowledge in a knowledge-based economy, when “knowledge is inherently a non-rival good” (pp29-30). Tuomi clearly places knowledge, and hence OERs, in an open fountain model - and proposes that, on this basis, the “emerging economy is fundamentally driven by value creation and innovation, instead of allocation of scarce consumption opportunities.” (p30) This does present challenges in finding new business models, but it also represents an opportunity to start a flourishing of creativity and goodwill - which is already in steady, if not yet full, flow.

Related to the famous four freedoms of open source software, Tuomi offers a hierarchy of openness in OER. I welcome this as a defining template, but I find it problematic as a hierarchy - in that full level 2 openness is only going to be available to accredited learning organisations, like schools and universities. Wikiversity’s content is free to access, modify and use in any context, but it will not lead to a certificate (at least not at the moment). This means that, in my reading, Wikiversity is fully open at levels 1 and 3, but only partially open at level 2. However, this being a hierarchy, if something is not fully open at level 2, it would seem to follow that it could not even be considered at level 3. All I’m saying that this does not seem to be a usable hierarchy - 3 does not necessarily include 2. But, as I said, it’s still an interesting and welcome list of attributes of openness - equatable to the definition of “Free Cultural Works” (which itself is much more similar to Stallman’s software freedoms).

Overall, this is a stimulating paper - which I might not have given full credit here. Other reports on OER (such as was presented at the 2007 Hewlett gathering) focus on perhaps wider implications and more specific uses, but this one benefits from focusing on the definition and background/context of OER, in order to act as a foundation to build meanings from.