eRambler

This blog post is part of my contribution to the open online course Introduction to Openness in Education.

Copyright

At the heart of the various forms of “open” lies the concept of intellectual property: who owns it, who can use it and for what.

A physical object, such as the computer I’m writing this blog post on, is in one place at a time, and its ownership is pretty clear cut: I paid for it and it’s in my house, and if you took it without my permission we’d call that theft.

Things get trickier when you start talking about creative works. If I write a piece of music and you make a copy, I still have the piece of music, but so do you. I can take a photograph of a painting by Degas, and it stays hanging in the gallery, but in some sense I have a copy that I can enjoy independently of the original work.

If this situation goes unchecked, then there’s not a lot of incentive to become an artist, or a composer, or a writer. Even if you charge for your work there’s nothing to stop me buying one copy and then selling hundreds, for which you would see no profit whatsoever.

Under most modern legal systems, the concept of copyright exists to right this imbalance. It does this by allowing the creator of a work the opportunity to exploit that work in whatever way they see fit, effectively creating a monopoly.

As the creator of a work, it’s still possible to grant certain rights to third parties, and this is done by the granting of licenses. This is the mechanism which allows you to “sell” rights to a work in exchange for money or some other consideration.

Fair use/fair dealing

If you were to film an interview in the high street of your town, you might think that it would be difficult to infringe copyright in any way. If you’re not infringing copyright, you don’t need to pay anyone for a license. Yet if, say, a TV set in the background was showing reruns of The Simpsons, then you could well be in from a visit from lawyers representing the Fox Broadcasting Company.

Some jurisdictions include a concept of “fair use” (or fair dealing in the UK), which permits such incidental reuses under a specific set of circumstances. This can make documentary-making, for example, much easier.

However, many organisations (Fox being a common example) are quite happy to threaten legal action and demand that you pay tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds(/dollars/euros/etc.) for a license, even if you may in fact be covered by fair use rules. They are able to do this because most people are unaware of their legal rights, or even if they are do not have the money to fight the ensuing lawsuit.

Even if the law gives you a fair use right to use some work or other, other organisations to which you might sell your own work may not be so forgiving. Because of the litigation culture surrounding copyright, a lot of organisations take a very paranoid approach and insist on rights being cleared and licenses purchased even if they’re not strictly necessary.

Orphaned works

The situation becomes worse when the holder of the rights that must be cleared cannot be found. This usually happens when no contact details can be found for the creator of a work, or when those that can be found are out of date. In many cases, it’s impossible even to know whether the rights holder is still alive, and works like this are referred to as “orphaned works”.

In the early days of copyright this would not have been a problem: for copyright to exist it was necessary to the creator to explicitly assert their rights, and to renew them periodically.

However it is now the case in the US and the UK that copyright automatically exists for the lifetime of the creator and for 70 years after their death. If the creator has passed away, their estate still owns the copyright, but may be impossible to trace until they discover the breach.

For this reason, it is almost impossible to safely use orphaned works — if you do, you do so at your own risk.

Open licensing

As you can see, copyright creates incentives to create, but the way it’s currently implemented can also have a chilling effect on certain types of creation, especially those that involve mashing up existing content.

There’s not a lot most of us can do about the depredations of Fox and their ilk, other than lobbying our MPs for a change in the law. But thankfully we can make it easier for others to make use of our own works.

Open licensing gives creators legal tools to relinquish some or all of their rights over a piece of work, in the interests of supporting the creativity of others.

Creative Commons was set up to provide a set of open licenses which creators can use to make it very easy to understand what can and can’t be done with their work.

The key terms which can be applied by the standard Creative Commons licenses are:

• Attribution: the creator of the work must be acknowledged in any works which incorporate it;
• Share-alike: the work can only be used if the resulting work is released under the same license;
• Non-commercial: the work may only be used if the user doesn’t profit financially from doing so;
• No derivatives: the work may only be redistributed unchanged from its original form.

By combining these terms, it is possible to specify exactly what rights you want to retain on each individual work.

In higher education, we often find ourselves needing a photo or video to illustrate a point in a class or at a conference, or increasingly in a blog post (like this one). Thanks to Creative Commons, finding content to be used legally in this way is as easy as doing a simple web search — no more excuses!

Conclusion

This was intended to be a short blog post, and it’s already longer than I intended! There are a whole raft of other important issues, such as the creeping extension of copyright terms, which I haven’t had space to cover, but hopefully I’ll come back to those some other time.

For now, I hope you’ve got a good idea of why open licensing is necessary and how you can apply it to your own creative works. It’s worth noting that this whole blog is released under a CC license — just scroll to the bottom!

In writing this post, I made heavy use of this open licensing material, which I encourage you to take a look at if you want to learn more.

Photo credit: Ioan Sameli via Flickr

This is the second part in my exploration of what it means to be a research technologist. If you haven’t already, check out part 1: proactivity and innovation.

Research focus

There’s another area where the role diverges from the typical member of IT staff: a focus on the unique needs of researchers. Network infrastructure, file storage, email are necessary but not sufficient to meet the needs of a modern researcher.

It’s vitally important to pay close attention to the unique needs of researchers and to find appropriate tools and techniques to adapt to serve those needs as well as possible. Research is after all the primary business of a university, alongside teaching.

So we need to find ways to fulfil the needs not just of an institution’s researchers, but of a faculty’s researchers, or a department’s or even a single research group’s.

I actually think that once we start doing this well, there will be a lot more commonality than there appears to be right now. But first we’ve got to get there.

Serving the long tail

The much abused Pareto Principle holds that in many circumstances 80% of your profit comes from 20% of the people/products/whatever. But we’re not looking to profit from our users, we’re looking to serve them. Questions of how to fund that not withstanding, taking this attitude means you’re ignoring of the people!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from successes like eBay, Amazon and many more, it’s that if we’re smart we can use modern technology to efficiently provide large numbers of niche products and services without drowning in the overhead traditionally associated with trying to do so.

Research attitude

Again, this can be a problem for centralised IT services, because it’s seen as inefficient for them to put significant R&D time into things which may only ever be of use to a minority of their users.

In an academic department, however, the culture is different. Success in research demands innovation, which requires risk. Scientists and engineers, for example, intrinsically understand the need to experiment, and no-one questions the idea that many of those experiments will fail.

Notice that word fail. In this context failure is not a loss, it’s merely a failure to produce the anticipated results. Most researchers still don’t like failure — they’re human after all. But they learn not to get so hung up on it, because if you set up your experiment right (which is really the key to the whole enterprise) then you learn as much or more from failing as you do from succeeding.

And that’s really the point. We want to help our researchers to do their jobs even better than they already do, which means we need to learn, which in turn means we need to make mistakes. There are no lectures and degree courses to teach us about ideas which don’t exist yet.

So to steal one of those trite little phrases life coaches and the like love so much: fail early, fail often, fail smart and learn from it.

I’ve decided to sign up and join David Wiley’s MOOC, Introduction to Open Education 2012. A MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) is an online course, typically run by a lecturer at a university, which is freely accessible and built around the ideas of connectivism and social learning.

The content of the course, which is about the various ‘kinds’ of openness currently practised in higher education, fits nicely with what I’m doing at the moment so I thought I’d give it a try.

Although I could theoretically find, study and blog about all of the content in this course on my own, I think that the social aspect and the defined set of objectives (in the form of “badges”) combined make it more likely that I will follow through.

Let’s see if that’s actually true…

I’ve now had my Kindle for just over 12 months — it was last year’s Christmas gift from my wonderful wife — and I can quite honestly say that it’s completely changed the way I read.

I’ve always been a keen reader, but sometimes found it difficult to find time to read while also having a book available. I also tended only to buy books one at a time when I was in a physical bookshop. As a consequence, most of my reading happened at home, either in bed or in the bath, and I would get through books at around one a month.

Since getting my Kindle (well, since first getting the Kindle app for iPhone 14 months ago) I have read 45 books. I never used to read non-fiction books, but have just finished my third of the last few months. My decision on what to read next would generally wait until I’d finished my last book, but now I have 14 books waiting to be read and about another 20 on an Amazon wishlist waiting to be purchased.

What’s caused this change? As you might guess, it’s a combination of several things. Compared to a paper book, my Kindle weighs almost nothing, so I can slip it in a bag or a pocket. I can hold it in one hand while drinking tea, or lie on my back and read, both of which I found too tiring to do with paper books.

I also have iPhone and desktop Kindle apps, which are always in sync. I always have my current book with me, so I have many more opportunities to read.

When I finish a book, I can immediately start the next, whether I have one already lined up or I need to go online and buy one. I’ve basically turned into a chain-reader, going from book to book without pause.

Irritatingly, the prices do not reflect the near-zero marginal cost of distributing digital content — if you shift content in the volume that Amazon can, your income is almost pure profit.

However, digital books are still cheaper than the print editions. The difference for popular fiction is pretty small, but I appreciate it nonetheless. For specialist non-fiction, on the other hand, where low volumes make print copies prohibitively expensive, digital editions come at a significant discount — often half price or better in my experience.

I actually wrote the entire first draft of this post without mentioning either screen quality or battery life. Both are so good that it didn’t even occur to me to mention them.

There are downsides too. Because I’m locked into Amazon’s infrastructure, I can’t lend books to friends or family (this feature still hasn’t been enabled outside the US). I also can’t donate books to charity shops once I’ve finished them.

Both of these facts still make me uneasy, and I’m not sure that I want all my books to be controlled by a single company for the rest of my life. And I haven’t even started on the problem of how many books I need to read on Kindle to break even on the carbon footprint, or even whether that’s possible.

That said, my pragmatic side is winning at the moment. Reading on Kindle just works, and it seems to suit my lifestyle much better than books made of dead tree.

I know a lot of people have been given Kindles this Christmas, so I’d love to know if any of my readers have thoughts on this.

I began writing this a couple of months ago, shortly after ALT-C, the Association of Learning Technology Conference. Then it turned into “one of those posts” that I had to perfect before I could publish it. And that’s silly, so I’m going to publish it now and continue it in further posts, because this is a blog, not a thesis.

Anyway, as is often the case at conferences when you meet a lot of people, I kept having to answer the question “What do you do?”. My actual job title is “ICT Project Manager”, which while impressive sounding doesn’t go any way to explain what I do. In the end, I came up with the following stock response:

“I’m a research technologist: I have a very similar role to learning technologists, except that I support academics as researchers instead of as teachers.”

There are a few roles out there which sound similar, or which have similar names, so I thought I’d mention a few things that set this role apart from other similar sounding jobs. This post is the first part of a series exploring those aspects.

First, a disclaimer

I’m not foolish enough to think I’m the only person doing this type of job, or to pick out these features as important, or even to come up with that name. I’m quite certain there are people doing this in IT departments, in research development departments, certainly in academic departments and quite possibly in e-learning departments too. It’s more that there seems to be no standard position for this role (except where institutions have dedicated e-research teams) and I’m setting out to find other people in similar roles to share ideas with.

Proactivity and innovation

Although part of my role is to support existing systems and respond to queries from users, that’s not the whole of it. I feel it’s important to keep abreast of the latest technology innovations and explore how they can be used to support research. This contrasts with the typical approach of central university IT services, which generally have a core set of “supported” software and services with rigorous procedures and checks in place to control changes to that set.

I don’t wish to suggest that this centralised model is inappropriate: on the contrary it’s absolutely necessary. University IT services have the very challenging job of providing an acceptable and consistent standard of service to a huge and diverse user base. To do this efficiently it’s necessary to make sure that all IT staff have a reasonable understanding of every supported service, which just can’t happen if that set of services is too large.

The trouble is that as well as providing users with a very stable, high level of support for essential services (networking, email, payroll and so on), it also tends to stifle innovation. If a new service is to be offered, a lot of time and resources must be invested in doing so at the level of existing services; quite a risk if there’s no guarantee that the new service will succeed. That means that there’s no scope to start something small, with the option of either growing it organically if it takes off or letting it die peacefully if it’s not right.

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I’ll be exploring this further soon, but for now I’d be interested in your take, especially if you disagree or recognise some of what I say in your own role.

Well, I’m just back from the launch meeting of the JISC Managing Research Data programme, of which our Research360 project at Bath is a part, and coming to terms with the fact that blogging is now an inescapable part of my job.

Looks like it’s time to get back into my blogging rhythm once more. Time to make a few tweaks that I’ve been planning to the layout too. Let me know what you think.

On Wednesday 8 September I’ll be presenting at EuroSakai 2011 in Amsterdam. For those who are interested, here are my slides.

And so ALT-C 2011 draws to a close. I followed online last year and the year before, but it’s been my first chance to attend in person, which has been a great experience. I’ve met lots of people who I’ve been following online for some time, and plenty more who are completely new to me. I also seem to have come up with a new job title and a bit of a mission, on which more at some future time. For now, here are my first thoughts on this final day of the conference.

Project results

I was up bright and early again, this time to hear some of the results from three small learning technology projects.

Lyn Greaves (UWL) and Claire Bradley (London Met) told us about their development of open educational resources to support students’ digital literacy and general academic practice.

Cheryl Middleton and Steve Brierley (Sheffield Hallam) presented their experiences in using enquiry-based learning methods instead of conventional lectures to deliver a course to their Information Systems undergraduates. They were inspired by Donald Clark’s keynote at last year’s ALT-C, and it’s great to see lecturers attending the conference and sharing their own practice from the front lines.

Finally, Vicki McGarvey and Anna Armstrong (Nottingham Trent University) shared with us their project to encourage lecturers to share their learning objects with each other.

Great work all three groups!

Making the case

My next session of the morning was run by freelancer Sarah Chesney, who recently carried out research commissioned by PebblePad to find how individuals and small teams were convincing senior management to roll out successfully concluded small-scale projects on a wider basis.

Sarah did a good job of getting us talking together over a couple of example scenarios, and gave us some useful pointers. For example, she pointed us towards the Sloan-C Quality Framework as a useful tool to help structure thinking around the quality of a initiative.

I think my main takeaway from this session will be to always be paying attention to data on costs of particular ways of doing things, especially for the period before and after making a change. Gathering data to convince management is not always at the front of your mind when you’re not sure yourself whether a particular change will work.

The elusive technological future

Invited speaker John Naughton closed the conference with a thought-provoking talk on the impossibility of predicting the pace and direction of technological change. This is another talk that I doubt I can do justice with a summary, so I encourage you to take a look at the online recording when it becomes available on the ALT YouTube channel.

One aspect which caused a bit of a stir, on Twitter at least, was Naughton’s presentation style: just him, a microphone and a script on his iPad. It sounds like a recipe for all that is bad about the lecture as a format, but in fact it was riveting.

There was a certain amount of frustration that he wouldn’t be drawn on what the implications were for education, but my own feeling is that he was quite sensibly avoiding speaking about something when he didn’t feel qualified to do so — the whole gist of his argument was that it is futile to try and predict what technology will do to our society in the future.

Anyway, I hope you’ve found my small slice of ALT-C useful and interesting. I certainly enjoyed it! It’s sparked off a few different trains of thought which may well develop into blog posts in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!

Continuing with the task I began yesterday, here are my initial thoughts on today’s talks and workshops at ALT-C 2011.

Social media and professional identity

I began the day with Anne-Marie Cunningham’s talk on professional identity in the context of medical education. Anne-Marie herself has a complex identity, as practitioner, educator, researcher and student, and when she began blogging and tweeting in order to combat the isolation she sometimes felt as a GP she found that identity challenged in some interesting ways.

Following Anne-Marie’s talk was a poorly disguised sales pitch from some guy who works for Blackboard — the least said about that the better, I think.

Led by the “Knows”

Next up, Doug Belshaw and John Traxler gave me a refreshing change: a workshop which was actually a workshop. They’d chosen a couple of collections of elearning-related case-studies, and split us into groups to critically analyse the case-studies therein. We got a really good debate going, trying to decide what the purpose of a case study should be and what it should contain to be valid/useful.

For my part, I think that a lot of the weaknesses we identified could be mitigated by the inclusion of references to the sources of the data quoted, so that if you choose you can verify the conclusions for yourself.

I did like John Traxler’s comment that we need to be wary of policy-based evidence replacing evidence-based policy.

Are we in Open Country?

The last session before lunch was a bit of fun, but with a serious message too. Amber Thomas, David White, David Kernohan and Helen Beetham got dressed up as characters from the Wild West to talk about issues related to OER. There was even bonus banjo music from Dave Kernohan!

Some of the most interesting points for me came up in the extended discussion that followed their introductory presentation. In particular, it’s very important when thinking about OER to not get sidetracked by the content. Making content open has some value, but it does not democratise access to education per se; in some ways it can have the opposite effect. It’s important to be able to associate the pedagogical context with a given open resource. Similar arguments seem to apply to other forms of openness as well.

Transforming American Education

After lunch we had a keynote speech from Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. She told us a bit about the Obama government’s plans for educational technology, which does indeed sound quite impressive!

She described technology as a “force multiplier” — not a replacement for teachers but a way of making teachers more effective, which I think is the only attitude that can work in the long term. As part of that, they’re making an effort to make educational research more transparent and accessible to educators so that they have more opportunities to learn about evidence-supported good practice.

She also talked about making learning more like a game, something which I’m currently a bit sceptical about. I can see the advantages, but there’s always the danger that as you incentivise one group you end up disincentivising or even alienating another. It has to be implemented in a sufficiently fool-proof way to avoid that situation occurring.

Effective web conferencing

My final session of the day was a workshop on web conferencing with a guy from collaborATE, who provide support for Adobe Connect in the UK. I’ll admit, I was a bit wary of this after the earlier Blackboard sales pitch, but actually the presenter did a great job of providing us with some useful tips for running a successful webcast.

I took a lot of notes from this session, so I’ll probably save them for another post, perhaps when I’ve had chance to try them out. The key message, though, was this: preparation, preparation, preparation. Like all forms of communication, webcasting works best when you’re confident, well practiced and in control of your environment.

In a little bit it will be time to relax a bit and have a good old chinwag with some old and new friends at the gala buffet, so I’ll wrap it up for now.

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PS. If you’re wondering where all my tweets about the conference have gone, I’m experimenting with a separate conference account, @jezconf to avoid spamming my regular followers with lots of ALT-C tweets. If you’re interested, please follow that account, or you can just follow the conference hashtag, #altc2011.

Plan Ceibal

After a short introduction from the Lord Mayor of Leeds, conference chair John Cook handed over to Miguel Brechner from Uruguay to talk about the inspiring Plan Ceibal.

This project started in 2006 and tapped into the One Laptop Per Child programme to provide every schoolchild in Uruguay with a laptop and Internet access. I can’t really do it justice here, but I encourage you to watch the recording of his talk and the questions afterwards.

By focusing on users and usability, rather than on the technology, and not just letting vendors taking the lead, Plan Ceibal has made a reall cultural and social difference in Uruguay. Kids are now eager to get to school, parents are getting online with the help of their children.

It raises serious questions about how we do technology in our schools. I don’t have the statistics to hand, but it sounds rather like a developing country has more schoolchildren with Internet access than we do, which is worrying. If they can teach programming and robotics in primary school, why are we still having computer classes (and qualifications, such as ECDL) that focus on word processing and spreadsheets?

Cloud Learning with Google Apps

My first parallel session was about Google Apps in education. I had high hopes of this, but to be honest, I didn’t feel I learnt very much from it.

The guy from Google did wave a Chromebook around, which looks like a very useful device, but possibly a bit hamstrung without a network connection until HTML5 offline web apps become a bit more commonplace. There were also rumours of being able to run virtualised desktop apps in the browser thanks to a partnership with Citrix, but no demonstration of how at might work.

The one thing that did show some promise was the brief mention of Manish Malik’s work to use Google App Engine to start building a VLE integrated with Google Apps, which he calls a Cloud Learning Environment. I’ll be looking into that in a bit more detail when I get a chance.

Collaborative technology

After lunch it was three short papers on the general theme of collaboration with technology. Jill Fresen of the University of Oxford gave a nice overview of the mobile interface, Mobile Oxford, to their Sakai-based VLE, WebLearn. They’ve done some really interesting work with it, especially integrating with the Sakai Polls tool to make a cheap, mobile audience response system.

Jak Radice and Maureen Readle had some interesting stories to tell about digital story telling. They’ve done some really interesting work (with their colleague at the University of Bradford, Caroline Plews) bringing the stories of real health service users into the classroom. If you’re interested in learning more about that, take a look at their fictional town of Bradton.

Finally, Chris Turnock talked about his work with Erik Bohemia at Northumbria University setting up tools to help students collaborate with each other and with external partners. I really like they way they focused on open source solutions and managed to ensure they were as integrated as possible into the university systems.

Pecha Kucha!

Next up, I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as much attention as it was my turn to speak. You can see my poster and slides about our Virtual Research Environment in my earlier post, and if I get round to it I’ll add some words to the slideshare presentation so you can all understand what it was all about!

Also in the same session, Alan Cann from the University of Leicester asked some interesting questions about reading lists for students, which came out of his attempts to get his own students reading around the subject more.

Finally, Philip Wane from Nottingham Trent University had some useful thoughts on his experiments providing feedback to his students via video. Not only did most students watch their own feedback, they also watched each others, and watching the videos made them much more likely to collect the paper versions of their assignments from the office and read the feedback in the margins too. Great work!

Dinner!

I suppose I should mention that the dinner tonight was pretty impressive. I’m sure James Clay will have tweeted photos of it, but it’s a bit late at night to go searching for the link now so I’ll leave it there.

Looking forward to tomorrows session, especially Anne-Marie Cunningham’s invited talk on professional identity and some intriguing-sounding banjo playing from Dave Kernohan in “Are we in open country?”. Bye for now…