Fortnightly Mailing

Snippets from 4 December 2012 to 9 February 2013

Uncorrected records of "in person" evidence to the House of Lords #OpenAccess Inquiry now available (4 PDFs) - http://www.parliament.uk/busines...

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Karen Coyle ponders small/micro payments for scholarly content. I know I'd not baulk at this in the way I do at >$30. - http://kcoyle.blogspot.co.uk/2013...

    

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No more dogsbodies? Interesting reflection on Francis Report by @rsamatthew (Matthew Taylor RSA CEO) .@OldDitch - http://www.matthewtaylorsblog.com/uncateg...

   

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It's harder than you think. Convincing piece by Arie K den Boon about developing an AI-inspired MOOC at U of Amsterdam - http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs...

   

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The FT's @xtophercook has a great analysis of the Gove "climb-down" measures (it's more complicated...) - http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata...

   

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I'm a bit torn as to whether @Jeffrey_Beall is doing us all a service, or banging on needlessly about obvious scammers. - http://scholarlyoa.com/2013...

MOOCs and Open Access: parallel reactions

In Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken Clay Shirky eloquently counters Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College, a no holds barred attack on MOOCs and their proponents by journalist Maria Bustillos.

I agree with Shirky's line in the excerpt below, though I wonder if, as someone who can more or less name his price as a public speaker, Shirky is being a bit disingenuous getting down amongst the academics with his "us", "my peers", and "we".

But setting that aside (and I do not grudge Shirky his success) what is very striking about the reaction of academics to MOOCs is its similarity to some of the reactions in the UK [353 page PDF on House of Lords web site] to the pressure from Government and the funders to move scholarly publishing to an Open Access model.

The competition from upstart organizations will make things worse for many of us. (I like the experiments we’ve got going at NYU, but I don’t fantasize that we'll be unscathed.) After two decades of watching, though, I also know that that’s how these changes go. No industry has ever organized an orderly sharing of power with newcomers, no matter how interesting or valuable their ideas are, unless under mortal threat.

Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.

Afterthoughts

1. In the case of scholarly publishing, the O'Reilly funded PeerJ is one of the upstarts to watch.

2. In the UK it is in further education colleges (which generally do not have lecture theatres) where degree-level students are given the most individualised attention.

MOOCs and educational TV - an insight-rich 1989 discussion

If you've the time, do watch this insight-rich 1989 discussion between Mara Mayer and Lawrence Cremin about technology in learning (via Stephen Downes and then Mike Caulfield).

Caulfield draws points from the discussion astutely, but you'll need to watch it for its many "aha" moments (as Caulfield says, you can safely skip the first 10 minutes).

The video is very relevant to current discussions about MOOCs, equity of access and provision, "hard-to-teach/hard-to-learn" subjects, and professional development.

Unusually the discussion focusses simultaneously on schools (Cremin) and on HE (Mayer), which adds greatly to its value.

New from ICTP: an app that compiles images and audio into video-like recording

The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste plays a key role in training physicists from developing countries. Some readers will remember Enrique Canessa and Marco Zennaro's terrific presentation in London in May 2011 about ICTP's elegant low-tech automated lecture capture system, which allows archiving and sharing traditional lectures and talks carried out using, for example, very large chalkboards found in classrooms and/or using more modern presentations systems. ICTP has just released EyApp which is an iPhone app that applies the same principals. From the media release:

EyApp enables your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to make a video composed of a series of captured images along with simultaneous audio recording. With just the press of a button, the App automatically captures images at intervals ranging from 5 to 20 seconds (or manually by the user) and then synchronizes the images with a continuous audio signal.

The resulting recording is a smaller size compared with traditional video (HD or standard resolution) because the still frames can be processed by the highly-efficient compression algorithms used by the H264 movie format found in modern mobile i devices.

The film is then ready to be shared immediately or, when saved on a device's photo/movie gallery, can be further edited with other Apps, shared by email and rich-media messaging systems or via social networking Apps, or transferred to a computer. EyApp makes it easy to create personal recording archives as well as to share them via YouTube.

An Android version is follow, and EyApp is available now for download from the iPhone App Store. My feeling is that combined with a Swivl to hold the recording device, EyApp would have specially good potential for low-cost systematic capture of workshops and speaker sessions.

Drifting from "having a market economy to becoming a market society" - Michael Sandel

In this 50-minute session from the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael J. Sandel gets his audience (and viewers like me and you) thinking about the adverse civic and moral consequences of market mechanisms being introduced into so many areas of public and working life. At the same time he exemplifies a (very difficult to carry off) approach to large group learning.

Here is a rough transcription of Sandel's conclusion, which probably owes its impact to what came before it in the talk:

I think it is no accident that two things have been happening over the past 30 years. One is that what we've discussed today: the tendency to rely more and more on market mechanisms without any public debate. And something else that's been happening which is the hollowing out of public discourse in general. What passes for political discourse these days consists mainly of shouting matches on talk radio and cable TV, and ideological food fights in congress. People are frustrated by this. I think one of the reasons for this is our reluctance to engage in serious public debate about big and controversial moral questions.

But the result of that reluctance is that we have a public discourse that is either managerial and technocratic, which inspires no-one, or, when passion enters, we have shouting matches. People want a better kind of politics.

People want to elevate the terms of our public discourse. People want to address big things in public. So I think that the hollowing out of our public discourse, and the market triumphalist faith that has gone unexamined even after the financial crisis have a common solution. It's not an easy solution. But it's a new kind of politics of the common good that admits, that welcomes into public debate moral engagement on big tough controversial questions, not because we will all agree: we won't; but because it may teach us to listen and learn a little bit better, and it will also lift our sights from the rancour that inflicts our politics, to what I think is a more strenuous kind of citizenship; but also a more satisfying democratic pulic life.