Category Archives: Open Online Courses

Books, print, recordings & conversations (#rhizo14)

Tonight’s reading, taken Feb. 17, 2014, by Christina Hendricks

For week four of the P2PU course on “Rhizomatic Learning,” we were prompted to think about whether books are making us stupid. How might it even be possible to consider that they could be?

Dave Cormier on print

Dave Cormier explains in his short video introducing the week (available on the previous link). There, he asks us to consider that there is something about print that encourages “objectivity,” “distance,” “remove,” “impartiality” (I didn’t get all his words written down exactly, so I’m just quoting the parts I did write down exactly!). He argues that print tends to move us more towards the definite, the defined, rather than the relational. And he asks us to consider moving more towards orality in learning. This is not to say that books are a problem, but rather that we think about how we learn with books and print in general, and consider both its upsides and downsides.

Here’s a post by Dave that really helped me get my head around what he’s getting at: “Is books making us stupid? Behind the curtain of #rhizo14.” There, he suggests that in moving from orality to print, “We moved from ideas moving towards fluidity to them becoming more truth based,” and he suggests that conversations bring out more complexity while print can lead us to think about things in more simple terms. Here’s the quote from that post that gave me that proverbial light bulb turning on in my head:

The book promotes independence of thought, our ‘own’ ideas and our ‘own’ inferences. It promotes possession. It reifies the things we are reading and makes them a thing that can belong to a person. There is value in this. But there is also a fundamental difference between an idea that I HAVE that I DEFEND against someone else and an ongoing conversation that develops BETWEEN people.

I read this is saying that part of the issue with print is that it encourages us to think of ideas as belonging to their authors. We start to talk in terms of “Foucault’s view,” and “Nietzsche’s view” (I’m currently teaching a course on Nietzsche and Foucault, so they’re on my brain), and try to figure out what their ideas were. Those ideas and arguments become stuck in time, in the same form, for as long as the print exists and people remember it. The ideas are held by a certain person and the arguments are their defense of these ideas, as if the ideas need to stay static. As authors of print works ourselves, we start to think about our “own” ideas and arguments as embodied in the print. Of course, intellectual property and citation requirements in written works add to this sense.

Another part of what I think Dave may be getting at is that in printed works, the “feel” is that ideas are presented with arguments supporting them as if they are to be taken as true, as if there is little conversation to be had because the answer has been given. When we read arguments for positions it can feel like the author is saying: here is what is the case, I’ve backed it up with reasons and evidence, so we really don’t have much to talk about. I don’t know if that’s what Dave means, but I can see how that might be a concern too.

How different is the notion of having a conversation in which ideas develop through the conversation itself, and are not really owned by anyone in the conversation because they emerged out of it. And of course, it’s probably the case that most (or all?) of our ideas work this way anyway, it’s just that the conversations are spaced out further in time (more on this below). How different too the experience of engaging in a conversation with someone about ideas and arguments, rather than just reading those of a distant author in a book. The ideas and arguments become more fluid, change with the conversation.

I really liked this opportunity to think this way about print, as it’s something I hadn’t really considered before. Of course, it’s not just print that does this, since video and audio recordings can be part of the same phenomenon. They, too, freeze ideas and arguments in time, can make us think of these as belonging to a particular person who is espousing them. Indeed, Frances Bell says in a recent blog post that she recorded a video for week four of Rhizomatic Learning, thinking it might be less “book-like,” but that the video itself reifies her words and thoughts just as much as text does, and the comments on the video are a conversation but reified in text (they would be in video too). Her point in this thought-provoking post is that both the reified and the participatory are useful, and can intertwine in complex ways (the video and comments were reified, but also constituted a participatory conversation). You can’t have one without the other, as the title of this blog post states (she notes that this comes from the idea of a “duality of participation and reification” from Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice).

My reflections

My first thought on considering this topic was: well, the books I read (philosophy, literature, some educational theory, mostly) do not stay the same over time. Every time I read them, and especially when doing so with students, they change. What they say is not so much a matter of what’s on the page, but how it’s interpreted and understood, and this changes between people and over time in the same person. Further, as others have pointed out, including Jenny Mackness on her blog post on this topic, reading printed works doesn’t preclude having lots of conversations with others about those works.

Later, I also thought: I consider at least some books, especially those that are more open to interpretation, as conversations over long periods of time. Whereas a conversation that takes place simultaneously, or in a short period of time, can only include a few people, a printed work can reach many more over longer periods. Socrates and Nietzsche and Foucault are all still talking to us, and we can converse with them to some degree insofar as we read and react to their works. They cannot respond, though, and so it’s a one-way conversation.

Finally, I thought: do I consider printed works as solidifying or at least stabilizing ideas and arguments in the sense that they are presented, with supporting arguments, as “true” and thus do not invite further conversation? The rhetoric with which some works are written, including philosophical ones, can often seem this way. But I think of offering reasons for claims as actually inviting conversation rather than closing it off. By giving reasons for a view, one is suggesting that the view is potentially debatable; for if it were not, if it were clearly true, no one would take the time to offer an argument for it. So in a way, I think of writing arguments for views as inviting others, from many places and over long periods of time, to engage in a kind of conversation by considering whether those views and arguments are valid, inviting criticism as well as potential agreement. We might even say that printed or recorded works can potentially engage more people in conversation with them than simultaneous conversations can do at any one time, since those who miss out on that conversation can’t participate in it later unless it’s written down or recorded in some way. But once again, the “conversation” one can have with a written or recorded work may be one way only (not a conversation with the author), especially if the author cannot respond (though we can still have a multi-way conversation between various readers!).

Thus I think I’m agreeing with Frances Bell that the relationships between more stable works and the conversations with and around them are complex. First, many of our ideas that we write down or record most likely come from conversations (whether through textual or other media), such as in-person conversations, comments on blogs, responses to journal articles, online meetings, and more. But also, once they’re written down or recorded they can be part of several conversations, perhaps even after we’re gone.

Does any of this address the issue of thinking of ideas as “belonging” to their authors in some deep way? Probably not. Inviting discussion of one’s views and arguments puts them up for contention and change, but by connecting them with a specific author we are likely to still them of them as the view of a particular person. I wonder how much that happens in oral conversations too, though? We do, after all, have ways to “cite” oral communication as well as written. And there are so many social and educational structures built on the need to be able to tie ideas to people that it’s hard to avoid thinking in this way. Which is not to say it’s impossible. 

Enforcing(?) autonomy (#rhizo14)

I will walk and walk and walk Flickr photo shared by Fimb, licensed CC-BY.

Week 2 of the Rhizomatic Learning course on Peer 2 Peer University is about “enforcing independence.” In the introductory video for this week (found on the previous link), Dave Cormier asks us to consider how we might help students to be able to be responsible for their own learning, including being able to self-assess the quality of their own knowledge and work, and to self-remediate when necessary. This could include recognizing what you do and don’t know, where there are gaps in your knowledge or skills, how to go about filling those, and then actually doing the filling. With these things happening mostly or wholly on the students’ own initiative. Well, I think mostly so when we’re talking about a formal course situation, since in such situations there will always be an element of external forces (the teacher, the mark/grade, e.g.) playing into one’s learning activities. 

Independence and Autonomy

Dave noted that there is a “primary paradox” in the idea of enforcing independence, which is pretty clear on the surface: how can you force someone to act independently? It seems impossible from the start. Jenny Mackness wrote a blog post this week that addresses this paradox, and suggests that “autonomy” may be a better word than “independence”: partly because many of us don’t necessarily just want students to learn how to learn “on their own” but rather to learn interdependently as well, and partly because some learners will always be dependent on others in some ways (e.g., some with special needs). But also, she notes, the idea of learners being free to decide what they need/want to learn, taking the initiative to do so, and being responsible for the consequences that ensue suggests something closer to autonomy than independence. 

I guess that, being a philosopher, one thing I might do here is go into an in-depth discussion of the similarities and differences between the concepts of autonomy and independence. But I’m more interested in other things, so for now let me just say that to me, autonomy signals more of a sense of having one’s choices and actions come from one’s own will, one’s own choices, whether one is also working with others or also dependent on them for support or not. So in that sense, I agree that autonomy may be a better term.

Enforcing (?) autonomy

So, is it possible to enforce autonomy? Mackness says no, because as soon as one does so the person is not acting autonomously. I see that, of course, but the issue is pretty complex because we are, one might say, always (or usually?) in situations where there are forces outside of us nudging or pushing or shoving or even forcing us in some direction. Whenever I engage in an autonomous action, from my own will and choices, I’m not doing so in a vacuum, and quite often or possibly always there are conditions outside of me that are shaping my motivation to go in one direction or another. So perhaps it’s a matter of degree: how much external pressure can there be on someone and yet we can still say they’re making autonomous choices?

One of the most autonomous learning environments I have experienced is the open online course, like this one. I choose to engage with the #rhizo14 course, to write blog posts (or not), to comment on others’ posts (or not), to discuss things on one or another form of social media (or not), to stick with the course to the end or to decide to stop partway through. I decide why I’m here and what I want to do and not do. No one is giving me anything in the way of formal credit for this course, and I can probably count on 2-3 fingers how many people at my institution would even have a clue what I’m talking about if I said on my CV I took a course in “rhizomatic learning” (which is actually a pretty big number, when you think about it). 

But am I completely autonomous in what I choose to do or not do in this course? Mostly yes, but there are also external pressures, even subtle ones, even ones that no one is trying to exert. I have had some really excellent learning experiences in open online courses before (including ETMOOC and ds106, and the thing is, I felt like I got so much out of those courses in part because I was very actively involved and there was a wonderful, welcoming community who was too. I keep wanting to replicate that, even though right now I don’t have the time to devote to #rhizo14 to really do so. Still, I feel a kind of pressure to do more than I actually have time to do in order to engage more, to try to get that wonderful sense of community and connection I’ve had before. And, to be completely honest, to feel like others are reading what I have to say and finding it interesting enough to continue reading long blog posts and then hopefully leaving a comment is also a motivation for me. And, to be even more completely honest, I also have this sense that there’s a party going on amongst a number of people I really respect and I don’t want to miss out. It’s like being part of a group in a social sense, feeling like one is doing what others one likes and respects are doing.

Now, I wouldn’t say there is a sense of “force” happening in my participation in #rhizo14, but it’s also true that some or all of those motivations come from pressures I would locate outside of me, even though I’ve taken them in as my own motivations. The ones about wanting others to read what I have to say and to feel part of a party with those I respect–those don’t feel to me like part of my choices, like part of me, but rather things that I experience as coming from external sources even though now they are part of my own motivational set.

In a “formal” course

In a more formal learning environment (by which I mean a school or university, or an online course, or a training course, or other environment for which learners get some kind of formal credit), it seems to me that the external pressures are significantly greater just by the nature of the situation. There is some kind of “enforcing” going on just by the teacher/instructor/professor having the power of granting or withholding credit, as well as, sometimes, marks. Some of these situations seem to involve more enforcing than others, only because in primary, middle and some secondary schooling students don’t have a whole lot of choice as to whether or not to be there at all, nor what, exactly, they’ll be studying (I did have some choice among classes in high school, but not as much as in university. Of course, in university there are still required courses). This means that there is a good deal of pressure on students pushing them towards doing certain things in their learning, and some of that is coming from the teacher.

This is all very obvious, of course, only it’s important to point out when we’re thinking about whether it’s possible to enforce autonomy or independence, because it seems to me that any degree of giving students the chance to be autonomous when they’re getting credit and/or marks for their work also has an element of pressure, of force if you will. Yes, I can say students are free to choose to pursue various areas of study in my class, to go their own route with a project, and in that way I’m allowing them more autonomy than if I didn’t give them these choices; but nevertheless, they have to do something, and what they choose to do will be influenced in part by what they think will earn them a good mark or at least allow them to pass the class, or what others students will think (if they have to present their work in front of others). They could, of course, just refuse to do anything and fail, or drop the class, but there’s a good deal of pressure not to do that as well.

When I was thinking about whether there are any ways in which I engage in something like enforced autonomy or independence in my courses I thought of things like asking students to come up with their own essay topics, asking them to blog about what they are reading/what we’re discussing and thereby ensure that everyone has a voice (not just those who speak most often in class), giving them the chance to do a different sort of assignment than a traditional academic essay, requiring them to lead class discussion rather than me, and the like. In each of these cases, though I’m giving them some choice in what they want to talk about/how they want to structure their assignments, there is still a good deal of pressure on them that constrains what they actually choose. How many will choose to do a non-traditional assignment when they aren’t used to how such things might be evaluated and aren’t sure how to do them well (even if I provide a rubric), so the safest route is to do what they already know? How many will give a very non-traditional class presentation and lead discussion with a question that really goes far beyond what I’ve said and emphasized in class? In choosing a topic for a research paper, most will go for what seems already “important” in terms of what we’ve emphasized in class and what is most popular in the secondary literature in that particular philosophical area (which differs from decade to decade and century to century). The fact that I’m giving them a mark makes this even stronger.

My point is that there is always some element of pressure, of nudging of learners by the instructor, by other students, by the social and disciplinary milieu in which their learning takes place. So perhaps the paradox of enforcing autonomy is a matter of degree. At what point do my requirements for my course move from leaving space for autonomy with an acceptable amount of pressure from me and others on what choices are actually going to be made, to exhibiting a problematic amount of force? Perhaps the more space I allow for students to make autonomous choices the better, and yet perhaps even then I’m still, just by the nature of my role and the social situation in which it inheres, doing some “enforcing.” 

Digital safety in student blogging (for #OOE13)

I’m participating in a course called “Open Online Experience 2013″ (which actually goes until May 2014!), which is a professional development course for educators, focused on educational technology. This month we are focusing on digital literacy and digital citizenship, and earlier this week we had a Twitter chat about these topics that really got me thinking about my role in helping students think carefully about what and how they put online when I’m asking them to do blog posts and comments.

Because I’m so busy with so many things at the moment, all I could manage to do was make an audio recording of my thoughts (much faster than writing them out). I did it while driving, taking a cue from Scottlo at ds106 radio, who often does live broadcasts and recordings while driving to work.

I put my phone in my cup holder, shielded a bit so it wouldn’t move too much (a suggestion by Scottlo), and used the built-in mic to record the sound. It’s actually not too bad, considering. I had tried earlier with the microphone attached to my headphones, and the sound was much worse–the car noise really drowned out my voice. In this one, the main problem is the clicks and bonks you can hear from me switching gears, since the phone was right next to the gear box. But still, it’s not too bad.

It’s about seven minutes long, so it shouldn’t take too much time to listen to!

If you just click the link below, it should play…let me know if it doesn’t work.

digital literacy in philosophy blog posts

On cheating and philosophy (for #rhizo14)

I’m participating (as much as I have time for, which isn’t much) in a course on Peer 2 Peer University called Rhizomatic Learning, run by Dave Cormier. The first topic for this course is on “cheating as learning” (here’s an intro video about the topic).

My day job takes up all of my time and more, so when I kept finding myself unable to sit down and write a blog post, I took a cue from Scottlo over at ds106 radio, who often does live broadcasts or recordings while in transit–in the car, walking, etc.

The only problem with this one is that I was rushing to get to work, walking quickly, so I got pretty out of breath sometimes talking at the same time!

I realize that by recording rather than writing this I am limiting my audience to those who don’t mind taking 15 minutes to listen to something and try to remember enough to maybe comment. I’m also limiting my own future use of these thoughts, because it’s much easier to go back and skim something than to listen to it all the way through. It’s very hard to “skim” an audio recording! But it worked for the purposes of me not having much time to sit down and write. Hopefully I’ll be able to write posts for later on in this course.

For now, here are my thoughts on what “cheating” might mean in terms of questioning rules of traditional practice when teaching philosophy.

I hate it when spiders just sit there

[I usually do my ds106 stuff on Tumblr, but animated gifs over 1 MB become just gifs there, and I couldn’t make this one small enough without changing it substantially. Damn Tumblr.]

So there’s a new visual assignment for ds106 called “Illustrating odd autocompletes.” I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, especially with the example I’ve made here. I won’t comment on the last autocomplete above.

The idea of hating it when “spiders just sit there” struck me as very odd. I mean, what does one want them to do instead? Wave their legs and scream at you? I think I’d kinda rather they just sit there than, say, jump around wildly.

Of course, having a spider just sit there would be a plain static image. But I wanted to make it so the spider is sitting there doing something. I came up with the idea of having its eyes move, like it’s just waiting for you to do something, or for you to go away, and looking around in the meantime.

I wasn’t sure exactly which way to make the eyes move. At first I thought about making them move in different directions, but that seemed like it would just make the spider look like it had lost its mind, and that wasn’t really the effect I was going for. I thought about trying to make the eyes move back and forth sideways, but wasn’t sure how to do it. I could figure out how to rotate them (see below), but having the white part of the eyes move back and forth in the middle would have been trickier because I would have had to just move the white “glare”, and there is glare on the top of the eye as well as around the bottom. It just wouldn’t look right, I feared. So turning in the same direction it was. I was going to have the eyes go further around, but got tired of dealing with so many layers!

I made a version with just the two front eyes moving and was going to leave it at that, but then my 6-year-old son said: “Mommy, you should make the other eyes blink.” Sure, I thought, that’d be cool, but not gonna happen. But of course, once he planted the idea, I had to figure out how to do it. The blinking doesn’t look like real eyelids, but that wasn’t what I was going for. I just wanted to see if I could make it look like blinking at all! When I was done, my son said: “that’s pretty cool, but why doesn’t the blinking part go all the way down?” I had to tell him that I was just too lazy.

So I found a CC-licensed closeup of a spider (there are some really gorgeous ones on Flickr when you search for “spider close up”!): “Bearded Jumping Spider,” by Thomas Quine, licensed CC-BY. I then set to work on it in GIMP.

The process

I’m out of practice. I learned the first time I did ds106 that I should take screenshots during the process so I can explain what I mean in images rather than only in words. But now that I’ve merged most of the layers (steps 5-7, below), I can’t take any useful screen shots showing the various layers I made.

1. I made a duplicate or two of the original image, so that I could mess around with one and have at least one other one that was intact.

2. To make the eyes move, I needed to isolate them and put them on their own layers. I used the “lasso” or “free select” tool in GIMP to go around the spider’s right front eye, and then I went to Selection->Float, which made a floating layer with the selection. I then went to Layer->To New Layer, which put the floating layer onto a new transparent layer. I did the same thing with the front left eye, and made numerous copies of these (7 or 8, I think). That way I could do a gradual rotation with the layers.

3. But then I discovered a problem. When I floated the selections and put them on new transparent layers, what happened was that those portions of the original image were removed, leaving white space for the eyes. Not a problem if the layers above just cover over that space completely, but when you start to rotate them the white shows through (because they aren’t perfectly round. Given that the eyes are black, this was easily fixed. I just painted in the white areas on the original image with black, using first the “fuzzy select” tool to get most of the white area and then the bucket fill tool, and then, since there was a pixel or two still white around the edges, I used the paintbrush tool to cover over the rest of the white with black.

4. So now I had 7 or 8 each of the right eye and left eye layers, with the eyes surrounded by transparent areas, all stacked on top of the original image with the eye sockets now painted black. Time to rotate. I selected the first right eye layer and used the “rotate” tool to rotate it a certain number of degrees, and then did the same number with the left eye layer above it. Repeat, with the next right eye layer being a little more rotated, etc. Then, about halfway through I reduced the rotation of each eye so that the eyes would go back to their original position.

5. In GIMP, if you try Filters->Animation->Playback with things on different layers like they were, it will animate each layer separately, which means I’d get the right layer, then the left eye layer, then the right eye layer, etc., which doesn’t really show me what it looks like. So I merged the first right eye layer with the first left eye layer, the second right eye with the second left eye, etc. (by control-clicking on the one on top and choosing “merge down”). I also had to merge the first right eye/left eye layer (those two layers now merged) onto the original image, because the original had just black eye sockets and GIMP was animating that separately from the eye layers above it.

6. But there was a slight problem that I wanted to fix. The spider’s left eye isn’t as round as its right in this image, and when I rotated the left it covered over part of the hairy part around the eye, and then when it went back to the original this part showed through again. It was bugging me. So I used the paintbrush tool and painted some of that hairy part around the left eye black, where the eye rotated. Now you can’t see that happening at all.

7. So at this point is when my son said, hey, why don’t you make the eyes on the sides blink? To do this, I had to duplicate the original image that now had the black painted around the left eye as noted in #6, and with the first eye layers merged onto it. I made as many copies of this as I had eye layers. I then gradually painted brown onto the new spider image layers in a way that would look like the brown was going down, then up.

8. Last step was to merge the eye layers with the new spider layers that had brown eyelids painted on them. This was because the new spider layers had eyes rather than black eye sockets (given what I did in #5). And when I animated the layers I got the rotated eye layers interspersed with the original eye positions, so it was going back and forth strangely.

 

The ds106 daily create for today is to make the most boring video on YouTube. When I asked my son for what would make for a really boring video, he looked at this animated gif and said, “well, that’s pretty boring.”

 

A troubling result from publishing open access articles with CC-BY

For week four of the Why Open? course, we are looking at potential benefits of openness, as well as potential problems with it. There are many, many interesting stories and case studies listed on that part of the course, and I’m still working through looking at them (I’m interested in them all!).

For this post, I decided to add in another story that has recently come to my attention, and that hits home for me as an academic.

Rosie Redfield, Professor in the department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, recently blogged about an issue that a colleague had experienced with an open access publication: after publishing in an open access journal (PLOS One), which puts a CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution) license on published articles, she discovered that her research paper had been included in a collection of papers published by Apple Academic Press, for which the publisher was charging over $100 Canadian.

CC-BY logo, downloaded from the Creative Commons downloads page

Now, this may not seem so bad, because, after all, the CC-BY license allows this. It allows others to do anything they want with one’s work, so long as one is cited as the original author. So it would seem not to be the case that the publisher is doing anything wrong (that’s what I thought at first), and what’s really at issue here is authors not knowing that this sort of thing could happen. Thus it would seem that education about what CC-BY allows is all that is really needed (that’s also what I thought at first).

And even if the publisher is charging a lot of money for a book with open access articles in it, those articles still remain open access to be viewed by anyone, so no harm done, right?

Wrong. As I started reading more of Redfield’s posts on this issue, and when I read the results of a survey she did of researchers, I started to see some of the complications of the situation. Then when I met with her in person last week, I came to realize the nuances of what is happening and the potential problems that can result, both for researchers and for the public.

What’s the problem?

This is not simply a matter of authors being upset that someone else is making money off of their work (though as the survey results show, some do have that concern)–there are other problems as well. These are not listed in any particular order, but rather the order in which they’re coming to mind for me.

1. One might argue, as some of the authors in the survey did, that a publisher is making a profit off an open access work becomes more of a concern when authors have to pay a fee to publish in many open access journals (or to publish an article as open access in non-open access journals). Here’s a pretty thorough list of scholarly journal publishers and their “article processing charges” (APC’s). I was once asked if I wanted to pay over $2000 to have a 2-3 page book review published as open access in an otherwise closed journal. I decided the book review just wasn’t that good. 

The point is, it’s not just that some people are upset that others are making money off their work, but rather that they had to pay to publish their work open access, and they did this because they wanted the work available for others to view for free. Well, of course, it isn’t always individuals paying these APC’s–people can use grants to do so, and/or they can get funding to do so from their institution, just to name a couple of other sources of the money.

A rebuttal could be: well, the articles are still available to view for free, on the journal’s website, and likely other places around the web as well. This brings up the next problem.

 

2. Just because the articles are available for free elsewhere doesn’t mean the people who see the book in which they’ve been republished, and which is selling for a good chunk of money, are able to find that out easily. The problem with this particular book that Redfield talks about in her blog is that there was no indication at all that these were open access articles, and that they are available for free on the web. Of course not–that would mean no one would buy the book. Several authors in Redfield’s survey mention that they think such books should have to list the original source of the publication.

So people looking for scientific research may see the book and think they need to buy it to get access to the research. I find this quite troubling, as for me, the point of open access publishing is to allow people access to research without having to pay. That people are ending up getting duped into paying is a problem, in my view.

And it’s not just individuals, libraries may be buying such books (and using public funds to do so), as suggested in a comment on one of Redfield’s blog posts on this issue (the comment also mentions some other important downsides as well). When I met with her, Redfield told me she had spoken to a librarian at the University of British Columbia libraries, who said that they had about 50 of Apple Academic Press’s titles. Redfield was in the process of getting these titles to find out whether any of them are republications of open access articles.

Redfield notes in a blog post that actually, according to the terms of PLOS One, anyone who redistributes an article for that journal must also “make clear the license terms under which the work was published.”  The same is true for the license terms of BioMed Central. Upon looking into the legal code of the CC-BY 3.0 unported license, it seems to me that this sort of thing is required by the CC-BY license itself. It says, in section 4(a), here, that “You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform.” I had forgotten this, but of course I include a link to the CC license for any CC-licensed image I use on this blog, for example, precisely for that reason.

The PLOS One license terms also say that the redistribution of articles from PLOS journals must include citation not only of the author, but also of the original source. So do the Wiley Online Open terms (which allow you to publish an open-access article in an otherwise non-open access journal). And Taylor and Francis and Routledge Open too. I’m not going to do an exhaustive search of all open journals, or journals that allow open-access content, to see what their terms are. The point is that such terms do exist, and at least in the case where the article from PLOS One was republished without citing the original source and license, such terms were violated.

 

3. The articles in the book Redfield talks about were edited to some degree from how they appeared in the original publications (I’m not sure how much, exactly). Of course, the CC-BY license allows others to “adapt” the work, so this is not a problem in itself. The problem comes in when one thinks about what might be possible, such as book editors making fairly significant changes to an article that, even by accident, end up making the argument weaker or suggest claims that the author would not have made him/herself.

Then, what comes into the picture is potential harm for the author, from people thinking they’ve said things they haven’t, and wouldn’t, say (if those things put the author in a bad light because they make the argument worse, or the data analysis worse, etc.). A number of the authors in Redfield’s survey said they would be worried about possible misrepresentation of the authors’ interpretations of results. Other authors worried that others might think they had self-plagiarized–published the same thing twice, without citing their earlier publication.

It might seem on the surface that the CC-BY license allows such things to happen, but as Redfield points out in one of her blog posts, CC-BY (and all CC licenses that have “attribution” as one of their requirements) have a “no endorsement” clause: those who use a work licensed CC-BY and alter it in some way, must not indicate that the original author endorses the revision of the work. The legal code of the CC-BY license makes this even clearer–see section 4(b)(iv) here. 

Since the publisher of the work Redfield discusses listed the authors as “contributors,” and did not state that the articles had been previously published elsewhere and edited for publication in the book, one could make the case that the way they’ve presented the articles suggests “endorsement” by the authors. Redfield argues for this point here.

But since the authors in this case were not told that their articles were going to be published in the book, they did not have a chance to give an endorsement or not. Nor does CC-BY require that original creators of works with a CC-BY license be informed that their works are being reused and adapted.

 

What should be done?

My first thought, upon seeing the first one or two of Redfield’s blog posts, was that this problem could be solved by simply educating authors about the various CC licenses, and about what is allowed under CC-BY, so they can decide whether they want to use CC-BY or some other license. I thought that those who wanted to avoid the problems noted above could choose a different license, like perhaps CC-BY-SA (share-alike)–which would require that any use of the work have an equivalent license on it, possibly reducing incentives to republish collections of such works–or CC-BY-ND (no derivatives)–which would not allow anything to be changed. There are several problems with this response.

 

1. It may not be the case that authors have a choice of licenses when publishing in an open access journal, or when publishing an open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal. PLOS One, for example, does not give you a choice–you have to use CC-BY or not publish there. So do BioMedCentral and PeerJ and  Sage Open. Some publishers do allow a choice, such as Wiley (you can choose a license for your open access article in an otherwise non-open access journal), and Taylor and Francis.

But those who are worried about reuse of CC-BY articles might just choose not to publish in the OA journals that require CC-BY (this does not apply to researchers who are mandated to publish open access as CC-BY, of course). Unless some other things change. Like possibly the following.

 

2. As noted above, the republishing of open access articles without citing the original publications and licenses under which they were published may be in violation of the license terms of the original articles. If so, then it seems logical that legal action should be taken against the publishers who violate those terms. This is what Redfield suggests in a blog post.

I agree, but who should take such legal action? It’s too much to ask for individual authors to take legal action, unless they can find legal counsel who will take on the case without charging anything, or very much. Who among us has enough money to pay attorneys and other fees to sue a publisher?

Redfield suggests perhaps the journal publishers should take on the duty of suing such book publishers, which seems to me to make sense because the book publishers are violating the terms of the journal publishers’ own licenses. But this raises other issues, as discussed in the comments to that post (authors are the ones with legal standing to sue because they hold copyright, journals may have to raise article processing fees to cover such activities).

One might also ask: what motivation do journals have to go after publishers who are redistributing content that the journal is not making money from each time it is accessed anyway? They have made money through other means than subscriptions or fee for access, so would they be motivated to try to stop such republication? Perhaps, if enough authors shy away from publishing open access articles because of fears of this sort of thing happening.

 

Conclusion

The bigger point here is the following. Even if you don’t think this is a big deal (and many don’t, as evidenced by comments on Redfield’s blog posts about this issue), it appears that there are a good number of authors who do, and who may then choose not to publish in open access journals because of it. This is ignoring the point, of course, that many researchers are now being mandated to do so; there are still quite a few who are not…though this may change soon.

Even if a journal allows a choice of licenses, authors may wonder if, were it to be the case that the license was violated, they or someone else would be able to take action to do something about it. And if no one is doing anything about it, then what’s to stop this sort of thing from spreading further, if it’s lucrative? 

Whether it is a profit-making business, whether significant numbers of individuals and libraries are buying such books, remains to be seen. And the more that authors are required to publish open access works, the more this sort of thing might become lucrative, if it isn’t already. But I think this is an issue worth paying attention to and trying to figure out what can and should be done about the violation of open access licenses in open access journals, even if one doesn’t think that has happened in this particular case.

A new open, online, edtech professional development opportunity for educators (modelled on ETMOOC)

OOE13 image, by Glenn Hervieux. Check out the OOE13 site at http://www.ooe13.org

In a few short weeks, a new open online course will begin, called #OOE13, Open Online Experience 2013(-2014). It is designed as a profession development experience in educational technology for educators, but it is open to anyone who would like to participate. It starts September 4, 2013.

I am one of the many, many people who have helped to shape this course, and who will be helping to run it. And I mean many! There are probably 50 or 60 people who have contributed in one way or another! It has been (and I expect will continue to be) a great experience in collaboration.

I’m writing this post, though, to encourage others to join #OOE13, by noting its similarity to a course I did in January-March 2013, and which had a profound impact on me professionally and personally. It’s not exaggerating to say it changed my life in many ways. Those of us who are working together to make #OOE13 happen are hoping that will be the case for many of the participants as well.

I’ll first describe a bit about ETMOOC and why I found this experience so valuable–the point here is that we have designed #OOE13 similarly, hoping that others will also have a great experience. So in describing ETMOOC, I’m also giving you a flavour of #OOE13.

So please read on and see if this sparks your interest, and if so, you can register for #OOE13 here!

ETMOOC

What I took in Jan-March 2013 was ETMOOC (Educational Technology and Media MOOC): http://etmooc.org

This was a connectivist-style MOOC (massively open online course) (see my post on what I think a “connectivist MOOC” means), run by a large group of people from many different professions and educational institutions. It lasted for ten weeks or so, and every two weeks there was a new theme relating to educational technology (Connected Learning, Digital Storytelling, Digital Literacy, The Open Movement, and Digital Citizenship). You can see more about each of these topics at the ETMOOC main site, which has posts explaining some aspects of each topic and giving resources, on the front page (just scroll down).

To be quite honest, I wasn’t sure about joining this course, because I wasn’t terribly interested in educational technology. But I had heard of “connected learning” and the “open” movement, and wanted to learn a bit more about those; plus, the structure of the course seemed interesting.  So I tried it.

Structure

Each week there would be one or more presentations on BlackBoard Collaborate that you could join live from anywhere in the world, or watch the recording later. We had guest speakers from various parts of the world on these topics (though all English-speaking). Then we had suggested other things to read/watch/do each week. We were highly encouraged to reflect on what we were seeing/reading/doing in our blogs, which were connected to a blog hub–so you could easily find blog posts from each person in the course. We also were encouraged to comment on each others’ blogs during the course, to get conversations going that way.

In addition, we had a one-hour chat on Twitter each week, on the #etmchat hashtag. I hadn’t used Twitter much before that, and didn’t realize how effective Twitter chats can actually be. You may think you can’t get much done in bursts of 140 characters, but I was surprised at how rich and effective the discussion was at times. Here is a record of our chat on digital literacies, and here is one on open education (best to scroll all the way down to the very beginning and start there, b/c it’s in backwards chronological order).

Freedom to participate how and when you want/can

One very nice thing about ETMOOC was that there was no pressure to continue through the whole course, or to do all the activities. It was clear there was an open door to come in and go out when you wanted, and to do as much as you wanted. This felt freeing, for the times when I just got too busy. And since the topics changed every two weeks, new people could start with a new topic and there wasn’t a sense that they needed to go back and “catch up” on anything.

What I did in ETMOOC

I’ve got a couple of records of what I did in ETMOOC, in case anyone is interested. First, I’ve got quite a few blog posts I wrote during ETMOOC, which can all be found by clicking on the “Etmooc” category on the right menu.

I also put together a more connected narrative of what I did in ETMOOC, which can be found here on my blog.

Why I found ETMOOC so valuable

[Update Aug. 22: Of course, I should say that I got quite a lot out of ETMOOC in terms of learning things about educational technology, connected learning, digital literacy, digital storytelling, and more, but honestly, the things that really struck me, that are most meaningful for me, are those mentioned below.]

1. Making Connections –that’s the best way for me to think of putting it, but it can sound more crassly self-interested than I mean. By making connections I mean that I found many people in different parts of the world who are interested in similar things as I am in terms of teaching and learning, and whom I can now talk to long after the course is done. This is great, because it means having a group of people you can engage in discussions with about, not just educational technology, but pedagogy generally.

For me, it’s like when I go to a teaching/learning professional development workshop and meet interesting people and talk to them about pedagogy and get great ideas…except when that happens it all ends when the workshop ends. Sure, we could meet up again, but we’re all busy and usually that doesn’t happen. But with an online course like this, the connections and discussions seem easier to keep up. I’m not sure why, but that’s been my experience. I can do it from home, on my own time, talking to people on Twitter, on blogs, on Google+, or other social networking sites. We don’t have to schedule a meeting to be somewhere face to face at the same time (though sometimes we try to schedule video or audio chats on Skype or Google Hangouts, because we do want to talk in real time; even then, it’s easier because we don’t have to get to the same location).

A number of us found these connections so valuable we started a “post-etmooc” group on Google+, in which we read blogs or online journals and discuss them. We also have Twitter chats. And this is all after the course is long finished!

Beyond that, I’ve “met” (through online means such as blogs, Twitter, Google+, Google Hangouts) many, many people whose work I continue to read on their blogs, who I continue to talk with on Twitter, and who share helpful links with me about pedagogical topics we’re interested in (and vice versa!).

What this means is I’ve developed an online Personal Learning Network––a network of people from whom I learn and who learn from me (here’s a nice, in-depth video explaining PLNs, and here’s a shorter one with people’s views of why they find them valuable). It’s a group that talks about things related to teaching and learning generally, and includes K-12 teachers, higher ed faculty, educational technology specialists, businesspeople, and more. We not only share links of interest, but we ask questions of each other, support each other when there difficulties, offer advice/suggestions, and more.  I have found this of immense value professionally–and personally! Over time some of these connections have developed into friendships, even before we have ever met in person.

And several of these connections have turned into professional collaborations on other projects, such as #OOE13 itself. A number of ETMOOC participants have gotten together to plan #OOE13, modeling it in large part on ETMOOC, and hoping to share what has been a great experience for us, with others.

2. Changing my professional activities

Since doing ETMOOC I’ve begun to focus my professional research and activities much more on things I had never even heard of before, such as open education, connectivist MOOCs, blending on-campus courses with an open online component, making digital audio and visual media for courses and having students make them as well, and more.

I decided a couple of months ago to create a mind map to show all the things I’ve begun to do as a result of ETMOOC, just to try to explain how much it has affected my professional life.  You can see it here. It’s pretty self-explanatory!

#OOE13

We’ve designed OOE13 with the same basic structure as ETMOOC, and, as you can see from the list of topics (scroll down on this page), a similar content focus. We’ll have guest speakers doing synchronous presentations (which will be recorded for later viewing), Twitter chats, a Google+ group, and we’ll encourage people to post on their blogs and comment on those of others.

Time: September to May

The main difference is that we’ve designed #OOE13 so that teachers and faculty could participate more easily during busy teaching terms. This means spreading the course out over an entire academic year (September to May) rather than having it be 10-12 weeks.

The reason we did this is so that people have more time to watch recorded presentations if they couldn’t be there live, and to write blog posts/comment on posts from others. If there is a lot to do from week to week and people feel like they can’t keep up because they are busy, they may be less motivated to continue–even though we will stress, like ETMOOC did, that you don’t have to do everything, and it’s fine to move in and out! So instead of new topics every two weeks, we’ll have new topics each month.

Flexible

You can join in anytime and leave anytime, whatever suits you. I found I got a lot out of ETMOOC by being pretty active for most of the time, but that may not suit your schedule. If you want to just watch some presentations, that’s fine! If you want to blog about them too and comment on others’ blogs, that’s great–and you may make connections in the process! If you want to join in the Tweet chats, go ahead…even if you’re not doing anything else in the course.

Drop in to the topics that interest you…leave for awhile and come back…it’s up to you.

Badges

Some schools connected to #OOE13 have programs where they will earn professional development credit for doing the course, but for others who don’t have that option (and for any participant, actually), we’re creating badges you could earn. We’ve got a few already, but will be adding to this set as the course goes along.

 

There really is little to lose and potentially a lot to be gained, so why not give #OOE13 a try? Take another look at the website, and if you’re interested, sign up here!

Hope to see you there…

 

 

 

An embed of my ETMOOC Storify story

I tried to put this story into my blog without having it linked so intimately with Storify, here, and explained here. But that one is annoying at the moment because it opens up the post starting at the end and I don’t know why. Until I can fix it, here’s an embedded version.

click “more” to see it! It’s very long, so I don’t want people to have to scroll through this on the front page.

Continue reading →

Getting my ETMOOC Storify story into WordPress

Update, hours later: see below for what happened after I posted this…and do NOT do what I did, below, unless you know a lot more about html and css than I do (which doesn’t take much, b/c I know so little)

———————————————————————————-

I participated in ETMOOC, Educational Technology and Media MOOC (http://etmooc.org) from January to April 2013. During that time I decided to keep a record of things that stood out for me in the course–tweets, videos, blog posts–and reflect on them in one space (rather than spread out across blog posts).

I used Storify for this, as it was a really easy tool to pull all these different things together in, and to write text between the elements to tell a story. Here’s how it looks on Storify.

The problem was that I figured Storify wouldn’t last forever (these sorts of things come and go), and I didn’t want my reflections to get lost. You can export them as a PDF if you get a paid account, but I didn’t want to have to pay just for this.

Here’s what I did instead: went to my story page in Storify, clicked on “Distribute,” then on “Export” (rather than embed). Embed basically puts an active link in your blog back to the Storify site, like embedding a YouTube or Vimeo video–you can watch it in the blog, but it’s still hosted elsewhere. That wasn’t good enough for what I wanted; what if Storify goes away? Then the embed is useless.

But if you export the file into some other format, that seems to me like it will be more permanent. I tried exporting it to WordPress, but that didn’t work with this blog. I thought about exporting it to my Tumblr, but that’s only for ds106. I could have created a new tumblr just for this, but that doesn’t make sense.

Instead, I exported as html, which gave me the story on a webpage. Then, in Firefox, I right-clicked (or control-click, on a mac) on the page and got a dialogue that let me view page source. That opened up a new window with html code for the page. I copied all of that and opened up a new WP post (this one), went to “text” instead of “visual,” and pasted the code in there. Voila!

Here’s the html-export of the story in a WordPress post. Problem: it jumps to the end of the post when you open it! Why? No clue. So until I figure that out, I also created an embedded version, which works fine.

I think that the html-exported version doesn’t rely on Storify existing–even if Storify went away, I might still have my info. Which, I think, is not true of the embedded version.

Maybe I’m deluded about that, as the code in the html exported version still refers quite a bit to Storify. Hmmmm. If not, then maybe there’s little point to exporting in hmtl vs. embedding. 

Can anyone answer the question of whether what I’ve done by exporting to html is different in the sense of it possibly relying less on the existence of Storify than embedding?

One of the main reasons I did this, though, was because the story is quite long, and I want to be able to break it up into a few pieces. I couldn’t do that easily with Storify itself, but I thought I could do it with the html, maybe. Maybe not, though…I think I can’t just take half of it and cut and paste, because I think it relies a lot on some stuff in the beginning of the code that I don’t understand. So that may be moot as well.

I also wanted to do this so you don’t get that annoying “read next page” bar when you reach a certain point in the embedded version. I realize this makes the post really long, but it bugs me somehow.

Lesson learned: If you don’t want your Storify to be really, really long, break it up while you’re doing it, rather than trying to do it later. Or, if someone knows how to do this that I am not seeing, please let me know!

I tried my hand at messing with the html to get rid of the annoying social share buttons that often pop up (I left a few in at the html-exported story so you see what I’m talking about; they’re all over the embedded story). Seemed to work, though I messed up the formatting of the first text box. Just deleted this from html wherever I found it:

<div class=”s-share-dropdown”>
<ul class=”s-actions-share” data-url=”http://storify.com/clhendricksbc/favourite-tweets-from-etmooc-2013/elements/e61a5e776a8965605f8c5abf”>
<li><a title=”Share on Facebook” href=”#” rel=”facebook”>Share on Facebook</a></li>
<li><a title=”Share on Twitter” href=”#” rel=”twitter”>Share on Twitter</a></li>
<li><a title=”Share on Google+” href=”#” rel=”googleplus”>Share on Google+</a></li>
<li><a title=”Share on Linkedin” href=”#” rel=”linkedin”>Share on Linkedin</a></li>
<li><a title=”Share by email” href=”#” rel=”email”>Share by email</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

Note: a mind-numbing task that I thought would never end: “find,” delete, “find next,” delete, and over and over and over and over…

But hey, it worked! For the most part. There’s still some weirdness in the code in some places that leads to funky formatting, but I’ve reached the limit of how much I’m willing to mess around with html when I really don’t know what I’m doing.

————————————————————

Update, hours later: Well, all this seemed to work okay, except for two things:

1. When I opened the html export post, it would always open at the very bottom of the post rather than the top

2. That post also broke the ETMOOC blog hub. Okay, well, not “broke,” but made it look very weird. I went to that blog hub while preparing another post and saw that it looked very strange–all the content was squished up into one column on the far right of the page. I tweeted to Alan Levine asking him if he could (at some point) find out what was wrong (no rush), and he wrote back that my last post messed it up–the html export one. Oops. Lots of strange code at the beginning of it messed with the formatting.

Long story short, I asked a friend who knows a heck of a lot more than I do about coding and html and css to help, and he fixed the code for me pretty darn quickly. Stripped off the weird stuff at the beginning and added a css line to make the formatting look right (b/c when I took that weird stuff off, the formatting got all nasty). THANK YOU PAT LOCKLEY!

So don’t try this at home, unless you know what you’re doing. Or have a very nice friend who does know, and who is willing to help you with a project that probably isn’t even entirely necessary.