Research 2.0 – research in an open world

At OLnet/TEL day workshop. The group discusses what it means to be a researcher 2.0 .

Martin Weller presents his session on Elluminate and and points to the importance of trying and exploring new media and innovative ways of publishing and sharing content.

‘Liberate the archive’ is Martin’s message to the Open University. The community could consider more ‘distributed research’, with a set of interesting research questions generated by the community. Share results in a wiki for example, and blogs to overlap and share parallel conversations.

OpenLearners, come to the site … or not

Working on the OpenLearn project I think one of the surprises has been the ingenuity shown by other people. When we launched there were somethings that were in need of a bit of development. One of those was the upload/download of content. But at least it was possible. That has proved to be a good move as a few people have now taken the XML we provide and reworked it to suit themselves. I suspect I only know about some cases as there is no need to ask permission or contact us in order to do what you wish with the content.

The key example for me is the work that Tony Hirst has been up to on his OUseful site. Motivated at first by wanting to provide different navigation Tony took our XML apart and made it into RSS feeds. He has then played with it in various ways including a very neat way to make the content into daily feeds. He has set up a way to subscribe to the OpenLearn courses on a daily basis. Have a look at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/openlearndaily. (If you want to try it and you are not using an RSS feedreader at the moment then Google Reader is fairly straightforward). I presented a joint paper with Tony at the TENCompetence workshop, the paper and presentation for that are available via http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?docid=9126

At the technical side this is a push towards providing RSS feeds so that there is no need to convert our pages before processing. On the more general side it should encourage us to consider ways to have various of the possibilities that the open content offers happen, whether as part of our core site or through the efforts of others.

Tony Hirst is not the only one working with OpenLearn content, at the same conference Stefan Dietze from the Luisa project http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/luisa/ talked about ways to use the content to illustrate the semantic web and learning designs. These are both examples from people working at the OU, but with no connection to OpenLearn. A further example comes from Australia where as part of their work on a Global Library Services Network http://glsn.com OpenLearn content is being put into a collection of material under Creative Commons licence so that it can be distributed to remote communities.

There is no need for anyone to ask us or work with us to do this sort of thing – so is there anything else out there yet to be found?

Patterns

The use of patterns in the project is definitely taking off. They are now an integral part of the transformation prcess and I think they are serving a good purpose alongside the integrity model for the content. It means that even if changes are limited the report back gives the transformation team a chance to explain ideas and share their interpretation.

Ideas for later trials

The open content system is potentially of use to eveyone. However as Maurice Sloman said in a recent seminar it is hard to design only for emergent use, he would rather try to meet the needs of some user group, and then let other uses emerge. This means we should  pick some targets we expect to be included and set out to study them. Candidates include:

• Transistion from school to university

• Remote communities – the commonwealth of learning has sugested the virtual university of the small states of the commonwealth

• Enthusiast communities – e.g. Birdwatchers, sports fans, health, etc.

• Retired people

• Education drop outs

• Partner universities eg in Brazil

There are many more.

Trials

We are starting to plan the trial set for OpenLearn. I am very keen to set up two early trials. One would be be as initial technology trial with some friendly users very probably from aross the university. They would be able to understand the role for the system and step it through but stop short of a real test. The second trial though would take a potential uer group through a scenario. This use of trials worked well  on the MOBIlearn mobile learning project and should take place as soon as we can, in practice that will be September.

OpenLearn research and evaluation plan

I have now produced the research and evaluation plan. I always knew it would be quite tricky to do this so had written in a couple of month delay before issueing it. That time has been very useful in bringing out ideas and adjusting the emphasis however I have also felt the lack of a written plan so with hindsight I should have made myself deliver this earlier. I intend the plan to serve as a way to collect thoughts and options as well as tie down things that must be done. This fits with the model for agile research that I proposed last year. To emphasise the living nature of the plan I am putting it in a space on the wiki and also publicly available on the KN. Preparing the plan also remminded me about our short timescales and the need to get moving on a research environment, initial trials and data collection methods.

CALRG Conference

The annual CALRG conference took place on 27th and 28th June.As a member of this research group I try to play an active role but had to miss the first day as I was external examinining at Heriot-Watt University. On 28th I presented a talk about the Open Content Initiative “Transforming for Open Content”. In the talk I covered four aspects: background and examples; the overall research area and how open content links through to so many research issues; a look at the work we are now carrying out on using patterns to support the transformation process; and, how we need an environment to support this sort of research. I used ochre as the concept for the tool that are needed.The talk went very well and resonated with presentations that followed. Jonathan San diego was reviewing how to analyse use of simulations in Mathematics teaching and had mad good use of eye-tracking and video analysis while Andrew Brasher had updated his work on data gathering with portable devices. Andrew’s work could map to an experiment where we send mp3 recorders out and gather audio reflections. I mentioned using podzinger as automated transcription which raised a lot of interest though I am not sure of its capabilities. Tony Hirst put me on to looking at and its purpose is to build an index of podcasts by automated transcription of public audio sites. My suggestion is that if this is s good as it looks at first glance then we could carry out interviews, publish them via an open feed and then get back the transcipt from podzinger. Sounds too good to be true but I have a lot of respect for BBN who sre providing the technology behind the scenes. Mary Taylor from AEM spotted an even better application to generating transcripts to audio in our materials for accessibility reasons. Once these are on open content we can forget about the copyright issues and take advantage of these approaches. I think it was Mary who also suggested Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as an alternative where humans will do this sort of thing at low cost.

Other presentations at CALRG were also very good and deserve checking out.

What is in a name?

One of the sticking points at the moment is quite what to call things in our project. We had consulted internally and then surveyed our quick panel of OU students (PRESTO) to confirm choices. However we have now been pulled up on getting an external view, which is a good point but has set us back a bit. We will now carry out some external consultation and it will probably be worthwhile.

Coincidentally I was told at the CALRG conference http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/index.cfm?wpid=5407 that myArtSpace http://www.myartspace.org.uk/ had become ookl http://www.ookl.org.uk/- this will be a good move if it becomes popular but is obscure if it doesn’t. I guess our project has the same issue to either spell out what we do or try to be short and snappy.

How do people choose names these days?

A new start!

This blog has the title I thought up a few days ago to describe the work that we are doing for the Open Content Initiative. There has been a lot of discussion about the name for the overall project (which I won't list here as I guess there might be some plan about releasing it with a bang. Anyway this got me thinking about all the things that we need to bring together to support the research side. Ochre was the result – an acronym for Open Content Holistic Research Environment.

ochre resolution

This time I will post more regularly. Honest!