An Open Practice Manifesto?

Over the last two days I attended #ukoeras11 – the SCORE-led Autumn Symposium for OER in the UK. I worked with a small, fascinating team: Tracey De Beer (SCORE), Tony Coughlan (Open University) , Julian Priddle (Science Training and Education Partnership), and Simon Thompson (head of eLearning at Leeds Met). We produced a manifesto for OER, Open Practice and education more widely which, on re-reading, I think we should all be fairly happy with. Certainly it captures one position within a range concerning one possible future for the OER “Movement” (if such a thing exists), and we’d be interested in comments. This manifesto is in the public domain, under CC-0. [edit: @tore has shared another attempt to build a ten point OER Declaration at Nordlet.]
It is time to reclaim the radical roots of OER.
OER should once again become a means to an end, not an end in itself. 

How:
Ensure that students leaving HE are independent thinkers and analysts, and adaptable to change.
Teach openness – evolve a code of open ethics/conduct that can taught Professional body that recognises openness
Clear promotion of what OER and OEP is to the general public / create a need through marketing OER and OEP to stimulate the ideas behind the moment (the ideas of sharing and openness)

We agree that we must re-focus our activities to achieve societal and cultural goals. We recognise that the nature of education has become contaminated by the assumptions and language of business and commerce, and has lost the ability to meet the needs of learners and educators.

How:
Lobby government that HE is not a commodity that can be sold (students are not customers!)
Change the way institutional success is measured
Change the idea that HE is just another 3 years for school.
Destigmatise the idea of academic failure.
Ensure that students leaving HE are independent thinkers and analysts and adaptable to change.

We propose the concept of Open Practice, to cover the range of practices and ideas that encapsulate the concept of the academic as a public intellectual. We argue that the work of a public intellectual includes open research, open teaching and open scholarship

How:
A percentage of public lecture/outputs a condition of employment – back to proliferation of knowledge. 
Promote a sense of community and support – agreed peer review to support your work.
Change the views of senior management at institutions to show that having our lecture (or outputs) openly available is good for the reputation of the institution: gather evidence and present it to the right people in the right way and at the right time.

We re-assert the primacy of the practitioner as being responsible for the quality and utility of what they offer. The measurement of educational quality is qualitative, not quantitative.

How: 
student exit interviews plus follow-up interviews at regular intervals post university.
Entry level student versus exit level student (the journey of improvement) measure.
Increase the quality of the learning experience by forcing lecturers to spend more time on their practice because it will be in the public domain.

The current metrics of education quality are short-term and focussed on immediate satisfaction/gratification, rather than long-term effectiveness. We require a scholarly conception of quality supported by a community of peers and a community of scholars. 

How: 
The development of personable metrics for the quality of education, and a managed retreat from the aggregations of learner analytics.
OERs cease to be a select category of resources but become a benchmark for resource quality.
We need to teach openness and demonstrate the benefit to students and communities.
We need to use openness to develop global reputations for our students.

We recognise learners as being co-responsible for their own learning and personal growth.

How:
Accelerate the transition from transmission/accreditation of information to developing learning/analytical skills as the purpose of learning, which has the beneficial side effect of preparing learners for a rapidly changing society/employment market.
Investigate new models of learning, away from the traditional 3 year full time attendance leading to something called a degree.

We assert the right of the learner and the educator to the ownership of the product of their own labour, and we assert the right of the world to access and use these products without financial penalty. We deplore the reification of knowledge into commodity, of insight into profit, of learning into commerce.

How:
Open practice as the norm – closed practice as a specifically argued for exception.

We welcome the implied and tangible support of our allies in the Free Culture movement, the Open Data Movement, the Open Source Movement and the actions of forward-thinking institutions, organisations and governments in supporting our aims. 

How: 
We will build links and celebrate notable achievements as a part of a wider community.

Misattributing cyber-lawyers, Wilde on twitter and a TINA turn – free culture and value

Like most memes, it’s difficult to trace the source of “if you are not the customer, you are the product”. Often linked, vaguely, to google, the earliest citable source I can find is a 15 June 2011 report of a conference at Harvard on “hyper-public spaces”. Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkmann Centre for Internet and Society is quoted as saying “If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.”. However, an earlier (23 Nov 2010) Lifehacker article cites a Metafilter user, blue_beetle, as the 26 August 2010 originator of the idea, simply stated as “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”. His real name is Andrew Lewis (@andlewis), and – wonderfully – he now sells t-shirts with his much retweeted comment on, possibly having given up on the idea that free culture colossus Zittrain would send him some money/beer/whuffie.

[of course, awesome scholars such as Brian Lamb and Jim Groom – writing in EDUCAAUSE! – have traced the source of the meme back even further, to a 30 April 2010 tweet from Steve Greenberg (greenbes)]

It’s one of those tilt-shift ideas that offers a new perspective on an old way of seeing the world, and as such has spread quickly through the twittersphere, fitting as it does neatly within 140 characters. One of the many things I love about twitter is the resurgence of the bon mot – should Oscar Wilde ever be reincarnated he would utterly kill twitter, the entire opening essay to Dorian Gray is pretty much the best tweetdeck column ever, as far as it appears to me.

Blue_beetle‘s comment began one of those long interminable metafilter threads about the redesign and adaptation of a then-popular web2.0 thing, in this case the user driven news aggregator, Digg. He got first comment too, itself pretty braggable. But fundamentally, the context was our right, as users, to complain about changes to a service that we are paying for by indirect (participation, personal data, unpaid creative labour) means rather than directly (subscriptions and such). If one user gets so annoyed that he tweets “@kevinrose way to go ruining digg, now it’s gay and ur a fagg.” (source of info about this erudite tweet: stavrosthewonderchicken), does the fact that he is not paying for the service with money mean that he doesn’t have the right to speculate about the sexuality of the site and founder?

However, as the quotation has spread across the internet, it has taken on a number of utterly polarised inferences. It can be read as a cheesily alternative hipster “corporations are, like, really terrible“, or a neo-liberal “you freetards gotta learn that you’re still paying, just in another way“. Like Wilde’s bon mots (or his US near-contemporary, Mark Twain), it is used by just about everyone, to back up just about any position concerning Stuff on Teh Internets and the Paying For It thereof.

Which brings me to @ambrouk giving “The OER Turn” a spin on the JISC InfTeam blog. For the non-believer, Open Educational Resources are an excellent microcosm of the wider debates about free and libre online, debates I’ve touched on in my attempt on the old post-scarcity warhorse.

Simply put, the idea of someone putting the byproduct of their intellectual labour online for people to do stuff with for free breaks pretty much everything we think we know about economics. Not just bends, or challenges, actually breaks. The two generalised responses to this are:

(i) the paper-over-the-cracks model where we sprain pre-frontal lobe-strings talking about the place of value within a system with the whole customer-or-product thing (or arguing that the system itself constitutes value) and start pretending advertising as a revenue model makes any sense whatsoever.
(ii) the “OK, this is something new” model where we realise how little we “get” about human motivation. And start watching. And learning.

People in the west tend towards (i), bowing to another staple un-citable “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism“. This is especially true within the OER movement, where people are acutely and uncomfortably aware that somebody somewhere, be it Hewlett, Gates or the Government, is paying for all this. Therefore, goes the rhetoric, we need to show them that the practice has impact: so we firstly skew our practice to be somehow measurable, and secondly we spend time, energy and (someone else’s) money measuring it. And if we show them impact, then they will give us more money. Apparently. This is also where the customer/product idea comes back in too – if in every interraction we are either a customer or a product then – hooray – we’ve saved capitalism for a few more months.

But if you look at, say, university funding in the UK (just to pick a topic at random 🙂 ), you’ll see that the sector has done a sterling job in demonstrating return on investment. This has not stopped lead funders (the UK government) from screwing the system up like an old fag packet and bringing in something a bit more, y’know, private sector. Funders do not listen to return on investment arguments – which is good news as it allows us to build for genuine long term change under the guise of doing whatever it is they are fleetingly interested in. But bad news for people who want to build return on investment arguments based on ideas of what funders might want to hear – especially if they are wrapped up in TINA arguments of “valourise or die”.

Polishing this off in my usual apocalyptic mode, we’ve really not got long left with this old free market stuff. If you want a tweetable from me: it’s not a recession, it’s the real end of boom and bust. I guess we’ve got to start using any resources that we have to think about alternatives, and the open availability of the knowledge and expertise that humankind has developed during this failed market experiment is an essential starting point. As Brian Lamb puts it “it is almost criminally irresponsible to hoard knowledge” – now, more than ever. Put simply, what if during our online lives we were neither customers, nor products? What if we acted like we were human beings?

This post represents my personal views and not those of my employer, or of programmes and projects I am responsible for. It is made available under a CC-BY license.

OER: the cowboy gospel? #altc2011

“A lot of you need churchin’ – And some of y’all need birchin’ “

I was subject to significant ribbing regarding how easily the role of banjo playing, bible thumping, traveller preacher man came to me. In a session with more and weirder accents than a Bulgarian PC keyboard, what I said in a vignette of the old west was fairly close to the kind of thing I say anyway – as I think, in a way, it was for all of us.

We chose our roles freely – Amber the sheriff, Helen the gadabout, Dave the settler and me. And at many points during the panel session it was difficult to tell whether we were in character or not. Talking about William Tyndale to Diana Laurillard whilst dressed as an C19th preacher was, probably, the oddest thing I’ve done at a conference since – er – talking to Diana Laurillard about guitar tab and OLGA at #OER11 (note to self: maybe do some “proper” conference presentations one day?).

Opencountry
(image: with thanks to Jackie Carter)

To me, questions around the lasting place of OER as a concept were most interesting. There seemed to be general agreement that the gains in knowledge, experience and understanding we had made via the OER experience were permanent, and were a lasting part of the landscape we are cultivating beyond the frontiers of academic publishing. Whether we would continue to be using it as a term in future seemed more open to question… @ajcann and others argue (and argue convincingly) that OER is not, and should not be, a demand side term. They are right.

But on the supply side it is a useful bundle of concepts, and provides a focal encapsulation of a number of issues that academia (and I would argue, wider society) is struggling with. My contention was that OER was a symptom of a wider systemic issue, which takes in publishing, the idea of the public intellectual, online life, online practice and information as a right. As long as the machinations of legislators and company lobbyists keep propping up the bodies of the dead business models, we will need something like OER as an alternative. If we’re getting Hegelian about it, what is likely to emerge is a series of compromises that will require us “open evangelists” to sup with the devil and the (printer’s?) devils themselves to put down the pitchforks and open the gates a little.

As long as the aggravating conditions are still there, the symptom will be there in some form. Maybe we’ll be hurting our hosts in other places in the future, expanding fair use, improving citation… but there is no cure for us. And if left unchecked, we will do the system some real damage. It took nearly 400 years between Roman persecution of Christians, and the Romanisation of Christianity with the conversion of Constantine and the Edict of Thessalonica. We’ll be faster, though no-one will know the day or the hour when the publishers and the authors they exploit finally convert to openness.

Multimedia-wise there’s a full (if rough) audio recording of the session (which covers an amazing amount of serious ground alongside the cowboyLOLs), courtesy of @easegill and wonderful #ds106radio, on soundcloud. And @jamesclay offered a startling ALT Live Beta video interview with the four of us in full western regalia, complete with banjo music. I suspect there is more video to come from the session too. And of course the trailer. All of it brought to you by CC-BY!  

Thinking beyond edupunk and eduprog, Amber asked “have we invented ALT country?”

This post represents my own views, not those of my employer. It is available under a CC-BY license.

You will do what you are told, until the rights to you are sold #altc2011

An excellent #altc2011, and particularly an excellent John Naughton keynote address, was soured for me by the announcement of the themes for next year’s conference – concerning “a confrontation with reality”. That kind of language sets my teeth on edge, as the “reality” we are expected to confront is not the usual, empirical, kind of reality that we can verify with our senses or with data. There are no questions about the educational technologist’s disregard for gravity, statistical methods, or electromagnetic forces.

The reality we are expected to confront is the one that is being imposed on us. The one where there’s not enough money to actually try and improve anything, and we’d better be careful to somehow justify what we are doing. The one where we’ve all “run out of money”, “maxed out our credit card”, and need to enter an “age of austerity”. All to support the need for the continuation of the bad choices and gaping inequalities that make up the society that existed before the “mysterious” and “unforeseeable” collapse.

Nothing in the paragraph above is true, unless we accept that it is. Economic conditions are a choice, not a force of nature. The market is an aggregation of choices, not an unseen hand. In confronting this “reality”, we must first accept it, then conform to it. I don’t think we can accept it – it is a narrative, and there are other narratives to choose.

One narrative is that universities will be funded at levels at least comparable to currently, and in many cases more generously. This has the advantage of being empirically verifiable. Sure, there are a lot of issues relating to sustainability of structures, our government having for some reason decided to remove certain cost-saving continuity measures that allow for long-term planning, but there’s just as much money in the system. And there is no reason to believe that institutions will suddenly decide to spend money on different things – the “student at the heart of the system” is just as likely to want a stable and well-resourced department, or access to the latest technology, as they are now.

This is shock doctrine stuff – and our eagerness to submit to these new rules in the name of “reality” is being used as a weapon against us by those who think things would simply be better if their companies earned more money from the UK higher education system. When John Naughton talked about the dissolving value chains of information industries, it’s not universities who need to be worried – we’ve dealt in an environment with an abundance of information for more than 200 years. It’s publishers and monopolistic software companies, whose business models are predicated on scarcity.

Which leads me on to ownership, one of the key themes that I took away from the conference. I was struck in a couple of presentations that the idea of saying that we have a VLE which is “owned” by the institution, whereas the ePortfolio is “owned” by the student, is flawed. In strict financial terms, both are owned by the software companies we lease them from, or are in the public domain. If we are talking about who controls them, who administrates them, the answer is the institution. Student “ownership” of platforms (both in HE, and in social media) extends only as far as personalisation – tweaking colours, images and fonts. This would apply equally to an institutions “ownership” of an iTunesU presence. Their control only extends as far as deciding how much of their intellectual labour they want to donate freely to a computer manufacturer, and which logo to put amongst all of the shiny apple ones.

The concept of ownership is being shifted – think of what I bet you call “your” iPhone, leased from your network at a high monthly rate, tied to one approved source of software and subject to terms and conditions variable by the manufacturer. In return for this amazing deal, you give Apple access to your personal data and access to your personal reputation. Where do I sign?

Do institutions “own” their students? Have a look at your prospectus – the experiences of students are simply marketing narratives, demonstrating an institutional skill in landing graduates attractive jobs, convincing them they are satisfied with their course and the “facilities”, and filling the grassy wasteland in front of the only attractive building on campus with a handful of the blondest, thinnest ones for a front cover. We are asking them to spend thousands of pounds so that they can ensure our statistics look good enough to get more students to spend thousands of pounds…

Ethics. Every student we pump through this system with the illusion of choice is a student that never had the freedom to learn from their mistakes, to define their own reality, to consider anything other than a well-paid graduate job. And we are pumping them into a system that is so divorced from humanity that it is actually sheared from our emotional and environmental needs. And it is not as if this system is even working on it’s own terms. How can we even talk about “putting students at the heart of the system” when the system is wounded, toxic and violent. We should be taking students out of the system – a way out from the “reality” where we learn enough to be economically useful, are exploited by various non-human entities and then left to starve when we stop making them money. Pragmatism does not come in to the equation.

There is a genuine need for a space outside of confrontation and capitulation – a space of redefinition and reflection. If we can resist the need to buy in to the narrative that is being sold to us with greater and greater degrees of panic, higher education can actually offer capitalism not what it wants but what it needs.

Competition.

This post represents my own views and not those of my employer. It is available under a CC-BY license.

managing the transition – academia in a post-scarcity knowledge economy

Post-scarcity economics is an imaginary concept more usually found in “hard” science fiction than in contemporary public policy. It describes a situation where resources are near unlimited, and able to match the near unlimited range of human needs and desires comfortably. In some formulations of the hypothetical situation, automation has meant that human labour is based on interest and pleasure (creativity) rather than required to be exchanged for resources needed (or wanted) in order to survive. It’s not a new idea, by any means – Stallman was all over it in 1985!

Simply put: in a post-scarcity system there are no barriers (financial or pure availability) preventing us from having what we want. You can politicise this from either dominant perspective, as it demonstrates either the final triumph of the free market, or it’s inevitable destruction. Possibly both.

It is usually imagined across the entire range of an economy – a post-scarcity situation regarding all (food, medicine, technology, information…) human needs – deliberately not using the Mazlow hierarchy as it doesn’t mention information (and more generally because it is flawed, which is maybe a post for another time.).

However, my suspicion is that we are facing a situation currently where certain elements of human needs are scarce, and others are post-scarce.

Information is now post-scarcity. If knowledge exists, we can easily and near-instantaneously gain access to it. If openness really is the enemy of knowledge, with enemies like these, who needs friends? 

Digital media, meaning the digital objects themselves and their distribution, is also post-scarcity. This one gets a lot of people into a lot of trouble.

The problem we face as a culture arises because a lot of the other stuff we need to live is very definitely running on a scarcity model, which leads us to want to make a post-scarity system act as if it was a scarcity system in order to derive value from it that can be exchanged in other places.

This has led, via the growth of Digital Rights Management and restrictive licensing online, to a corporate- and government-backed attempt to import an artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity economy. Unsurprisingly, this has failed and will continue to fail. DRM and licenses are routinely broken and ignored, both knowingly and unknowingly, in day-to-day online life.  

People point to the likes of amazon and itunes (yeah, they don’t need the hits…) as examples of successful business models in this area, but really what they are selling is a user experience – specifically friendly and accurate search. If it was as trivial to find, download and listen to an album on a torrent as it is to find one on iTunes, there would be no business model for iTunes (I’m not counting insidious ecosystem lock-in…). It’s even possible to suggest that UI is the one thing that people will (indirectly) pay for online.  (as an aside, it’s worth noting just how steep the technical hurdles are – torrenting, usenet, drm removal – that people routinely negotiate to access digital content. I’d love to hear more about this in the digital literacies space…]
The digital economy has it’s own currency already – reputation. Yes, like “down and out in the magic kingdom“. (or “Accelerando“, if you’d rather. And, yes, I would). However, until the (unlikely) emergence of a reputation-$ exchange rate, it will remain as a parallel economy with only second-order impact on participation in the non-scarcity economy via stuff like “professional reputation” and “credibility” impacting on earning potential.

In the education world we are seeing a huge tension between the ideals of academic openness, and the “reality” of the market-driven exploitation of academic labour. Neither of these are going to make anyone any money. And happily, neither describe how academics generate income. Getting paid for having done something once is an exception, getting paid for having the ability to keep doing things – or to keep do things to order – is the rule. We have (or had) a system for the employment of creative people that supported this, which naive links to the monetised exploitation of content artifacts can only undermine.

This, as I’ve outlined above, is a massive global cultural issue. It’s not that we urgently need to find a means of financially sustaining academic online sharing. It’s that we can’t, because the business models that worked in tangible-object publishing for the 300 years since the enlightenment simply don’t work in this universe. The fix for this isn’t going to be micro-payments, or usage tracking. It’s going to be a wholesale reorganisation of our cultural concepts. And academia should seriously be at the cutting edge of that.

What we do is one of the few things that is – and will likely remain – scarce. The development and training of highly optimised and highly adaptable human mind – capable of drawing links and parallels from a variety of sources in to a coherent whole, that provides an insight into something interesting and important. As above, the insights aren’t the point, the point is we are set up to keep doing them. And there’s no short-cuts to being able to do this. Just years of training and experimentation. These skills work in a post-scarcity world. We just need to manage the transition.
This post represents my personal opinions only, and not those of my employer or colleagues. It is available under a CC-BY license.

Using social media where access is restricted.

This is public service blogging, available under a Creative Commons Zero public domain compatible license. Though it is based on established good online practice, and publicly available information, I should be clear that this is my own work and is not endorsed by my employers.

Professionally and personally, social media has become near-essential to most of us. But what would you do if access was unavailable, because of a technical or policy issue? In this post I’ve tried to collect together a basic toolkit that might be useful in such situations. Needless to say, you should probably read this post before rather than after you experience issues, and actually preparing stuff now is perhaps sensible as you may not be able to read this post when you need it.

In all, there are three possible places things could go wrong: issues with connection to the internet, issues with the availability of a particular service, and issues with your account on a particular service.

1. Connection to the internet
Most of us have access to numerous ways of getting online – via mobile networks, home broadband, workplace/place of study broadband and public (eg libraries, coffee shops, internet cafe…) broadband. It would be rare for all of these to go down at once, so actual connection to the internet in some form is unlikely to be an issue. However, any or all of these methods potentially could block access to particular services, so do please see section 2 below..

If you are genuinely in a black hole, dial up internet still exists in the UK, and many laptops still have integrated modems. It’s worth being aware of settings stuff like Free Dialup UK and Freeola, and ensuring you have the appropriate cable.

2. Availability of a service
Before donning your tinfoil hat, it is possible that a popular social network may have just fallen over. You should use down for everyone, or just me? to check. If “down for everyone…” reports the service is available, and you are able to access other sites (eg google.com), chances are the service is being blocked between you and the servers it lives on. If you are interested where, you could use something like Traceroute (Mac/Linux) or TRACERT (windows) .

First thing to do is try an alternate browser, specifically Opera. Now I’m a fan of Opera anyway (on mobile and desktop) but even if you are a hater it’s worth having around for odd moments like this. Opera includes a function called “opera turbo” in the desktop version (built in to Opera Mini for mobile phones) which is a very easy to use “proxy” service. Without even worrying about what a “proxy” is for the moment, if you turn on opera turbo you effectively look (to your network) like you are connecting to a server in Norway, and to the site you are trying to connect to like you are in Norway! So, whether your network manager is blocking access to a service, or the service itself is blocking access to people in your country, you should be OK.

Of course, Opera is a proprietary, commercial and single-supplier solution. It’s very easy, but also very obvious. You may feel happier using an alternate “proxy” service. There are many, and they change regularly. Here’s a huge, dynamic, list. Here’s another. Each of these works in a similar way to Opera Turbo… you point to one server, the server goes and fetches the actual page you ask for and gives it to you. There are many potential issues – certain scripts and multimedia objects may not be available, and security may be an issue. For speedier connection, you may want to connect to stuff like the mobile twitter or facebook site rather than the full-fat version if you are connecting via a proxy.

For serious privacy and anonymity, you may want to consider something like TOR, a multiple-layer proxy originally developed by the US Navy but now entirely open. You need to invest some time in setting up TOR, and for most applications it’s probably overkill… but it is definitely worth having around.

3. Issues with your account
If your social media account is blocked, it’s been done by the service provider (twitter, facebook, g+, whatever [links are to terms of service]). They’ll have done this either because you have done something naughty, or because someone scary has told them you have done something naughty.

The easy advice is to try and avoid doing anything naughty… however the definition of naughty is constantly changing and may correspond to stuff that actually needs to be done. Sometimes it is unavoidable, sometimes existing restrictions are applied in ways that are unexpected.

The key message here is redundancy. Don’t communicate to people via a single network, have multiple connections to the same group. For instance, don’t just use facebook messages to communicate to someone, know their email address too. This also makes sense should a social network suddenly disappear entirely.

With the wide availability of free email addresses, it is trivial to create an alternate account. Judicious use of twitter hashtags, facebook groups, or simply a good memory for user names would get you back to where you were fairly quickly. Of course, there’s nothing to stop your new account being closed too if you continue to be “naughty”, so be prepared to do this a number of times if you are committed to this course of action.

Do you need to post something somewhere without anyone knowing it came from you? Several tools are available to freely and easily post material online anonymously. Pastebin is perhaps the best known for plain text, you could also use something like typewithme for collaboration and comments. File transfer services like MediaFire are a good way to anonymously share binary files.

“You are listening to a machine. Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.”

I’ve read a lot of astounding things recently. This is probably the most astounding:

“We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities […] or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.” – Charles Stross.

Far fetched? Corporate brands now have personalities.  And have more spending power than the US Government.  And, with my Damon Knight head on, I’m wondering what they eat…

I suspect data. Unfortunately, non-human entities aren’t the pickiest of eaters, they’ll eat pretty much anything and hope the label is right. Remember how all those banks and hedge funds got ill:

“The quants on Wall Street now, in large part, don’t have market sense, and they don’t have a long history of experience with what’s wrong with models. They simply take the math. They, themselves, are wowed by it, and they build a machine which, in their imaginary world, must work just fine and must be safe and sound. But in fact, with the securitized pools that were put together to underlie these things, terrible, unsound mortgages were put into the pools, and that’s not directly the fault of the quants, except that the quants should, if they were poking around and curious, have known how unsound these things were.

It’s more the fault of the sell side, who didn’t care what was in there and figured they would sell it off, and they wouldn’t be caught holding the bag, and of the regulators in government who simply looked the other way.” – Ed Thorp

The failure here is actually one of translation. The “quants” speak a pure mathematical language, the “sell side” speak the language of commerce, of profit and advantage. And the non-human entities – they’re with the “sell side”. In Higher Education we are beginning to learn the “sell side” language too.

Of course, the financial bubble was really an insurance bubble – risk packaged and resold, labelled in increasingly misleading ways by algorithms and filters designed to maximise apparent value. But the numbers were always just numbers, the further away from the source they got, the less what the numbers meant mattered. It was the aggregation that made them attractive, but that very aggregation also made them less meaningful. And – if you like – less nutritious.

Enter David Wiley. He argued at eli2011 that although behaviour data in an LMS is limited it could be usefully captured and analyzed. Every industry does a better job than higher ed of using data to improve service. With sufficient data, we could turn teaching into more of a science. (paraphrasing Peter Froehlich‘s report). This would be an odd argument to make in 2008. In 2011, after all the chaos caused in the financial and insurance worlds by using approximations from data to drive up value, it’s just bizarre. (He’s not the only one pro-analytic – there was a whole conference about this stuff this year in Banff)

You see a parallel trend around the gamification of learning, with stuff like the Khan Academy Badges and the new Mozilla stuff. People are genuinely celebrating because an assessment of learning is now available from a non-human.

But isn’t a central characteristic of a gamified system that it is gameble? Didn’t those cheeky algorithms that those clever quants knocked up increase the appearance of value rather than realisable value? And in a world where learners already “learn to the test”, how long before the only thing higher education teaches you is how to reverse-engineer grading algorithms?

More importantly, why are the radical edges of the new HE so keen to jump aboard a three-years past band wagon that has already lost wheels? My colleague Amber once warned:

“At a time when the very notion of state-funded education is under attack, is it really a good idea to go about presenting the break-up of the education system as an opportunity to try out risky ideas?”

“Experiment, communicate, be passionate. But don’t make anything taboo: don’t exclude the pragmatists, the cautious implementators, the people who refuse to be swept along by your enthusiasm. Most of all, be very careful what you wish for. Because you might just get it and I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

She was talking about “open education” – but we need to be similarly suspicious of learner analytics. No matter how delicious our non-human software-peddling phone-hacking overlords find them.

This post represents my personal opinions, and not those of my employers, projects, or programmes I am or have been responsible for. This post is available under a CC-BY license. For this post, I especially want to be clear that there is clearly a lot of useful and interesting work to be done with learner activity data – CMU’s OLI stuff springs to mind for a start, and I know there is a lot of very cool JISC stuff in this space too – it’s just that historically us “quants” have been unable to reliably emphasise the limitations of data analysis to the “sell side”…

Spinning a story: Gove, Klein, BECTA, Cameron and Murdoch

Allow me to tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a media organisation called News International. They owned a number of powerful media sources, including the Times, The Sun, The News of The World and a big chunk of BSkyB TV. And that was just in the UK. News International’s parent company was News Corporation, which was run by a chap named Rupert Murdoch and also owned important things like Fox News, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal.

Such was the power of this media organisation, many former employees went on to become members of UK parliament, and many former (and current) members of parliament ended up writing columns for News International papers.

A charming young man named Michael Gove was a leader writer at the Times. He subsequently became a member of Parliament, maintaining a useful contract (valued at £5000/month) to write for News International. Happily, whilst at the Times, he met and fell in love with his wife Sarah Vine – who still writes for the Times on important international issues such as advising readers “how to be a perfect housewife“, including the delightful suggestion “As to sex, you’ll soon be down to doing it once a month while the children are at granny’s, so really he should get accustomed to the idea now.”.

Even after becoming the Secretary of State for Education, Michael – perhaps in gratitude to his former employers – found time to accept a contract from HarperCollins to write a book. His friend, David Cameron, became Prime Minister (after a troubled campaign where the greatest turning point was the accidental broadcasting of the incumbent PM’s ungarded comments on a member of the public by Sky News), a cause of great delight for his neighbour and riding partner Rebekah Brooks, now Chair of News International, and also to his director of communications, Andy Coulson – who also used to work for News International.

Meanwhile, at News Corp, things weren’t looking quite so rosy. The internet was rendering many of Mr Murdoch’s business interests less and less profitable. Information was indeed turning out to be free, and an attempt to monetise his high-cost acquisition of the once-popular MySpace demonstrated that he did not understand this brave new world. So he and his son James concentrated on lobbying for tighter controls on media “piracy”, building paywalls to hide behind (and ensuring I can’t link to the sources I want to), and searching for a new revenue stream.

Late in 2009, he found it. Educational technology. Moving quickly, he bought a number of existing companies in the area, and brought in former head of the New York Public Schools System, Joel Klein, to lead this new initiative. Joel had left his previous job under something of a cloud, having sacked Columbia University academic Rashid Khalidi from his teacher training programme because he didn’t like his views on Israel and Palestine. However Rupert (much like his friend David Cameron) believed in giving people a second chance.

Joel Klein became friends with Michael Gove, and in January 2011 Gove invited Klein to speak at his conference about “free schools” in UK education. Klein’s also found time to give an interview to News International’s “Sunday Times” during this visit – and this interview included the dynamic assertion that “It’s easier to prosecute a capital-punishment case in the US than terminate an incompetent teacher.”

But speaking at the inaugral New Schools conference, he was clearer about his aims for education.

“Last, to shake up the system, we must change how we use technology to deliver instruction. (This is what I’m now seeking to do at News Corporation.)… [O]ne of the best things we could do is hire fewer teachers and pay more to the ones we hire. And, as in any other field, technology can help get us there. If you have 5,000 math teachers, many of whom are underperforming, significantly improving overall quality is nearly impossible. But if you get the best math professors in the world—who are great teachers and who deeply understand math—and match them with great software developers, they can create sophisticated interactive programs that engage kids and empower teachers.”

Happily, Michael Gove and David Cameron displayed the foresight to abolish BECTA in 2010, BECTA being the organisation charged with supporting schools in using ICT to ensure that they don’t get ripped off by unscrupulous vendors making over-egged claims about the power of educational software. This was a controversial and unexpected decision, later criticised by the Public Administration Committee, and by experts in secure IT provision.

Parallel to this, Gove had set up the facility for parents to set up “their own” schools, with the support of the fine services offered by the growing private sector. So Joel’s delightful dreams of breaking teacher union power and selling schools expensive software could come true here in the UK, and his friends David Cameron and Michael Gove had managed independently to do the exact things that he needed to move this dream forward – just like in New York!

Sadly, this is not a story with happy ending. In July 2011, it emerged that David’s friend Rebekah, and his former communications director (but still his friend) Andy, were implicated in a major scandal involving bribing police officers and intercepting the voice mail message of terrorism and murder victims. Such was the outcry that Rupert had to fly over to visit his friend David, and Rebekah had to resign. Happily Rupert (and David) knew just the man to solve this difficult problem of Rupert losing lots of money and power: Joel Klein!

Post-script: I am not an investigative journalist, I’m an education blogger. All of this I brought together over one lunch-break in front of Google. If I can do this in an hour and feel reasonably confident in it, how much more could a real journalist do?

This post represents my personal opinions, and not those of my employers, projects, or programmes I am or have been responsible for. This post is available under a CC-BY license.

The AAB Opportunity: Anti-competitive?

I’m way of my depth here, but I was wondering how “average qualification on entry” data relates to some of the other aspects that the amazing UniStats data let me look at. You’ll remember earlier this week I examined the numbers of entrants with 340 points across various subjects, institutions and groupings. This time, I’m going to try to work in similar ways as prospective students might in choosing the “best” place to study (and this excuses my #statsfail I guess too…) 

Just to give us a pool we can get our heads round, I decided to look at Social Sciences subjects only (Groups L and P in the JACS coding, so stuff like Economics, Politics, Sociology, Social Policy, Social Work, Anthropology, Social Geography, Media Studies, Publishing, Journalism). Social Sciences are interesting because they are mostly difficult to link to a specific job, but together constitute our understanding of the underpinning structures of western civilisation, and offer us ideas of what to do when it breaks.

Kids, study Social Sciences. The Social Sciences are way cool.

Anyway, based on the percentage of entrants on 340 UCAS points (AAB or equivalent), here are the top 10 places to do Social Sciences in the UK:

Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL, St Andrews, Warwick, Bath, Edinburgh, Durham, KCL, Exeter.

Pretty much as you’d expect, I guess.

Other measures below do not have complete data, but it is important to remember that this is the data this is out there – this is what entrants are using (or are encouraged to use) to make their choices. If, say, KCL hasn’t returned destination data in this area, why should anyone just assume it will be good. Informed consumers and all that.

Let’s say a student was very keen to be actually working after they graduate, and wanted to choose an institution where many social sciences graduates actually reported that they were “working” after graduation. If we did that, the top 10 places to study Social Sciences in the UK are:

Bath, Hull, Lancaster, Stirling, Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sussex, Reading, Coventry, St Andrews.

Of note in that little lot: Coventry. Only 11% of entrants have 340pts or above. And they are only charging £7,500…

Okay, getting more specific… let’s say you wanted to find work as a Public Service Professional. Sounds like a good thing to be, and according to UniStats is the modal job category destination of Social Science graduates. Your top 10 are:

Reading, Oxford Brookes, Strathclyde, Dundee, Royal Holloway, Bath, Birmingham, Stirling, Goldsmiths’, Lancaster, East Anglia.

So, the University of Bath has turned up in all three lists… otherwise this is pretty diverse recommendations for our student.

Final cut: what about teaching that really inspires?  National Student Survey Q3: “Staff are enthusiastic about what they are teaching.”. If I went to an open day, and met staff filled with passion and enthusiasm for “my” subject – that would sell an institution to me. The top 10 highest percentages of of graduates scoring this aspect as 5, “excellent”:

Winchester, Northumbria, Bath Spa, UC Plymouth, Goldsmiths’, KCL, Robert Gordon, Bournemouth, Royal Holloway, Loughborough, Buckinghamshire

Wow.

So – four different criteria, four different lists of recommendations. And there are thousands upon thousands of other criteria we could have chosen. But only the first is recognised as valid in the university funding method. Students are supposed to aspire to study at institutions in that first list, despite other institutions being “better” depending on your choice of criteria.

This strikes me as anti-competitive. It rewards inputs, not outputs. Would you choose a garage based on the quality of cars they serviced? Or how those cars drove afterwards?

Here’s a summary of the source data to play with on Google Docs, the full deal is yours to mangle over on unistats.

This post represents my personal opinions, and not those of my employers, projects, or programmes I am or have been responsible for. This post is available under a CC-BY license.

The AAB opportunity: which courses and institutions stand to benefit? #hewhitepaper

One of the only real innovations within the recent BIS White Paper on Higher Education was a relaxation of the student number cap for entrants scoring AAB (340 UCAS tariff points) or above. “This should allow greater competition for places on the more selective courses and create the opportunity for more students to go to their first choice institution if that university wishes to take them”, according to paragraph 4.19. But this flat language tells us very little about the kind of courses and the kind of institutions this would affect.

To get a better understanding of this, I’ve been playing with Unistats data, and have identified “areas of study” where the median entry qualification (that’s the “middle” of an imaginary ordered list of all entrant qualifications, stats n00bs) is at 340 UCAS points or above.

This approach showed that 422 institutional offerings across 21 (top level) areas of study in 52 English HE institutions had a median student offer of 340 points (AAB at A level) or above last year. Of these, 25 are medical courses and thus subject to student number controls. The remaining 397 are those most likely to be in a position to take additional students with AAB grades in 2012-13.

222 of these 397 courses are based in Russell Group affiliated universities, 151 in the 1994 group.
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The University of Liverpool has 17 areas of study likely to be able to grow if AAB numbers are unrestricted, Nottingham, Leeds and Birmingham all have 16. Despite this, courses making AAB median offers are overwhelmingly based in the South East of England (74), and London (63).

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(note, the graph above includes medical course related data)

Law (34), Languages (30), Social Studies (29) and Biological Sciences (29) are the areas of study most likely to be able to expand via the increased intake of AAB students.

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So what does this tell us? At the moment, no major surprises. It is, in fact, comforting to see Social Studies subjects likely to benefit from this policy, and pleasing to see a reasonable range of institutions in a position to recruit more students via this policy. But I’m sure there are more stories that can be told, and for that reason the data is available as a google spreadsheet for your analytical pleasure. (note, I only added coding regarding institutional affiliation and region to the courses I was interested in, so I have only shared that. The full data set (minus those two fields) is from Unistats. I used the year 1 figures to examine the most recent set of entrants)

Other interesting lines of enquiry may be:
(i) how satisfied are students with these courses? how does this satisfaction rate compare to all courses in these subject areas?
(ii) what jobs do graduates from these areas of study at these institutions go on to? Are these better or worse paid than jobs done by graduates from these areas of study in other institutions?
(iii) What fees are being charged by these institutions for courses in these areas of study?

This post represents my personal opinions, and not those of my employers, projects, or programmes I am or have been responsible for. This post is available under a CC-BY license.