dkernohan – Page 26 – FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE

#bebettr , @anna_debenham , skills vs literacies and my shady past.

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

Not for the first time, I think @jukesie is on to something. #BeBettr was the bare bones of an event, simply a room to keep the rain off and some interesting people talking, both on the stage and from the floor. No tedious “conference dinner”, no dodgy buffet lunch, no reams of paper, no trailing through the bowels of an expensive venue finding the next break-out room. No wireless to lure you in to email and the backchannels. My suspicion is that we will see a lot more events like this in 2011, and a lot less multi-day quasi-academic conferences for edtech folk. This can only be a good thing.

When I go to a conference I expect to leave with my head spinning, and at least one blog post ‘twixt my teeth. I was especially keen (after very positive reports from #drumbeat) to see Anna Debenham speak and I was not disappointed (here’s her talk on similar themes given to London Web Standards). She’s a young, talented, web professional who feels she has been let down by formal ICT education, and provides example after terrifying example to back up her narrative. Academia and the world of education has simply failed to keep up with the changing face of web technology – teaching children how to lay out a web page using HTML tables, or design a site in PowerPoint helps no one, and although these examples are taken from current GCSE and A-level syllabi it has also been argued (Leslie Jensen-Inman, in A List Apart) that HE is not much better. Anna herself chose not to apply to university based on a poor impression of what courses were focused on, and has instead developed a successful freelance career.

I agree with her diagnosis, but was wary of her solutions – which were that ICT professionals should work to support the development of updated syllabi. I simply don’t think this is sustainable, as web technology and development practice are liable to keep changing at the same dizzying rate as they are currently. Will we still be teaching web design in a world dominated by platform specific applications drawing information down from the cloud, bypassing the web entirely?

My suspicion is that any course that purports to teach you how to do “x” is probably a waste of time if it talks about industry standard practice. It’s not education, it’s training – and thousands of commercial training providers are quite delighted that training becomes out-of-date very quickly as they sip champagne cocktails and cavort in pools of gold coins.

Education isn’t training. Training shows you how, education supports you in understanding why, and in gaining the general principles and aptitudes that allow you to find out how for yourself in the future. (NB although this sounds pretty convincing, please remember that I am essentially a policy wonk that spent too long listening to experts, so I claim no special insights here).

Back in 2003, I taught Music Technology to a group of Foundation year (level 0) students at a University not unadjacent to Pontypridd. I’d graduated from what became a MusTech degree in 2000, and even three years later most of the practices I had learnt had become laughably outmoded. I had learnt how to programme the venerable Akai S1000 sampler as a cutting edge tool, I was now teaching on a platform where a plug-in was available which allowed you to play the S1000s vintage, grungy, low bandwidth samples.

However the students were expecting to learn the latest industry standard tools, and many of them were much, much better than me in using them. Clearly something had to give. So I didn’t teach any tools at all – I pointed students to newsgroups, websites and online tutorials… I showed them how to identify and use reliable advice. I talked about copyright, music publishing, composition, harmony, basic production principles and critical listening. I even did a seminar called “how to play keyboards – in 40 minutes”. I also (wonderfully) branched out of a critical listening session because of questions asking me to explain what a passing reference to “Marxism” meant – the response prompting one keen student to opine that this revolution of the proletariat stuff sounded brilliant and why hadn’t it happened already? Students used the tools they were comfortable with, supported others in developing their own skills and were supported experimenting with new ideas.

But still, when one student asked me if this course he had signed up for enthusiastically would prepare him for a career as a sound engineer, I had to say no. I explained (truthfully) it would make him a better sound engineer, a better musician, and give him the literacies he needed to work in a fast changing field… but he left the course the next week and became a sound engineer in a club in Cardiff. Fair play to him (and I hope he at least took on board the stuff about ear protection!)

We can’t teach skills in HE. We’re not set up to do it, we’re not very good at doing it and we need to stop selling ourselves as if we are. We shouldn’t run courses claiming to make people professional sound engineers, or professional web designers, or professional anything else. We give people the literacies they need in order to pursue these careers (or any other). The subject matter of a degree, I suspect in more cynical moments, is largely a way of getting students to concentrate long enough to swallow the literacies pill.

What does it matter if you studied English Literature, Music Technology, Pharmacy, Modern History, Software Engineering or Horticulture? The important things are that you learnt how to find information yourself, make decisions about it’s validity and usefulness, use the information to gain new knowledge, capability and expertise – write and argue persuasively, use sources and quotation to back yourself up, use technology to better express yourself, and had the confidence in your analysis to stand by it in the face of contrasting opinions. These are the graduate skills that most people end up using – as web designers, sound engineers, sales managers, doctors and business analysts – we need to be a little more open about them at the start of the journey.

January 17, 2011
How to read a funding council grant letter (and how to constrain government financial exposure)

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

“There will, of course, be an overriding need to manage within public expenditure constraints, given that the student finance regime will continue to be subsidised from public funds. This will require developing a new approach to constraining Government financial exposure at the sector level, without restricting student choice of institutions. Lord Browne offered one imaginative solution; we are considering other possibilities and will say more in the White Paper. Meanwhile, we would welcome the Council’s active engagement and ideas for how our policy goal can be achieved in 2012/13 and beyond.”

(Paragraph 16, Grant Letter from BIS to HEFCE, December 2010)

When I first went to work at HEFCE in 2003, my Dad sent me an amazing present: The Complete “Yes, Minister”. I still would (and do) recommend this to anyone working in policy in whatever field or whatever level.

Many of you will have spotted why I thought of Yes Minister when reading the above paragraph of the recent HEFCE grant letter, and may be wondering precisely how far Lord Browne’s stock must have sunk to have an idea described as “imaginative” in a public document! At least they didn’t say “courageous”…

Anyway, for both Sir Humphrey and HEFCE, all the power is in the drafting. I don’t think anyone outside the organisation appreciates quite how much drafting goes on; but in order to understand any of what is published it is vitally important that you understand what isn’t. Something like a funding circular will have at least 10 drafts behind it before it sees the light of day, if you are looking at a policy document, at the very least double that. It’s a very “old school” civil service way of working, and it leads to very strange documents indeed.

I’m increasingly beginning to believe that such documents are not written to be read; rather, they are written to have been written. When you read a HEFCE document, the sound of the words in your head is not important. Imagine it instead as a series of quotes in a news item.

“HEFCE have said that…”

“HEFCE maintain that…”

“HEFCE are in favour of…”

and so on. Thought of like this, every word and phrase count because they can all be used in a variety of contexts. Like an x factor finalist, HEFCE are almost touchingly aware of their own media profile. The individual words and phrases in a funding council document are far more important than the overall sense of the document.

So why am I writing about HEFCE documents in a post about a letter they got from BIS? Well, it’s a pretty open secret that HEFCE will have seen this document a long time before any of us did. They’ve been involved in the drafting of the letter for weeks, if not months. So every word, every phrase, every inference of the letter is in there very, very deliberately. And some of the odder things may be evidence of discussion and compromise between BIS and HEFCE.

Let’s take an example, from paragraph 16, note “we are considering other possibilities and will say more in the White Paper. Meanwhile, we would welcome the Council’s active engagement […]” and compare:

paragraph 3: “We will set out our overall thinking and plans for HE in more detail in a White Paper, and will value your advice in preparing it.”

paragraph 18 “We will say more in the White Paper about our priorities for targeted funding and would welcome the Council’s advice“

At first glance, these three quotes seem to be saying the same thing. BIS are writing a White Paper, they would like HEFCE’s input. But if you look deeper, there is more in there.

Paragraphs 3 and 18 use the “we will say more in the White Paper” construction. This implies that HEFCE will be told more about the governments plans for those particular areas of policy in the White Paper, and that in the meantime they will be asked for advice when needed. Given that we are expecting a White Paper in January you would hope that BIS have already sought all or most of the advice they need from HEFCE by this point. But the words are important – BIS are actively “setting out their thinking”, HEFCE are passively giving “advice”.

In paragraph 16 both participants are actively engaged, HEFCE emphatically so! This is the paragraph regarding how to constrain the overall government cash exposure to a market-based system. Clearly, BIS are much keener to get advice here, quite possibly because they haven’t got a clue how they are going to do it. So, this particular hot potato has landed in HEFCE’s court, as Jim Hacker may have said.

But Government departments don’t ask quangos for advice unless they are pretty sure what they want to hear. What other clues are in paragraph 16?

“There will, of course, be an overriding need to manage within public expenditure constraints, given that the student finance regime will continue to be subsidised from public funds. This will require developing a new approach to constraining Government financial exposure at the sector level, without restricting student choice of institutions”

Notice what is not being said here: student numbers. The government can’t afford to be seen to be calling for constraints on student numbers – the whole idea of the market system is to let the market decide the size and shape of the sector. So we get the euphemistic “constraining Government financial exposure”, with a little extra tag on the end making sure we know that this isn’t restricting student choice (I’ll come back to “of institutions” presently).

There would only really be one way of doing this… setting an upper limit to the total government cash commitment to HE, and bringing in some kind of a system to keep spending under this cap.

Here’s one way of constructing such a system (which won’t work): allocate funding to institutions in respect of students sequentially from the cheapest to the most expensive, firstly for “core” numbers (based on current intake) and then for “additional” numbers (new intake)

So if you charge lower fees you are more likely to get all the students that you want to enroll, if you have more expensive courses may be subject to not getting all of the students they’d like. The positive side effect of this is that it would drive prices down, the negative would be the perception that the most able students (applying to “the best”/most expensive) universities) would be less likely to get places than students with less good A-level grades. It’s pretty rough, but you could sort it out into something tidier fairly easily, maybe adding regional or subject elements.

[I’ll work this out further in future blog posts if anyone would be interested. If HEFCE are interested, I’ll work this out in a research report for £50,000 :-)]

But “of institutions” is the killer – one of the most out-of-place aspects of the Browne Report was the idea that no institution should go out of business… even though everything else in the report seems designed to make exactly this happen. HEFCE even got the promise of a small budget to prevent this from happening (“The Council will have powers to provide targeted funding to prevent institutional failure from taking place“, Browne, p47) which greatly upset the poor darlings as they felt they were doing an excellent job of this anyway (they are, as it happens). So HEFCE, is here, for the first time, instructed to work against the effects of the shiny new market – not to support wider subject choice, or a choice of mode of delivery, but to protect actual institutions.

At least some heartening news for an increasingly bleak midwinder.

[This is my last post this year, I’d like to end by saying thanks all for reading, commenting, retweeting and disagreeing, so:

“I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice in government service as we approach the terminal period of the year — calendar, of course, not financial — in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One — and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation — indeed confidence — indeed one might go so far as to say hope — that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant factors have been taken into consideration, susceptible to being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having been by no means unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and, in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect to have been significantly higher than the general average.”

Thanks, Sir Humphrey]

December 21, 2010
My favourite part of the HEFCE teaching funding method, and how screwed we are if we lose it

This post represents my personal opinions only, and not those of my employer, or of programmes or projects I am responsible for. It is made available under a CC0 (Public Domain) license.

The current HEFCE funding model has a number of quite marvellous features which I would be happy to expound upon at great length, but my personal favourite must be the “tolerance band”.

This is technically defined as an allowance for the difference between the standard resource (the funding available for the number of students enrolled on particular courses that the institution has indicated to HEFCE each year) and the assumed resource (which is the funding available for the students that have actually enrolled on particular courses each year). Because HEFCE is wise and noble it allows a 5% difference either way between these amounts before it starts either clawing back funds or reducing student numbers for the following year.

This 10% band of tolerance is the thing that keeps institutions stable. It allows for fluctuations in student numbers, and permits an institution to receive an expected amount of funding every year, allowing for an accurate budget and long term planning.

Under the new funding model, the majority of the financial support (80%+) that used to come from HEFCE will come from a new organisation, Student Finance. This allocates funds based directly on student choice, and – crucially – does not include a compensatory function. So the stability of funding levels, year-on-year, is lost.

The graph above shows what would happen if the fluctuations in student number are uncompensated, assuming the rate of fluctuation linked to student choice remains similar to what we see currently. Already, you can see that a reliable level of funding is not possible, and that an institution must take a lower level of funding as it’s basis for budgeting.

But, of course, other factors come in to play in a purer market, the most significant of these being the enhanced importance of marketing and communications for institutions. Though marketing can offer great recruitment gains if done well, it must be remembered that there are multiple actors in the market, all of which will be engineering their own enhancements. You could imagine one-year-only cut-price deals, collusion and horse-trading, marketing “blitzes” on priority areas. (There’s a whole other post coming on how cool it is going to be to work in university marketing over the next few years.)

So something with much higher peaks and deeper troughs would be expected, meaning that the “base” level of institutional resource is substantially lower, and that the institution must be capable of quickly scaling particular courses substantially up or down depending on recruitment.

This is a similar scenario to seasonal changes for demand in manufacturing, and manufacturing companies have responded to these pressures in one main way.

The casualisation of labour.

Rather than keep enough staff permanently on their books to meet peak demand, it is more likely that a factory would keep only the staff that they would need for periods of low demand, and draw on a pool of casualised (short-term contract, hourly pay, semi-skilled or unskilled) labour to cope with peaks.

Universities are already starting to do the same thing. Staff on “atypical contracts” (a lovely HESA euphemism) already make up more than a third of university staff – and return accuracy for this category of staff is notably poor – it is likely to be far, far higher.

The new model of funding only makes this situation for staff more likely. It may be that the age of the “career academic”, of tenure and of teaching plus research contracts is dead.

It is possible that this is simply an unintended consequence of a policy that has been notoriously poorly conceived and understood. But (and I am moving into tin foil hat territory here) we have already seen how the new model costs the taxpayer more than it saves, adds a significant extra burden to students, and (at best) offers institutions a similar amount of funding to what they get currently. So what is it for?

Is it this? A straight-ahead attack on the academic profession? A new world of casual, teaching-only, HE tutors, juggling multiple short-term contracts just to stay afloat? I dunno. But if it quacks like a duck…

December 16, 2010
An open letter to David Cameron.

The views expressed below are either my own, or exaggerated for the purpose of my argument. They are not the views of my employer, or of any projects or programmes I have responsibility for. This text is available under a CC0 (Public Domain) license.

>Dear David,

You may wonder why I’m writing to you, why I’m not bothering Nick Clegg like every other student and academic in the country seems to be. Surely I don’t think I can appeal to your better nature, or sense of social justice?

Well the thing is, I can kind of understand where you are coming from. Primarily, you want to save money to reduce the deficit. It’s likely you also want to bribe the vice-chancellors of famous universities to take the fee increase and not care about anything else, and let the private sector compete directly with publicly funded provision. You pretty obviously couldn’t care less about lecturers or students – I comprehend that position, even though I (obviously) disagree with you.

>With Nick – bless him and his little hangdog face and the dead eyes – I don’t know what he wants, other than (apparently) to lose his seat in 2015. So I can’t make a cogent argument to him and have any idea of how he’ll respond to it. He’s not making any sense at the moment, so I can’t use sense to argue with him.

Anyway, David, this reform of the funding of Higher Education thing. You’ve always been keen to link it to deficit and debt reduction. On 11 November 2010, in China, you said (during an interview on student fees where you condemned students doing to CCHQ what the Bullingdon Club have done to countless Oxfordshire restaurants):

“I think the will of the public was expressed at the time of the election when they rejected debt and deficit and putting off these difficult decisions under Labour, and they chose a new approach and we’ve got to be true to that and stick to that“

I want to hold you to that promise. To work to reduce the deficit. I’d like you to comment on my new proposal for higher education funding that will save you at least £5bn within this parliament on what you are currently proposing. Remembering the commitment of your Chancellor to “eliminate the bulk of the structural current budget deficit over a parliament” (24 Feb 2010).

The proposal is this: leave things exactly how they are. Don’t change anything.

And that’s at least an extra £5bn in the coffers, helping you hit your deficit target. It also has the pleasing side effects of keeping students and academic staff happy, making the university sector more sustainable, offering them fiancial stability and ending nearly a month of civil unrest. But forget about all that hoodie-hugging liberal stuff (you already have? excellent.) – it saves the country money. Keep hold of that idea.

You’ve linked the new proposals to the deficit so often you may be in danger of starting to believe your own spin. But in retreating from your policy you would be following the advice of the independent Office for Budgetary Responsibility, who note:

“For the November forecast the OBR has scrutinised and certified estimates of the additional loans [the loans in respect of increased student fees] that have been produced by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) for England. As the table shows, the impact on the CGNCR [Central Government Net Cash Requirement] is estimated to reach £5.6 billion by 2015-16, cumulatively adding £13 billion to PSND [Public Sector Net Debt] over the forecast period.” (pp123-124, in “Box 4.3”)

The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) agree that:

These are my personal opinions and not those of my employer, or the programmes and projects I am responsible for. The following is available under a CC-BY-SA license.

This is a particularly grim and cheerless December for Higher Education in the UK, I hope you will forgive me a brief moment of levity and Christmas cheer.

An OER Christmas Carol (and 9 Lessons)

“The VLE was dead”: to begin with. There was no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of its burial was signed by James Clay and Co at ALT-C 2009. The old VLE was as dead as a doornail.

I’d never painted out the Old VLE’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the repository deposit interface. Some people called it the VLE, some people called it the Learning Object repository – ’twas all the same to me.

Once upon a time – of all the good days of the year, on Christmas Eve, I sat busy at my desk. I was counting up the number of learning materials in the repository, scowling at the list of figures as they steadfastly refused to add up to the required 360 credits. And unless we could reach that magical number by the end of term, the dastardly Lord Browne would call in his debts, and the Old Repository would be as dead as the Old VLE.

“Merry Christmas, repository manager, and God save you!” called my assistant through the door I had left open to keep an eye on her as she wrote the final and completion reports.

“Bah!” I said. “Humbug!”

“Christmas – a humbug? returned my assistant gaily. “You don’t mean that, I am sure”.

“I do,” I said. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? With Lord Browne’s judgement due tomorrow you will be poor enough.”

My assistant left the room prudently, without an angry word. And as the hum of our ancient RAID array filled the void, I felt myself drift towards a strange and troubled sleep. Was I indeed asleep, or awake, or in some state between the two… as I picked up a case study I had previously discarded, and began to read the words on the last piece of yellowing recycled paper…

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Conclusions and Recommendations

1. Check the licence carefully.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” 2 Timothy 3:16

” I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.” Revelation 22:18-19

It took some effort to find the license(s) for the Bible, as they are presented in a non-standard format, and are split between two sections of the material. What we appear to have is an attribution license, with specific authorisation for use in an educational context, alongside a “no derivatives” clause, which goes into particular and alarming detail regarding the penalties for a breach of the license terms.

Clearly under the terms of this license the Revelation of St John of Patmos should never be included in an aggregation of material, or indeed translated. However the fact that this is actually what has happened suggests that the terms of this license were not clearly understood at the AD 397 Council of Carthage.

Seeing the Bible as an aggregation also gives us an issue regarding the Second Epistle of St Paul to Timothy – what did it mean by “all scripture”? Was the apostle referring to the present collection (as codified nearly 350 after the accepted date of composition), a specific class of document marked as “scripture” (there isn’t anything in Dublin Core), or something else entirely? Unclear wording of license terms has always caused issues for end users, but seldom of this magnitude.

Our conclusions here must be that “no derivatives” licences effectively must be broken in order to allow resources to be reused in any way, and that other licenses must be clear about the work that is being referred to.

2. Building in openness from the start is easier than repurposing existing materials.

” A voice of one calling:
In the wilderness prepare
the way for the LORD;
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.” Isaiah 40:3-4

Preparation is everything in open release. Rather than have the Lord do all this tedious checking of individual components, a project manager by the name of John was engaged to clear the relevant resources. However, this did not end well as he subsequently lost his life in a bizarre ritualistic killing in a Jerusalem nightclub, to which royal links have been made. The resultant lack of preparation may have been linked to later difficulties regarding the engagement of senior stakeholders.

3. Don’t ask too for much from metadata.

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.” Luke 2:1-3

This is a classic example of the way in which repository managers can fail to appreciate the inconvenience that may be caused to depositors by an emphasis on the quality of metadata. A repository manager several steps removed from the user community chose to arrange records by their provenance, which meant that materials had to be returned to their original point of creation. This caused an enormous strain on infrastructure and storage systems, and brought the entire area to a grinding halt at the busiest time of year. We would conclude that it is essential that those with responsibility for repositories balance the user experience with the need for accurate data.

4. Authorship and ownership are different concepts.

“This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.” Matthew 1:18-19

Here, an academic (Joseph) claimed ownership of a resource he had no part in creating, for selfless political reasons. Laudable as such an action is, this mis-attribution subsequently caused problems in assessing the provenance of the resource when it was re-used. It is important that resources are attributed to both the author, and the body claiming ownership of the work.

5. Content quality is more important than reputation

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times.” Micah 5:2

Despite the generally low academic standing of the then Bethlehem University College (now the University of North Jerusalem) and reports of academics being housed in conditions suitable only for livestock, some very high quality resources have been released. Increasingly in an OER world, it is the quality of material, rather than its provenance, that is seen as important.

6. Make intelligent use of marketing.

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. “ Luke 2:8-9

This is one of a pair of useful examples of dissemination practice drawn from this case study. Here, a great effort has been made to draw people to visit the resources, including celebrity endorsement and son-et-lumiere. However we must compare the probable expense of this marketing with its end results, as only a small number of shepherds actually visited the site in question. It appears wasteful to go to the expense of engaging the Angel of the Lord, a host of angels singing, and covering associated AV and event management costs in order to attract so few users. Better use could have been made of this marketing opportunity.

7. Make open content visible and discoverable.

” After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” Matthew 2:1-2

Here, a much better example of marketing used a simple tag to draw international users to resources. Despite this, the users in question needed to ask a number of contacts in the Jerusalem area for further information, suggesting that the specific resource was not, after all, easy to find. The fact that the international visitors initially went to Jerusalem rather than Bethlehem may point to an underlying issue with Bethlehem’s reputation.

On finding the resource, the visitors were startled to see the low quality of the infrastructure, but recognised the quality of the resource and left a substantial endowment. There is no audit trail regarding the use of this endowment, which we ascribe to the poor overall standard of documentation.

8. Open, informal, learning is amazing

“Not until halfway through the festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?” John 7: 14-15

There is real evidence presented here of the use of OER in informal learning, and the reputational benefits of informal learning. A community of scholars was initially incredulous, but eventually convinced by the quality of work produced. However, this led eventually to jealously and animosity from institutional managers, and serious problems faced in the later career of the academic in question. Had APEL been available within the Jewish Temple system then history could have been very different – independent learners often face difficulties in demonstrating their accomplishments.

9. Openness is (eventually) inevitable

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” Luke 8:17

Whereas the documentation suggests that the LORD will sit in judgement over all on a fiery throne, until that (often posponed) QA event occurs quality assurance has to be carried out by peers. There are currently two incompatible systems in place, one using a set of accredited experts and the other relying more on the layity offering advice and guidance. Simply in terms of scale the latter is more resilient, the former representing a huge overhead. Both systems suffer from disagreement and multiple interpretations of guidance documents – the hierarchical system is able to rule on these issues (though this is often criticised as ignoring the user voice), whereas the folksonomic sysem tends to fragment into competing subsystems. We await with interest the coming of the quality assurance manager, and hope that earlier predictions of this causing enormous upheaval, changes to working practices, war, famine, pestilence, death and water purity issues are overstated.

As all materials will be openly available at this point, it makes sense to recommend that users prepare for openness as soon as possible…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

… rubbing my eyes, I awoke to find myself in my office, but not my office – a warm and bright place, filled with cheer and light and Christmas joy. My flushed and delighted-looking assistant pressed a glass of mulled wine into my hand. I sipped and yawned as she babbled…

“… so I put out a special request on the ALL-STAFF mailing list, and on the intranet, and on twitter with the #ukoer tag… so many people have been coming in and dropping off materials… images, text, video, audio, even SCORN-compliant learning objects… thank you!” – she smiled at the Dean of Philosophy who had put a DVD filled with correctly tagged reading lists on the pile – “… and everyone has really pulled together for the sake of OER…cheers!” – an august and bearded Professor of Applied Linguistics toasted us as he uploaded the last of his prized collection of dialect recordings to the repository – “… and look, here comes the music department…”

I heard a band playing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and before I knew it, I was dancing in a circle, singing, and beaming at everyone in the candlelight. I’d never felt so happy and at peace… until a black-gloved hand touched my shoulder.

“I see you are within reach of your end of year target,” purred Lord Browne in a dark, oily voice. “Allow me to contribute.”, and yes – his Report, his precious Report so written about and so feared – was disaggregated and rendered into granular objects ready for deposit. “Congratulations!”

“God bless you, you crazy old open learning repository” yelled the Academic Registrar, as around us dancers circled and church bells rang louder than the cheers of what appeared to be the whole body of staff and students. “Merry Christmas, every one of us!”.

“Till auld aquaintence be forgot, and never brought to mind…” we sang lustily, as a tiny ringing bell indicated another successful deposit…

(… and far above us, in CETIS, Wilbert Kraan had finally got his wings.)

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ONE AND ALL, AND THE BEST OF LUCK FOR THE NEW YEAR.

blogging on blogging on #ukoer

The opinions expressed within this blog post are my own, and not those of my employer, or of projects or programmes I am responsible for. This post is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

For the purposes of future re-enactments of this post, I would like to confirm that all of the bloggers mentioned here were at all times dressed in the traditional blogger attire of red cape and goggles and that all posts linked to were (to the best of my knowledge) made from high-altitude hot air balloons.

Three people said to me yesterday that they were finding the current rush of ideological commentary on OER difficult or impossible to keep up with. So, I’m going to try to do an occasional series of these posts to help people keep up. I also note that blogging about blogging is inherently naff. So I’m cringing slightly as I write this.

I’d like to emphasise that it is not essential to follow any of the wider conversations around OER to be a part of OER as a movement. People release OER for all kinds of reasons, from a simple desire to give knowledge and education to the world, to a need to better market what their institution offers to students, to a will to destabilise the current structures of power around intellectual capital. What I love about OER is that it allows all of these reasons to co-exist, whilst still uniting everyone in a common cause of getting learning materials out there in some way that allows people to make use of them.

At the moment, there is a bit of an argument going on between David Wiley and Stephen Downes, both edublogging superstars of some renown. As I understand it, Downes sees Creative Commons as essentially a way of shoring up the idea of copyright and as potentially harmful to a longer term goal of reforming intellectual property. But Wiley is arguing that Creative Commons is a necessary fix to copyright, and enables us to be a lot of things that we could not otherwise do. And as every workaround to a system is a reason to re-examine the system, it is actually doing the copyright reform agenda a lot of good.

But then Joss Winn chips in (as a comment on Wiley’s post) to suggest that certain forms of Creative Commons do in fact shore up an existing system of the exploitation of intellectual capital. He prefers the “copyleft” (share-alike) licenses, and the public domain (CC0) licenses, as he feels these successfully negate the intrinsic capital value placed on intellectual and cultural works. What Winn wants (and I’m just inferring here, only Winn can say what he really wants… in fact I think he’d admit that he’s not worked it out yet) is a system where people are not valued solely for what they have produced or can produce – which would require the effective abolition of private property. To say that this is outside of the political mainstream is maybe to state the obvious… it’s certainly an attractive idea, but as a programme manager how can I help but think about process and implementation 😉

It’s maybe useful for the slightly interested reader to think about where they stand as regard the purpose of Creative Commons licensing and what they (personally) hope to achieve by it. In Higher and Further Education, we do need to be wary of uncritical action, and this kind of reflection can be very useful. But there are always going to be people that disagree with your understanding, which is what makes this an (academically as well as practically) interesting field.

David Wiley (where does he find the time?) has also been arguing with Steve Carson, a key player in the OpenCourseWare Consortium and in MIT OCW (which, it could be argued, is the birthplace of the modern OER movement). Carson has been digging through a lot of qualitative data he has built up over the years around the benefits that academics and students involved in the use of OER, and has provided an interesting list of commonly observed benefits. Wiley’s point is that these benefits are not predicated on the “openness” of the materials, and the same benefits could have been realised (he argues) with the copyrighted release thus avoiding what he cites as the additional expense of preparing materials for open release.

Exercise for the reader – does Wiley contradict himself between his position defined against Downes and his position defined against Carson? Explain, with examples, your answer. (8 marks)

Now, within UKOER we can actually answer Wiley, by noting that we have found that the additional costs of open release only exist where we attempt to “open” existing materials. Where material is designed by academics with open release in mind, the release itself is trivial. And MIT (notably) has a model entirely based on the redevelopment of materials centrally by the institution rather than engaging academic staff with the openness agenda – which wouldn’t have even got you funded at UKOER phase 1. But what Wiley is doing is arguing as a way of advancing our understanding. As he says himself:

“Let me be clear: I don’t want OCW to be unsuccessful. I want openness and transparency to become absolutely ubiquitous throughout formal education. I’m not trying to tear down MIT OCW or any other OCW initiative (I’ve been involved in a couple myself). I’m just trying to be the little child who asks a naive question about the emperor’s new outfit: Why are we investing so much in the use of open licenses if open licenses don’t enable the benefits we care most about? And, If open licenses don’t enable the benefits we care most about, what benefits do they enable? Are those secondary benefits worth the very significant investment we’re making in them?”

So the questions he is raising here are, again, about the benefits of open release and our reasons for being involved in it. You’ll see this in a number of posts which are attempting to advance OER both as a self-aware movement and as an emerging academic field. And in many ways the question can never be answered with so many different reasons for being involved co-existing.

Is OER doing what you want it to do? That is the single question all of this discussion and political theorising is asking. And your answer to that is as valuable and as valid as anyone elses.

November 24, 2010

Browne and beyond: three key assumptions critiqued

These are my views and not those of my employer, or of projects and programmes I am responsible for. This post is available under a creative commons CCzero license and I would prefer it to be used without attribution.

Today, in parliament, David Willets announced the coalition plans for higher education funding. As expected, it draws heavily on the Browne Review – with the main changes being a hard cap set at £9,000 for institutions committed to widening participation (at the moment, all of them) and £6,000 otherwise. Repayment rules have been tweaked, , there’s additional spending (more progressive) on student support, and additional requirements for funding and support for widening participation. It’s OK though, as it offers a “better deal for students” apparently.

But the plans still rely on three big assumptions that, to me, seem wrong-headed.

1. We need to cut spending on Higher Education to reduce the big scary deficit
Two arguments here (if you ignore the Nobel Laureates arguing that the big scary deficit isn’t something we should be be basing policy decisions on), firstly HEFCE’s own figures suggest that for every £1 spent on Higher Education, the economy gains £3 of added value, which you may want if you were trying to cut a deficit. And even this doesn’t take into account the long term benefit of a workforce with critical thinking skills. Return on Investment calculations are notoriously dodgy, but investment in HE is clearly investment in the education and skills of the national workforce.

Secondly a number of people, most notably 2me2you2me and LeftFootForward have suggested that implementing Browne will cost more than the current model – Margot James MP appeared to agree with this analysis (though as a positive point in favour of Browne) in the House of Commons. Due to the fact that fees are paid by government funds which are not recouped substantially until after graduation, assuming that most institutions will do as they did in 2004 and charge the maximum allowable fees, and taking into account the enhanced student support sweeteners (Willets himself admitting that £28 in every £100 are not expected to be recouped) this is likely to be broadly true at least for this parliament.

Sadly the HEFCE teaching funding model is not properly documented in the public domain, unless this information is released we can’t properly model the differences. But both blogs cited above appear at headline level to have used a fair set of working assumptions.

2. Student choice based on price will lead to efficiencies and drive up quality
This is really a broader question about the ways in which free markets work, and there is a lot of observational and theoretical writing that points in both directions. At the very least, their should be an admission that a number of critiques of this model of driving efficiency exist, and that what is being proposed includes a great deal of regulation and intervention in the activities of autonomous market players. I’m not about to launch into a critique of the market in front of so many people who could do so better than me.

It is also worth pointing out that prospective students already have a choice, based on subject of study, academic reputation, locality and environment, and their own academic abilities. It is not clear exactly how adding a further factor, cost, makes this choice more valid. Teaching funding already follows student intake, though in a balanced and compensated way thanks to central oversight of this. Indeed, it could be argued that the tendency of markets to bring about supplier consolidation and monopolies would actually harm student choice long-term.

A market adds so many weaknesses to the system – it allows institutions to fail, not as educators, but as businesses. It attempts to encourage low-cost, low-quality models of education for those who cannot afford the premiums. It pressures institutions not to make long term plans about staffing or material investment. Of course, as a fan of evidence based policy, I’ll admit that we can’t know any of this for certain without testing these assumptions. And were the increased fees not simply a substitute for a cut in HEFCE resources, we could maybe do this.

But fundamentally, it allows student choice to dictate the flow of funds within the market. To generalise, 18-year-olds are rubbish about knowing what they want to study. I went to university at 18 dead set on being a pharmacist. After a year of that, I realised that Pharmacy wasn’t for me, and switched to English Literature and Performing Arts. Based on the transferable skills I learnt in that course, I now work in IT and Administration, after spells in Education and Public Policy. I know there are people who set out to do a job, did a course and then got the job. But they are in the minority. I work with a biologist, a computer programmer, a philosopher, an agriculturalist, several librarians, a historian… all managed by a geological engineer. In jobs outside of subject specialisms this is the norm. It’s the transferable skills – research, rhetoric, writing – that makes graduates valuable, in most cases the subject of study is just an interesting way in to gaining these skills.

3. The existing funding model is not fit for purpose
According to HESA in 2008-9 the Higher Education sector in the UK enjoyed a total income of £25.3bn, and made expenditure of £24.9bn. It taught 2,396,050 students (the largest population of students ever recorded, and a student body more than twice the total population of Birmingham.) A business model which makes a profit whilst attracting a record number of customers is not a failing business model. I’m leaving aside why anyone would ever want to judge an education system in these terms, I’m just saying that if you want to, those are the numbers.

Admitting more students is going to require more investment, both on a year-on-year basis and reliable long-term investment in infrastructure and capacity. If the government wants more people to access HE, and they want this access to come from parts of society that have previously have not had access, then it is going to require investment by the the state. The proposals recognise this, with £150bn pounds of additional funding in this area. But rather than developing new funding channels, why not just support the cost of teaching by the state?

In conclusion

Within the Bullingdonian ideology, you are not allowed to critique policy unless you have a fully worked out alternative, Willets again pushed the point today – Labour had “no costed plans”.

I’ve got one, it’s called “sticking with the status quo for the moment.”

The status quo is not perfect, but it works well enough to deliver a world-class HE sector. It needs work, but the work that needs doing moves in the opposite direction to the current plans… removing elements of market driven competition rather than adding more. There are more detailed critiques emerging – for instance by the University of Utopia – but we need to give them time to fully emerge.

We’ve plenty of time to think about these changes too – there’s no crisis in HE funding, despite what we are encouraged to believe. So lets not rush into half-baked policy with serious long-term consequences. We can’t go on like this.

November 3, 2010

The OER spin doctor on the wheels of steel.

These are my views and not those of my employer, or of projects and programmes I am responsible for. This post is available under a creative commons CC-BY license.

As @josswinn frequently reminds me, OER is political, in terms in how it stands both within and against the prevailing ethos of marketised education, and in the way it is (at heart) a personal choice with wider political ramifications, taking in debates about work and labour, intellectual property and ownership, and the nature and purpose of the institution of academia.

As an essentially transformative political idea, it needs help to gain ground in areas where diametrically opposed opinions have long held sway. I’ve been wondering if we couldn’t be doing a better job of getting our key messages across using a well chosen metaphor in the grand political spin-doctor style.

Our Coalition overlords provide an awesome example of what I am looking for – how many times have you heard, in the context of the national debt, the UK compared to a poorly managed household budget, where belts have to be tightened? Hundreds, thousands? It works because it connects something theoretical and abstract with something real and concrete which many of us will have experienced.

It models a response in a new situation from a response to an old one.

However metaphors work both ways. You could argue that this choice of metaphor tells us more about the background of Gideon Osborne and colleagues, multi-millionaires who have never had a mortgage, much less a personal cash-flow problem. And you’d maybe suggest that a family having difficulty paying a debt may look to earn more money, or restructure their loan, rather than going without food and clothes.

There’s a whole other blog post to be written about how wrongheaded and dangerous this concept is as applied to this situation. But despite this, a cursory glance at any set of comments on a Guardian editorial, or at Gideon’s dire opening to his CSR statement suggest that it has had and continues to have a huge effect in shaping public opinion, and public responses.

The situation around the (re)use of OER in formal is slightly more obscure. What common experience do we have which models a useful response to OER by a teacher or lecturer?

Breaking it down, do we need to demonstrate that:

* reuse is preferable to the creation of new content?, or
* reuse is a part of the creation of new content?
* reuse is valuable because of the nature of the content, not the cultural frame of references?
* reuse saves time and/or money?
* reuse adds value to existing practice?

The CSAP OER team compared sharing and using OER to sharing and using recipes in cooking in a recent blog post, other responses to a request I made on twitter last week have included:

The Roman Catholic Church(?), ebay ; freecycle; comedy (parody / mimicry), music/theatre/dance, the use of the reference break in hip hop (the funky drummer), environment/energy areas, cooking, museums/ libraries (providing access to limited/rare things); (unhelpfully) teaching, mash ups (both in the hip-hop and web app senses), coding, books, crosswords, videogames (in jokes / references), boardgame design….

(hat-tips to the PatLockely/xpert_project mindmeld, deburca, BasCordewener and especially KavuBob)

There’s some great (and very off-the-wall!) suggestions in there, but – to me – nothing that really captures what we hope OER reuse could be. Coding, the idea of code reuse being better than starting from scratch and the existence of stuff like Google Code, perhaps came closest – but is hardly mainstream to most academic staff. Music is another interesting idea, especially the use of famous sounds and loops (gratuitous link to what may well be my favourite website ever, mid-nineties HTML tables and all) – but how much of this is the musician remembering how a particular sound or style makes them feel in another context.

So much of cultural reuse is about the associations and resonances that a particular artefact has within popular imagination. I remember being in equal parts distressed and cynically impressed when I first came across DJ Yoda, cutting and pasting enough of any given genre or meme to allow an audience to recognise and respond to it, but without ever being anything other than a stream of references without a meaning. But OER isn’t about the greatest hits of teachers, I see it more as an educational pandora, where (unexpectedly) you find just the right thing…

The idea of “teacher as DJ” has been popular for a while, using images of bringing in materials from various sources to keep a thematic flow going. It’s perhaps the closest we have come, but it may take a few more years in western culture before the DJ and the musician are seen as equally creative (though I’d argue the case for people like DJ Shadow as being worth several thousand limp-wristed indie kids in the creativity stakes). And are DJs not more concerned with entertaining their audience than in getting them to “understand” what they are playing?

“Teacher as DJ” says a lot about us too – the DJ is (very much) the “sage on the stage”, setting the mood, introducing themes, calling for responses. The audience have little control over the experience, except to walk out in disgust. And the DJ (in popular imagination) has that insouciant air of unstudied cool that commands attention and respect without attempting to earn it. Is this how we see ourselves?

But somewhere out there is *the* killer OER metaphor, which would allow us to explain to people that “it’s just like x”, where x is a situation that prompts desirable outcome “y”: which is a close analog to our desirable OER outcome reaction. Thoughts?

October 28, 2010

Whose university? why? pt 3

Ahead of the Browne Review, and the associated storm of nonsense in the national press, I’ve been getting very interested in the nature of the university, and how this has changed over time. With the fees issue, the influx of private institutions into the UK and cuts to research funding, we are going to be living through some great upheavals. I think it is important to show that the virtual stasis within the system between 1992 and 2004, and from 2004 onwards, has been an anomaly, and that change is embedded into the DNA of the institutions we work for. This is part 3 of a short series of blog posts: this post focuses the future, the previous post was on present day funding pressures, the first focused on the history of state funding for the university system.

These are my views and not those of my employer, or of projects and programmes I am responsible for. This post is available under a creative commons CC-BY license.

As I write, we are mere hours away from the launch of the Browne Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance and the first whir of of the fearful machine that will change the face of higher learning.

This is the same machine that has turned our private sector into the behemoth that we placate with government bailouts and job cuts, and protect or mollify with new laws and new crimes. The machine that turned friendship and trust – ideas and beauty – into one man getting richer as other toil.

And this is it. We’ve reached the end of the profit margin. We can patch up the business models, flutter life into the stock certificates, pump the corpse of commerce with tainted coins and bills clawed from the hands of the exploited masses. We’ve no oil, no energy, no growth. The crops are dying, the seas are dying. The stories that we tell ourselves – the American dream, the myth of the self-made man, the benevolence of the market, the meritocracy, the idea of perpetual growth – they never were true, and we always knew it. But now even the leaders can only parody the mechanisms of belief.

Or to put it another way – we are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death. (& part 2)

If we have a last hope – is it too late to talk about hope? – it is our own ability to understand, to create, to synthesise and to draw together. The first academic was a man drawing patterns in the sand. And we all did it, we drew patterns, connections, network diagrams… we were nodes in the lattice of learning, explaining as we created, weaving the strands together.

And we are the only ones that truly understand this machine that is coming for us. In many ways we built it.

There are contradictions, flaws, logical errors. Who better than we to point these out? Even in the past week we’ve seen the hot ice and wondrous strange snow of cuts that cost money, price rises that bring in nothing, market fundamentalism that leads to Sir Green’s call for the Government to exploit and twist the so-called natural and immutable market forces to benefit itself.

In a world where jobs and income are in danger we are urged to take on more debt.

In two major reports, days apart, we are called upon to collaborate and compete, monopolise and diversify, act local and buy global. There’s no rationale here… they’re as scared as we are.

More so, because they are cowering not because of what they are about to destroy or what is already falling around their ears, but because they know that we can and will hold their ideas to account and that those ideas will be found lacking.

Lacking in a logical sense, incoherent, self-contradictory, divorced from the very cause and effect that they claim we need to “get real” and understand.
And lacking in a spiritual sense, without a dream, a vision, an inspiration, a sense of any purpose beyond one number rising as another falls. They show us a balance sheet, we show them the stars… and the gods, and the artists, and the dreamers dreaming.

We hold the very secrets of the universe in the University, a treasure beyond value, and we don’t sell them, we share them.

Our Arcadian islands have gotten tarnished over the years. Our own “big society” of scholars and seekers of truth has taken in those who can advise us how to play their game (as if we couldn’t if we wanted to). We have our own balance sheets now too, our own income/outgoings, shortfalls and profits. We even mutilate ourselves to fit their image – a department lost here, a lab there, a few thousand books and journals tipped into the great stack. Good people held back because they care more about truth than money and the corporate way.

The last thing we want is to claim that we can play that squalid game better. Our argument is that the game is wrong, the whole game, and if anyone can find another one it’s us. Think of all the things we do that isn’t make money… we invent, we reappraise, we reuse; we expose young people to worlds and ideas they never knew existed. We’re a community, and we are part of other communities. And we dream, the last dreamers in a world that has forgotten how. But they’ll be needing us, if not now then soon.

Departments that close, institutions that fold. They won’t come back. They say that we shouldn’t hand our children debt, but let’s at least have something to hand on that we are proud of. Or the stories we’ll be telling them of learning for all and the life of the mind will be of a land as far away from their daily experiences as fairytales. And I want some new stories, some better stories, to tell my son.

This post owes a debt to some of the amazing writing around the Dark Mountain project, and to Joss Winn, Richard Hall, Dave White, Adam Cooper, Rob Pearce, Lou McGill, Brian Lamb, Amber Thomas and everyone else I’ve agreed and disagreed with over the past few months.

This is the end of a series, and as once again I’m reminded by some it’s not my job to look at the big pictures, it might end up being the end of my contributions to these conversations. I hope not though, but anyway thank you all for the words of encouragement and support. And let’s hope I’m back later this week to go over Browne in more depth.

October 11, 2010

An #ukoer Christmas Carol (and 9 Lessons)

blogging on blogging on #ukoer

The death of the university? – a video for #cetis10

Browne and beyond: three key assumptions critiqued

The OER spin doctor on the wheels of steel.

Whose university? why? pt 3

Author: dkernohan