It’s coincidental that I was also in the process of updating many of these resources with Creative Commons (CC) licences. As part of the process, I created a rights register, basically a combination of a spreadsheet recording all the resources and their copyright holders,  and copies of the replies received when the copyright holders were asked for their permission to use a CC licence on their work. This rights register was then passed on to those archiving the website and managing the repository.

As these resources shortly become someone else’s responsibility, it occurred to me that perhaps this sort of information (particularly permissions given) should be routinely held in the repository that stores the resource. This could be useful should there be a challenge to the licensing, particularly since materials can outlive their creators and the ‘depositor’ information that repositories routinely hold can quickly go out of date (job change, retirement, etc.)

Are there any repository managers thinking about storing information from rights registers for the long distant future of their resources?

Rather than for the sake of the topic itself,  I thought it important enough for inclusion because of how well it illustrates a couple of important issues:  science doesn’t always deliver nice pat answers and scientists don’t always agree. Some non-scientists have been known to express complete disappointment in science/scientists when this happens. Including subjects where there is still debate would seem to be a suitable way of countering this naive view of science as something that does your thinking for you, and scientists as people without opinions.

Further along in the same article, it is suggested that we need to teach content that doesn’t “…date”.  So no content based on theories then which, by definition, could be disproved? I know this wasn’t what was intended but again it seems to suggest a lack of understanding of what science is, something changing and developing.

‘Why would I want to do that?’

Because someone, in fact many people, would appreciate it. For someone profoundly deaf, an audio-only podcast is inaccessible, without a transcript it offers nothing whatsoever. But even for those who can hear the audio, a transcript can be a help if the podcast is in a language with which the listener is not fully familiar or the speaker is aware they have a heavy accent. A transcript can be useful for all as it can be scanned through to see if the content is of interest before listening, to review key points or to extract specific information quickly.

‘But it’s extra work.’

Yes, but not a great deal if you are working from a script and you probably at least have some notes to get you started. And the point is, the podcast will be of more use to more people.

‘I don’t make podcasts.’

No, neither do I, so why not ask those you know who do if they will consider adding transcripts in the future, or at least trialling the idea.

‘And what will you be doing while we are doing this?’

To get you started, if you have a podcast* you have made for use in an educational context of no more than about 3 minutes, send it to me and I will produce a transcript for you**; then you can see if anyone uses it and whether they found it useful. I will also tell you how long it took me to produce (and that’s typing with two fingers.)

‘Anything else?’

Well, a comment below would be appreciated if you have experience of transcripts,  as a producer or user.

* one podcast per person; some editing on your part may be necessary when it comes to names and specialist terms beyond my ken; offer ends April 2011; English is my only language, sorry.

**I’ll be doing this in my own time, in case my line manager reads this.

Update 24/01/2011:

I’ve learnt via Twitter that the QAA will provide a transcript to a podcast upon request. When I asked why they were not made available  on the website without request I was informed ‘Providing resources when requested lets us target funding where needed, rather than routine transcripts that may be unread.’ In a world when resources are a) finite and b) always a bit less than you would like, I can see this argument, but I can also see contrary ones (see original post above.) What do you think?

The presentations and workshops were spread what at first seemed very thinly across the time available. But once I had attended a couple of sessions I began to really appreciated the breaks: it allowed me to keep up with my other responsibilities for the day, catch my breath and gather my thoughts. Each session was very intense with the oral presentation, slides, the synchronous and asynchronous panes to follow. It was a real challenge to take it all in and keep up; how the presenters managed, I do not know. The use of facilitators seemed to be an excellent idea and did at least aid the speaker in the balancing act of giving their presentation with following the ‘conversation’ going on amongst the audience sufficiently well to be able to comment and answer questions.

I couldn’t choose a highlight as I enjoyed all the sessions I attended both for the presented material and the interaction with other attendees. All were thought provoking.

I have attended a number of individual on-line sessions before this conference, many of them using Elluminate (the same tool used here), and though I could never say that I would like virtual meetings to replace all face to face events, I see real benefits. Short meetings are simply hard to justify the time spent in travelling, let alone the expense, and attending remotely may enable some to attend and still fulfil other commitments on the same day. Virtual conferences may enable some to attend events they would not otherwise be able to afford. Who wouldn’t support something that enables conferences and workshops to continue in lean times and possibly attract a greater range of attendees.

But I wonder also if there isn’t something extra to be gained from on-line meetings. It’s often said one of the most important aspects (or at least most often achieved) of face to face meetings is networking. I don’t know if it just the virtual meetings that I have attended, but I notice a lot more interaction, and between many more people, than in face to face events. Of course, what the quality of this interaction is, only time will tell. It would also be interesting to know how presenters feel about the kind of session where the audience can be ‘talking’ even more than they are.

My Tweets on the event

Ifan Hughes (Durham) spoke about the use of interactive screen experiments and the role of pre-lab tasks to increase the efficacy of the time students spend in laboratories.

Steve Hanson from the Centre revealed some preliminary findings from the soon to be published data on graduate skills in physics, based on detailed interviews with new graduates from around the UK (there will also be corresponding data published on chemistry and forensic science.)

Simon Bates (Edinburgh) reported on the shift there from years of recruiting undergraduates to now being able to select students and the challenges this has brought.

Vijay Tymms (Imperial) looked at whether repeated testing (at school) was leading to a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation in students.

Fredrick Floether (Cambridge), our Student Award winner, spoke about his experiences as an undergraduate. He noted the movement towards documents existing only in electronic form (and the possible advantages of this), more use of animations and use of mobile devices. He noted the increase in online learning, the encouragement of students to take learning into their own hands and increasing interdisciplinary nature of science courses. Also highlighted was the increasing internationalisation of higher education, with students flowing in more directions around the globe in pursuit of their education but also the possible bifucation of students into those who attend a campus and those who teach themselves from online resources.

Dick Bacon from the Centre introduced the new adaptive questions that are now available in Question Bank with a call to try them and perhaps submit more to the collection.

Ross Galloway (Edinburgh) spoke about work with students whose coursework scores were significantly higher than their exam scores. These tended to be students whose qualifications were non-UK and who had taken a gap year, and interviews had shown that they had unrealistic ideas about exam preparation and the time it would take. Interesting, merely interviewing students about this appeared to have the effect of improving their subsequent exam performance, though no other intervention had been made.

Sally Jordan (OU) presented details of work on computer assessment of short-answer questions. She emphasised the importance of modeling answers on the real answers of students, rather than those of staff who answer questions differently. The unintended consequence of this has been the greater understanding of the ways students interpret questions which has been used to improve question.

Ross Galloway (Edinburgh) held a workshop on data handling skills. Discussion amongst the participants revealed the following:  teaching such skills tends to be concentrated in the early years and it is hard to convince  students are they should do some data analysis during the experiment as they would rather do it afterwards once the experiment is complete. At Edinburgh it was found that once teaching data handling skills stopped, improvement stopped also; students appeared not to pick up skills without support.

Robert Francis (NTU) detailed an archeo-astronomy project that was being used with school and university groups. A virtual field trip was built to enable pupils/students to be able to make the most of their field work.

Marialuisa Aliotta (Edinburgh) reported on the use of scoring rubrics, use of which students felt led to reduced variation and fairing marking.

Lynn Moran (Liverpool) spoke about outreach work which had grown from an informal grouping of students and had worked on tackling negative views of science.

Personal response to the opening Keynote of ALT-C 2010:

If he’d just said that we should get rid of bad lectures I would have agreed with him but…

It’s like the calls you hear to ban PowerPoint. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with PowerPoint, there is with bad PowerPoint presentations. Similarly, a call to get rid of lecturers is simply missing the point. We’ve probably all had a bad meal in a restaurant, we didn’t call for a ban on restaurants… or eating.

The only good reasons to stop lectures would be 1) because they do no good/do harm or 2) because we have something better. This morning we were not offered evidence of the first (disappointing as the scientific method was mentioned by the speaker) or ideas for the second (simply saying ‘doing more online’ does not count.)

Lecturing (and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way) is varied, because the people who lecture vary, as do the students and courses. You may have had a bad experience as an undergraduate, my experience as a physics undergraduate was a good one; let’s call it quits.

I’d like to suggest the speaker actually takes a look at what is going on in lectures today, rather than reach back for a memory of his undergraduate days. It is pointless to say you are angry at a situation but have no real ideas for remedies. Find out what’s going on and you will see what today’s lecturers are doing with their lectures. You’ll find (even physics) lecturers who know about cognitive overload and working memory, and ones carrying on Mazur’s work. There’s still work to do but that’s what the Centre I work with support. Let’s stop cursing the darkness and light a candle.

And last but not least: physics researchers should not teach because they would be ‘square pegs in round holes’ hopelessly held back by introversion and lack of social skills? Feynman managed both very well, Brian Cox isn’t doing too badly either. There are others less well known if you care to look; I will be meeting some of them immediately after ALT-C at our physics education conference. It’s called PHEC*; we may have no social skills but it can’t be said we have no sense of humour.

*Physics Higher Education Conference

I’d hoped to be included in a workshop at my first ALT-C but it wasn’t to be, still I went along. Crowdvine, which I’d never encountered before, was particularly useful when attending a large conference for the first time and without colleagues. It gave me an idea of who would be there and the topics that were uppermost in peoples’ minds, so when I arrived at the conference itself I hit the ground running.

It also got me using Twitter, which at that time was little known and still finding its feet. I don’t know if any of us knew then what we were going to do with it but I’m glad I persisted.

This will be my third ALT-C and my first time with a presentation which makes it particularly special. Crowdvine has again be very useful for pre- conference planning and I aim to be using Twitter in my usual ‘meeting’ mode (a cross between note taking and broadcasting.)

If you have an interest in open educational resources, whatever your discipline (or none),  do stop by poster 0225, flag me down during the conference or leave me a comment on Crowdvine.

The reasons include the carrot-y ones (‘the less restrictive the license the more likely your resource will be reused‘) to the stick-y ones (‘if there are restrictions on reuse, you just don’t get the meaning of open’.)

So I’m getting on my soapbox…

I love the idea of sharing that which does not diminish us and practice this with my own personal work (I do not own that which I create at work, so that’s a different story, but I’m working on it.) However, I do not subscribe to the all or nothing view of openness. Here’s why.

There are categories of resource that are just not suitable for completely open release.  Here’s are some examples (there are others) and if you disagree, leave your counter arguments in the comments:

1. Sensitive material – e.g. forensic science photographs.
2. Q & A that include the A –  good for self-educating students, but can there be nothing that educators can use ‘as is’ without having to change because students can look up the answers?
3. Specialised tests – e.g. concept inventories, the outputs of which are only useful because when students meet them it’s for the first time.

Is anyone saying that the originator should never presume to select who should access a resource?

I’m also in favour of having a more restrictive license available in cases of new users, and not giving them a hard time if they use it. Organisations and individuals can be nervous about openness and what will happen; is there real harm in them ‘testing the water’ with a more restrictive license so they can get some experience and see that adding an open license does cause the sky to fall in? And if they do find that their resources don’t get much reuse, that might be the perfect time to explain that it’s opening the licence up that may solve that problem. In this way, the user moves in a more open direction and doesn’t need to be pushed or cajoled.

I’ve seen nothing that suggests that those that use the more restrictive licenses never graduate to less restrictive ones; I myself have moved from the most to the least restrictive CC licence as I have become more comfortable with the idea. I had to start somewhere and I’d like to extend that option to others.

I’m for encouraging sharing, and support this as part of my role, and to me that means understanding others’ motivations to share and the specialist knowledge they have about their resources. Saying ‘all or nothing’ when sharing,  might get you the latter; be careful with your zeal you don’t just put off the very people I am trying to coax into participation. The shallow end is there for a reason: paddlers have the potential to become strong swimmers.

(Many thanks to @Lawrie for giving me the impetus to complete this posting, started some time ago.)

I try to use Twitter at events as I have found it an excellent tool for summarising what I’m hearing (or thinking) and others, who are not present, have been kind enough to tell me that they find it useful; those who find it irritating have been kind enough to keep it to themselves.

Looking back over my Tweets, I seem to have asked a lot of questions inspired by the presentations. Here’s a selection:

• Do OER replace the textbook… or the educator?
• What would OER look like that didn’t need an ‘educator’ to deliver it?
• What do students lose by not seeing inspirational teachers?
• What happens when the number of graduates exceeds the number of graduate posts?
• What do we mean by ‘validation’ and ‘quality control’ in OER? Who decides, the users or a committee?
• What about accreditation for students self-teaching with OER but not enrolled on a course?
• Could an institution be created, based on using OER already available, giving accreditation?
• Is learning without accreditation worthless today?
• Who should be creating OER? A free for all? An organised body that take commissions?
• Do academics know just how many OER there are out there incl. Creative Commons images, and how easy to find?
• Are people who create OER also users of OER? Does it matter if they are two separate groups?
• Do we need to be looking at relative levels of supply and demand for various kinds of OER?
•  Is it ethical to charge for a course made of OER?
• Problem of orphan works; what’s to do?
• Is copyright the problem?
• Are the copyright laws now outdated in the digital age?
• What is the meaning of ‘Commercial/non-commercial’ in Creative Commons licenses?
• How much can knowledge be said to be owned by individuals?
• Does copyright deny the contribution of others and hold back development?
• Could and should OER replace educators?
• Are institutions missing the point my focussing on OER as marketing tools?
• Is there a relationship between the open source and OER model?

I’d be interested to know your thoughts.

Because we tend to archive everything, broken links to long past events and old news items tend to occur over time. Similarly, when other sites undergo an update, pages and resources get moved and, sometimes, removed.

However there are other broken links which really surprise me; these are the ones to website home pages. Whereas I understand that these sometimes need to be changed, for instance, to reflect changes in an organisation’s name, it seems incredible that the owners of the website don’t always consider it important enough to use a redirect.

Looking through recent statistics for our site I can see a significant number of visitors reach our site via  a redirection. Our site changed name over three years ago, and we advertise it widely, yet many people must be reaching us though a URL they made a favourite years ago. We even have visitors using the URL from an even earlier incarnation!

So if you are going to change the name of your site or have recently done so, consider how many visitors you could be losing by not using redirection or taking it away too quickly (a quick check of the web statistics will tell you if visitors are still using the old address.) You may also be loosing links to your site from other sites (like ours) albeit temporarily until someone likes me fixes them; again, web statistics will tell you how valuable these are to your site.