Royal Roads University is open!

open 19

A couple of tweets came my way today that alerted me to something that I am so happy to see come alive:

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Open.RoyalRoads.ca is open.

The brainchild (as so many good ideas are) of my Royal Roads University colleague Emma Irwin (@sunnydeveloper – don’t worry. I’ll wait while you go follow her…okay…) open. royalroads.ca is a one stop shop where the RRU community can share the work they do.

When people have asked me about my move from RRU to BCcampus (where I am at the end of a wonderful, mind blowing first week), I have been saying that one of the things I am sorry about is that I won’t be there to see the fruition of projects that have been in the works for awhile. This project was one of them.

Open started about a year ago when Emma came to me with an idea that she was trying to get buy-in for. At Royal Roads, we developed quite a bit of custom code for our Moodle installation. RRU is also a Drupal shop and there was some custom code that was written to extend Drupal as well.

Emma wanted to find a way to share this code, not only with the Moodle and Drupal communities, but with the wider world. She suggested setting up a code repository on GitHub, a very popular and active code community.  I told her I would weigh in with whatever institutional support I could give her to help her set it up because I thought the idea of setting up a GitHub repository to share our code was brilliant. After all, if you are going to adopt “free” open source software and use it to support your operations, you should be prepared to contribute back to the wider community. That is how open source works. You can’t just take – you participate and give as well. Which is why the word free above is in italics.

There is a very practical benefit from sharing your work because sharing is reciprocal. It builds goodwill. What you share will come back to you. In the case of open source software, you can see this in the communities that spring up around projects. Those that help and those who give have a level of status in the community. They become known. And when those people need help to solve a particular problem, it is there in buckets. The community supports those who support the community. In the case of sharing Moodle & Drupal code, Emma can find developers who can help her solve the problems she is working on. In the education circles I travel, you can see no better example of this type of reciprocal effect than with the work of  Dr. Alec Couros, who’s willingness to help out the network is legendary, and whose calls for help generate a massive response. People want to help Alec because he helps people.

But there is another reason why I think we should be sharing – something that gets to the very core of what we do as educators. As David Wiley points out, sharing is a critically important piece of learning:

In fact, those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students are the ones we deem successful. Does every single student come out of a class in possession of the knowledge and skills the teacher tried to share? In other words, is the teacher a successful sharer? If so, then the teacher is a successful educator. If attempts at sharing fail, then the teacher is a poor educator. Education is sharing. Education is about being open.

As an institution that has learning as their core purpose for existing, it only makes sense to me that we share the work we do with as many people as we can. Because education is sharing.

As Emma and I talked about the importance of sharing with our respective communities, Emma asked me about the open educational resources in CTET. RRU has an open Moodle instance where (thanks to the work of Mary Burgess and funded by a grant from my current organization, BCcampus a few years ago) we were sharing some OER’s we had developed that focused primarily on faculty development. Over the years, the collection has grown to include OER’s developed by RRU faculty, and other open initiatives. As we talked, Emma said she had this vision, inspired by Open Michigan, where we could gather all of our open institutional resources and share them in one place. I told her I had a similar vision, inspired by Open UBC.

And then I left RRU to go and work on other open stuff.  But Emma, like she does, kept on working and plugging away. And yesterday, open.royalroads.ca went live. And I am very happy for Emma because I know how hard she has worked to make that happen. And what benefits not only she, but the wider Moodle & Drupal communities, and RRU itself will reap from her efforts.

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Photo: open 19 by loop_oh used under Creative Commons license

 

 

The ds106 snowflake

I love this ds106 data visualization put together by Martin Hawksey at JISC. This video is a representation of the community activity that occurred in ds106 – the unMOOC MOOC developed by Alan Levine, Jim Groom and the rest of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology at U Mary Washington (whose innovative work I have gushed over before).

With each white circle representing a blog post, and circles clustered around individual blogs, you can quickly see just how much activity occured during ds106, and how much this beautiful visualization represents a model of learning that reflects the qualities of the internet itself – distributed, networked, nodal, autonomous yet connected. It’s no accident that this visualization looks like the internet itself.  As Alan points out, ds106 was specifically designed this way.

The very essence of ds106 is that it is made of the same stuff that the web is made of, a distributed, open, decentralized connected network managed by participants in the space it inhabits. You will hear people talk about their organizations or projects being on the web. but there is more than a shade of difference of ds106 being of the web.

In an environment that has proven its resilience, growth, and capability, should we not emulate the very ideals of the internet in the learning experiences we create? For the most part, while being on the web, the majority of MOOCs are operating via a structure that is not built by nor cared for by its learners. The truly open, syndicated model of ds106 works because it acts like the web itself.

 

Academic Paywalls or It Costs HOW Much?

Open Access – unrestricted access to peer-reviewed academic research – has been popping up on my radar lately, brought on by the tragic death of Aaron Swartz. Sad that it takes the death of a brilliant young man to shine a light on the absurdity of heavy-handed copyright enforcement and the right of the public to have access to research that, in most cases, they have bought and paid for.

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Knowledge that teachers need to educate our children, locked away and inaccessible.

And this Journal of Comparative Neurology annual subscription price for this peer-reviewed medical journal? $30,860 per year. This is the institutional price….FOR ONE JOURNAL!

How much does that academic journal cost?

Madness.

Remember, this is the amount that institutional libraries pay – publicly funded institutions. This is our money going to pay private corporations for access to research that, in most cases, WE THE TAXPAYERS HAVE ALREADY PAID FOR! We fund most of this research, and then give it to these publishers who lock away access to the research & force us all to buy the results back. It’s insane.

I have no idea what a similar Canadian institution pays, but Harvard alone pays close to $4 million dollars per year in access fees to publishers (aside: this article above contains some real and practical advice for academic researchers who wish to support open knowledge).

I understand that this isn’t an easy issue. That academics feel under intense pressure to publish in prestige journals in order to secure more funding, jobs, etc. And it was heartening to see the #pdftribute hashtag emerge on Twitter. But, as Berkley Associate Professor Michael Eisen says, academics can do more:

Posting our PDFs is all fine and good, but the real way to honor Aaron Swartz is to combat this pervasive institutional fecklessness and do everything in our power to make sure no papers ever end up behind pay walls again. We have to demand that our universities alter their policies to reward, rather than punish, free scholarly publishing, and that they stop cutting the checks that keep this immoral system afloat.

Can do more…need to do more, as Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior points out in her excellent Al Jazera article The Political Consequences of Academic Paywalls.

When an activist needs information about the political conditions of her country, she should be able to read it. When a lawyer needs ammunition against a corrupt regime, she should be able to find it. When a journalist is struggling to cover a foreign conflict, she should have access to research on that country.

Meanwhile, 15 year old Vancouver high school student Jack Andraka uses free, open access journals and comes up with a new test for pancreatic cancer.

“I used them religiously,” Andraka said, “Just because, in most online databases, articles cost about [US]$35, and there are only about 10 pages.”

“The public funds a lot of this research. Shouldn’t the public have access to it?”

The case for open access – open to use and open to reuse – couldn’t be more clear in my mind.