Open Academia

On Friday, James Neill presented Going Naked - Openism and Freedom in Academia to a small group at the University of Canberra. The talk and responses were broadcast via uStream, but the host for the session appears to have forgotten to click record. Luckily James took notes on the Wikiversity page.

Interest in open education and research practices seems to be growing at the University, particularly it seems within the Faculty of Health (the largest number of people at the session).

Jame's talk set down a case for staff at UC adopting open educational practices.

Discussion:

• Questioning the assertion that there is an altogether trend towards openness
• Concerns of commercial exploitation of openness
• What is the relavence of a University in the face of openness?
• Why does the university not engage staff in the review of policy?
• How much does the use of restricted content cost UC each year?

Actions:

• The Teaching and Learning Centre to find out the annual fees paid to CAL, and if possible - a break down of that fee.
• The Teaching and Learning Centre to find out why only external agencies review UC policy, what agency reviewed UC's IP policy, and what their review was.
• Leigh and James to run Workshops on how to source free content and reuse it in a free way
• Leigh and James to propose the Faculty of Health lead the university and adopt a default open education and research position.

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Originally posted By Leigh Blackall to Leigh Blackall at 3/08/2010 01:18:00 PM

There is a story example further down. Skip to that if you prefer that way of imagining.

As always, I propose that we do not set up a silo type website that requires us to build a user base from scratch. Instead I propose that we think smart about how light we can make the journal's actual website, and distribute functionality widely across various publishing and communication systems that people already use and prefer. In other words, the Internet is our open journal platform, where ever you may wish it to be.

This is not to say our journal does not have a website of its own, it is necessary that it does, for the sake of recogition and usability for some. I'm imagining a very minimal, clean skinned site that simply indexes the articles with a copy of the text displayed (in html, be gone pdf!!) and the various backchannels of comment and related media are harvested and displayed along with it.

After clicking a link to an indexed article title, imagine a main central column that is the text, and a right column that is the harvested responses - such as a twitter hashtag feed, a Youtube tag feed, a Delicious tag feed, links to related wikipedia/wikibooks/wikiversity articles, etc. The point is to capture responses from people based on what time and inclination THEY have, rather than require people to sign in and leave comments based on the limited functionality WE have. Networked communicators are familiar with this form of distributed discourse, so it s a matter of making it easier for others to track.

Of course, the benefits of networking responses and discourse like this is that we attract new and wider audiences and expose our authors to a wider range of feedback (not all rosey). In doing so we are open to any sort of feedback, I am comfortable with that, I think we can set up expectations to accomodate that too.

Another aspect of this distributed and open communication, is to encourage the publishers of articles to engage in "popularising" their work. If through looking at their article they saw discussion taking place in a Wikipedia article, my hope is that would encourage them to at least monitor that, perhaps even contribute. Something less time consuming might simply be to look at a twitter stream responding to the article and be exposed to the occasional benefits of twitter. Likewise for Youtube and so on.

Not everyone has the time for all or even one of these backchannels, and that is fine - but enabling and engaging with them has tangible benefits they can take or leave.

You might have noticed the "anyone can publish, anyone can review" aspect. I've been trying to spread Russell Butson's new speak for students, calling them instead "emerging academics". The shift in thinking and behaviour that that title change brings to undergraduate study is interesting. Russell's work at the University of Otago (no link sorry) experiments with student run journals, where the emerging academics edit, review and publish their essays in their own year's journal. Russell tells me he has been doing this with much success with medical students.

This idea of emerging academics publishing their work has captured the imagination of a few lecturers here, and I would like to see it where an emerging academic's work was published on the same platform as an established or professional academic's, such as this open enetworked and distributed journal I am explaining.

I see no reason to separate works based on title or experience, but obviously there remains a need for a seperation based on quality. There would be an editorial process in place whereby exceptional articles are peer reviewed and featured. It is the featured articles of the month, quarter or year of the journal edition that make the front page. Articles that do not make it through this featured article are then managed through a user generated rating and tracking system. We may discover new and emerging talent through that system as well.

Finally, on the question of how to submit and article.

My preference is to encourage people to publish their work on their own channel, and then to simply provide the link to the journal. Their article would be instantly listed in the user rated pages, and if nominated - it would enter into a peer review process toward becoming a featured article. If it succeeded in becoming a reviewed and featured article, it would be reformatted and stored on the journal site itself. Social media feedback channels and related media would be set up around the copied article. There are numerous ways we could approach this submission process including anything from straight emailing a submission, to tagging a work with a particular tag. The key here is that is should have been already published on a personal web space of some sort. The main point is to subvert the silo thinking prevalent in imagining a journal, and to encourage a distributed and networked approach for publishing and reviewing.

An example.

I write my article on Wikiversity with a finished copy on my blog. Linked to the article are pages documenting my submission, including research data, article background and editing history, discussion and other processing. When the article is complete, I send an email to the journal editor (as well as tag it in delicious with the journal's submission tag). This automatically lists my article on the journal's website (on the second page, not the featured page), where it awaits review in various forms. I can edit the information around the article such as what pages articles it relates to in Wikipedia, as well as giving it a tag word for people to use if they wish to respond to it on Youtube or Twitter etc. Almost instantly the submission get's retweeted, and one or two people even blog about it. The journal editor contacts me to tell me my article has been nominated for featured article status, and that it will be officially peer reviewed. It undergoes that peer review process and successfully makes it through as a featured article. Now that it has official status as a peer reviewed journal article, I notice that 2 or 3 of the related Wikipedia articles have been updated with citations from my article. I correct a few minor typos on one of those articles, and occasionally notice a new tweet and youtube response to the article in the following months. 2 years later I am reminded about the article by a new blogger who has critiqued it, and I am now in the process of rewriting it with the help of that blogger and we plan to resubmit it to the journal. Over the years the journal has achieved a reasonably high rating and is now recognised as a legitimate peer reviewed journal by my employer who agrees to recognise my work and pay me lots of monetary reward for all my adventurous work. I might even get tenure next year, if it still exists.

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Posted By Leigh Blackall to Leigh Blackall at 1/13/2010 06:23:00 PM