McLuhan’s Tetrad

McLuhan’s Tetrad comprises 4 laws of media that can be used to analyse the effects of technological change on society, rather than the causes.

Timothy Kraft describes the tetrad as:

Enhance
The technology must enhance some capability of the person. The medium is an extension of the person.

Retrieve
The result is a retrieval of some earlier service or capability that was lost and is now brought back into play in a new form.

Obsolesced
What is pushed aside and made obsolescent.

Reverse
If the new media is taken to extreme what will result that reverses the original characteristics of the media when it was first introduced.

While the first three of the tetrad seem quite obvious to me, the fourth, “reverse” has troubled me somewhat.  McLuhan suggests that a medium “overheats”, or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.

Reading articles of how people have interpreted and applied reversal to other medium has caused some confusion, as I think many who have written about the Reverse law of the tetrad may have misunderstood its meaning.  Or perhaps it is just different interpretations of what McLuhan defines as the reversal.  Or more likely, maybe I have it all wrong. After reading through some of the Canadian Library Archive notes about McLuhan’s work, and listening to a radio interview with Nina Sutton in 1975, it became more clear to me.  McLuhan says that when a medium is pushed to extremes, it reverses or flips into an alternate form.  In an excerpt of an interview with Nina Sutton hosted on the Library and Archives Canada webiste, McLuhan discusses the revolution of the steam printing press to the telegraph press.  When the telegraph press emerged, the way that people wrote for newspapers changed immediately and flipped.  The type of writing that was required for the telegraph was inverted so that all the very important information was transmitted first sentence, and then all the other information followed in order or most importance.  This was due to the risk of the transmission being interrupted, so that the critical information had the lowest risk of being lost.

The misunderstanding of the Reverse is derived from the word “extreme”.  I wonder whether the flipping or reversing is not a result of extremes of adoption as seems to be alluded in examples online such as here or even here where the more it is used, a flipping effect occurs. I take from McLuhan’s examples, the demonstration that it is extreme changes to the medium, rather than the application thereof that is the catalyst for the reversal.  I don’t know whether this is significant or not.  The flips that McLuhan speaks of are in response to extreme changes in the medium, that then have extreme impact on their use.  So the flipping of the steam press was a result of introducing the telegraph press, rather than changes in how they used the original steam press or how much the stream press was used.

A different take on an analogy for McLuhan’s press example for flipping or reverse, is with the mobile phone as described by Library and Archives Canada.  Mobile phones changed things a lot and brought to prominence aural communication, over written anywhere anytime.  However, the mobile phone taken to extremes saw the advent of SMS texting, which became very popular and evolved as a result of the high cost of mobile telephony.  SMS Text Messaging quickly became much more frequent than mobile phone calls.  So the mobile phone taken to the extreme (at the time) has flipped the prominence of aural communication to short written messages, perhaps akin to the telegraph.  Of course mobile phones have evolved considerably more since text messaging, and McLuhan in his radio interview with Nina highlighted the fact that there has been many “flips” in the printing press leading up to the 1975 interview.  So extremes seem to be able to persistently take on new heights again and again, flipping as they evolve.

Looking at internet technologies is considerably harder than the examples of printing presses and mobile phones, because the rate of change is significantly faster, and because of the modern convergences of technologies.  I also wonder whether many of these technologies have not yet reached the extremes necessary to cause a reversal.  Dan Pontefract’s article highlights the following reversals for Learning 2.0 as a medium:

• Everyone is an expert
• Content & opinion overload
• 90-9-1 hypothesis
• Time mismanagement
• Learning groupthink
• Loss of certified company staff

I suggest that each of these items is part of the extends or enhances category.  These are aspects of learning 2.0 that are enhanced, intensified, made possible, or accelerated as a result of the learning 2.0 medium’s introduction.  They are just some of the negative outcomes that sit along-side the positive ones, and likely emerged around the same time.  In other words as learning 2.0 extended positive things like formal classroom/eLearning, Social Networking/Web 2.0, Traditional Corporate University, and so on, it also extended the everyone is an expert paradigm, content & opinion overload and so on.

So what would I consider the reversals for learning 2.0?  Well I guess it depends on context.  My context in higher education and curriculum development appears different to Dan’s article which uses terms such as training which makes me think of VET type education rather than education via the academy.  This assumption may be incorrect of course.  Nevertheless, from a university context, the first thing that comes to mind in terms of pushing learning 2.0 to the extreme is the explosion of the MOOC concept.  Within higher education, MOOCs have flipped the learning 2.0 medium by breaking the mould of the traditional university course as being closed and elitist, to open and accessible.  It is the MOOC that has pushed learning 2.0 to extremes that has caused this flip, rather than the amount of people engaged in learning 2.0 in higher education.

The idea of the reverse law sings to the swings and round-a-bouts we see in technological circles.  McLuhan’s tetrad is a fascinating construct for analysing the influences of technology on society.

 

McLuhan says the medium is the message

McLuhan is probably most popularly known for his theory succinctly posited “The medium is the message”.  Federman offers a very clear explanation of this concept in his article “What is the meaning of the medium is the message?”  Federman explains that McLuhan considers the medium in quite broad terms, more so than perhaps first impressions give of this famous statement.  In particular, McLuhan considers anything that is an extension of ourselves as a medium.  So medium is more broad than human communication, and can encompass any technology that extends our physical and intellectual essences.  Federman puts it well when he states: “… since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.”

There are examples of “the medium is the message” everywhere in modern society.  For instance, the rise of social media has seen changes in television entertainment programs.  While in the past, some programs might have had a “mailbox” for you to post a letter or more recently an email, containing your thoughts and opinions on a matter, there would then be a delay until the next broadcast where these letters would be selectively read on-air.  In the past year or two, more new and diverse approaches to interacting with audiences have occurred afforded by social media.  Twitter was one of the first medium’s to be used to facilitate “talk-back” or back-channels for live television programs, typically syndicated across the bottom of the television screen.  Question and Answer from Australia’s national broadcaster, The ABC famously (within Australia) use the QandA hashtag to denote tweets relating to the political television program.

 

 

In the past week, Australian television programs are now making use of a service called zeebox.com.  This provides even tighter integration with the television format where the television programs can have their own “space” within the zeebox medium itself – the cloud service.  It is also mobile enabled so viewers can participate in television programs no matter where they may be viewing them.  It is also an approach to stem the flow of viewers resorting to digital video recorders to playback television programs, and skip the ads while they are at it.  The use of social media offers an incentive to be present at the live broadcast, and consume those wonderful advertisements that keep the television network executives happy.  McLuhan is quoted in Federman as saying “a ‘message’ is, ‘the change of scale or pace or pattern’ that a new invention or innovation ‘introduces into human affairs.’”.  This change in television programming would have been an unintended consequence of social media at inception. There are many other examples that demonstrate McLuhan’s theory.

Week 11: OERs – The future of text as we know it

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba. Our instructor has asked us:

Apple recently announced the iBooks 2 – an app that collaborates with major textbook publishers to release books on the apple device. See the YouTube video of someones excitement about this. The Huffington Post’s report suggest books will cost $15. How long do you think it will take for books to become available at the college level? Is this an initiative you will encourage in your schools or business? Do you think Apple will succeed in pushing traditional textbooks out of the market?

Books have long followed a model of depth and linearity.  Consider the scroll – a long sheet of continuous paper that is rolled from one spindle onto another as you read the text from the top of the sheet all the way down to the bottom. This provided a simple and sequential approach to reading information.  At some time in history, technology moved onwards to the book format, which broke the physical linearity of the text from the scroll, to virtual linearity by allowing text to continue on the page adjacent in a repeating fashion.  Some clever people using their imagination have given a popular comical portrayal of what the transition was like from scroll to book as shown below with the youtube video titled “Medieval Helpdesk”.

Our technological sophistication marches forward as we continue to refine and improve ways of being knowledgeable.  Going from an analogue device such as a hardcopy book to a digital device such as a tablet is no great leap, and has been attempted many times in the past by various innovators.  So Apple’s new iBook software in conjunction with their iPad technology should come as no surprise. But will Apple succeed in pushing traditional textbooks out of the market?  My answer is “if not Apple, then someone else will.”  In my estimation, the traditional hardcopy book will be a relic – an artefact of history in the future anywhere from 5 to 50 years from now, just as man moved on from the scroll to the book.  I also predict that many people – particularly the older generations will initially struggle with this transition, just as our medieval friend depicted in the youtube video.

My reason for lack of confidence in Apple being the “pusher” is one of interoperability.  Apple are renown for “vendor lock-in”.  Their marketing spin is that they are innovative and ahead of the pack, and that their tight integration between software and hardware provides a better and more reliable “user experience”.  While these statements may to be true in some of their ventures, it also smells of anti-competitive behaviour and market control.  Afterall, they are a company whose sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders, not further mankind’s quest for knowledge and enlightenment.  This political viewpoint aside, the upshot is unless all your readership (students and faculty for instance) have and use Apple iPads, then committing to a service such as Apple’s is simply not “open”.  Emerging standards in electronic publications will help to ensure interoperability such that you can use any device, much like the World Wide Web standards, but it will take time for these to evolve and mature into a stable publishing platform.  Which brings me to my next point.

What I find interesting is that even with the move to electronic publications, we are still tethered to the concept of a depth-wise linear body of work with this new technology.  This is in contrast to the World Wide Web which is a distributed non-linear publishing system. I do understand that the tablet computers can do non-linear things, but I bet for the mostpart, people who create content don’t use this – at least initially.

I have heard many decry the loss of depth in writing with the popularity of the WWW.  Modern society sets an incredibly high pace, and I wonder if this is simply a sign of a new era of enlightenment.  We live in an incredibly complex world with technology that requires very specialist knowledge to develop and maintain.  Typically no one person knows everything about something because it is so complex.  Think about your car for a moment, and how they have evolved over the past 20 to 30 years.  Once upon a time you could do most of the maintenance yourself, but these days even mechanics plug the car into a computer to find out what is wrong with it using software and hardware developed by someone else.  So we use layers of abstraction or black box approaches to break the complexity down into smaller consumable pieces.  Depth has been subsumed by breadth of knowledge – knowing enough about something to get on with what needs to be done.  I’m not suggesting that writing no longer requires any depth.  I am saying that there has been a shift of priorities that means for the masses access to quick high-level rapidly changing information is in greater demand.

Of course I hope there will always be a need for linear formats for creative bodies of work such as novels – digital or analogue.

Week 10: OERs – The dream

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba. Our instructor has asked us:

What are your impressions of Open data, open research, open books, open journals, open government? Is this the reality or just a dream? Can this happen in your school or business environment? What are the implications? Blog about this.

Is this the reality or just a dream?

Taking a deeply philosophical analysis of this question, consider the following quote from Social Evolution, Psychoanalysis, and Human Nature by Daniel Kriegman and Charles Knight in relation to Freud’s evolutionary biology:

Freud’s view of human nature is generally consistent with the experience of capitalist competition and its adjunct philosophy at the extreme, social Darwinism. The inevitable tendency of human motivation is toward competition. Inevitably struggles ensue and yield a “survival of the fittest” dominance hierarchy.

Information has increasingly become a commodity that can be bought and sold and therefore has inherent value.  Modern online companies for instance provide free services in exchange for information about their customers.  This information is often aggregated and/or sold to other companies.  In the context of competition and survival of the fittest, sharing information is counter-productive.  By this reasoning, you are giving wealth in the form of information to your competitors thus strengthening their position while weakening your own.  Western society is largely based on capitalist models, so it is no wonder there is such an emphasis on ownership of information such as in the form of copyright.  So one could argue that while there is an economy based on information as a commodity, it is not likely that these open initatives will become mainstream.

The paper continues with discussion of the more modern theories of social evolution and reciprocal altruism:

… [Trivers] developed the concept of “reciprocal altruism.” This fascinating evolutionary construct undermines the simplistic notions of social Darwinism and provides a basis for reviewing the erroneous thinking underlying the misuse of evolutionary theory in support of reactionary dogma.

The concept of reciprocal altruism suggests that there may be a bio-genetic basis to altruistic behavior. At first glance, altruistic behavior, which in evolutionary terms reduces the altruist’s fitness and leads to an increase in the recipient’s fitness, appears to be in contradiction to the basic self-serving survival interest of any organism. However, the concept of reciprocal altruism is based on the notion that an altruistic act is often returned to the altruistically behaving organism.

So contrary to Freudian views, and considering the development of OERs as altruistic, perhaps there is hope for OERs afterall. The authors of the paper continue with what they believe to be the prerequisites for the evolution of reciprocal altruism.

What can be demonstrated by the evolutionary analysis are the prerequisites for the evolution of reciprocal altruism: high frequency of association, the reliability of association over time, and the ability of two organisms to behave in ways that benefit the other…   The prerequisites for the evolution of reciprocal altruism are present in our species and have been shown in other species to be capable of shaping extremely cooperative behaviors.

So in the context of these open initiatives, will they involve frequent and reliable association and interaction between collaborators; and will such association and interaction be mutually beneficial?  It would be interesting to conduct an analysis of OER initiatives to see whether those with the above prerequisites perform better than those that don’t.  From my perspective, while the production of open resources can be mutually beneficial to contributors, I suspect the first two elements (frequent and reliable association) are under-represented in OER initiatives.  To me it implies frequent and ongoing collaboration for mutual benefit.  With the current rate of change in modern society, long-term collaboration does not seem likely in many instances.  Consider your own work initiatives over the past 5 years.  My guess is many have a duration of no longer than a year or two before moving onto something else.  So can these prerequisites be artificially contrived, or must it be organically arranged by chance? Perhaps the slow uptake of OERs and open initiatives is a result of lower naturally occurring situations with the right prerequisites for reciprocal altruism?  Time will ultimately answer this question.

A final quote from the article: “Once a cooperative strategy begins to invade a population, it should be able to outcompete the selfish strategies.”  On this reasoning, perhaps there is hope for a future of more open sharing of information and co-operation for the benefit of all.

Week 9: OERs – Accessibility

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba. Our instructor has asked us:

An interesting perspective to accesibility is the US’s America with disability Act Section 508. Is there as similar act in Canada? Do we need a similar act or are existing laws sufficient to address the disabled? What would these laws be? How does this apply to your own context? Blog on!

Instead of responding from the Canadian perspective, I’ll instead respond as an Australian.  Australia does have a provisions in law commensurate with the USA accessibility disability act.  It is known as the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.   So that Australian Government agencies adhere to the DDA, all Australian Government websites must adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guideslines (WCAG) version 2.  This is inline with the USA’s Section 508 which too “… requires that Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.”

However, unless I have misinterpreted both the Australian DDA and US Section 508, interestingly, in both cases the requirement is only for Government websites, not corporate or hobbyist sites.  This seems rather peculiar to me.

Recently my employer has renewed it’s commitment to accessibility guidelines with a push to improve the publishing of Moodle course websites.  Although the Moodle course websites are not published publicly, they still provide a service to enrolled students and need to be inclusive of all learners including those with disabilities.  Being a government owned university, I believe it is bound to the same rules as described above as part of the DDA.  The interesting challenge in my context is that our academic staff are not web publishing experts – they are discipline experts teaching Engineering, Business, Science and so on. Having to grapple with the WCAG standard and ensure compliance is going to be a difficult challenge for some staff who are not tech-savvy.

There are a wealth of tools available online and commercially to assist with ensuring adherence to accessibility guidelines, such as the WCAG.  I’m not sure whether they are targeted at web publishers or whether there are options for those less tech-savvy such as the example given above.  While it does take extra effort and time on the part of the author, I can imagine the appreciation felt by those who can then access your material using their screen-readers for instance with greater ease, than is otherwise possible.

In terms of how they laws could be improved or extended, I wonder whether Section 508 or the DDA could be mandated across all corporate websites for instance?  If the government is able to ensure accessibility, then with the appropriate education, and supporting technology, why not the rest of the community?

Week 8: OERs – The copyright question

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba.

Our instructor has asked us:

Is the preponderance of different types of licenses making it easier to reuse resources, or is it adding another layer of complexity which in effect works to place a barrier on using oer? In other words, are all these divergent licenses actually restricting the ways in which resources can be reused? Would it be simpler if we just had copyrighted work, which had to be cleared and public domain work which was free to use. Post your reflections in your blog.

The short answer is ‘yes’, all these divergent licences are restricting the ways in which resources can be reused, and ‘yes’ it would be simpler if we just had copyright work which was all rights reserved or public domain.  But would it be better without them?  I’m not so sure.

If you consider the original purpose of copyright as declared in the US constitution and referenced by wikipedia article about copyright being “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” you would have to wonder what all the fuss is about.  It seems quite reasonable to allow limited periods of exclusivity as a reward for one’s labours.  Sadly, the original intent of copyright has been perverted over many years to serve as a means of protecting corporate incomes.  As reported by Wikipedia, the limited period in particular has ballooned from a period of less than 30 years for an individual in 1790 to 120 years for a corporation in 2008.

So why have permissive licences become so tangled and complicated in terms of the variations in restrictions?  Are we making it all too hard for ourselves?  I think part of the answer relates to altruistic protections ensuring that work shared for the common good of all is not exploited for profits.  For example, licencing your work for non-commercial use (cc-nd). Another example is the share-a-like licence which requires any derivative works propagate the same licencing terms, ensuring they too remain in the public domain.

The other major aspect to this is the egoboo factor.  The term egoboo refers to the ego boost one receives as a result of sharing their work with the world (online).  The creative commons base licence and all derivatives ensure attribution as a requirement to using one’s work. This reminds me of a blog post relating to a presentation by George Siemens where he discusses the concepts of connectives and collectives in the context of networks.  He suggests that while humans like to be social and part of things larger than ourselves, to a certain extent, we also crave autonomy, individualism, and recognition for our own personal contributions to the wider network in which we reside.  Egoboo is part of this desire.

Denying ourselves a sense of individualism and a source of egoboo may well be more counter-productive than negotiating the complex array of open licences. In short, without the flexibility afforded by the range of licencing options, there may well exist significantly less desire to share works at all.  It is perhaps another one of life’s necessary evils.

 

Week 7: OERs – Integrating OERs into learning and teaching

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba. Our instructor has highlighted eight steps to OER integration as described by the OER Handbook.   The eight steps are:

1. Assess the validity and reliability of the OER.
2. Determine placement within the curriculum, if not already done. Note that some OER integration may be abandoned at this point if the OER relates poorly to the rest of the curriculum.
3. Check for license compatibility. (See License Incompatibility in Licensing for more details).
4. Eliminate extraneous content within the OER (assuming the license permits derivatives).
5. Identify areas of localization (see Adapt OER).
6. Remix with other educational materials, if applicable (see Adapt OER).
7. Determine the logistics of using the OER within the lesson. For example, you may need to print handouts for learners. In other cases special software may be needed.
8. Devise a method of evaluation or whether the currently planned evaluation needs adjustment (see Evaluation for more details).

We are asked to consider what these steps mean for our context.

Assess the validity and reliability of the OER

A natural first step is to consider whether a given OER fits with your overall strategy or goals for your artefact.  Does is convey the message(s) that you wish to share with your readership?  Is the OER coming from a trusted source, with suitable rigour in terms of critical analysis?  This step is essentially the first pass filter of weeding out inappropriate OERs.

Determine placement within the curriculum, if not already done. Note that some OER integration may be abandoned at this point if the OER relates poorly to the rest of the curriculum.

Assuming that a given OER is valid and from a trusted source, where does it fit with the over design of your OER.  While abandonment may be necessary if the OER does not neatly fit, it may also be the case that the overall design may need alteration instead, if the OER is a particularly noteworthy addition to your artefact.

Check for license compatibility. (See License Incompatibility in Licensing for more details).

This step in my mind should be second in this sequence – I’d eliminate an OER on the basis of an incompatible copyright licence before even considering it’s place in my final artefact.  I’d pay particular attention to the permissions of the licence.  Does the OER require adaption or derivative works to fit with my context?  This will help inform what type of licence is necessary to use the given OER.

Eliminate extraneous content within the OER (assuming the license permits derivatives).

I see this step and the former (licence compatibility) working hand-in-hand.  What possible changes might this OER need, and permissions do you have?  Alternatively, you can direct your students to portions of the work, without having to redesign it yourself.

Identify areas of localization (see Adapt OER).

Again depending on whether you have permissions to adapt the OER, you will want to identify aspects of the OER that do not fit with your context.  You could take a copy of the OER and make direct changes to it if the licence permits.  Alternately, you could remix the OER with other material, or your own.  See next step.

Remix with other educational materials, if applicable (see Adapt OER).

If you do not have permissions to alter the OER, you can still include it, along with other materials to help localise the content.  For instance, provide your own examples or analogies that accompany the OER, or use elements of another OER with more appropriate examples.

Determine the logistics of using the OER within the lesson. For example, you may need to print handouts for learners. In other cases special software may be needed.

This is an important step.  In my context, consideration of our complex blended environment is important as we have all of distance, face-to-face and international students in many of our courses.  Devising OERs that can be utilised by such diverse cohorts is important.

Devise a method of evaluation or whether the currently planned evaluation needs adjustment (see Evaluation for more details).

The process of creating an OER should be based on a cyclic development process that includes feedbacks that allow for continuous improvements.  Without this, an OER becomes dated and eventually superseded.  To keep an OER up to date, and relevant will require continuous review and refinement.  Wikipedia is a good model for this where the content is constantly reviewed and improved.

Our instructor also asked us to consider any additional steps to include.  Before embarking on the integration, you would want to carefully consider the format and technology used to publish your resulting OER.  This may also influence your choices of OER for integration with your artefact.  For example, if you are planning to support mobile platforms through epubs, and you are incorporating an OER from a website that does not permit redistribution (only linking), then this could prove problematic.

Many of these steps are co-dependent, especially around the licencing so allowing for some flexibility in your processes for integration will make for a more effective process.

 

Week 6: OERs – Reuse…Revise…Remix…Redistribute…

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba. Our instructor has asked “How does [internationalisation & localisation] apply to OERs? And how can you adapt your own OER content to address issues of local and foreign culture?”

As with the creation of any artefact, consideration of the intended audience is paramount.  What do you assume that they already know? What do they need to know?  What are their life experiences? What is their cultural background? How will they use the artefact?  In terms of OERs, one of their strengths is the licencing that enables you to repurpose, revise, remix, and redistribute taking into account the context in which the body of work is to be used. So I guess the trick when producing OERs is to design them such that they are as easy as possible to repurpose for different audiences, rather than trying to make your work accessible to everyone.

The localisation of work is not necessarily limited to a region or ethnic culture.  It can in-fact include organisational cultures.  I am considering my final project for the course and what body of work to produce.  I’d like to create something applicable to my place of work.  This means ensuring it is localised to my workplace culture, and aligns with the organisational goals, language (what organisations don’t have their own acronyms and idioms for instance?), facilities and so on.  So re-purposing an OER can mean combinations of reuse, revision, remixing, and redistribution such that the final product meets an organisational need.

Factors to consider when localising content can be obvious such as language.  If an artefact was written in Spanish as an example, it would be completely inaccessible to the likes of myself who can speak nothing other than English.  While other factors are far more subtle, yet still significant.  For instance, it is common to use an analogy (or examples) to teach a new concept or idea by drawing a parallel between a known concept and a new one.  What if the concept you assume to already be known by the learner is not known at all?  So your choice of analogy must be localised to match the context of the learner, or else it becomes meaningless. While there are a growing number of software tools available that will translate one language to another, the more subtle nuances such as analogies embedded within bodies of work are harder to address. Returning to my initial point of designing OERs such that they are easy to repurpose for different audiences, it would be useful to be able to mark-up within an OER, elements that are contextual, such as analogies so that they can be interchanged to meet the needs of a particular audience.  So when translating a body of work from one context to another, these marked-up areas can be replaced with something more meaningful for the intended audience.

The future of OERs and the current publishing paradigm

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba.

I recently read a blog post of a class mate relating to the future of OERs.  It has got me thinking further about this very topic and how technology is affecting the way we share online.

Stu says of OERs in five years time:

Instead of OERs what will we be talking about in five years?
We will still be talking about OERs in five years.  What I think we will be talking about more is the increasing ease of quality creation and the increased ease of distribution. Publishers are already under pressure because of this and that pressure will continue. Apple’s recent release of iBooks Author is a great example of this trend.  Even though the tool requires that content be distributed within the Apple ecosystem the ease of use and quality level achievable is astounding.

I tend to agree with your thoughts on what we will be talking about more in five years time – easy creation and distribution of artefacts.  You mentioned the pressure on traditional publishers as a result of the growing accessibility of self-publishing, and the introduction of new technology and services creating new markets for creators to sell their wares, such as Apple’s new iBooks.

I doubt the traditional publishing fraternity will rest on their laurels and will fight tooth and nail to retain their business model and profit margins as any corporate entity would do.  Of course, it may also mean a changing of the guard where the old tyrants are replaced with the new – Apple may well become a new breed of corporate control of the world’s intellectual property.  Money perverts altruism every time, but I am a cynical one.

Stu continues with a discussion of officialism in publishing:

First…should some OERs be “official” and others “unofficial”?
I don’t think it matters.  The most important thing for students is to have the skills and tools to find, verify and then appropriately use the resources they locate.  It does not matter if they are “official” or not.  In fact…the idea that a resource or piece of information is “official” I believe tends to lull people [students] into a state of complacency.  Everything should be looked at with the appropriate degree of criticism and be improved by the application of that criticism.

It would seem to me that it is only of value when there is trust in whomever the official may be.  Trust is a weakening commodity in the 21st century as our information age has given rise to many vectors by which to mislead and deceive others.  Fraud is rife online with all manner of cons being perpetrated.  Of course, as the information age provides the means for fraudsters, it also provides a counter in terms of being able to validate and verify what we are being told online – cross-referencing information from other sources.  Consider plagiarism detection systems for instance (http://turnitin.com/). But what do you do when you cannot verify information? For instance, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (http://www.abs.gov.au/) publish aggregated information based on census surveys.  The data however is not available to be validated against the reports produced.  I’m not suggesting at all that the ABS has fabricated any of their reports, and to my knowledge, they have quite a high degree of trust in the community, but there is no way of independently verifying the information they publish.  It is an Australian Government Department, which makes it more difficult (not impossible) to fabricate information.  Large international companies however have far less scrutiny and that is where I am very mistrusting.  Google’s algorithms for search results are a highly guarded secret, and yet it is the most widely used searching tool in the world.  Who audit’s Google’s practices here?  They have been accused in the past of manipulating the results.  The EU has started an Antitrust investigation into Google.

When answering the question “Are OERs just a cute kitten?”, Stu asks the following rhetorical question: “[Is there such a thing as a well trained cat?]“.

The mention of kittens (or in the case of this little anecdote cats) reminds me of a comment made by a colleague who described the management of academic staff (faculty) akin to herding cats.  So my gut tells me the answer is “No!”  More seriously, while managing people who are effective critical thinkers is very challenging, these people serve an important role – questioning is what purported to be “official”.

 

Week 5: OERs – information accuracy and integrity

This blog post relates to my study of Open Educational Resources as part of my Emerging Technologies for Learning Program of study at the University of Manitoba.  This week our instructor has given us free reign for our weekly blog topic, in part asking “What are some of the issues that bother you about OER?”

Reflecting on the past 5 weeks of my study I recall my very first blog post and a comment by a colleague and good friend David Jones.  David suggested one of the problems for OERs was that everyone has their own preferred method of introducing a topic, and so there is a predisposition to creating anew rather than re-using or re-purposing resources. This fundamentally undermines the principles of OERs.  While I did concur with David’s comments, and drew a connection with this idea, and more broadly the ideas of George Siemens around Groups and Networks, I do have another related issue that I see for the future of OERs.  The predisposition of the teacher is only one small (but significant) part of a broader collection of varying factors that influence the design of an OER.  These varying factors generally are what I would call the learning context.  I have blogged quite a bit about the significance of learning context in the past.

I believe the context of the learner is a critical input to the design of any learning artifact.  You wouldn’t create an online course for learners with poor Internet connectivity.  When doing instructional design, a typical

There are just so many factors to consider when designing a resource, not least of which the learners themselves.  Learner demographics, their previous knowledge and experience, their motivations for study, their work and family commitments, their culture and nationality,  their access to technology, their competence with technology – there are so many dimensions.  In most cases, you can only speculate on some of these matters, but they all have an influence on the outcomes for the students.  When you are looking for OERs, you may need to contextualise them for you and your students.  Depending on the variation of context, a consider re-write may be necessary to make the OER accessible to your own students.

There are also institutional factors to consider including your institution’s attitude towards OERs, copyright policy, publishing platforms (mobile devices, hardcopy print, LMS and so on).

My concern is that variations in learning context may significantly limit re-use of OERs.  I have previously commented that to maintain a healthy learning environment, it is important to have a good balance of re-use and adaptation of OERs:

Too much re-use will result in assimilation of ideas which can stifle innovation and stalls evolution. Too much creation anew or even adaption to an extent will limit the benefits of OERs in terms of sharing the costs of development of such resources, as you are constantly re-inventing the wheel.

It is the latter that I am concerned will be he downfall of OERs.

Further questions put forward by our instructor for this week are “Should some OERs be ‘official’ and others ‘unofficial’? Why? Should this be a question to ask?”

This goes to the integrity of OERs, but perhaps the question should be “how do we educate educators to write professionally in an information age?” My class-peer Leah has written an excellent blog post commenting on attitudes towards the citation of wikipedia in scholarly articles.  The academy generally frowns on the use of Wikipedia.  Yet, Leah quite rightly makes the point that many Wikipedia articles are critiqued by many more people than  any “official” publications.  Even Google has a similar opinion.  Like any source of information, it needs to be evaluated in terms of accuracy, authenticity and integrity – all important information literacy skills of the 21st Century and something that we should all do when reading/viewing/listening online.  It is a self-publishing world.  Consider the authorship of the article, the history, and the citations contained therein on which the article’s content is derived – all prominently available in wikipedia.  Then make a reasoned judgement on the credibility of the information and if it checks out, why not use it.