Love of Learning society

An online society open to all dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the love of learning.

“For the LoL”

This is an idea that was developed with the help of Simon Thomson at the Jisc Creativity Workshop run by Lawrie Phipps.

CC - https://www.flickr.com/photos/pollyann/329186325
CC – https://www.flickr.com/photos/pollyann/329186325

The LoLs 10 Tenets:

  1. Not for profit
  2. No credentials or qualifications given or required
  3. 100% online
  4. $5 lecture fee
  5. All lectures happen live with no limit on the number of students
  6. All lectures to be funded in a ‘kickstarter’ style with visible speaker fee
  7. Anyone can run a lecture as an expert
  8. 50% of lecture running time to be Q&A/discussion with questions chosen by the students
  9. All sessions released as a recording under an open, noncommercial license
  10. All income (after expert fee and admin) to go to educational charities that work to widen participation and make knowledge freely available

The following to be decided by the expert for each lecture:

  • Subject focus
  • Lecture length (must be a prime number of minutes between 7 and 29)
  • Speaker fee, which will be visible to the potential students (the fee will either be waived or a prime number)

LoLs student (sLoL) journey:

  1. Become a member of the society by signing up to the LoLs platform.
  2. Seek out an interesting  lecture and pledge $5. (It will be clear how close the lecture is to the minimum funding level needed. Beyond this point all income goes to charity. All lectures have a set start time.)
  3. If they make a pledge early (before the minimum funding has been reached) they can submit a question to be asked during the Q&A portion of the lecture. If they are in later than this then they can vote potential question up and down. The number of questions used will be proportional to the length of the lecture.
  4. They might explore some of the pre-lecture links if any have been submitted by the expert. They can also check the lecture hashtag to get involved in pre-lecture discussion and connect with others who have pledged.
  5. If the minimum funding level is reached they receive a reminder of the lecture time and an access code of some sort.
  6. The lecture runs in a Google Hangouts style platform with a video feed from the expert, a hashtag driven back channel and a text chat area. More confident experts could use whiteboards and polls etc. All lectures are supported by a facilitator to assist with the tech and to moderate. Facilitators can work for free or be paid in $5 lecture tokens. Experts will be encouraged to respond to the backchannel and text chat as much as possible.
  7. At exactly half-time the lecture moves into Q&A mode with the facilitator stepping through the top questions as voted for by participants. If there is time left they can respond to questions that have emerged from the backchannel and text chat.
  8. Exactly on time the platform shuts down the lecture with extreme prejudice (automatically 🙂
  9. The video feed is then placed on YouTube or a similar channel under an open, non-commercial license.
  10. Discussion can continue on the hashtag.
  11. Participants can rate the lecture and the expert within limited LoLs criteria.

LoLs expert (eLoL) journey:

  1. Become a member of the society by signing up to the LoLs platform.
  2. Experts must have participated in at least two lectures before having the option to create their own lecture and have completed a LoLs expert tutorial.
  3. Create a lecture by submitting the following:
    • Subject area, title, blurb etc
    • Level (novice, intermediate, advanced)
    • Associated material and links
    • Pick a speaker fee for themselves
    • Pick a lecture length and time
    • Pick a charity or charities (from a LoLs list) that any income over the minimum will go to
  4. The expert can mark what they think are good questions with an expert tag during the voting process but can’t create questions.
  5. The expert might join in the hashtag based discussion.
  6. They may also promote the lecture via their networks to ensure it reaches the minimum funding level.
  7. If the funding level is reached they are given an expert code of some sort to access the lecture space which they can visit as much as they want to set-up.
  8. The lecture runs (all they need is a webcam and headset). Experts and facilitators arrive 30 minutes before the start time to ensure the tech is working smoothly.
  9. After the lecture the expert can chose to join in with any additional hashtag based discussion. The expert or the facilitator may put a link to the recording in appropriate Wikipedia articles.

So that’s about it in simple terms. It’s based on a number of principles:

  • People like to be involved in live events even if this is less convenient than watching a recording. (See ‘Eventedness‘)
  • The format is honest about paying the experts if they want a fee. The $5 format also negates the need for advertising (depending on what platforms are used) or sponsorship.
  • People like to influence events and have input – in this case via submitting or voting on questions or via the live discussion. 
  • Most people can relate to ‘classic’ nomenclature such as ‘lecture’, ‘expert’ and ‘student’. This is a deliberate choice and has no bearing on the style of pedagogy experts chose.  
  • It allows for huge mainstream lectures and niche ones designed for no more than a few students.
  • People like to lead up to and away from live events – in this case via the lecture hashtag.
  • ‘Big names’ can chose a big fee or munificence.
  • in keeping with the LoL principle only lectures that people are truly interested in will run.
  • Popular lectures are very likely to bring in income for the chosen charities as there is minimal (if any) cost as student numbers increase.
  • People tend to be more invested in something they have paid for even if the fee is minimal (and incidentally a prime number).
  • The format encourages both the expert and keen students to promote the lecture.
  • No knowledge is withheld as all lectures are freely available as recordings.
  • Anyone can get involved in hashtag discussions.

I’d estimate that a LoLs pilot could initially be developed by stitching together a number of free-to-use platforms. The difficult part is managing the way the money flows around. I suspect a bespoke pilot platform could be put together for less than the cost of developing the materials for a mainstream MOOC.

So, who’s interested? 🙂

P.S. If this got off the ground then I’d form a parallel organisation called the Love of Learning institute ( LoLi – pronounced lolly). This would also be not for profit and would handle any commercial interests in LoLs content. For example a number of LoLs lectures under a given theme could be built into a curriculum structure and accredited. The LoLi protects the tenants of the LoLs and would hopefully feed more money to educational charities.

Analysing digital literacies – four headlines

One of the recent activities of the Visitors and Residents project has been the development of an analysis framework to help us to gain a deeper understanding of how our participants are engaging with technology for their learning. During the process of coding our interviews we noted down recurrent underlying themes and used these as headlines for the framework. We query the data in NVivo using our original coding e.g. “(ANY: Social Media, Facebook, Twitter, Blog) AND (ANY: Authority, Relevance, Reliability)” – the results are then mapped into the framework which captures the nuances of participants views and motivations.

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CC – http://goo.gl/Ib7eb

Getting involved in discussions at a couple of JISC Developing Digital Literacies project cluster meetings I found myself using the high-level themes from the framework to respond to reporting from the projects. I was tentative about this as the framework is still evolving but the feedback from the cluster meetings was positive so I promised to make the high-level themes available as a reference point to help structure evaluation and/or dissemination. What follows is a brief review of the four top-level themes in our framework:

1. Genres of participation

This is the overarching perspective with Visitor (web perceived as a collection of tools) and Resident (web perceived as a series of co-present spaces) as the principle genres placed at either end of a continuum of engagement (see our First Monday paper). With regard to digital literacies it’s possible to equate the ‘skills’ based (learning the essential functionality of technology) approaches with Visitor and the more experiential/personal-professional identity approaches with Resident. Of course there is no hard-line between these genres of participation, for example many of our participants use social media only for organisational purposes. They are using an apparently Resident technology in a purely functional, Visitor manner. Having said that for reporting or evaluation it’s often useful to initially separate skills based approaches from experiential approaches as measuring their ‘impact’ requires different methods.

2. Attitudes

In the Visitors and Residents project we are exploring ‘motivation to engage’. Often the participant’s motivation is influenced by an underlying attitude or ideology. This can be as simple as not trusting ‘crowd sourced’ resources or as complex as their views on what ‘learning’ is or should be. For the most part these attitudes will not have been closely considered or deconstructed by participants and in some cases simply boil down to forms of prejudice. Good examples of areas which can be highly attitudinal and effect motivations to engage are:

  • Views on the authority and role of Wikipedia and other non-traditional sources.
  • Views on the legitimacy and validity of academic blogs and blogging.
  • Views on the role of social media as a valid space for learning.
  • Views on the relative authority of various media e.g. the ‘a printed book always has more authority than a blog post’ stand-point.

The majority of these areas can be related back to issues of credibility which is proving to be a very useful concept to ‘take the temperature’ of many of these underlying attitudes. What is or isn’t credible in the service of learning and academia is highly contested and has been massively broadened and disrupted by the affordances of the web. There are some very interesting tensions between credibility and convenience emerging from our data which we hope to explore further.

3. Transition points

Whether a particular ‘moment’ or a slow incremental slide it is useful to consider what factors encourage or force individuals to shift their mode of engagement. The majority of the transitions we see in our data are from a Visitor to a Resident mode as the Visitor mode tends to be the ‘default’ state in an institutional context. However we do have examples of participants who have transitioned back into a Visitor mode having found a Resident approach to be inefficient, distracting or uncomfortable. Good examples of transition points include:

  • Geographically relocating – engaging with social media to keep in contact with remote friends and family or students from a previous institution.
  • Course requirements – assessment being attached to a Resident mode of engagement such as blogging.
  • Social tipping point – participants discover that the majority of their peer group are organising social events via social media and so they have to create a profile to ‘stay in the loop’
  • Professional identity – participants decide that it is of value to be ‘active’ online and to develop a visible online profile around their professional role.
  •  Efficiency – participants discover that a Resident approach is ultimately a reasonably efficient/effective way to gather trusted sources and to further their thinking.

A key factor here is the participant’s attitude towards open practice. Being required by an institution to post work in ‘open’ online spaces is counter to most participant’s experience of the educational process. While they might be happy to be part of, for example, a student run Facebook group attached to a course that is very different from being required to engage in a Resident manner. If a participant is generally suspicious of ‘open’ they are unlikely to make any transitions and they are also less likely to trust non-traditional sources (or a least admit to using them…).

4. Management

This again is useful to consider via the genres of participation. The methods participants develop to manage their engagement with technology tend to vary based on whether they are in a predominantly Visitor or Resident mode in a given context. Often participants in a Visitor mode want to retain control over what they engage with and when. There is a desire to keep their time and their roles compartmentalised so that work and personal activities remain distinct making it easier to predict the time and effort that will be required when they log on. Participants with a compartmental approach tend to decide what they want to achieve before they go online. In contrast to this the almost inevitable decompartmentalisation that is an effect of Residency means that participants in this mode are more likely to go online a ‘see what’s happening’. The principle management issues for the Resident mode are likely to be around addiction, distraction and the artful maintenance of the blurred boundaries between differing roles and personas e.g. the perennial ‘do I friend my students?’ conundrum.

 

These high-level areas have been a useful in making-sense of our data and we are busy discussing more granular sub-themes. I hope you find them a useful starting point when considering digital literacies and reviewing your approaches to facilitating new forms of learning and teaching practice online.

The project is also designing a four session learning resource based around these thematic areas. It will be an Open Education Resource under an appropriate Creative Commons licence and we hope that in the first instance it will be a helpful resource for staff developers and those involved in professional development programmes. We will be releasing a first draft of the structure of the ‘course’ for comment in the next few days so watch-this-space.

 

Disappearing digital resources

One of the most striking aspects of our JISC funded Open-Educational-Resources Impact study was the extent to which using digital resources has become embedded in teaching practice. Digital resources are ‘disappearing into use’ as they become part of the fabric of higher education.

We interviewed strategists, academics and students to find out how they found and used digital resources. It wasn’t surprising to find that students were Googling for anything they could get their hands on but the extent to which academics are doing this as well was unexpected. The difference between the groups was that staff have the expertise required to critically evaluate what they find while the students are nervous about waiting-time using resources which might prove to be off-topic. They are also uncertain of how to cite non-traditional resources or if they should admit to using them as all. This is a good example of where digital literacy and traditional research skills are both essential.

But what about licensing? Well, those whose practice was highly visible on the web and therefore closely tied to the reputation of their institution were keen to use openly licensed materials. E.g. an online distance elearning team or groups that make modules which are rereleased out onto the web. Those in course or programme teams were less focused on licensing because their practice is largely private – within the VLE, in the lecture theatre etc. In day-to-day teaching the technicalities of reuse come second to the potential of a resource to make the student’s learning experience richer.

The OER Impact project analysed the link between the value of use and its impact in teaching and learning. There is a full research report and a shorter ‘accessible’ report available for download from JISC. Or you can watch the short video below to get an overview of our findings.

The video is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY)

OER Impact project team-

Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning:
Mr David White
Ms Marion Manton

Learning Technologies Group:
Dr Elizabeth Masterman
Ms Joanna Wild

Who is using Open Educational Resources?

This post marks the official open-on-the-web style start to our JISC funded OER Impact study. The key tasks of the study being:

  • The investigation of patterns of behaviour around the use and reuse of OER.
  • Examining the impact of these behaviours on teaching and learning strategies from institutional, tutor and student perspectives.

Our methodology is distinctly qualitative, focusing on the ‘why’ and much as the ‘what’. Why you might be using OER rather than why they should exist.

As anyone who has cruised the blog posts around OER will know there is a never-ending debate about the value-cost ratio of openly licensing educational resources much of which hangs on an expectation of repurposing/remixing. Up to now there has been little research on the potential value of OER as distinct from stuff-on-the-web from the perspective of the users/re-users/remixers. We hope to somewhat redress that balance.

Most ‘big OER’ activity to date has been driven be the production side of the produce/resuse coin. I recently heard of a university which was considering working with iTunesU in a potentially OER manner. Interestingly it was the marketing department who was pushing for this which is indicative of an understanding of one of the values of open resources/OER from an institutional perspecitve. I don’t know if that marketing department has considered who might use/reuse the resources they hand to Apple?

In any event, stats out of our slice of iTunesU here at Oxford show that a lot of people are using OER. The majority of this use being informal (a term often incorrectly equated with ‘casual’) and individual. I suspect the videos which are CC licensed are used in much the same way as those that aren’t. After all, one of the benefits of informal usage is that you don’t have to be seen to be playing by the rules isn’t it..? That aside there is a pleasant ‘social-good’ aspect here because beyond any formal curricular use of OER they benefit the-man-in-the-street in a manner that would be difficult to argue against.

In a recent post Amber Thomas made the point that OER is a “supply side term” which I tend to agree with. Given that the distinction between OER and stuff-on-the-web is technical (in legal terms) one of our primary concerns is to make sure that we capture narratives of use/reuse which are related to OER not simply to open-stuff-online. Having said this we don’t want to devalue non-OER reuse or examples of the steady cultural shift towards an acceptance of ‘openness’ in the most general sense. To position our conversations with participants within a broad use/reuse territory we are proposing to use the following map.

David White, JISC OER Impact Study.

As ever the semantics could be tweaked/argued over well into the night but I hope the map covers much of the use/reuse area that could be found in and around a Higher Ed institution. Suggestions for how the diagram could be improved are, of course, very welcome.

In conjunction with our research questions this approach should allow us to concentrate on OER value from a use/reuse perspective without discarding valuable examples of the informal use/reuse of OER or close-to-OER type resources.

Over the next six months our project will interview staff who use OER in their teaching practice and those who are interested in taking advantage of OER. In addition to this we will be interviewing students about what motivates them to use particular resources in their learning either as directed by the curriculum or discovered independently. If you have any good examples of OER use/reuse which has been embedded in course programmes/institutional strategies then please let us know.