“Don’t fence me in”:

an academic perspective on the impact and future of open access in researchPamela Ryan

School for Graduate Studies

College of Human Sciences

UNISA

Cole Porter

Give me land lots of land

Under starry skies above

Don’t fence me in.

A new philosophy for new times

We are witnessing a revolution unfoldingNew academic ideas about disciplines

and the boundaries between themTeaching without bordersA new global philosophy

From information to interaction

The fourth wave in digital technologyMany users – one large mainframeSingle user – single pcSingle user – many devicesMany users – many devicesConvergence between users and device

and other users = interaction

Social context is changing

Free and open use of technologySkypeAll of MP3FacebookGoogle messengerWikiblogs

Implications for teaching and learning

Free use is becoming the norm for academic institutions

MonashStrathclydeStanford (largest number of open

courses)Open university’s Learning spaceGoogle books and the library project

Free web platforms with multiple uses

SakaiMoodle

Implications for academics

Free access and up to date knowledge from e-journals or journals on line

Transfer this knowledge to students via uploads on web

Not a one way street: Web 2.0 and Scholarship 2.0

Democratic participation in knowledge creation

The role of the library in the new age

Still be custodians of precious documents and archives

Still purchase books but more NB purchase subscriptions to journals and web of science

Be facilitators and guides (to follow the metaphor) through wilderness of information

Psychology of institutions shadows psychology of academics

Timid and fenced in?Open and wide-ranging?Confident and generous?Ability to share?

But

Bewildering array of information not necessarily equal to knowledge

Students and staff need guidesStudent may resent intrusion into their

spaceStudents may prefer structured systems

Future students: the millenials

Will be accustomed to free and open access to materials of choice

Will demand high quality and speed from flat earth concept

Will more than ever need structure from home university

Will expect to learn where they are (wirelessly)

Thus

A fenced in university will be left behindScholarly communities unbounded by

time and space (asynchronous learning)Internet used as a space for social

interaction rather than as a resource for information (youtube, facebook, myspace and second life)

Wikis, blogs and podcasts

The future

Digital librariesE-portfoliosShared resourcesIncreasingly sophisticated studentsBenchmark libraries against Google

Provoking ideas

Community source model projects are held together by “enlightened self-interest”, John Norman, University of Cambridge.

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations

(New York: Doubleday, 2004).

A warning?

The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased. (p. 4) 

And another…

The central filtering agent is no longer the teacher or institution. It’s the learner. Think about what that means to our education system as we know it today. It changes everything . . . . [A]s educators, we are not grasping (or prepared for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it's happened (breaking apart the center) in every other industry - movies, music, software, business - what makes us think that our educational structures are immune? And what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our institutions? Ourselves? Our learners?

George Siemons

Connections over content

I don't use textbooks in my courses. I use a combination of my own writings, augmented with websites, and supported through dialogue and learner to learner interaction. My intent is to provide learners a diverse set of voices. A textbook is most often a one-sided view of the knowledge of a particular space (and, in certain fields, they can be dated by the time they are published). I don't view content as something that learners need to consume in order to learn. As I've stated before...learning is like opening a door, not filling a container. Content is something that is created in the process of learning, not only in advance of learning.

Learners piece together (connect) various content and conversation elements to create an integrated (though at time contradictory) network of issues and concerns. Our learning and information acquisition is a mashup. We take pieces, add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up with some type of pattern (meme?) that symbolizes what's happening "out there" and what it means to us. And it changes daily. Instead of a CD with the songs of only one artist, we have iPods with a full range of music, video, audio files/books, images, etc. Our classrooms, instead of the pre-packaged views of an instructor or designers should include similar diverse elements.

http://connectivism.ca/blog/2006/03/it_doesnt_come_prepackaged_any.html

The Horizon Report

The core of the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have an impact on higher education over the next one to five years.

Technologies to Watch

User-Created Content Social Networking Mobile Phones Virtual Worlds The New Scholarship and Emerging

Forms of PublicationMassively Multiplayer Educational

Gaming .

Donor funding for open sources

Mellon foundation (because such openware projects have the potential to solve problems facing our constituencies and a collaborative approach has the highest probability of benefitting the most people (do more with less)

Ira H Fuchs, Vice President for research in IT at Mellon Foundation.

No more time…

To talk about camels and lams, vle and vre

Another time perhaps?