The Give and Take of Open Knowledge
The purpose of this piece is to reflect on my, admittedly limited, professional practice of using open knowledge (OK) (re)sources and relate it to the university and higher education. I have divided this in to two parts: what I use from the OK arena and what I contribute to it.
My use of OK
For some time I have been a poster (@johnwpal) and reader of tweets (as can be seen below).
The use of social media platforms such as Twitter has been commented upon in a previous posting by Kate Holmes. Whilst my tweet activity is sporadic, it is based around my academic and practical interests in retailing, but I also tweet, and retweet, about education, my local football team and sometimes use it to vent my spleen about (train) commuting. Some may suggest that Twitter is but an echo chamber. But, like any tool, used in an appropriate way I have found it to be very useful. So here are some of the key tweeters that I follow and why:
Neil Saunders is a retail consultant. Every day he provides hyper links to all the breaking retail news covered in the print and broadcast media in the UK and the USA (where he is now based). As a retail academic I find this invaluable as Saunders aggregates in one set of tweets everything that is current, interesting and, most importantly, relevant to my teaching area.
Neil’s tweets are so valuable that I have now embedded his twitter feed in the Blackboard area for two of my retail courses. And do the students use it? Looking at the reports on Blackboard it is an unequivocal ‘yes’.
Dr Steve Jones is a colleague of mine at the University of Manchester (UoM), who teaches and researches about higher education. Steve is someone who I admire, and can trust to post material that is useful to those with an interest in higher education. His feed helps me keep abreast of key issues and hence contextualise and reflect on my practice.
Rosie Jones is another outstanding individual who is based at the Open University. I have worked with Rosie at both the Manchester Metropolitan University and the UoM. Rosie is excellent at providing links and insights to information literacy and to sites such as the OA resource My Learning Essentials at the UoM shown below:
Tim Harford is also known as ‘The Undercover Economist’, and he sometimes has links to his full text articles from the Financial Times. So whilst I’m not an economist I find his articles of general interest and he is a great communicator — surely a major role of an academic — both in print through his tweets and personal web page , and also on BBC Radio 4’s ‘More or Less’.
My colleague John Hynes who has published an interesting posting on OK, has likened information on the internet as trying to drink from a fast-flowing fire hydrant. Working out how to handle this torrent of potential data and information on Twitter has taken some trial and error. This approach reflects my use of the Kolb learning cycle, where I like to experiment first, and then reflect on that. So now, I use some simple rules: I follow people due to either some form of personal connection — like meeting them in person — (as with the two Jones’s), or because of a deserved reputation as leaders or experts in their area, such as Saunders and Harford.
Before I started on this programme I enrolled on a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) delivered by a major UK Russell Group university — I have deliberately NOT identified the course. The free-to-access materials included film clips of lectures, some ‘talking heads’, pdfs of articles by the teaching team, and some practical activities. There was a chatroom moderated by a PhD student. Over a thousand ‘students’ enrolled on the course and the chatroom was a free-for-all with little structure, intermittent responses to questions posed, and no feedback on the activities. I may have been unlucky in my choice of course (that was operated by Coursera). But just because something is free and open does not necessarily mean anything, nor does the fact that it is developed and delivered by a reputable university guarantee a good experience.
That’s the taking; what about the giving?
Apart from my tweets, and retweets, I have made three contributions to the Open Knowledge community. Firstly, my bespoke Link2Lists reading list, like all those at the UoM are freely accessible to the whole world.
Of course not all the hyper links embedded in lists are accessible to all viewers, as they are paid for by the UoM subscriptions to journals. But UoM students not enrolled on my course can access the links. Nonetheless the list itself, ‘paid for’ by my students, is accessible to everyone. Initially, I was somewhat aggrieved that my work had (potentially) been made available to other academics. But hey, I’ve got over that. (I was obviously trying to put a value on my work and a great synopsis of trying to put a price on everything is available here. A word of thanks to my brother, Andrew, who sent me this link in relation to something else we were discussing).
And the reason I’m now not too concerned about my reading list being visible is that my students get me — not just the list — and I still, rightly or wrongly, believe that education is an activity that is to be undertaken, partly or mostly, with some form of individual and connected activity between the parties involved. Open access can have a part to play in that process, but it is just a part.
Secondly, I have been involved in making a number of film clips about the retail scene in 2014 and 2013 for the UoM’s Business School. These have been made freely available via the university’s YouTube channel and promoted via a number of social media channels. And the viewing figures? Less than 200 for most film clips. So here we have a retail academic (a disclaimer here — I do not badge or position myself as an ‘expert’) but even with the reputation of the UoM behind me the number of ‘hits’ on YouTube clips is fairly negligible. But does quantity equate to quality and usefulness? Having said that I’ve probably had more hits than ‘reads’ of some of my scholarly publications!
And thirdly I have undertaken copious amounts of media work under the banner of the University of Manchester Business School (as you may have detected from the background on my Twitter page). I don’t get paid for that work, but it does allow me to try to explain to the tv-watching public (probably sitting in their pyjamas eating toast) about issues in the retail sector. OK you want proof now that I have not photo-shopped myself with Susannah Reid and Charlie Stayt on BBC Breakfast, so look here: “Are supermarkets to blame for food waste?” from April 2014 where I am interviewed by Steph McGovern, also on BBC Breakfast — a Sunday morning at that.
I suppose these last two examples sit within a university’s wider remit of improving public understanding of, in my case, retailing. The idea of universities giving academics ‘space’ to making freely available materials and talks fits with the notion of dissemination of knowledge through open access. You can find high profile examples at the University of Brighton and the University of Oxford.
So am I put off this whole OA/OK ‘thing’? No; the course has opened my eyes to the topic and in particular Martin Eve’s critique of the double whammy of charges involved in journal publication. What am I doing about this most invidious of practices? I have accepted an invitation to be on the advisory board for a new OA journal, and am promoting it to my network some of whom are on Twitter. Having read this piece, perhaps you will too?
