Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
...the Department of Anthropology, I'm also associate director of Matrix which is a
digital humanities research Center here on campus.
My primary area of research is cultural heritage informatics, so
basically the application of computing information technologies to
cultural heritage materials, questions, problems, datasets, things like that.
I'm an archaeologist so the path that I took
to come from digging holes in the ground in Egypt--and I did work in Egypt--
to here is logical to me, it makes sense in my head.
But recently I've become particularly interested in you
know; actually not recently, since I was in grad school frankly,
using competing technologies for peer to peer and peer to public
communication and scholarly practice
in the digital age specifically in the area of cultural heritage.
So I come before you to talk on a subject very near and dear to my heart.
I titled this, "Tales of an Open Scholar".
So what does this have to do
with the subject matter of this talk today or with this
forum today which is social media and networks?
Basically the argument that I'm making, and you're gonna have to sort of stay
with me through this whole argument, is that
the idea of "open"
is an incredibly powerful form of social media.
And that by living an open scholar, and I'll talk about what I mean
by an open scholar,
I'm able to connect with a far larger
number and greater range of colleagues and potential colleagues
as well as students. My work has a greater reach and a greater
impact than if I lived as a closed scholar,
and I will talk about what a closed scholar is as well.
Now most of this is just my experience.
This is living my life as an open scholar,
talk about my strategies, what has worked, what hasn't worked, challenges, all that
kind of stuff.
So when I say open, what do I mean by open? This is
my definition of open.
Lots of people have different definitions of open
and different scholars in different disciplines have different
definitions of open so this is unique to me.
So the first thing is that
silos are bad.
And by silos I mean I do my best to
not put my intellectual work in systems
that are only acceptable, accessible by a small
privileged group of people.
Open also means the open web.
I do my best to choose tools, platforms, services, communities
that play well with the open web. And for those of you who are more
tech inclined in the room, you'll know what the open web is, that means
something technically speaking.
It also means that
I evangelize for open. I think that is a very very important component
in this open lifestyle
is I evangelize for open scholarship.
And there is a really nice quote; Amy Morrison who
is a professor at an eLit at the University of Waterloo in Ontario,
she has this really interesting quote.
Basically says to seek a conversation, not a convert.
And I very much kind of fall into that, I really like to have conversations with
people about open scholarship and I don't try to find
converts despite the fact that it kind of seems that way.
Now obviously open in sort of generally speaking is not without its
problems, its challenges, it's frustrations.
Many of these frustrations come from within the academy itself.
They are my colleagues, frankly,
who are frightened, hostile to this idea of openness.
I don't want to suggest that this is a generational issue,
it isn't. A lot of the colleagues that I work with
who are very very friendly to this idea of open scholarship
are respected senior scholars.
And there are just as many
young Turks like myself who are very hostile towards the idea of open
scholarship. So I don't want to make this suggestion that it's a
old verses new, young versus old whatnot, it isn't.
It's also important that my framework for doing all of this
is a grass to roots, bottom- up,
DIY, hacking kind of perspective.
I am frankly the I.T. Manager's nightmare.
If I want to do something,
I just go dump something on my server. I'm really kind of fortunate in the sense
that I have a large server farm to play with
that I can put anything on.
I don't like living within the
boundaries of the university tech ecosystem, I actually think that it is
personally quite restrictive.
That doesn't mean that I speak down to people who want to
live within that ecosystem, that's fine,
but I like just doing stuff and building stuff and if I want to try something else
or try something out I just do it. I personally
don't feel that
we need institutional level blessing to do this stuff. If you want
to go do something as a faculty member, just go out and do it.
Alright, so one of the components of this whole idea of the open scholarship
is the open classroom.
Now the term open classroom has actually been used before and I'm kinda ripping
it off and changing it a little bit.
The term open classroom actually originated in the 1970s
to basically talk about the architecture of a classroom and spatial organization of a
classroom. When I say open classroom I don't mean this, this is something else.
When I say open classroom I mean this. Open classroom to me
is a philosophy, it's choice about platforms,
and it's also practice. How I run my classrooms
and how I manage my courseware and how I put my course content out
there and how I interact with students around courses.
Now we can drill down
a little bit into this and talk about open courseware. Now anyone who has
seen me talk about this subject at all knows that I'm a very very
strong advocate of open courseware.
Now for those of you who are unfamiliar, open courseware is basically high quality,
university course material made freely available on the web to anyone.
Ooh your phone likes that.
It was; the term open courseware was pioneered by MIT. They were
certainly not the first to do it,
they actually branded that open courseware.
And the salient point here is that
the material is released under a creative commons license and we're gonna
kind of circle back to that in a little bit.
All of my classes, all of them, exist
outside of the ANGEL ecosystem. I do not use ANGEL at all except for grade book
because I cannot make two and two add up to four.
And I don't
use ANGEL to deliver any kind of course materials at all
because primarily ANGEL makes me sad.
And there's a lot of reasons why ANGEL makes me sad and I will not get
into that.
This morning I actually looked at
my two classes for this year.
So in the fall I taught
a pseudo archaeology class,
small four hundred level seminar, fifteen students.
And in the spring I taught Archaeology of Ancient Egypt which is roughly the
same amount of people.
These are the unique page views from the classes.
So the pseudo arch class had a hundred nineteen thousand unique page views
where the Egyptian archaeology class had fifteen thousand unique page views.
Now obviously web statistics are problematic, yes, but
these numbers alone speak to
the reach of the course material.
These are getting to people: scholars,
individuals, high school kids,
domestic, international, across the board.
A far greater
and more impactful way than if I had all my course material in ANGEL
which would only probably have
a hundred, two hundred unique page views; it would be just the class.
So here is the networking point of this, I'm putting all of my course
material out there freely available and I'm reaching
a far, far broader and wider audience
then I possibly could if I was a closed scholar.
The second part of this is open platforms and this is
once again these are what I use and these are what I choose to employ.
Now by open platforms
I mean free
open-source tools
or tools that have
an open philosophy, so they have open APIs, things like that.
And tools that are meant to be forward facing.
And my tech ecosystem is this, this is what I use. I use WordPress, I use MediaWiki
and I use Twitter exclusively, and I have for
years. Now obviously I dabble in other tools and I
dip my toes into other platforms and play around with stuff;
I always come back to these three things, always.
So all of my course websites are served,
run by WordPress, all of them. It is not only
the delivery mechanism for the course material,
but it is the platform for a lot of the assignments students do in
the class. So for instance
on a weekly basis they have posts and responses.
Now all of this stuff is open,
you know this is not hidden behind a password or a login or anything like that
so they're having all of these discussions out in the open.
And I tell them at the beginning, we have a really frank discussion about what
open means, what it means to them,
the consequences and the benefits of it,
and they have the opportunity to opt out of this if they want.
I saw, "I will password protect your stuff if you want, that only I can see it, that
only the class can see it.
If you want to just send me stuff, that's fine. If you don't want it living
on the site that's perfectly fine as well". And we spend
half a class talking about this. Never once has a student opted out of it, never.
So they go into this with eyes open, they
see the benefit and years later
I have students e-mailing me saying,
"Is that paper I wrote in that class, is it still up there and
available?" and I am like, "Yeah it's still in the exact same URL"
because they needed it to apply for grad school.
So this idea that putting the stuff out there,
there is this longevity to the content that they produce and
the discussion that goes on
extends beyond the class itself.
I also use MediaWiki for more robust
writing assignments. For those of you who are unfamiliar
MediaWiki is the platform that runs Wikipedia,
mostly. It is a wiki in the truest sense of the word. It is a,
it has compared to other sort of commercial wiki's like
PBworks or Google Sites,
it has a somewhat
steep learning curve. And I've chosen to use it specifically because I want to
challenge my students to become familiar and to literate with these technologies.
I use MediaWiki for large writing assignments that post stuff on
all their research papers go on MediaWiki, all their smaller writing
assignments go on MediaWiki.
Some of them are collaborative, some of them have; I build in
sort of peer assessments into it as well so they use MediaWiki to
comment on things.
I also use Twitter, I am a Twitter child.
This is my primary form of social media.
And in a class context,
because Twitter is also going to come up in a scholarly context as well,
Twitter is important because it essentially moves--
and you can't really see it there--
from there sequestered in the little office there
down there. It connects
me with students. It creates a
arguably meaningful connection with my students.
And I've also made the very conscious choice to merge my personal and
professional voice.
There's actually fairly good research that shows that
students who have a closer--undergraduates-- who have a closer connection,
personal connection, to their professors have better success.
There's also very recently
some, a study that came out that shows that
professors who merge their personal and their
scholarly voice together
are considered to be more trustworthy by students.
Boy that was hard for me
let me tell you.
Any of you who already follow me on Twitter know that I have
a very very high volume.
It was completely integrated into what I do and every day.
I mean last night when I was putting this together I was having
people vote on which images I should include,
so it's part of my regular scholarly behavior.
Now the other part of it is creative commons. We've already talked a little bit
about creative commons.
Open courseware is defined as this material that's made freely available
under a creative commons license.
I've taken it one step further.
In this conversation that I have with my students at the beginning of the
semester talking about open and why I do it--and I'm very very frank about it and I'm
very very frank about
the potential consequences and the potential benefits of it--
I actually challenged them
to choose a creative commons license for all of their material. I have a plug-in
installed on all my course web sites
that allows them to choose
a creative commons license which is appropriate for them.
So if they don't have a problem
with using their material for commercial purposes they can choose that
license if they want to.
So it basically allows them to better understand
what creative commons is, it also allows them to exert more control
over their contents. And we talk about this a lot and
there's been a couple of times where
there's been posts on the course website where people have chosen no license
or a very restrictive license and I often cycle that back into the class and say,
"Why did you do that?" and
we have a discussion in the class about this. Because
I really strongly believe that this kind of discussion, scholarly practice,
should not be divorced from the content, it should be completely integrated
within the context of the class. So we'll have these discussions in the
classroom, "Why did you choose by attribution no derives for
your license? What about that?"
and they may say,
"I chose the wrong thing".
Or, "I don't want people to match this up, I like the whole voice
and I want it to be taken in its entirety".
Now the other part of this open scholar is open scholarship.
So my research, my work and how do I,
how do I integrate open into myself as a scholar?
Well open scholarship for me is about data, publication,
discourse and practice.
Data being that I firmly believe as an archaeologist--
I haven't been in the field for many years but I still consider myself an archaeologist--
I believe that my data and my research
has far more benefit
when it's shared with other archaeologists than hoarded myself.
So all of my archaeological data, and it is not insignificant,
all goes on in open repositories.
I did that years ago
where all of that
stuff on both the artifact level data and the
the actual site data, it's all in open repositories.
So any scholar in the area or outside of the area, any student
can actually get access to this.
And sort of the reciprocally
I expect and I would hope
that other scholars would do the same.
So then when I go out to write something about
the upper Egyptian predynastic household which is my specialty, I
can look to other scholars who have contributed data
to this collective whole.
Publication is also really really important to me.
I work very hard--
I don't always succeed because it is
challenging in the academy to do this--
but I work very very hard
to have all of my work published in venues
that are open to anyone.
We'll chalk this up under shameless self promotion.
It's a book I've got coming out and it is a completely open-access, it's by a very
prestigious archaeological publisher.
Completely open access, completely online, completely free.
And I made that choice to do that and I try to make that choice
every time. It doesn't always work
but I do my best because I think that
publishing in these venues
means that my work and my intellectual product
will have far greater reach and far increased impact
compared to it being in a fore-pay, subscription based
system that only the biggest libraries are able to subscribe to.
And every year
fewer and fewer and fewer libraries are able to do this
and the costs raise more
and more and more and more.
So what happens is fewer and fewer scholars get access to the information.
Now this is where Twitter comes back into it again.
In many ways Twitter is the lubricant that facilitates my personal
belief in open scholarly
communication and discourse. So this is once again personal,
professional voice merge together. So I
talk about my son and my dogs and what I did on the weekend as well as
talking to other scholars about ideas. And I have had unbelievably
powerful conversations over social media, over Twitter specifically.
So here's actually, it's actually impossible to read
but here's something that actually happened. So that's me on the
right sitting in Nat-Sci and I said,
and this happened fairly recently, I said
"Does anyone have a reference to"-- in the eighties there was a court case
concerning intellectual property
and a copyright in course material at the University of Kansas
and I couldn't find a reference to it--
so I said, "Does anyone have a reference to this"? Well at the University of
Regina, which is also my alma mater,
someone said, "Is this what you're looking for"? and sent it out.
So Twitter is this platform that allows me to have
you know connect with my students, but it also allows me to have really
meaningful conversations with other scholars and connect with scholars
who I never ever ever would have connected with
because they're in different disciplines
or they're in Kuala Lumpur,
or something like that. And the other benefit is that
this back and forth didn't just benefit me and the other person in the
conversation, it benefited the
other people who are followers of both myself
and this other guy.
So everyone listening in gets the benefit of this conversation
as well. So they are all
essentially in the room, and maybe ten percent of them are interested in this, but
that's beneficial to them as well.
As one would expect the model is constantly evolving.
And like Leah says, "Change is the only constant".
And you know next Tuesday I could do something else but this works for me
right now and I advocate for it and I argue for it.
There are lots of issues,
there are technical issues,
there are pedagogical issues, there are epistemological issues, there are legal issues,
there are issues up the freaking wha-zoo. BUT,
it works for me.
The bottom line: open classroom, open scholarship,
is that it requires taking a leap. It requires that
traditional scholars--and I don't
consider myself a traditional scholar--
have to walk away from a model of intellectual production
and scholarly practice
that they are familiar with and walk into
a territory that is frankly quite frightening
and very very unsettling.
So that's it,
I'm being flashed to stop. Thank you, son.
You can,
my e-mail is up there and my Twitter is up there as well if you want to hear me
talk about my dogs and son and the sun burn I got this weekend.
Questions? Yeah? 0:24:02.850, 0:24:09.850 When you have something that's of value, and I'm not saying that tweets aren't of value,
but for instance the book you're coming out with that could potentially provide you with an income stream
if you made it on a more restrictive basis.
There is no income in academic publishing. Let me be frank about that, there is no income in academic publishing.
I mean I have
thousands of colleagues
who published hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books,
none of them make any money.
I mean I'm being a little facetious there but
yeah. Academic publishing is not like commercial publishing. I'm a
commercial publisher as well, I've written seven books on
interactive design and user centered design
and I barely make any money with those.
So academic publishing just doesn't make money.
Did you have to sell that point of view to the publisher? Yes and no. There's actually an interesting story there.
So that book came out of
a session at the Society for American Archaeology meeting, which is the
biggest archaeological association in North America,
three years ago.
And we took it to this publisher, Cotsen, which is a really
important archaeological publisher
and this book was going to be
their first open-access venture. This is going into the University of
California-Berkeley or University of California's e-scholarship program which is a big
digital repository.
It was going to be their first open-access publication,
it was going to be the first in their digital archaeology series as well. So they made
this big fanfare. We didn't have to sell it at the beginning
but I said this was three years ago.
This has been probably, this project is a textbook
on how to screw up an open-access publication.
From top to bottom everything that could have happened wrong
happened wrong. Three entire turnover of staff,
the board reneging on its agreement to publish it as open-access.
It's a very odd situation but at the beginning,
no we didn't have to sell it to them.
Now since we had to re-sell it to them like three times and threaten them
and whatever. Do we have one more? Yes, no?
I, like you, cross that personal/professional boundary
in my status updates and stuff. I get a lot of feedback;
my students seem to really like it, at least the ones who talk to me seem to like it. Sometimes my colleagues though feel
weird about it. How do you sell that kind of relationship to your colleagues
especially when it comes time for teaching evaluations or basically when you're showing with a value
what that work is, how do you describe the value of
the blurred boundary?
Well it's good that there's some decent research on it
and I've always; I mean that's my go to like, "Hey look over there".
So that definitely helps.
A lot of them aren't even aware, I mean it is
so far out of their kin that
they don't know, they don't care and it just doesn't come up at all.
I have had students tell me; one student came up to me and said
"You know I really really like you, you're a really good professor,
but you Tweet way too much".
And it's completely true and I immediately when he left started Tweeting
about it. So anyone else?
As an I.T. person I often search Google whenever I have a problem
and one of the big things is
resources are either blogs or comments with questions and answers and that stuff is in
Google but Twitter feeds are searchable for four days.
So why use Twitter?
If you were to ask that question
say on an archaeological blog
somewhere or forum then that question and answer could be preserved and found by somebody else.
Well I mean there's;
yes you are right, but there's ways that you
can archive your Twitter stream
a little bit so there's
kind of ways around it.
But it, I mean yeah that's an issue and I'm not sort of
advocating one over the other by any stretch of the imagination, I'm a regular
commenter on lots of different sites I mean on my own sites, on my students
and all of that kind of stuff.
The Twitter is just another feed, it's more immediate
and frankly I think the hundred and forty characters
makes scholars more productive
because as you well know we have a tendency to blah-blah-blah
blah-blah-blah. A hundred and forty characters you've got to say
what you got to say
and I find that that is,
that constraint is very very powerful. Does that sort of answer your question?
I think as well, if I can add to that,
if I'm having a deep conversation or an enriched one I'll turn that into
a blog post. If it's something that I think needs to be; if I couldn't find the answer.
And not everyone does this obviously, but then at least it exists somewhere
whereas your deep conversation, the information
ended up somewhere and there's a permanent link to it, so it's there somewhere.
Whereas in this example
it hadn't existed so now it does, here's the archive on my blog so maybe someone else can
run past it. Right. See Leah is really really good at that, I'm really really bad at that.
Well that's the beauty of this whole thing though, there's zillions of people out there doing it so
if Ethan's not, I am and you can find mine. There's another thing, recently there's a tool
called Storify
which allows you to--and I'm seeing it being used a lot in conferences
because that's where I'm looking at a lot of the time--
that allows you to build a chronological narrative of tweets
and save them in an archive basically as this long permanent narrative.
And you have to build it, you
have to massage it, it's not something that's automatically generated.
But I see a lot of people doing that where it's, and you see that
conversation response you know
someone else comes in, someone else raises something in this sort of long
narrative.
That's the back channel that was mentioned earlier? Yeah. Sort of, if there's any marketing people in here 0:30:55.429, 0:31:04.400 definitely sign up for Storify because it's something you can publish in your
newsletters and then in the website. It's a way of making
Twitter make sense to people that are outside of the conversation. It's fabulous.
And Twitter is very challenging because it's very rapid.
You know it happens in a
large conversation and large transfers of information happen in a
very constrained time period.
And if you wander in halfway through you have no clue what the hell is going on.
So there are a lot of these tools that archive
conversations so that you can go back and take a look
and you know and who said what and when did they say it?
I think the general thing which is a really good part of the question which is about
control, right? Like
a lot of these systems we've talked about Facebook, Twitter etcetera,
you lose a certain amount of control when you make a choice to use those platforms.
Facebook you have very little to no control over the content you place on Facebook
or how it looks or anything. So I think it's a huge issue.
I think, I personally like the idea
of a forum because people can come back to it. But on the other hand
I might not find the right forum to answer my question, that's why I rely on Twitter.
I follow people I trust,
so then I can ask a certain question.
I call it the lazy web basically because then people can give you the links to resources.
Yeah, you couldn't see it but
at the end of that it's tagged with lazy web in open-access.
I was like, "I don't know, web give me answer", send and the answers came
back to me. And I participate in that as well and I'm very conscious about this,
it's not a one way street. If when someone says, "Does someone know the link to blah blah blah",
if I know I send it out
because I understand that this is a very reciprocal environment. Anyone else?
It might be
a tad complicated of a question but like deep cover falseness
like in a wiki
you have links at the bottom and they either get destroyed over time through
content disappearing
or it wasn't a real
attribution to begin with, how do you,
how do you defend against something getting; against a false becoming a truth
because of lack of correct citation or an incorrect analysis of data?
That's not unique to
you know digital media,
every time I read a paper it's the same thing.
The difference, and I will agree with this, is that it's in a public
forum or it's in an open forum but
the caveat is everyone knows that these are
course websites and that it's course material and I have warnings and
you know full disclosure about how this material is being generated.
Some of it is absolutely wonderful, I mean I've had, I've been
extremely fortunate and happy to be able to share some truly incredible work
with the world from students that would
the paper would get read and it would get put at the bottom of box
and now it's out there.
Granted there is some truly crappy work as well but you know, that's what you do.