Freeing up access to learning: the role for Open Educational Resources

The internet revolution of the last few years has had an impact on how we all live our lives. So it is not surprising that this is also a time of change in attitudes towards how we learn. Free access to information through computer networks has expanded, and part of that information flow are materials designed to help people learn. In addition there are many further online resources that help the learning process, even if that was not the original aim. However, there are risks in this evolution in access to information both for the end user, who can be confused by the options available to them, and to those involved in providing education, who may see their traditional role changing and becoming harder to perform. This situation provides the background for a growing movement to directly consider how education can be provided in a freer and more open way. This has been termed “Open Educational Resources” (OER). The exact definition of the term depends on interpretation, however a useful statement was provided as an outcome from an event organized by UNESCO in 2002 as: “OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007, p4).” Arguably the only difference between an online learning object and an open educational resource is the declaration that it is open. This may be true but that turns out to be a powerful difference. By being open the content can be accessed by any learner who can do so, it can be taken and run in new contexts, it can be reworked by others and adapted for local needs (with the result shared back if desired), it can be made part of shared pool of resources, it can be the shared point of reference for collaboration, and it can be the key to building policies that work in different domain

When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance

Blockchain technologies have generated enthusiasm, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterized by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organization; and critical accounts of such discourses which, while contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralized institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. In this article, we draw on Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain beyond such standpoints. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualization of six affordances that this technology may provide to communities: tokenization, self-enforcement and formalization of rules, autonomous automatization, decentralization of power over the infrastructure, increasing transparency, and codification of trust. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices into blockchain-based tools to foster forms of self-governance. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focused on blockchain-based commons governance

Collaborative Development of Open Educational Resources for Open and Distance Learning

Open and distance learning (ODL) is mostly characterised by the up front development of self study educational resources that have to be paid for over time through use with larger student cohorts (typically in the hundreds per annum) than for conventional face to face classes. This different level of up front investment in educational resources, and increasing pressures to utilise more expensive formats such as rich media, means that collaborative development is necessary to firstly make use of diverse professional skills and secondly to defray these costs across institutions. The Open University (OU) has over 40 years of experience of using multi professional course teams to develop courses; of working with a wide range of other institutions to develop educational resources; and of licensing use of its educational resources to other HEIs. Many of these arrangements require formal contracts to work properly and clearly identify IPR and partner responsibilities. With the emergence of open educational resources (OER) through the use of open licences, the OU and other institutions has now been able to experiment with new ways of collaborating on the development of educational resources that are not so dependent on tight legal contracts because each partner is effectively granting rights to the others to use the educational resources they supply through the open licensing (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp and Lane, 2011). This set of case studies examines the many different collaborative models used for developing and using educational resources and explain how open licensing is making it easier to share the effort involved in developing educational resources between institutions as well as how it may enable new institutions to be able to start up open and distance learning programmes more easily and at less initial cost. Thus it looks at three initiatives involving people from the OU (namely TESSA, LECH-e, openED2.0) and contrasts these with the Peer-2-Peer University and the OER University as exemplars of how OER may change some of the fundamental features of open and distance learning in a Web 2.0 world. It concludes that while there may be multiple reasons and models for collaborating on the development of educational resources the very openness provided by the open licensing aligns both with general academic values and practice but also with well established principles of open innovation in businesses

Beyond the Gender Gap: Understanding Women\u27s Participation in Wikipedia

In 2010, UNU-MERIT researchers surveyed editors of Wikipedia, “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Glott, Ghosh, & Schmidt, 2010). When the report revealed that almost 90% of the editors were male, however, it suggested that perhaps not everyone “can edit” Wikipedia—especially women. As the resulting media and academic explanations of the Wikipedia “gender gap” have largely attributed the gap to ‘female lack’—lack of initiative, confidence, or technical skills—very little research has explored the treatment of women within Wikipedia culture. Thus, this paper first draws upon feminist technology scholars to problematize current explanations of the gender gap that frame it as a ‘woman problem’. Then, through in-depth interviews with 26 English Wikipedia women editors, it explores sociocultural norms within Wikipedia that influence women’s lived experiences and participation. The findings frame these norms as gendered organizational tensions, describing how women’s experiences of these tensions lead to their perceived outcomes of isolation, emotional exhaustion and distress, and attrition. Despite these effects, many women editors persist due to their deeply rooted sense of purpose in their work on Wikipedia. The findings also draw upon feminist standpoint theory to discuss the tensions in women’s sense-making of the gender gap, specifically its causes, appropriate editor responses, and solutions. While the standpoints of the participants are complex and fluid, two primary approaches emerged. These approaches can be conceptualized as two ends of a continuum, as women who espouse an essentialist view of gender and an individualistic approach to addressing the gender gap are on one side, and women who hold to gender constructionism and call for cultural and structural change to address the gap are on the other. Thus, this study suggests that gendered sociocultural factors do bear upon women’s participation within Wikipedia, and their sense-making of these gendered tensions—their causes, outcomes, and solutions—are textured by their own social locations and experiences, demonstrating the complexity of women’s participation within Wikipedia. Due to these findings, put simply, the gender gap is not just a ‘woman problem’

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Collective Intelligence for Knowledge Building and Research in Communities of Practice and Virtual Learning Environments: A Project Experience

There is little evidence about how collective intelligence, social networks, and communities of practice work in maternal health projects. In this paper, we discuss the approaches towards collective intelligence in a project by focusing on the virtual and web-based environments communities of practice and social network approach. This paper builds upon a research project IS0907 COST action and focuses on the communities of practice, social media within organization and team projects, and how through these networks and communities collective intelligence is building. Also, the current investigation stands as an example of COST IS0907 team and the relationship built between countries and communities of practice through working groups, manage knowledge transfer, and improve research collaboration and partnerships. This article aims to present the working environment developed to facilitate collective intelligence role in knowledge building and how communities of practice can enrich collaboration, in maternal health project settings, both educational and effective health research and knowledge building

Seeing industrial services through experience lens - Revealing a customer experience map to design for an experiential service in B2B context

Nowadays, more and more companies become aware of the importance on experience investment, which not only brings customers pleasant and meaningful interactions during the business but also supports the company to formulate key brand differentiator compared to other competitors. Through the theoretical background research, it has been found that there is still a lack of academic studies and design cases about investigating industrial services with experiential thinking in business-to-business context. As a branch of UXUS research program, the thesis work relies on the case study in cooperation with Rolls-Royce Marine that deals with B2B transactions with customers. It depicts the exploration on how the customer experience map could be constructed under the product context ‘UUC azimuth thruster’ to support refining its industrial service through utilizing experience lens for the near future. Starting with project background introduction and study context definition, the objectives of this thesis have been framed as three research questions, which comprise of discovering the way to promote internal understanding on UUC customer journey as well as bringing the big picture of UUC customer service experience to in-house staff, and enhancing the focused service from the experiential aspect within a short-term outlook. After representing the literature review from both academic and practical domain, the in-house research is described about applying semi- structured interviews to map the industrial service process with touch points. It documents the identification regarding key service interactions and the internal standpoints about the customer service experience. The customer study process is explained then as collecting first-hand customer experience within the targeted UUC service scope, the information of customer journey context has been enriched at the same time. T o Integrate the internal and external study results, the first outcome of this thesis - UUC customer experience map has been uncovered to Rolls-Royce Marine. By identifying the key opportunity from the customer experience map, the thesis continues to illustrate the process of utilizing the experience goals for ideating the experience-driven actions that Rolls-Royce Marine could take on future service development. The developed concept is presented in detail as an experiential service story which has been further built up through information architecture, the flow of interaction and wireframes establishment, and Hi-Fi prototype creation. Lastly, the two outcomes of the thesis have been evaluated by internal experts to determine the directions for the following implementation. Through the in-house assessment, the customer experience map has been regarded as a valuable and meaningful tool that could help mapping the UUC customer journey and the related customer service experience. The re ned UUC service concept has also achieved quite positive feedback from the evaluators, which aims to boost the user experience both inside and outside the organization