The P2PU Experience (and Why Freemium Won’t Profit H.E)

For the last 6 weeks I’ve been a part of the fun experiment that is P2PU. I’ve been a student on a course and given the founders helpful (I hope) information about how in my day job we support students at a local level. There’s a rash of similar systems springing up, feeding on the bloom of quality open educational resources (OERs) and various governments’ decisions to either cut H.E funding or fund open initiatives like P2PU. It looks like some are very much better than others, and I think most will be short lived. But I’m convinced that good ones will keep appearing and that they’ll be the death of a freemium approach in H.E, before it’s even really happened. Or to be more precise, that freemium models will be consumed only at their free levels, and profit only from advertising revenue. Even accreditation fees will be too thin to matter.

The first presentation of P2PU courses is probably best thought of as an Alpha-test, a proof of concept. There were always going to be major teething troubles and unless they look to be inherent in the model, I’ll ignore them here. With that in mind, I can summarise what P2PU does well, and at what cost.

First the model. If you can find good course leaders –and they don’t need to be subject experts– the model is excellent. Course leaders need the skill to plan attractive areas of learning, at an appropriate level, to an attainable but challenging timetable. Then they need to be able to take control of online discussion. On my particular course the level was good; I’d call the level ‘basic undergraduate’. But the amount of planned content was over-ambitious; we could have studied half the one-week blocks, for two weeks each. This could be rectified by the class though, in discussion with the leader[1]. So this is a model for people who are already confident self-directed learners, remembering that as the study is unacredited, the level and the choice of topics matters more than the amount of content covered.

It may be because I’m an MA student, with the nightmare of the MHRA Style Guide squatting over everything I write, but I found the freedom to escape scholarly conventions really shiny. This was a relaxed scholarly atmosphere. The course leader (again) can explain the need for sources to be made explicit, but it’s good not to have to set them out in a way that punishes you for missing a comma. So this isn’t a system that promotes the finesse of scholarly work.

One of the things I enjoyed most about P2PU was the freedom to experiment with educational approaches. Our course leader wanted to try a Problem Based Learning approach and that’s what we’ve stuck to, with tweaks and variations. It worked for us and if it hadn’t, we’d have tried something else. The model is good for those capable of meta-learning about their learning.

This sort of learning depends on free content. And with the advent of OERs, there’s never going to be a shortage of learning materials. On the week we studied game theory I found I could watch an entire Yale course on the topic. It was tens of hours and quickly got to a level far beyond what I needed. But it met my immediate need and whet my appetite for maths. Students need the information literacy to find their way around the OERs, but they’ll never find their ‘textbooks’ thin, or uninteresting.

The P2PU student I’ve profiled so far already engages in active, reflective self-learning and has an interest in playing with that process. The model may not be for novice self-educators, even if it’s for subject novices.

If the system has a problem, it’s delivery of the peer group sessions. My class used traditional synchronous chat, but it was really clunky. None of the free, accessible alternatives seem to be quite the ticket. Elluminate, which we use at work, looked ideal but is expensive[2]. As I write Google’s Wave is breaking, and that type of system may be the answer, along with voip voice solutions. I’ve no doubt this will get sorted out though, by each course in its own way.

In summary: this type of learning works, and it’s at legitimate H.E level. Course leaders don’t need to be subject experts and there’ll be no shortage of people wanting to share their passions for free. Among those there’ll always be a subset –course leaders and students– with the skills to make this sort of system work. So there’s a quandary for established H.E: will those same people pay anything at all to support the non-free sections of any ‘freemium’ approach they might offer? Let me answer that this way: I’ll be happy to buy and wear a P2PU t-shirt, but that’s because I’m proud of what our group put in to our learning. The only people wearing those shirts for ‘freemium’ providers will be the teams that create and run them.

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[1] We didn’t mess with the structure of this first course in this experimental stage – we all want to see how this works as-planned at this point.

[2] This came as a shock, because I thought it was free, and kept pushing the idea of using it. Oops!

Freely Available Electronic Texts – New Reception, New Uses?

This is the core of my work for the next year. Of course it’ll change as realities of getting the work done bite. But I’m excited about it.

Freely Available Electronic Texts and Readings – New Reception, New Uses?

Preamble

Before easy electronic distribution, texts out of copyright still had to be professionally proofed, edited and printed for republication. Even a ‘budget’ edition would therefore incur a cost and might suffer from poor proofing or inadequate editing.

All out-of-copyright, culturally-important texts, including novels, are now available for free, to read or listen to in a number of formats. Getting hold of them is trivial, the number of ways of experiencing them is huge.  Several cultures of production — literary, technological, altruistic, performance — have come together to make this happen. They employ innovative technology (such as captchas http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html ) and innovative methods (such as distributed proof reading http://www.pgdp.net/ ).

Texts

Any two or three popularly-downloaded novels of 1880-1930, at least one of which was covered in the OU course AA810. Project gutenberg provides a download chart which will aid selection. http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top At least one of the novels will also be studied in free audiobook form.

Investigation

I propose five areas of investigation:

• Producers’ motives and experience. Why do financial donors, distributed proof-readers, audio book readers, technologists and others produce these editions, in an environment where the usual financial rewards for working on a text are absent? How does creating these editions change their relationship with the text? Is there a difference in approach between those who already know a text and those who first meet it during this process?

• Quality of the text. What work, especially scholarly work, can reliably be done with these editions, as opposed to their printed counterparts? Can they be used in teaching? Can they be used in critical, theoretical practice? This is especially relevant to concordancing because the electronic medium makes this use so simple.

• Reception and Reading. What are people using these texts for, and where? Are they used with assistive technologies by those unable to use printed editions? Are they used by those unable or unwilling to pay for printed editions? How are the editions used in education, particularly higher education? Do readers remix and re-edit the texts for their own purposes, becomng producers? (If so, see questions of production and of editing.) Are non-print texts used for recreational reading?  Do users print them out? What devices do they use to view them?  How do these compare with professional print-texts and audio books for the users’ purposes? For users, how do these texts compare with professional electronic texts, such as those sold by Amazon or iTunes for use on the Kindle or iPod platforms? In what way do users’ receptions of these texts change their experience of these novels? Is the human voice in the audio versions always ‘better’ than having a machine read the text (with notes on reading versus parsing)?

• The unseen editor. What editorial decisions are being made, by whom, and how transparently? Do those editors know that their voice is affecting the text, or to what extent?

• Free, as in beer? In open source communities, ‘free’ has two meanings and a phrase is commonly used to compare them: ‘Free as in beer, free as in speech’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre. Are these texts merely without cost, or do they encourage re-use and revision? Do the readers ‘own’ them in the same way, and with the same constraints, as a printed text? What does it mean to ‘own’ a book in this context?

Methods

• Library research and literature review
• Close reading and comparison
• Questionnaire survey (by approaching the owners of http://www.gutenberg.org and www.librivox.org)
• Interviews (email, synchronous electronic, or in person)

Great Free Software for Open University Students

Working in Learner Support, it’s frustrating to see OU students buy software unnecessarily. It’s expensive even with a student discount and can tie them into restrictive and unfair license agreements. There are usually free alternatives with fairer license agreements which work just as well if not better. This is freeware.

Freeware is not the same as ‘trial’, ‘shareware’ or ‘adware’. These programs are absolutely free, without any hidden timer to make them ineffective after a trial period and without placing advertising on your computer. They may lack official technical support, but the unofficial support provided by authors, wikis and user forums is just as good.

Here are my favourite replacements for OU students’ bought programs.

Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Paint)

OpenOffice Suite (Writer, Calc, Database, Present, Draw) – Made by Sun Microsystems and the community; compatible with Microsoft Office documents but with greater functionality than Microsoft Office.
http://www.openoffice.org

Star Office – Better than Microsoft Office but not as highly regarded as OpenOffice. But a good place for OU students to begin as it’s provided on the OU ‘Online Applications’ disc.

Norton, Sophos, Symantec, McAfee  Antivirus and Firewalls

This market works on three models: (i) sell to corporate customers; (ii) sell to small/medium business, with free home products to encourage goodwill among future customers; (iii) provide time-limited trial versions then scare home users into buying paid versions they don’t need. Model (ii) leads to the good, free software listed below. Sadly, model (iii) companies often get their discs into the packaging of new computers.

Avast! http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

AVG Free http://free.avg.com/

Comodo Internet Security http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/download_firewall.html

BitDefender Free http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en–BitDefender-Free-Edition.html

Zone Alarm http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/zonealarm-pc-security-free-firewall.htm

These programs, by their very nature, change constantly so ranking them isn’t possible. Each has a non-free version which subsidises these free versions.

Inspiration, Mind Manager and Other Mind Mapping Software

Xmind is very good, and very pretty. The free version lacks the ability to output to pdf, but so do many paid programs. http://www.xmind.net/

Freemind is slightly more straightforward than Xmind but the results are not as attractive. It will export your map to pdf, among the other usual formats. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Compendium comes from various sources including the Open University. It’s more of a concept and knowledge mapping tool than pure mind-mapping. To put that another way: it’s okay for mapping out how ‘the Renaissance’ relates to ‘Humanism’, but you wouldn’t want to try and plan your essay with it. http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2824

Screenshots of these programs and others can be seen on Wikipedia’s page about mind-mapping software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software

Photoshop

The GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) does everything you’ll want of an image manipulation program unless you’re touching up the cover of Vogue. Even then Photoshop wouldn’t do it better – it’d just give a license for commercial use. http://www.gimp.org

Sumo Paint is unusual in that it can be used directly online, through a web interface. It’s as much a paint program as a photo editor. Reviews aren’t as good as for GIMP but it’s fun to try a number of alternatives – after all, it costs nothing. http://www.sumopaint.com/web/

Red Shift and Other Planetarium Software

Stellarium has made everything else almost obsolete. It’s used by professionals and is certainly up to degree and post-graduate level work in astronomy. It has some cool features such as a red-screen mode for use on laptops without ruining night vision. It will also drive all standard computer-controlled motorised telescopes, and has a suitable projection setting for a home planetarium. http://www.stellarium.org/

Celestia is not pure planetarium software – more of a 3d universe simulation. It’s cool rather than useful. Lots of add-ons are available. http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

Nero, Nero Burning ROM – CD/DVD Burners and Virtual Drives

It’s difficult to suggest anything specific here because this is a technical area and people’s results and needs will vary greatly according to their system specifics. However, two tools I use on my Windows machine are:

CDWriterXP – a fully-featured CD/DVD ripper and writer with an attractive interface.

Daemon Tools Lite provides virtual drives and will create and mount disc images for them (for example, to make an image of a course audio cd or cd-rom and store it on your machine for use when the  original disc inevitably gets scratched or lost).

Both are available at download.cnet.com (see below)

Where to Find More and Get Involved

There’s a wealth of free, high quality software in addition to those mentioned here, including games. In fact, whenever you want to do anything fun, or laborious, check for freeware.

http://download.cnet.com

http://www.tucows.com

Even non-programmers can get involved in this movement. Projects need documentation writers, proof readers, bug testers and more. A good place to get involved is at SourceForge:

http://www.sourceforge.net

Why PirateBay Won in the Courts, Really

On first sight Pirate Bay’s decision to launch a video streaming site immediately after its founders were handed down gaol time and huge fines seems a bit mental, but it’s not. It demonstrates why IP rights holders will be forced to find new models to work by and why the courts, especially, won’t help in the long run.

There are two things I learned early when working for the civil courts. First, power in litigation accompanied funding; if you had more money than the other party then even a mediated outcome was likely to suit you most. Unpleasant but true. Second, this meant there was no more dangerous litigant than one who qualified for Legal Aid or its successors. They effectively had endless reserves and no costs implications to consider. This is what the media companies and IP holders find themselves facing in Pirate Bay.

The criminal system will keep prosecuting, imprisoning and fining because it has no choice. But IP rights holders facing an endless succession of infringers who are willing to forge on regardless are screwed, really. What are they going to do? They can sue all they like, but if the defendants already owe all they’re ever likely to own in punitive fines, and if gaol isn’t a deterrent, sooner or later even their clients will realise that the ‘principled’ solution is just throwing away money in court to gain greater but entirely notional recompense.

It therefore becomes difficult to see any sensible future for court action in file sharing arguments. Little-old-lady file sharers and teenage boys are going to be stopped by a cease-and-desist letter long before court, because they have little money and they need it. But the industrial-scale infringers will win the court battles by attrition – not because they have enough money, but because they have so little and because they don’t care about enough about keeping it.

Organisation Tips for Dyslexic Learner Support Staff in H.E

The real problems for dyslexics working in H.E learner support aren’t to do with spelling, or reading text, or producing documentation. Most of us learned to deal with those issues long ago, or we wouldn’t be working in an office. The problems that remain are issues of timeliness, organisation and multi-tasking, because we’re in an environment where everything runs against a big, fixed, annual, cyclic timeline. Climate change is confusing the outdoors but we can still reliably tell the season by looking at what’s in the in-tray: first assignment issues, DSA assessments, student withdrawals, exam arrangements, course results… and back around again. The workload in your role may differ, but the point is that unlike some creative or technical response jobs there’s always a big clock ticking away in the background. Other people, especially students, rely on that annual clockwork for some pretty momentous achievements and occasions and that creates pressure for any support staff with a SLD.

When I arrived in H.E this floored me. I came from a job that was all about people and where literally everything was negotiable by those people, including the systems and deadlines (I was a mediator). Though I knew that organisation could theoretically pose me a problem due to my dyslexia, I’d never actually experienced it. But in H.E I just couldn’t juggle all the ongoing workloads against that big, ticking annual clock.

After a couple of years I’m more organised than not, though I still find it damned hard. So this post is to try and help anyone in the same situation with some of the tips I’ve picked up so far. I hope you might add others. If you read this and think this is all just standard organisational instruction, then you’re probably not the intended audience. :0)

1. Understand Why Your Line Manager Doesn’t Understand

Your Team Leader is the head of a Higher Ed LS team precisely because she* has a natural talent for staying organised. She may be messy-desk organised or tidy-desk organised, but the fact is she almost certainly finds foresight and timeliness are as normal to her as they are tricky for you. She may not easily understand that anyone can be naturally organisation-deficient. And very few people, if asked, would list cognitive or organisational issues as being a symptom of dyslexia.

Two approaches are possible. Either bear in mind your LM’s frustrations when they cause you your own, but get your head down and work for organisational mastery, else communicate that your problems are related to your dyslexia, perhaps providing some reading, and explain what you intend to do about it. The latter seems best to me, but the choice is going to depend on your relationship with your LM.

2. Study Time Management Seriously But Not Slavishly

I had a big breakthrough when my department manager said to me that it could be difficult to understand how anyone so obviously academically bright** could have so much difficulty learning to get organised. This taught me in an instant to learn organisational skills as you would any other subject. Once you have a look there are a host of blogs and books to choose from.

http://zenhabits.net

http://www.lifehack.org

http://organisingtips.blogspot.com

A caution I’d give is to beware anyone selling a complete organisational system, no matter how well reviewed. One of the first things we learn as dyslexics trying to get through education is that one size fits very few. Read for aims as much as for methods; cherry pick good ideas. You’ll soon notice that certain themes recur in these manuals – they’re what a lot of the rest of this post is based on. It’s all about getting things done rather than Getting Things Done.

3. Capture Everything. Everything!

I learned to relax and admit it: I will forget something during the day, no matter how important, unless I move it beyond memory. I’ve settled on a mixed system of Microsoft Outlook Tasks, yellow legal pad, hPDA and a moleskine notebook. It’s too personalised to be of any use explaining it here, but the point is that my system attempts to capture every meeting-action and every ‘would you please just…’ that floats over my desk. Yes, sometimes I still lose one, but without this system I wouldn’t manage any.

A recurring temptation is to just think, ‘I’ll finish what I’m doing and add this incoming task to my capture system next.’ This just turns the capture system into another hurdle that the new task must jump. Capture everything, capture it now.

4. Software Is My Friend

Software is great, and it doesn’t have to be time management software. At work, where I have a Windows pc, I use Outlook to track tasks and give me reminders, but I also use txt files as searchable lists and spreadsheets as simple databases. The best use of software has to be automated reminders, though. Reminders keep the system on track, because procedures and to-do lists are useless if I don’t look at them.

5. Procedures Mean Learning Something Once (or Twice)

I found it frustrating having so many complex tasks that came around infrequently –just weekly or even quarterly– because I had to keep re-learning them. In the end I’ve found I save time in the long run by writing myself fairly detailed, timeline-and-checklist style procedures. Colleagues rarely need them, but they’re useful to new staff.

My procedures range from the meta (my daily checklist of places to check my various workloads) to the micro (my checklist of what to do in the week that’s sixteen weeks before exams for prison students). It takes time and a few runs through a task to document it.

My most important tip here is to create procedures with a time element. Carrying out LS tasks isn’t hard for dyslexics, locating them in time and space is. So the ideal cycle goes something like:

reminder causes me to look at procedure > procedure tells me what to do at this time, when the work is due, and to set a reminder for the next element > reminder causes me to look at procedure

Ad infinitum, to retirement. :0)

6. When Swamped, Ask for Help Before Panicking

This is something I still find difficult even though I understand the reasons. The trouble is half-buried fear of seeming weak, or stupid, or… disorganised.

I’ve found it helps to remember that no, my colleagues aren’t running to my Line Manager because they’re mired in organisational mess like I sometimes am. That’s true. But on the other hand I can do all sorts of things only I can do, and can often help the team when nobody else can. We’ve all got our strengths weaknesses, my weakness just happens to be organisational skill. Even that thought process doesn’t allay the fear entirely, but it’s usually enough to allow me to go to my manager and explain any organisational problems.

7. Socialise, Tweet

Being able to stay in touch with colleagues in similar jobs at other institutions has been a godsend. Discussing the role and the workloads in an echo chamber gets a feedback loop going. I begin to wonder if other offices have the big clock ticking away, the same cyclical workloads and quiet summers. The nature of LS teams is that few people in the same office share all the same tasks, so your colleagues can’t always understand what’s going on for you just now. It’s worth seeking out and joining social networks and mailing lists relating to your areas of work, like those run by jisc:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/

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* Not a nod to gender balance, nor sexist assumption. Experience and straw polling tell me your team leader in H.E LS is most likely a woman.

** I’m not, but I’m flattered somebody said it, so I’m quoting it immodestly.

What’s This Blog For?

I’ve been avoiding this blog for a while because I never clearly delineated its purpose and that gave me some serious cross-chatter of issues I couldn’t decide where to post. That, and the fact I was scared of writing, ‘I want a PhD’. More about that in another post.

This blog has two purposes :

1. To publish things which might be useful to anyone else out there searching a subject for ideas or tips. My main blog is limited-access and  people wouldn’t see my gems on topics like parenting a deaf child or building a better paper aeroplane.

2. Record my academic progress and engagement so that I can shamelessly foist my thoughts on potential supervisors, employers and journal editors over the next few years.

In Defense of Roguelike Save Scumming

Save scumming is frowned upon by players in the main RL community. It’s seen as cheating and we’ve even applied that homonym ’scumming’ to describe both skimming off the files and ‘being scum’. Having just given myself permission to do it, and enjoying it, I want to defend the practice and point out that there are different levels of scumming. Readers who are not RL players won’t find any clever analogies to my other pet fields [1], so might want to skip this.

First let me define my terms. Save scumming is the copying of backup files allowing the player of a roguelike game to ignore the no-second-chances nature of the genre. Effectively you get a save and restore option.

The argument against goes something like this. Perma-death is integral to the flavour of the game. It’s what makes the random nature of the game so hard to overcome, since you can’t learn anything from one play to the next. It’s also what makes the ultimate victory post on rec.games.roguelike.[game] so sweet. Save scumming detracts from the genuine hundreds of hours of play by those who complete the game ‘honestly’.

Some of those points aren’t arguable. But in some circumstances I defend scumming anyway.

Some people with busy lives and pressures on their time from family, study and work just don’t have the tens or hundreds of hours it takes to identify the game’s items, master its systems and finally get a character to victory.  Carers and those with disabilities, for example, might never have that time. And faced with a death near victory, anyone might be tempted to reach for a backup, if they have one.

Scumming has different levels, too. Scumming a dead character seems universally frowned upon, but what about scumming a single Identify Scroll in order to inscribe all currently ‘unknown’ items? And what if even that’s only done to allow the player an accelerated learning curve, preparing for that all important ‘clean’ run one day in the future, with a victory post at the end? In those circumstances, to argue that the slow learning curve is integral to the game is to argue that once a player has scummed, they can never achieve an honest victory, because their knowledge is somehow tainted.

Playing RLs is supposed to be fun and if someone’s enjoying the game without harming others then we don’t have any right to frown on what they’re doing at their own computer.  The only caveats here are, ’so long as they don’t make a victory post claiming an unaided win’ and ’so long as they don’t publish spoilers’, because that would unfairly diminish the efforts of other players, and of the volunteers who make all the RLs.

If someone want to save scum and they’re honest about it, then leave them be – it’s none of our business.

[1] Except the obvious ones about empathy and personal liberty and the wiccan rede and so forth.

Involuntary Muscle Activation in BSL Users Reading English Text

I know that first-language BSL users have very different brain activity when reading. They get two-hemisphere activity of the sort dreamed of by new-agers and productivity gurus.

But here’s a question: English speakers involuntarily sub-vocalize when reading, the vocal folds flexing imperceptibly. Do BSL users’ arm and hand muscles act similarly?

*Heads off to the library.*

Involuntary Muscle Activation in BSL Users Reading English Text

I know that first-language BSL users have very different brain activity when reading. They get two-hemisphere activity of the sort dreamed of by new-agers and productivity gurus.

But here’s a question: English speakers involuntarily sub-vocalize when reading, the vocal folds flexing imperceptibly. Do BSL users’ arm and hand muscles act similarly?

*Heads off to the library.*

El Reg, The OU, Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense

When I worked at Nominet, El Reg used to be my daily organ of choice (oo-er, fnar, and so forth). Then they started doing things like continuing to use KD – ‘The Journo Who Went to Clean Up ICANN’ and other such nonsense. Then they got so flaccid and placid that I gave away my ‘Biting the Hand that Feeds IT’ t-shirt.

Now a friend has pointed me to this little spat they’re having with the OU. Wherein they claim –to save you the bother of reading nonsense– that a certain article that OU postgrad students are asked to read, from a peer-reviewed journal, is… well, nonsensical. [1]

I’ve looked at the article as they quote it, and they’re wrong. Semantically, it’s fine.  I don’t know is if the content works, because it’s all about concepts and items that are either very technical or don’t exist, depending who you believe.

So at worst what we have here is a technical ‘Jabberwocky’. But the Reg writer seems to suggest that the sentences themselves make no sense, and even provides an insert-commentary to prove it.

This leads me to the heartbreaking conclusion that Reg writers no longer know how to read sentences. How very sad.

Judge for yourself: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/13/verity_stob_open_university/

[1] I’m leaving aside their more ridiculous and self-contradictory claims here, and concentrating on the linguistic argument which is, apparently, my area of knowledge.