There's a horror film, which I've never seen, called The Human Centipede (if you've never heard of it, I apologise for bringing it to your attention). Now, I like a horror film, but I really don't want to see this one. But here's the thing: the mere existence of the idea that the film contains has given me disturbed nights. In some respects the director deserves credit for this - he has conceived of an idea and then put it into a film, which you don't even need to see to give you nightmares. That's the power of a bad idea.

I was thinking about this the other day in relation to Digital Natives. Of course, there's nothing horrific about the digital natives idea, but like that film, its has kind of infected a lot of educational thinking merely by its existence. 

If you haven't read the studies, most people now think the central ideas in digital natives are, in a word, bogus. There are no real differences between generations, attributable to technology. There are differences between how we used to do stuff and how we do it now. But digital natives (or if you prefer net gen) is largely a myth. In this book Marc Prensky says it was meant as a metaphor and people took it too seriously. Maybe. And maybe there's some back pedalling going on.

But here's a question: how much money has been spent on the idea of digital natives over the years? There have been innumerable keynotes from people proclaiming themselves experts in the area; schools, universities and companies have shelled out for consultants to advise them on how to deal with this strange new breed; we have yards of publications on the matter; then there are the research projects looking at whether it exists or not (for example, my colleague Chris Jones led a very good project in this area); and by no means least there are all those essays, theses and dissertations which take it almost as a given fact.

That's like a mini-industry centred around an idea that had a kind of fashionable appeal, but no real basis in evidence. And what of the opportunity costs? While we were fretting about whether they existed or not and what we should do about it, did we miss seeing what was really happening and the more interesting and subtle changes in society in general. And that's a shame because it's not a competely bad idea - many of us feel instinctively that our children are growing up in a different world than we were, but then we're operating in that world too. The age element made the argument attractive ("these kids are completely different!") whereas the interesting thing was how technology was making it different for everyone. Highlighting changes needed in the education system to deal with this new technology context were a good thing, but wrapping it up as a generational shift missed the point about the different groups and attitudes across all generations. 

My favourite Net Gen nonsense quote is from Oblinger and Oblinger who claimed as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that “they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, the like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity.”

Are they comparing this with evidence of a preference for ambiguity and lack of structure in previous generations? That statement seems almost like a horoscope - vague enough to be true of anyone. 

I suppose critics of blogging and the like might point to the fact that the idea didn't generate from a peer-reviewed academic journal, which would have filtered out some of the claims. We could chalk one up for the peer-review system here, and note that popularity and linking is not evidence of rigour and value.

So beware the next good bad idea you come across in relation to ed tech (or horror films), a nice soundbite idea that seems to capture a feeling of the times can lead you off down false paths for years. 

"Oh my God, it's full of stars"

Dave "the rhizome" Cormier posted the other day about uncertainty and rhizomatic learning. If you don't know what the latter is, Dave says it's

"A botanical metaphor, first posited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus(1987), may offer a more flexible conception of knowledge for the information age: therhizome. A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008)."

In Dave's post he talked about habituation and how when you learn something it becomes automatic, and the vocabulary you adopt reflects this. In the comments I mentioned some of the work done with experts, in particular pattern recognition in chess experts. For instance, chess experts will be able to reproduce a board they are shown much better than you or I (assuming you're not a chess expert that is). The reason is that they encode it as patterns linked to long term memory eg "the mid-game position in Kasparov vs Karpov 1984" whereas novices are encoding it as discrete elements eg white rook next to black pawn two spaces in".

Experts don't know they do this, but it's a by-product, or rather a means, of expertise. They don't set out to encode in this manner, but it is what they do as they gain expertise. Interestingly, if you show expert chess players random placement of figures, ie not real mid-game positions, then they fare the same as everyone else.

Over twitter Dave said that maybe what he was talking about wasn't expertise in the traditional sense. To which I responded that in a very general, maybe even trite, sense, all learning is a shift away from novice towards expert, even if you never reach the expert level. No-one learns something to know less about it.

But then on reflection, maybe Dave has a point. The kind of learning he is talking about is accidental, acquisitional. It's almost collateral damage learning. I was thinking about being a blogger as an example. I didn't take a formal course to become one, obviously (I'd want my money back if I did). And I don't think I ever articulated to myself the goal or ambition to 'learn to be a blogger'. But over time, reading others, and experimentation, I learnt a lot of things, such as the right voice (for me) to use in a blog, what subjects to blog about, how to connect with others, the use of certain technologies, etc. I also became enculturated and learnt or adopted the 'blog culture'.

I suppose in one sense, I am now an expert, or at least more expert than some, blogger. But this feels rather different from other things I might be considered an expert in (erm, I can't think of any now, but there must be some), which have been the result of very intentional, and directional learning.

And this to me gets to the heart of the good and the bad about rhizomatic (or if you prefer, networked) learning. It works, at least in the sense that I have learnt to be a better blogger than I was six years ago. But if it's unintentional, undirectional, informal and accidental then is there much we as educators can say about it other than 'that's interesting'? My point is if we can't foster it, direct it, start it, measure it, or even look at it then is there much we can do about it? It may happen, and be very useful, but as soon as you try and touch it, then it disappears. It's like stars you can only see in the periphery of your vision, as soon as you focus on them, they fade from view.

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/miller-lowe/2179212600/>

A long time ago, well, before Simon Cowell was a household name anyway, universities used to run university presses. These would print journals and books. They didn't really make a profit, in fact they often made a loss. Their titles were esoteric, academic and occassionally odd. But they did it because that was the best, indeed the only route often, to sharing knowledge publicly. Other universities and libraries would buy these journals, sometimes the production was very professional, other times less so and the glue and string would show. 

Then gradually, universities began to realise they weren't in the print business, and that they couldn't really compete with the professional publishers in terms of marketing and distribution. So, one by one, they sold their titles to the publishers. For a while it was a mutually beneficial deal. Their publications had a wider distribution and they had access to centralised expertise in publishing, library contacts, copyediting, etc. In exchange the academics provided their content and their labour in editing and reviewing. 

But over time, the distance between the publishers and the academics increased, and it became less of a mutually beneficial arrangement. Libraries were locked into 'big deal' packages, and as academics continued to provide the majority of the labour, the profits earned by the big publishers increased. As Edwards and Shulenberger put it: "beginning in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity".

One of the problems previously was that printing and distributing paper journals was an alien business for universities to be in. It involved equipment, and logistics which were costly to maintain and seemed increasingly detached from the everyday business of the university. But I would suggest that the almost wholesale shift to online journals has now seen a realignment with university skills and functions. We do run websites and universities are the places people look to for information (or better, they do it through syndicated repositories). The experience the higher education sector has built up through OER, software development and website maintenance, now aligns nicely with the skills we've always had of editing, reviewing, writing and managing journals. Universities are the ideal place now for journals to reside.

I would argue then, that now is the time for the rebirth of the university press as a place that runs a set of open access, online journals. In times of financial stress in the sector, it may seem perverse to be proposing that universities take on a function that is not aimed at earning revenue, but here is my economic, and public good, argument.

Running journals on an ad hoc basis across universities is inefficient. By centralising resource you could support several journals. At a rough guess, based on my experience of editing JIME, I think one central, full time administrator could support 4 journals. The same, or maybe less time required, for technical support. That admin support may or may not do the copyediting also. The other main roles are those that are currently performed by academics for free anyway - reviewing, managing and editing the journal, organising special editions, reviewing, etc.

The same universities are currently paying a considerable sum to publishers through libraries. By withdrawing some of this spend and reallocating to internal publishing, then the university could cover costs. In addition the university gains kudos and recognition for its journals and the expertise and control is maintained within the university. Now, if enough universities do this, each publishing four or more journals, then the university presses now begin to cover the range of expertise required. And in times of financial crisis people will increasingly ask 'what is the university for?'. Being able to point to the wealth of knowledge that we generate and then share freely will be one part of an answer.

This is, of course, happening at many universities, but it's a piecemeal approach, often operating in the spare time of people with other jobs. One has only to look at the list of journals currently using OJS to see that it's an approach that is growing. I feel though that the time is now ripe for a more focused, concerted push to make the university press the home again of academic knowledge.

In his book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton makes the point that we are living through the midst of a revolution, and it's very difficult to see what the outcome will be. While I think that digital, networked and open approaches to scholarship do represent a revolution, I think we also tend to over simplify what this means. John makes this point also.

There is a tendency to think of revolutions as absolutes: pre and post. Everything that has gone before is swept away and everything that happens since is cast in the new light.

But for many revolutions this isn't the case. The actual picture is far more subtle, and interesting. I was reflecting on this the other day with regards to my own musical tastes and history. My musical tastes really started emerging in the immediate post-punk era, and this coloured everything for me. So my early album purchases were The Jam, Clash and later Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes. I inherited a completely dismissive attitude towards anything pre-1976. I scoffed at prog rock, folk and metal.

This wasn't actually a bad attitude to have as a teenager, you're meant to have strong tastes. But it did mean it took me longer than it should have done to come round to bands like Led Zeppelin, or Nick Drake.

But the lesson is, for many people my age punk was a defining revolution in music. But it wasn't as all encompassing as history may have painted it. I had plenty of friends whose musical tastes remained largely untouched. Queen, Iron Maiden, Luther Vandross - punk had no impact here.

And I had yet other friends who didn't think they liked punk, but went on to become new romantics (it was a confused time). And while that music had different values, it was a 'scene' that was undoubtedly influenced by the possibilities that punk had awoken in people.

Now this isn't just a nostalgia trip - there is an analogy here with digital scholarship, and what revolutions feel like. There are scholars for whom the digital aspect is nearly all consuming - I'm one of them, I simply can't imagine what it's like without working in a networked manner. There are those for whom it is largely irrelevant. Think of them as the Queen fans of scholarship - they have been successful and have a preference for an established way of working. Then there is probably a middle group, whose tastes and practices are touched by the existence of digital scholarship, even if they are not particularly strong advocates. These are the new romantics.

I guess the point is, a revolution changes some things completely, alters some, and has no impact on others, but we tend to focus only on the first of these.

Over the past week or so I've had a couple of twitter discussions around 'frictionless sharing'. Brian Kelly captured some of this discussion in Storify and then followed up with this post (like a dog with a bone, Brian has also created a wikipedia stub :)

The term has been somewhat corrupted by Facebook, which has inevitably led to it being rather sneered at. Particularly worrying I think is unintentional sharing, ie Facebook simply broadcasting your actions. Sharing should always be a conscious decision I feel. 

Pete Johnston made the point about context, which is another concern around frictionless sharing. Consider the following examples:

1) You 'favourite' a number of offensive tweets from people to be used in a talk about online behaviour.

2) Your daughter borrows your iPod and listens to some teeny bop music, which is displayed in your LastFM profile.

3) You collect a number of articles in Scoop.It which demonstrate fallacious arguments about the net generation.

In each case you wouldn't want the casual observer to infer any endorsement of the resources by yourself, but without any clear context, that could happen. Nonetheless, frictionless sharing represents a significant practice for academics I feel. Much of the value of a scholar is to be a knowledge filter. They are also knowledge creators, through research, of course, but a valuable role is to read around a subject in more detail than most people have time for, and to filter the key resources and messages. Thus if someone I know and respect curates a subject in Tumblr (or delicious, or Scoop.It or Mendeley) then having access to that set of resources is tremendously useful to me as a researcher. It doesn't mean I shouldn't do my own research, but knowing that this is what the world expert thinks is interesting, is a useful resource. And for anyone doing this the simplicity of the tools I mentioned (which usually equates to clicking on a bookmarklet) doesn't cost them much in time, effort or money. This can be seen as democratising this kind of knowledge. Previously I would need to know the person in order to find out what they thought was of value in their field, but now it's open to all.

This kind of trusted digital curation is increasingly valuable I feel, and one that is not easily recognised by current systems. Someone could be the key 'go-to' source because they spend a lot of time reading and filtering, but not publish anything themselves, and yet have a huge impact in their field. Stephen Downes is a good example of someone who is highly valued for this curation role, but he combines it with producing his own excellent material as well. But if he didn't and only did the filtering role, that would still be enormously valuable and yet difficult to recognise formally (imagine trying to put it through the REF in the UK).

I want to emphasise that this doesn't mean all sharing should be this way. I think we can see increasing levels of friction in sharing, and arguably, the value of the resource increases as more friction is added. In the chapter on openness in my Digital Scholar book, I suggest three degrees of sharing friction: 

1. Frictionless – sharing that occurs without much additional effort required, for example, if a scholar is gathering resources for her own research, then using a social bookmarking tool is an effective tool for her as well as making the list public.

2. Quick sharing – this requires a small level of effort, so does not occur simply as a by-product, but the effort required is minimal, such as sharing a link via Facebook or uploading a Powerpoint presentation to Slideshare.

3. Content creation – this requires some effort to produce a digital artefact, for instance, creating a blog post, a YouTube movie, or adding and synchronising audio to a presentation to create a ‘slidecast’. The effort and expertise required are still relatively low compared to many traditional forms of output.

The end of the year is time for my traditional running review post, much to the pleasure of absolutely no-one, including myself. Still, that's what traditions are for, so here goes.

First, the data part, because you're worth it:

• Total distance: 1028 miles
• Number of runs: 136
• Total duration: 182 hours
• Average distance: 7.56 miles
• Average duration: 1hr 16mins
• Average pace: 10.09 min/mile

Compared with last year, where I was a bit lost and only did a total of 831 miles, this was a big improvement, and I finally broke that 1000 mile barrier. Even so, this still only comes in at just over half an hour a day on average. That's not actually that much time is it? I probably spent this much time watching Masterchef. So there is plenty of time to do more. I like this video that asks, 'can you fit in all the sleeping, watching TV and being online time into 23.5 hours a day?':

The biggest single factor in increasing mileage this year was running two marathons. I did my first one back in April in an ok time of 4hrs 11mins and then a second one in November in a poor time of 4hrs 30mins. I learnt two things about myself from these experiences.

Firstly, ignorance is a kind of bliss. When I first started running I thought doing a 10K was a big deal. Then I moved up to, and stayed at, half marathon distance. But having done a marathon now, I have knowledge of long distance, and I don't think I could be happy with just staying at shorter distances. The problem is I like those shorter distances, and I'm even worse at longer ones. Sometimes newly acquired knowledge isn't always a blessing. Like when you begin to understand about writing or film making, you can't simply 'enjoy' a book or a film anymore, there is always some critical appraisal occurring. But of course, this brings with it pleasures of its own, and longer distances do have that. They also have a lot of really boring, slogging it out miles too though.

Secondly, I have to earn every mile. I am not a natural athlete. I know people who put in less training than me and complete a marathon in 3 hours. Even if I gave up work and concentrated solely on running, I couldn't do that - we're just built differently. This came home to me as I struggled around the second marathon in Nice. I hadn't put in the same level of training as for the first marathon, and it showed. There was no reserve of natural talent I could draw upon - every bloody mile has to be earnt.

In making my tenuous connection to learning, I'd say there are a lot of similarities. Some people can breeze through a course and an exam, others have to work hard, study long hours and fret through the night for every single mark. And no matter how hard they try most people won't achieve top marks, but they still study and learn and gain from it. Learning, like running, is about competition with yourself, not others.

Like many people, I have a Facebook profile, but it isn't something I use much. And like many people I've become increasingly uneasy about the way our interactions are monetised and manipulated. I don't mind this to an extent - I'm willing to trade off free use of something for some adverts I ignore, for example. But it's begun to feel all rather insidious with Facebook.

Alan Levine posted that he wasn't going to dramatically quit Facebook, but his plan was to maintain a non-presence:

But quitting seems to pointless. Or impactless. So I have an evil plot. I am keeping my facebook account, but I have completely neutralized its presence. I belong to no groups, like nothing, or use anything that sucks in my information 

But I think you could take this one step further. In those fantasy books and comics, when a human needs to slay a monster, they nearly always have an epiphany where they use it's own strength against it. The same approach could be applied to the behemoth of Facebook.

What Facebook really sells to companies is meaningful data and connections. The key to this is that they are meaningful. If I 'Like; a company it matters because my friends will believe that I really endorse their products. If I install an app it's because it appeals to me. And if people who Like X tend to also Like Y then that becomes valuable data.

But what if those actions weren't meaningful? What if they were genuinely, and deliberately random? A company may get some benefit along the lines of 'all publicity is good publicity', but the real value of knowing it's something I genuinely like is removed. And this corrupts the data set, because those connections between points are no better than a random number generator.

So, if I was a real hacktivist type, I'd create a tool that searches Facebook and randomly suggests companies to Like and apps to install. Then we'd all do it, and Mark Zuckerberg would cry 'I'm melting, I'm melting.'

This is only a half-serious suggestion - the point I want to make is that in social media, it is integrity that counts - data integrity, personal integrity and behavioural integrity. Which prevents marketing firms and retailers with a problem as often they are trying to modify or coerce this integrity. But as soon as you do that, the whole approach becomes meaningless. If I retweet something because I might get a prize, then people don't value that tweet. And so the moral is, don't sell your integrity cheaply. And don't manipulate our integrity or we can use it against you.

WARNING - this post contains stretching of a flimsy idea to breaking point. Look away if you find strained literary metaphors distressing.

In keeping with the festive season, I'm going to frame some thoughts on stages of academic publishing with a Dickensian motif. I'm trying to develop an approach that covers three phases of a journal article's life, so let's go for a Christmas Carol. 

The Ghost of Articles Past - Scrooge is shown his own past Christmases, and given to reflect and reinterpret them. The ghost says he is there for Scrooge's 'reclamation'. For articles, they are usually published in a journal, where they may receive an initial flurry of interest, and unless they become a standard text they fall into obscurity (indeed most never emerge from obscurity). As I mentioned in my last post, I'm interested in the possibilities that open access allows for a new life for articles, for them to be taken, republished in different collections or reused in different contexts. This can happen with existing, proprietary articles but it's a closed process, it is open access that allows for the generative, innovative reuse that will allow articles to be reclaimed.

This idea is somewhat in its infancy in terms of meta-journals and having a critical mass of open access content, but in other ways one of the oldest practices online with bookmarking, linking, blogging. So it indeed resembles the first of Dickens' spirits in being "like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium"

The Ghost of Articles Present - This is the easiest one, as it represents the norm. I've written about academic publishing a lot, especially in this chapter of my book, so I won't repeat it all here. But despite the many criticisms we may have of it, the carefully researched, well-written and peer-reviewed article has a strong place in academia and is in many ways the core practice that allows it to distance itself from commercial or marketing influence. But it's also a bloated industry in its own right and one that is both bountiful and undergoing change, just as Scrooge is in the midst of change as he views the different interpretations of present Christmas. So we can both see the current publishing model as akin to the Ghost who was "a jolly Giant, glorious to see" and also one who like the Ghost of Christmas Present is destined to fade soon.

The Ghost of Articles Yet To Come - one of the most interesting developments over recent years has been the rise of the physics pre-print repository arXiv. Articles that are ‘published’ here are not peer-reviewed, so can be pre-publication, or unpublished. An initial filter is applied, which is that the article is of reviewable quality. To quote the arXiv founders: “that they would not be peremptorily rejected by any competent journal editor as nutty, offensive, or otherwise manifestly inappropriate, and would instead at least in principle be suitable for review.”

ArXiv has become the de facto distribution medium for scholarly articles in Physics, with Sir Martin Rees commenting it has “transformed the literature of physics, establishing a new model for communication over the whole of science. Far fewer people today read traditional journals. These have so far survived as guarantors of quality. But even this role may soon be trumped by a more informal system of quality control, signaled by the approbation of discerning readers”. 

These are articles that have not yet been published, but could be. They are thus akin to the Christmases of the future that Scrooge sees - they are shadows, possibilities, but not definite. In the removal of the heavy peer-review process this approach strikes fear into many academics, like the Ghost who "was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form... the Spirit neither spoke nor moved"

My plan is to try and cover all three of these aspects. I have the Meta EdTech Journal, am an editor on JIME, and am trying to set up an arXiv type pre-print for ed tech. I think people often see new technological approaches supplanting old ones, but it's the complementary nature I find interesting. It is the advent of alternatives to previously monolithic systems that is exciting.

So, join with me and Scrooge in saying:

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"

The other day I was trying to find a list of Open Access journals. I found this very useful open list from George Veletsianos. While looking through the journals it occurred to me that what would be useful would be a regular review of these, or a kind of meta-journal. Not one that just lists all the papers, but rather a filtered view.

I mentioned it on Twitter and Doug Belshaw pointed me at the new Google/Wordpress collaboration, Annotum - a WordPress theme for creating open access journals.

So in the a spirit of DIY, I have created Meta EdTech Journal. The idea is simple - three times a year an issue will be published, collating some of the articles from the open access ed tech journals. At the moment this is at my discretion, but I would welcome an editorial board, or perhaps editors to work on very focused special editions. You could imagine very interesting special editions drawing on the open access journals in all manner of subjects, and using material from the past three years or so. A Meta EdTech Medical Education Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Social Media Special Edition? A Meta EdTech Mobile Learning Special Edition? Well, you get the idea, they're all relatively easy to do.

Now, you could say, 'so what?'. After all, there's nothing in this I couldn't do in a blog, delicious, tumblr, paper.li, scoop.it, etc. However, I have come to the conclusion rather late in life, that context is important. By looking roughly journalish, calling itself a journal, behaving like a journal, and crucially only gathering together journal articles, it begins to feel like a journal. And that might be of interest to a few people. 

What I find most interesting about this though is the potential for interdisciplinarity. I have gone for a fairly boring Ed Tech focus, but you could have some really interesting intersection. Interdisciplinary journals have traditionally suffered because of the economics of publishing - they just don't have a big enough audience. But if you are drawing on open access publications, you can make an interdisciplinary journal on any subject you want (provided there are enough open access papers to draw upon). Classics and Manga Studies? You bet. Postmodernism and Sports Psychology? Why not.

The other mild revelation, is that it's yet another example of what I like about open access. It's the unpredictability and different uses that content can be put to that is really exciting. Your article no longer sits in just one journal, but may appear in dozens of different 'mashup' or meta journals. Each of these may have a different audience, beyond the scope of the original journal. Again, as an author, why wouldn't you want this? The development of meta-journals itself may be a driver for open access, since authors want to be included in them.

A couple of admin points: I've tried to give the proper attribution for each paper but if anyone thinks it looks as though I'm trying to claim authorship, let me know (it automatically adds 'Author' as the person who creates the post, which is annoying). I'm not a WordPress expert so I'm not sure I've set it up optimally. For instance I couldn't see how to create Issues, so I have simply created a page for each issue, and listed in the sidebar. Again, any thoughts on this are welcome.

We'll see how it goes, maybe no-one will read it, as the other tools I've mentioned above already fulfill this function. But for now, it was kinda cool to think 'this afternoon, I'm going to create a journal, on my own, with no funding.'