Category: Open Education

Critical Open Education Studies

Joss Winn / / Open Education, PhD

I don’t know what to make of David Wiley’s latest blog post ‘MOOCs and Digital Diploma Mills: Forgetting Our History‘. I am astonished, to put it politely, that one of the leading thinkers in the Open Education movement is still sitting on the fence, despite having written about the proletarianisation of teaching in his early work. Of course David Noble’s critique of distance education (later expanded in a book) is applicable to open education. Noble’s concern about “the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property” is not remedied with the simple application of a Creative Commons license – if only it were that easy. Many academics are already free to choose how to distribute their scholarly work (this simplifies the traditional transferral of copyright to the journal publisher resulting in more effective impact of the institution’s outputs), but what Noble was concerned with was the systematic interference by institutions in the re-production of teaching and learning, which is what xMOOCs are undertaking. xMOOCs are capturing value in teaching and learning where it was previously shared at the whim and will of the individual teacher. In choosing to license content under a CC license, such institutions are converting an under-commons into a valorised commons.

David Noble died in 2010 and did not revise his views about distant education in light of the open education movement. I suggest that this is because his argument remains apposite for OER-based teaching and learning, too. The content may be ‘free’, but the teacher is drawn further into the valorisation process of the institution.

As can be seen by David Wiley’s significant number of articles relating to open education, the movement has had over a decade to reflect critically on itself, yet there remains a void of reflexive, critical work that attempts to develop the open education movement and protect it from threats such as those which Wiley draws out of Noble’s article. There is no doubt that the work of David Wiley and others to advocate open education and grow the movement is a sincere and important contribution to a notion of the ‘public good’, but the movement still remains largely inward looking and self-referential. It is dominated by learning developers and technologists who are necessarily focused on implementation and have little time, motivation or opportunity for critique.

Where are the scholarly papers that examine open education from the range of disciplines within the social sciences? What has open education demonstrably learned from the tradition of popular and critical pedagogy? How have the critiques of open source been applied to OER? Similarly, the movement has much to learn from critiques of P2P, but where is this critical, scholarly dialogue occurring?

In the UK, the OER movement has been tightly coupled to state (JISC/HEA) funding, which has now ended. I was the recipient of two grants in this programme of funding. The synthesis evaluation of #ukoer clearly presents the instrumental agenda of the programme. Related conferences are mostly one project after another attempting to demonstrate their ‘progress’ with robust critique almost entirely absent. My experience at Open Education 2010 was the same. Academics seeking funding are naturally keen to satisfy the expectations of their funders and the effect that these funding programmes have had on the fundamental direction of open education in the UK has yet to be critically examined. What would open education look like if we hadn’t taken the money? Similarly, in the US, state funding and, to a greater extent, philanthropic funding has steered how the movement has developed. Funding is provided based on the premise of open education’s public good and we feel obliged to demonstrate this. There is a history of state funding influencing the outputs of academia, what effect has it had on us?

Clearly if this work is being undertaken, I have not found it, and so I am hoping that others will join me in reviewing the existing critical literature so that we might identify what has been written and therefore what needs to be done. I have made three contributions in the last two years. The first paper, with Richard Hall, addressed the potential role of open education to sustain higher learning. The second, was a critique of the valorisation of institutional OER. The third, was a paper with Mike Neary, which critiqued the idea of ‘commons’. While I am trying to develop a critique of open education within the framework of a critique of political economy, I know that approaches from other disciplines within the social sciences will prove insightful and fruitful, too. My next paper will be a critical examination of the historical role of academia in the development of hacker culture (and therefore notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘openness’ that have returned to the university via the success of Creative Commons). I think much remains to be done to uncover the historical forces, structures and conditions that gave rise to open education. Without this, how can we understand ourselves?

I have looked for literature reviews of open education and found little that satisfies my requirements for texts that are critiques of open education. For example, Mendeley groups point to the usual plethora of blog posts, news articles, reports and project outcomes. A Google Scholar search is not encouraging either. In the apparent absence of ‘critical open education studies’, I hope that you will recommend papers that offer David and I robust critiques of open education, OER and related practices. I think that the development of this area of scholarship would demonstrate the maturity of the movement and protect it from manipulation, co-option and coercion in the future.

Institutional approaches to openness

Joss Winn / / Hacking, Open Access, Open Education, Open Source, PhD, Projects, Student as Producer

As part of open education week, JISC commissioned a series of case studies on ‘institutional approaches to openness’. For Lincoln, I wrote that our approach to openness can be best understood in relation to our Student as Producer initiative.

Since 2010 a project called Student as Producer has been adopted as the de facto teaching and learning strategy for the University of Lincoln. This is an attempt to engage undergraduate students in research, and to make research part of the teaching process. It is also a vehicle for demonstrating the value of openness – an idea bolstered by the establishment of numerous other open access initiatives at the university.

Read the case study: Hacking the university

Speaking in NYC

Joss Winn / / Open Education, PhD, Presentations, Projects, Student as Producer

Mike Neary and I were in New York City from the 11-16th October, speaking about Student as Producer. We held seminars at Adelphi University, Baruch College CUNY and were part of a panel at the Mobility Shifts Conference at The New School. Here is a recording of the CUNY event, where we had the pleasure of sharing the seminar with Jim Groom, someone who’s been an inspiration for my work on the university WordPress platform.

Technology for education: A new group

Joss Winn / / Education, Fun, Mashups, Open Education, PhD, Projects, Software, Student as Producer, Support, Web

I offer this as one response to my previous post. Much more needs to be done to ‘reverse imagineer’ EdTech, but this will be my practical focus for the foreseeable future and the nexus of where theory is put into practice, where pedagogy meets technología: “The processes and practices of doing things, understanding things and developing knowledge”? (Selwyn 2011, p7)

A new group

In January, I wrote about how I had written a paper for the university about the role of technology in the context of Student as Producer. The paper included a recommendation that a new team be convened to “further the research, development and support of technology” at the university. January feels like a long time ago now, and I wanted to write about what’s been happening since then, because it’s all good 🙂

Following my presentation of the original paper to the Teaching and Learning Committee, I was asked to provide more detail on what the proposed team would do and a justification for the budget I had outlined. Both papers were written on behalf of and with the co-operation of, the Dean of Teaching and Learning, the University Librarian, the Prof. of Education, the Head of ICT and the Vice President of Academic Affairs in the Student Union. The second paper went back to the T&L Committee and, following their approval, then went to the university’s Executive Board in early April.

I began the paper by outlining what the team is for:

The team will consolidate and extend the existing collaborative work taking place between Centre for Educational Research and Development, The Library and ICT Services ((Since writing this, I’ve listed examples of our existing work in a recent blog post. You can add JISCPress and ChemistryFM, this WordPress platform and our e-portfolio system to that list, too.)) and invite staff and students from across the university to join the team. The team will offer incentives to staff and students who wish to contribute to the rapid innovation of appropriate technology for education at the university, through work-experience, research bursaries and internal and external applications for funding. Through our experience of the Fund for Educational Development (FED) and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Scheme (UROS) funds, we know this is an effective method of engaging staff and students in research and development. A core principle of the team will be that students and staff have much to learn from each other and that students as producers can be agents of change in the use of technology for education.

I then went on to argue:

The Student as Producer project is anticipated to take between 3-5 years to fully embed across the university. During this time, significant changes will occur in the technologies we use. In just the last five years, we have seen the rise of web applications such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Web 2.0 in general. Aside from such applications, networked infrastructure has developed considerably, with access to broadband now widespread and the use of smart phones and netbooks rapidly increasing. For a student at the University of Lincoln in 2011, high-speed networks are now ubiquitous across the city campuses and such networks themselves are now the ‘learning landscape’, in which the university is but one part.

There is a strong argument for shifting away from the idea of ‘educational technology’ to address technology straight on, recognising that any technology can support and enhance the research, teaching and learning process, and that the use of these technologies increasingly lies outside the institution’s control. We would argue that it is not the university’s role to compete with or determine the use of any technology but rather support access to technology in the broadest terms. This can be achieved through incremental improvements to infrastructure (e.g. network capacity and ease of use), supporting staff and students (e.g. training, workshops, courses) and personalising and integrating the services we do provide so that staff and students have a useful and enjoyable experience of technology at the university and understand how it fits within their wider networks. In particular, we should consider whether Blackboard can be better enhanced through mobile applications and the integration of other popular services such as Facebook. It is a key technology for the support of teaching and learning and if extended through the work of the proposed team, could be a platform for innovation. All of this work should be informed by a broad understanding of the social roles of technology and the objective of producing critical, digitally literate staff and students.

I presented a list of risks that I thought would present themselves if we didn’t take this approach:

  1. Poor co-ordination: Poorly co-ordinated investment in technology to support strategic objectives, resulting in competing interests in limited resources.
  2. Disjuncture: Growing disjuncture between student expectations and institutional provision of technology and support.
  3. Inertia: No locus for technological experimentation and innovation.
  4. Unattractive to potential post-graduates and staff: Technological provision compares poorly to other institutions, putting off new staff and post-graduates.
  5. Loss of income stream: Under-investment in ‘seeding’ projects that may attract external income.
  6. Business As Usual: During a period of significant change in Higher Education, our progressive T&L Strategy is hindered by poorly co-ordinated technological development.
  7. Student as Consumer: Technology remains something ‘provided’ by the university, rather than produced and informed by its staff and students.

Finally, I provided more detail about the costs. After taking into account existing budgets available to us and anticipated external research income, the total I asked for was £22K/yr to pay for an additional 12-month Intern position and a contribution to the staff and student bursaries we want to make available.  This was approved.

I was pleased with the outcome as it means that our current work is being recognised as well as the strategic direction we wish to go in. In terms of resourcing, we will have at least one more full-time (Intern) post and hold a £20K annual budget which will be used to provide grants and bursaries to staff and students, pay for hardware and software as needed and pay for participants to go to conferences to discuss their work and learn from the EdTech community at large. This doesn’t include any external income that we hope to generate. The nature of our applications for research grants is unlikely to change other than we hope to have more capacity in the future including both students and academic staff as active contributors to the development, implementation and support of technology for education at the university.

Team? Group? Network? Place?

The core members of the group (i.e. CERD/ICT/Library) met for an afternoon last week to discuss the roadmap for getting everything in place for the new academic year. We began by discussing the remit of the group (as detailed in the two committee papers), which is principally to serve the objectives of Student as Producer, the de facto teaching and learning strategy of the university. We spent a while discussing the nature of the group; that is, whether it was a team, a network, a group or even a place. In the first committee paper I wrote, I described it as “a flexible, cross-departmental team of staff and student peers”, but have since come to refer to it as a ‘group’, as ‘team’ does not reflect the nature of how we intend to work, nor the relationships we hope to build among participants, nor is a ‘team’ inclusive enough. I’d like to think that we’ll develop a network of interested staff and students and even attract interest and collaboration from outside the university, but I think it’s too early to call what we’re doing a network, although we are networked and working on the Net.  We’ve given ourselves a couple of weeks to come up with name but whatever we call it, we agreed that in principle we’d govern the group by consensus among us. Ideally, though not always in practice, the Net can help us create flatter structures of governance, so we’ll try to shape the way we work around this ideal.  My role will be to co-ordinate the work of the group by consensus.

UPDATE: We decided upon LNCD as the name for our group. It’s a recursive acronym: LNCD’s Not a Central Development group.

All participants will be encouraged to write about their work in the context of Student as Producer, building on the progressive pedagogical framework that is being implemented at the university, theorising their work critically and reflexively. We’ll support this approach, too, building a reading list for people wanting to think critically about EdTech and an occasional seminar series where we’ll discuss our ideas critically, reflexively and collegially.

Road map and tools

We will be up and running by the start of the next academic year. Over the summer, we’ve got a timetable of work that we plan to do to ensure we’ve got a clearly defined identity and the tools in place to support the nature of our work. By the end of September, we’ll have a website that offers clear information on what we do, what we’re working on, how to get involved and the ways we can support staff and students at the university. The site will allow you to review all aspects of our projects as well as propose new projects which can be voted up and down according to staff and students’ priority. There will be an application form for you to apply for funding from us and a number of ways for you discuss your ideas on and offline. We’ll be continuing our current provision of staff training, but will be looking to re-develop the sessions into short courses that are useful to both staff and students. The 2009 Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report recommended that

The time would seem to be right seriously and systematically to begin the process of renegotiating the relationship between tutor and student to bring about a situation where each recognises and values the other’s expertise and capability and works together to capitalise on it. This implies drawing students into the development of approaches to teaching and learning. [Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World, p.9]

This is very much what Student as Producer is aiming to do through embedding research-engaged teaching and learning across the curricula and the approach we plan to take around support and training for the use of technology in teaching and learning. We’ll be working with the Student Union and the Principle Teacher Fellows across the university to identify ways that students and their tutors can be encouraged to support each other and we welcome the input and collaboration of anyone who wishes to adopt and advocate this approach. We’ll be designing some posters, flyers and business cards over the summer so that people around the university know who we are and how to get in touch in time for Fresher’s Week.

For the Geeks, you might be interested to know that we’ve decided upon a set of tools for managing our work online in a distributed environment where most of us work in different parts of the university campuses. We’ll have a dedicated virtual Linux box (as well as our usual development servers) and the main website will be run on WordPress using our own custom CWD theme. We’ll be migrating all of our code to Git Hub very soon and we’ll be using Pivotal Tracker to manage our development tasks in an agile and open way. We’ll be using our existing combination of Get Satisfaction and Zen Desk to manage peer-to-peer user support and bug reports and we’ll also be looking at alternatives such as User Voice and the Open Source Q&A tool to provide a way for you to suggest and vote for project ideas. Notably, through the use of their APIs, most of these tools integrate well, so that we can create tasks in Pivotal Tracker from bug reports made with Zen Desk and associate those tasks with commits on Git Hub. We’ll be using Twitter just as we always do, and we’ll be using Google Groups for longer discussions around each project (as well as regularly meeting face-to-face, of course). For projects that don’t involve writing code (which we certainly welcome), we’ll be looking at tools that assist with resource development and document control, such as digress.it, MediaWiki, Git Hub, Google Docs, EPrints and Jorum, depending on the nature of the project. We won’t be prescriptive with the tools we adopt, using whatever is appropriate, but with an emphasis on those that offer decent APIs, data portability and good usability. Proprietary software lacking APIs and with poor usability (we can all think of a few) won’t get much of a look in. Finally, through RSS and widgets, we’ll be presenting a coherent picture of each project on the main website.

There’s quite a bit to do but we know how to do it.  If you’ve got any suggestions (a name would be useful!), ideas or even want to join us, for the time-being, leave a comment here and we’ll get back to you. Thanks.

Misunderstanding capitalism and OER

Joss Winn / / Open Education, PhD, Theory

David Wiley has just posted about Openness, Socialism and Capitalism. Comments are turned off on his blog, so I thought I’d reply here.

David’s post makes a good point: tax payer’s money that funds research, teaching and learning, should correspond to the tax payer being one of the recipients of the outcomes of research, teaching and learning; in other words, Open Access and Open Educational Resources. He refers to this as BOGO (‘Buy One, Get One’). To most readers, I think this will appear to be common-sense.

The problem I have with David’s post is this common-sense view that ‘capitalism’ and ‘markets’ are synonymous and that if the ‘flaws’ in the market were fixed, capitalism would serve tax payers well. David makes a common error in confusing capitalism with commerce. Capitalism is a historically specific method of organising social relations among people while commerce, which sometimes takes place in markets, existed prior to the development of capitalism in the 16th century.  I found Ellen Meiksins Wood’s book on the Origins of Capitalism very useful in understanding this point. The Monthly Review published a relevant chapter from the book which is a quick read. My point here is that in simple commerce or trade in non-capitalist societies, you might have expected to get a fair return on your money, but under capitalism, you should always expect to receive something worth less than you paid for it. I paid £400 for a TV, but I know that the cost of producing and selling that TV did not cost £400. Profit is extracted at every step in the production and exchange process, making my TV cost more to me than the actual cost of that TV. Under capitalism, we accept this for the private sector, but I think that David’s point is that publicly funded goods and services, such as educational outputs should be treated differently. I agree that seems fair.

David writes about a ‘fundamental social contract that allows markets to function’, giving the example of buying a pizza. A discussion around this ‘social contract’ can tell us more about capitalism than simply referring to ‘markets’. The ‘social contract’ refers to our shared understanding of the role of private property in society and an acknowledgement of the laws in place which protect private property. When the enforcement of social order breaks down in society or when someone exists in absolute poverty, this ‘social contract’ is often ignored and we call it looting or theft. In short, the ‘social contract’, although not an explicit written contract at the time of transaction, is underwritten in law and enforced through the role of the police and to a lesser extent other social institutions, such as education. Mark Neocleous has written a nice book about this called The Fabrication of Social Order, where he discusses the historical role of the police in enforcing ‘order’ (the functioning of private property and waged labour) in capitalist society.

The main point where I think David is mistaken is the expectation that under capitalism, epitomised by the functioning of markets, tax payers should expect to receive goods and services equal to the amount that is paid in taxes: you pay for a pizza and you get the whole damn pizza; you pay for education and you get full access to education. This makes sense but in my view is a naive view of the functioning of capitalism.

One of the defining features of capitalism is the extraction of ‘surplus value‘ from the work or labour that we are forced to undertake. The basic idea is that I work 8hrs/day but the value of the output of that work is worth more to my employer than the wage I am paid for 8hrs work. This is the basis for exploitation in capitalist society, which most of us participate in. We’re all aware that capitalism relies heavily on technology to improve the creation of surplus value out of labour (Meiksins Wood writes about the word ‘improve’ – very interesting and relevant to this discussion). Marx wrote about the shift from the formal subordination of labour to capital (the creation of a labour market in early stage capitalism) to the real subordination of labour to capital: the discipline of technology on labour and the transformation of the role of labour in the production process, which in turn effects a chain of social relations throughout society, from worker to shareholder. The important point here is to recognise that capitalism is not isolated to private trade or the markets but impacts all aspects of a capitalist society. It is a social totality subservient to the production of value.

Marx referred to two forms of surplus value. Absolute surplus value is basically the value created by extending the working day or cutting rest time, forcing people to work harder and other methods of discipline such as increased supervision. A situation of high unemployment can also lead to the creation of absolute surplus value because people are forced to work for less as wages are squeezed and workers have less bargaining power. However, there are obvious limits to the production of absolute surplus value: e.g. there are only 24hrs in the day, people get sick and even die if you work them too hard, workers organise into unions and can resist downwards pressure on wages. Relative surplus value is basically value created through efficiencies and innovation. Rather than extend the working day, efficiencies are introduced into the production process which ensure that labour does more work in the same time. These efficiencies can come about through better organisation of the production process and innovation through the use of technology, for example.

Having a basic understanding of surplus value, essential to capitalist accumulation, we can now situate the role of the tax payer and public services, such as education, in the production of surplus value. Marx made the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. This is a fairly simple distinction with widespread implications: Labour employed to produce surplus value directly is productive (i.e. labour directly involved in the production of commodities). All other labour is unproductive. This includes most government employees, managers in both private and public sectors, people involved in sales, finance, etc. In this view, most of my work for a publicly funded university is considered unproductive. However, unproductive labour, although not a direct source of surplus value, is still exploited by being paid less than the value of their wage. As Fine and Saad-Filho write in their excellent introduction to Marx’s Capital,

From the point of view of capital, unproductive sectors, for example retailing or banking, capture part of the surplus value produced in the economy (and, therefore, obtain the wherewithal to pay wages, other expenses and their own profits) through transfers from the value-producing sectors, via the pricing mechanism.

Although unproductive in the sense that this work is not directly involved in the production of commodities, it is still essential work in the economic reproduction of capitalist society, e.g. educating and training workers, keeping us in relatively good health so we remain productive, loaning us money to buy a house (because we are property-less) and selling us essential and non-essential commodities.

So, in this view, the publicly-funded education sector captures part of the surplus value produced in the economy (i.e. through taxes), and uses this value to maintain institutions for research, teaching and learning. What is of interest to me (and probably David), is that since Marx’s time, the appearance (though not the fundamental attributes) of a ‘commodity‘ has changed and the term now encapsulated a much broader range of ‘things’ than it did 150 years ago. I’ll leave a decent discussion about what a commodity really is for another day, but I want to note that Marx began Capital with that discussion and it forms the basic reference for much of his work on value and labour. Research papers and books sold by commercial academic publishers are commodities and I have argued elsewhere that OERs are being treated as commodities that may or may not create value for universities. So far, I am not aware of the production of OERs (involving the application of technology to labour) actually creating surplus value for an institution (MIT appear to be breaking even with the help of philanthropic grants). When we refer to ‘sustainability’ or the ‘business case’ for OERs, I think we’re talking about the potential to create value.

What’s particularly interesting to me is that the production of OERs through institutional means seems to be very much in line with capitalist production elsewhere and I agree with David that what Martin calls ‘big OERs‘, are ‘completely compatible with capitalism’. However, I don’t agree that OERs, because they are open, are ‘completely compatible with capitalism’. I don’t think openness has anything to do with it. The institutional production of OER is compatible with capitalism because it is clearly being situated within the overall production of surplus value for the institution. When we talk about the sustainability of OERs or business cases for the production of OERs, we’re talking about how to measure the value of this endeavour and usually this is through attracting external grants and raising the profile of the institution in some way.

So, where I disagree with David is the ‘common-sense’ expectation that tax payers should expect an equal return on the taxes we pay. From the point of view of capital, those taxes are potential surplus value that has been captured and transferred away from the direct capital accumulation process (M-C-M’ : Money is invested to produce Commodities that are sold in order to create Money and so on). From the point of view of capital, taxes are captured surplus value that are reinvested into the perpetuation of capitalist society, into educating workers, keeping us healthy and so on. Once these basic responsibilities are performed through the welfare state, capital will inevitably seek a return on this surplus value captured in taxation and seek to encourage the production of more surplus value wherever possible. e.g. selling publicly funded research outputs.

So, if David and I think it’s unfair that we don’t get a fair return on our taxes, it is no surprise really. It’s just a continuation of the exploitation that most of us are forced into under capitalism, where private property and waged labour are the organising principles of subsistence. In my view, a fair return on our taxes (or BOGO, as David calls it) through openness doesn’t ‘fix a disfunction in the market’; it is completely incompatible with a society where there is an imperative (partly through competition in the markets) to accumulate capital undertaken through the exploitation of working people, be they academics, housewives, students or car mechanics.

Recovering my past: Amateur and avant-garde film

Joss Winn / / Education, Fun, Open Education, PhD, Presentations

It occurred to me today that the work I did during my MA in Film Studies and Archiving (University of East Anglia 2001-2) might be of interest to someone of the Interweb. Here it is, retrieved from an almost forgotten folder on my hard drive. Let me know if you find it of any use.

My reason for undertaking the MA derived from my interest in amateur and avant-garde filmmaking. During 1998-2001, I lived in Japan and spent much of my spare time (and money), shooting Super 8mm and 16mm film (mainly landscapes and abstractions) and exhibiting international exchanges of European, North American and Japanese experimental film and video. I’ve never been interested in filmmaking as a career, but thought that working in film preservation and archiving would allow me to make a living out of a love for non-commercial filmmaking. With that in mind, here are the outputs of my MA.

Amateur Filmmaking During World War II

In my first paper for the MA, I discuss the dilemma of amateur filmmaking during war time, based on a study of original books and magazines from the 1930s and 1940s. In the second part of the paper, I draw heavily on my extended interviews with Dick Brandon, a soldier and amateur filmmaker during WWII. The paper lacks any critical theoretical method but offers a useful study of primary sources.

Amateur filmmaking during WWII

Site/Sight: Landscape and the Development of the Tourist’s Gaze in Early Travel Films

In my second paper for the MA, I discuss the development of amateur films within the context of early tourism. Specifically, I examine the broader development of commercial image making since the 18th c. and show how amateur travel films were simultaneously influenced by commercial, popular tourism and and its relationship with landscape painting and photography. I argue that “representationally, they add little to a notion of Englishness rooted in the landscape that wasn’t already well established and I am much more inclined to see them as commercial products which benefited from and contributed towards forms of economic and cultural consumerism.” I try to show how the production of amateur travel films was tied to the production of mass tourism, both of which are based on consumerism and the consumption of the immaterial. The paper draws on critical theory, secondary historical sources and my primary analysis of films held by the East Anglia Film Archive. Looking back at this paper now, I think that with the benefit of peer-review, this paper could be turned into a published journal article.

Site/Sight: Landscape and the Development of the Tourist’s Gaze in Early Travel Films

An Ecology of Images

Our end of year project was to make a short documentary which related in some way to the themes of archiving, preservation, conservation, etc. Some people made nice, straightforward documentaries about a given subject. I had a bunch of 16mm and 8mm footage that I shot during a trip across the USA (2000) and living in Japan (1998-2001) and used that to make a short film about history and memory.

I was heavily influenced by the narrative style of Chris Marker’s film, ‘Sans Soleil’ (my favourite film). The title is from Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’. I was reading John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ at the time, too…

The script is a blend of my own thinking at the time but also paraphrases Marker, Berger and Sontag considerably. The music uses bits and pieces by John Cage.

I was very proud of this when I finished it. Eight years on, I still quite like it.

Preserving the Hand Painted Films of Margaret Tait

In my dissertation, I discuss a small amount of the work of Margaret Tait. The Introduction offers a personal discussion on the profession of Archiving which I revisit in my conclusion. Section One provides a general overview of Margaret Tait’s life and influences. This brief biographical information serves as a background for the more substantial technical discussion in Section Two.

Though I do enjoy Tait’s films and find her work compelling, I should emphasise that I am not concerned with providing a critique of Margaret Tait’s films nor a complete overview of her life and work. I deem that to be a quite different paper and one I am not interested in writing. My main purpose here is to trace the technical developments Tait made in her filmmaking and show how an understanding of her practices can help in the restoration and preservation of her films. I hope this paper also demonstrates that the biographical is inseparable from the technical and for the Archivist, these two approaches to Tait’s work are again inseparable from the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the idea of permanence.

Preserving the Hand Painted Films of Margaret Tait

The relationships between technology and open education in the development of a resilient higher education

Joss Winn / / Education, Open Education, PhD, Presentations

Richard Hall and I are presenting at the OpenEd10 conference next week. Here’s a few slides that Richard has just put together. The paper can be downloaded here.

UPDATE: Here’s the video recording of our session. We ditched the slides.

Questions for Open Education

Joss Winn / / Open Education, PhD

I’m starting to write a book chapter on Open Education and have been thinking about its meaning as a movement, like other social movements. Earlier today, I was reading The Rocky Road to a Real Transition. The Transition Town’s Movement and What it Means for Social Change. This is a constructive critique of the Transition Towns movement. I recommend reading the ‘Rocky Road’ booklet as it asks a number of questions that are applicable to any movement that advocates positive social change. From reading the booklet, I’ve pulled out some questions we might similarly ask of the Open Education movement. What do you think? I’ll try to offer some answers in this book chapter I’m writing…

  • What is Open Education attempting to transform? Towards what, from where?
  • What can we learn from other historical and existing models of organising (social) change?
  • What is the historical and political context of Open Education?
  • To what extent is Open Education for radical social change and not simply about change within the existing boundaries of education?
  • Is Open Education apolitical? Can it be? How effective can depoliticised movements be?
  • To what extent is the Open Education movement really facing up to the issues of social inequality?
  • How does Open Education resist neo-liberal government policies and how is it being co-opted by government/private funding bodies as a way to maintain economic and political business-as-usual?
  • Do we recognise that we are complicit in the problems we are critical of? Is it a self-reflexive movement?
  • How does the liberalisation of educational resources (OER) serve the liberalisation of the knowledge economy?
  • To what extent does Open Education present a real challenge to the existing forms of education? Or rather, to what extent can Open Education be ignored?
  • How do the objectives of Open Education tie into the objectives of other movements for social change? Are we working together?
  • Creating alternatives to the status quo is one method of introducing change but to what extent does Open Education resist and challenge mainstream education?
  • Are our institutions resilient and sustainable? How can Open Education contribute to sustainability? How might Open Education be vulnerable to the unsustainability of institutions?