 I think we've had a great conference and looking forward to a suitably exciting and inspiring finale and I have full confidence that we've got the right speaker for that. Terry is a research professor. He's a professor at Athabasca University and Athabasca is the sort of Canadian open university. He's published very widely in learning technology. He's edited or co-authored six books. He teaches on the MSc and the PhD courses at the university and he has this distance learning background. So he has a special interest in the sort of evolution of pedagogies in this modern technological world to deal with distance education. I've heard Terry speak before. He's very informative, very inspiring. So I'd like to give you our final keynote speaker, Terry Anderson. Well thank you Tom and thank you all for hanging in here for the very last presentation. I'm quite honoured. I'm honoured in a whole number of different ways. Mostly I'm honoured because it's such a thrill. I've learned so much in this conference. I've seen the presentations, the comments, the discussions afterwards and it's reinforced my belief that the UK really has the greatest opportunity and the greatest source of funding for the innovation and innovative projects from the Gisges and the Settles and not to mention the European funding with all the zeros at the end of it and I think it's really, you guys are really the envy of all of us around the world. So that's why I was a little bit surprised to be invited to do this keynote but very thrilled and honoured and I'm also a little bit intimidated because we had such good keynote speakers the first two and I'm not going to be able to talk about my experiences of learning how to get this clicker to work. Oh dear. There we go. About wrestling with snakes, no snake wrestling stories like Michael and like Martin. I haven't been in the private sector swimming with sharks at all but I have been wrestling with dinosaurs. I'm almost my whole career and that's what I look like at the start of that career over there. So just by way of introduction I'm sure most of you have played with the World Tag Cloud but it is really fun to throw maybe your teaching outline, your course content, your university strategic plan and just in an instant get a vision of what you're all about or what you're presenting to the world anyways. So I did that and that's completely unedited but you see my name comes up big but I like the education, the distance, the learning, all those sorts of things. So that's a little introduction to me. I have a confession to make though just to begin with. Is that the irony of me traveling all over the world to tell people how they can stay at home and do their learning? It really strikes a lot of people and most especially my wife. So I've been thinking about this whole guilt trip of walking around with a carbon footprint that's so large I can't find shoes to fit any longer and so I have been doing some work. And this is a study we did looking at a conference that was held a year and a half ago in London with 194 people and we calculated how far each of those people traveled to get there and how much carbon they burned and with the idea it's part of a book that I'm working on on virtual conferences and so you'll see how fortunate you are that most of you I'm sure came from traveled by car rather than those of us who flew here and you can see the yearly consumption is quite staggering. A tenth of a year's carbon was burned just getting to that one conference at the very most highly used country and the UK is significantly better at managing their carbon imprint. So the long and short of it is you really should be grateful for Alt that you can come to a world-class conference and not enlarge your footprint overly and I think that's real nice. Okay, what my presentation today is going to be a brief scan of the environment. I'm going to talk about a model that I've been playing with that John Drawn and I call the taxonomy of the many and I'm hoping that it'll be useful in getting our heads around this whole debate of is the VLE, is it over, is it dead, what's right inside it, what's right outside that sort of thing. And then I want to talk a bit about open scholarship to a little bit about open educational resources but getting me on to some of the other implications of things that we can do as individuals to improve things. But first I think it's really helpful to be clear about your values and to argue and to make sure that your actions are in line with these arguments. I think that when we're all in the change business and we have to be clear in our own heads where we're changing and why we're changing and sometimes it's very murky world. But I guess these three sort of appetite reflect where I'm coming from and I think most of you in this room as well. And the first is that we can and we must continuously improve the quality, the effectiveness, the appeal, the cost and the time efficiency of the learning experience. And you can think of any one of those and I was thinking of the session this morning on sustainability and how little discussion there was about the cost of e-learning. What kind of e-learning? How much does e-learning cost if you do it this way versus that way? And so there's a whole bunch of issues that are wrapped up there and too often we're focused only on one dimension of a very complex educational interaction and system. So I think that we have to keep in mind too that most of us or what you do naturally is you teach the way you were taught and you don't often think about all the ways that it could be changed on sort of a whole bunch of different dimensions. But I think we always have to remember that we can and we must improve the quality, the time effectiveness, the cost effectiveness of our educational systems. The second is just when you're deciding on what kind of activities to have or what kind of tools to use is to put a real emphasis if you're going to stay with the flow of the whole 21st century is to focus on individual freedom and individual responsibility and I think that the more we push the control of the learning environment into learners the more they'll be prepared for lifelong learning. And finally it's probably pretty obvious to most of us but the current systems, John Daniels has been going around for 10 years talking about how we will never be able to build the kind of facilities that we teach in now for everyone in the world. So we have to do things different. Another theme that always comes up is these technologies and the way they're used is very disruptive to a lot of our systems and I'm sure most of you have been in big fights with your computer service departments, your colleagues, and how can we actually manage and align these things in order to be successful? And I think that one of the things that what we're all finding is that we need new kinds of leadership. We need to be upfront. We need to really walk the talk, use the tools, but try to develop our own leadership abilities and be prepared for lots of disruptions. And that's a quote from a new handbook that's just out from folks in Melbourne and it's an excellent resource free and online and if you're looking for sort of a faculty development kind of handbook or something like that I'd highly recommend it. This is a couple of quotes from a recent two-year-old article talking about the innovation and why it has or hasn't happened. And it makes the really interesting point that we haven't really had systemic innovation in higher education since the 1960s when a lot of the community colleges were founded in the States, the new universities, the open university, and my own university. And since that time all we've had is sort of pushing around the edges, little things we've been doing here. We haven't been able to get at the roots of change and of getting our innovations to go mainstream. Now the good thing about that is that we know a lot about things, innovative pedagogies, we know a lot about faculty development, we know a lot about the benefits of collaboration and technology. We have yet to be successful in making it mainstream within our institutions though. But we can't no longer go on the add-on approach and we really have to talk about systemic change. And despite all the gloom and doom that we hear in this country and in my country about the economic challenges that are coming ahead of us, I really see that we really need some economic challenge to shake us up and to move us forward in new directions. I'm afraid that we will just perpetuate the kind of ineffective models that don't scale, that don't meet student needs unless we have some real push from economic issues. So, despite all that scary stuff there are some promising signs. We've heard lots about the ubiquity and the multifunctionality of Web 2.0. We will and I will talk more about OERs and their usefulness. There's lots of new pedagogical model, new learning activities. There's real educational alternatives coming including the private sector. I think the competition will be useful for us. And finally there's death and retirement coming up all over the place. So how do we align with the 21st century students? You know, well you've probably read Mark Krinsky's and other journalists basically running around talking about the digital generation, the net generation, and how different and how this and how that. And I'm really pleased to see presentations at this conference where people are providing or showing the data that it is not a simple case of those born between a certain era and a certain and other certain era. That students, they're not digitally engaged. They know how to do things online but they're not multitasked. They're not skilled in ways that apply them and learning activities and doing lots of cut and pasting but not lots of deep thought. And we've heard that in David's talk just a few minutes ago here. But it's interesting and this is a great quote from a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article by Tom Clydesdale. And he says they arrive at college with well-established methods of sorting, doubting and ignoring. And you see that happening in our own face-to-face classrooms where people are maybe like some of you now are doing your email or googling or whatever. And it's very easy to turn off to I guess the life and to turn on to things that may be just distracting to you. So I think that, you know, we have to engage them and I really like Michael's keynote the first day talking about how we engage them on their turf and we engage them and push them into into into real learning activities. I like this quote by Tom who he says it's an odd kind of student, one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the coursework, the larger questions it raises or the value of living an examined life. Of course that raises the question of what is the examined life and whose potential and what are we examining. And but the point of it is I guess we can no longer maintain interest and enthusiasm based on just respect and our superior knowledge. So we need to get out, we need to help create our own net presence, we need to create social capital, we need to show our students how to create social capital and to do that not just in the face-to-face environment but in a blended environment where we're moving in and out of online activities. And you know the the it's not so much the content, the knowledge that the students ingest as much as the relationships and the ability to form relationships with both content and with people that really gives them a true education. So it gives us to the problem that we've been wrestling with this last three days is you know is the VLE dead and if it isn't dead is it on life support or are there ways that we need to augment it with different kinds of tools and if you look at and I'm sure many of you have gone to go to web 20 they now have over 3,000 applications about 80 of them listed under education and you can waste, use, learn for hours and hours on this site. It's wonderful to see all the different kinds of innovations that are happening all of which are totally accessible on the browser and free most of them. So how do you do it? Well John Drawn and I have been working for the last couple of years and thinking about a model a way that we can get our heads around how to choose which kind of tool and what kind of environment and how to use those tools and we call it the taxonomy of the many many people and the first level is the one that's most familiar to us and that's the group and you can think of a group as being a work team or in our context as being a class and whether that's an online class or whether that's a face to face or a blended class and everyone knows that they're in the class the registrar tells them that they're in that group it's structured there's leadership provided by the instructor there's organization there's pacing there's a cohort of people you know who's in you know who's out there's there's a real sense of privacy there's access restrictions it's focused and it's often time limited and it may be blended so the the metaphor is the virtual classroom and I'm suggesting that this group model is is the basis of all of our formal education for the last few hundred years and it works in lots of ways if there's a long history of research and study on it many of you are probably familiar with those old Venn diagrams that Randy Garrison and I developed a long time ago talking about social presence cognitive presence teaching presence and we know how to do it we know how to measure those constructs and and I think that the the transition of taking this group model and putting it into a virtual or online learning environment is not a great mental stretch and I think that we've done it lots and we've done it for the last 10 years we're a little bit stuck in the cohorts of 30 people and trying to get economy of scale but it's it's it's becoming familiar ground we have a whole set of true tools to design to aid learning in groups classrooms vle's synchronous tools are really important I think and we do realize that we have to develop face to face mediated and blended group learning skills because we can apply those group skills when we get into the workplace what do we need in those kind of environments we need collaborative tools document creation management versioning timelines calendars notification so people know when there's something happening within their group we need lots of security and trust and that's one of the reasons why vle's are almost always hosted behind the firewall of an institution so and a student knows what they're what they're coming at where they're going and who's going to read their comments and we need lots of decision making project management tools a little weaker there in terms of allowing people to work together within the current vle's but there's certainly improvements coming along all the time so we've got a theoretical model for groups even outside of education wangler's ideas of a community of practice things like mutual engagement joint enterprise a shared repertoire of tools so it's becoming a little bit old fashion but you can see how the familiar world easily transforms into an online world when we talk about a group group situation and online communities are means to help preserve and continue the interest knowledge and culture of a group bound by common interest that's starting to hint at the fact that there's a certain amount of of classism of group thinking of sort of a negative kind of nature that comes along with groups which I'll get into next and I wouldn't I wouldn't suggest that it's only vle's that provide group tools this is wiggly o and it's an open source or no sorry an open access web tool tool that gives you everything that you get in your vle's plus it gives you a hosting group conference calls and chat rooms so you can see that it doesn't have to be an institutionalized thing students can get out and form their own groups and they then they have access to their own group products but there's problems with groups the first I guess is the restrictions in time space pace and relationship none of which are associated with open learning so you all have to basically start at the same time you have to be at the same time or on the same record you've got to be focused you know it's sort of a a team thing that tends to confound those who have trouble marching along with the drummer with everybody else it's often overly confined by teacher expectation and institutional curriculum control and what the problem with that institutional control and teacher expectations is that if that's all a student that's been exposed to for 14 years then we throw them out into a lifelong learning world they can't learn anything without a teacher telling them what to do and so we have to you know realize what the what the value of groups are but we have to make sure that we're moving them to a world where they're where they're outside of a formal group learning environments they're usually isolated from the authentic world of practice there's low tolerance of internal difference sexist and ethnicized regulation high demand for obedience to the norms and expectations exclusionary practices it's danger of group think and again it's a poor preparation for lifelong learning the the model on the right is Paulson's work from quite a while ago where he talks about cooperative freedom and he talks about giving people or individuals freedom to set the curriculum set the time set the pace set the space set the access the medium and I've added a seven to one which is set the relationships that they want to enter into in their environment and group environments do not give maximize freedom on most of those dimensions and and we heard from Michael the first day too he he was saying how he was starting to get uncomfortable with the even the word group he said maybe we should talk about flocks and it made me start thinking that well maybe groups really only make sense in education when we talk about the real world there there's things that we need to go far beyond just groups so what's the frontier of group learning um it's uh we really have to continue working from systems designed to task to track to control to lead learners to systems designed to motivate and inspire them and what motivates inspires them well personal and social relevance the opportunity to really to do well to be recognized the chance to meet cool people run and do cool things the disequilibrium that can come from a group when it pushes you aside and makes you think about things in a different way and finally rewards and uh I pray that we ever if we ever leave or lose credentialing uh in a formal education uh it may well be the death of us so we really have to be careful that we can continue to give those formal rewards if we're going to keep using that group based learning so groups are necessary but I'm going to argue that they're not sufficient for quality learning and and that brings us to the second of the in this taxonomy and that's networks and networks um are uh or maybe flocks is another word for it there's lots on network theory these days from coming from organizational behavior and computer science but uh we're talking about the kind of networks that many of you are already in you're in networks of practice you're in networks of churches of sports groups of of community leagues all sorts of groups they they're very fluid you move into a group or sorry you move into that network you stay for in it for a while you go out of it you you meet new friends and you meet friends of friends and the leadership comes from a network not because of a teacher who's inspired or somebody who owns the network but rather from the reputation of those who are contributing it to it and those who are making the biggest efforts to make that network work and and make it useful for its members and there are no uh predefined structures in networks uh the what works in one network doesn't necessarily work in another and activity flows comes in comes out sometimes the network's real busy sometimes it's not and they rarely meet face to face and you will not know everyone who's a part of that network that they just it's a much more amorphous kind of a organization and you can think of it as a virtual community of practice and why should we get our students or ourselves involved in networks well I will love this quote by Burke it's a one of the big writers in social capital theory and he says people who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas and that's the kind of risk I think we really need to make sure our students are exposed to and to get things beyond the groups that we have within their local context so Morton Paulson always talks about the difference between collaborative learning and cooperative learning you see collaborative learning we know lots about it from face to face and online groups but cooperative learning the the actors are in and out it's it's it's he calls it compelling but not compulsory activities you give people opportunities you don't compel them they they they're attracted to the network activities there are tools around in fact you can see them being added to a lot of the individual web 2.0 tools this one is the BY's there it's a sort of a a tool to do simple computer assisted instruction a little bit beyond PowerPoint but not much and but what they add on to it is a whole community of people giving feedback on other people's tutorials and sharing social spaces and then of course now they're adding profiles and all sorts and showed out opportunities and ways for a single application to evolve a network around it google wave a big lots of question marks but I love the metaphor the idea that this wave will flow through your networks and it will it will be multimedia it will be both real time and synchronous but it'll be stored and have a long long life and so I think that it might be a very powerful tool if and when we see it sometime next year so networks of practice rather than communities of practice they're distributed they share a common interest they're self organizing both loose lengths and tight lengths and no expectations of meeting and knowing everybody who's in that network and little expectation expectation of reciprocity that's one of the interesting things that people who've been studying networks are finding that you think well the reason that I give something to this network is so that I can get something from it later on but that's not usually the motivation usually people are contributing to networks partly as a sense of altruism to make the world better to make this network work to achieve group goals and partly for their own social capital erasing their own contribution their own reputation so I think it's a whole new set of motivations that we really haven't figured out how to how to use in education very well yet and they're transparent the ability to view and share thoughts actions resources ideas and interests of others and I think that that's one of the really neat things about network learning is the way you can trace through other people who have been there before you you can you know you can see their profiles it opens those closed group doors and I don't know many of you saw Mark's presentation today and yesterday on the Manchester PLE but I love the idea he talked about it radically increased learner awareness of others learner learning activities in the PLE but it's not to say that it's easy to to get people to contribute to networks I love this cartoon I had my own blog for well but I decided to go back to just pointless incessant barking and it's I think that that's one of the things that's easy to set up these network tools it's hard to provide the incentives to know what's going to make them work in especially in a formal education context but a couple of other quotes about networks or Leonard Cohen my one of my favorite singers the great song a line in Anthem where he says there's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in and the there aren't not many cracks and light does not get in easily into groups and but networks are are created and formed upon that affordance and but of course it's like any any model or organization it has challenges and Galloway and Tacker talked lots about rogue nodes and sub topologies and the way terrorist groups use networks and it's a it the you can see networks forming all over the world in political social cultural nor environments and in an edge and I hope in formal education as well we've got some pedagogies that are evolving to address how to teach and how to learn in in network environment I'm sure I think George Siemens did a keynote here at all the year or two ago but he talks and writes lots about connectivism amongst others it's emergent practice rather than prescribed education I don't know if many of you probably went to teacher school the same time I did and learning outcomes in behaviorist terms we just got knocked into our heads over and over and over again how important that was but nothing emerged and nothing was constructed or created that wasn't determined by the teacher ahead of time and I think that we've we've got to move beyond that kind of learning so what do we do in a connectivist learning environment we help and we scaffold students to construct to connect to explore to mash resources and people to create contexts that induce learning besides connectivism there's lots on participatory pedagogy where students as content co-creators as peer teachers and also lots of interesting things coming from complexity there's a new journal founded about a year and a half ago in candidates and open access journal complicity and if you haven't seen it it's interesting to see a whole series of articles talking about complexity theory applied to a formal education context mostly higher education but some k12 as well but one of the nice ideas of complexity is learning at the edge of chaos and actually surfing it and enjoying it and I think that's one thing that really separates us early adopters from mainstream faculty members is the the idea of being comfortable in a chaotic kind of environment and so I hope that we'll be able to to model out for for our colleagues and to you know realize that you're not going to be in control of learning in a network to context but you might be a part of a really tremendous learning opportunity and networks are not only forming informal education there's all kinds of them you can see them on facebook on my own university you know we have a lot of independent study where people in self-paced almost all of it where could students start whenever they want and so our faculty they keep telling me over and over again with our students they come to us because they want to work by themselves they want to work at their own pace they don't want to have friends they've got friends already and so then I look on facebook and there's 24 different groups about Athabask University on facebook so you know our learners are changing very rapidly in the sense of what they want to get out of even an individualized learning environment so you can see this network's forming here this is web papers now it's a little hard to understand whether we're really talking about plagiarism and sharing papers here or whether we're talking about collaborative learning or whether we're talking about both but you can see how these networks can easily sit on top of formal education systems and they do sit on top whether we're organizing or a part of them or not this is another one course heroes learning network this one eats it's a facebook application as well and eats up all your friends and comments and imports them into facebook or into course hero and I haven't spent a lot of time on these but you can see that students are using networks for their own learning opportunities the one we've been experimenting with and playing with is in the Elgin environment and I'm sure most of you are familiar with it a nice contribution from the UK to the rest of the world uh the various tools it gives you and the reason why I'm most especially like it and most of the other emerging ples is the access control issues because we will never get an environment where it's the where everything should be behind a firewall protected secure we need those kind of environments but you cannot find one tool that sits that works best all the time behind the firewalls and you have to be able to move things out because they don't gain value unless they're exposed to the rest of the world and we think of lots of social bookmarking things blogs that really benefit if if the exposure be on the course level and even to the program level or to the faculty level or the institutional level or the whole world and how can one ever decide what should be exposed to what you cannot leave that decision to your computer services directors to make they just don't know how to do it and there's too many decisions that have to be made the only way to do it is to have individuals control what goes out and who's who it goes to so you can see you can have logged in users which is basically people at Athabask University just my friends just various communities that I'm involved with the general public which includes google or um private that nobody sees this is another network tool that I really love voice thread I've seen it demonstrated here at this conference but any of you haven't had a chance to see it the idea of putting any kind of a media up there and then having people respond by video by a text by audio and the fact that those things have persistence they live on it's a wonderful tool the only problem is it's not host you can't host it on one of your own servers and that's a big privacy issue and legal issue for us so I would love to be a part of a team to create a knockoff in the open source world for that tool but you can I think it's a really wonderful networking tool that's that's available for all of us to try out so just summarizing network learning environments there should be cooperative rather than collaborative compelling but optional interaction they have to be persistent they have to be transparent and the and the real value is finding building and enriching connections inside and outside of the course so real briefly the collectives is the third and final um collectives are sort of the aggregated other sort of the wisdom of crowd idea um the they use a lot of stigma agagation following traces that people leave as they go through the net and then we can sift and short sort them and we can find we can learn by the behaviors the actions and the the thoughts of others in a sort of an anonymous way they're more used more useful the more they're used the more useful they are lots of data mining and you never meet people in the collective you just use them so it's a john drannan and I've written it's a kind of a cyber organ is a cyber organism formed from people linked algorithmically it grows through the aggregation of individual group and networked activities so this is a little bit into the future and starting to get into the world of the semantic web as it grows in power but you can you can start to see how um when when we're on the net we're leaving all these traces what we've liked how long we spent what our recommendations are and as we can start to gather all this information aggregated all and then encapsulated in different forms we can start to extract knowledge from our collective behavior so we have our actions we aggregate them and then we filter and select from them and there's a whole bunch of applications that are arising now using this crowdsourcing kind of ideas and sifting and sorting through through the net and there's a whole book written by a built answer called click and he talks about how it's being exploited for commercial applications of finding all the google searches that people are doing all over the world and how you can filter them once you can learn from what people are searching for but there's a there's a whole bunch of not so many in the educational environment yet a few other things like slash dot the way it filters and recommends and finds you know helps us to save time by by aggregating and by finding out what other people find of value and then there's a tool called um gili or gili and it basically it searches through all the blogs finds out what people are talking about and twittering about and you know sort of gives us a you can type in words and you can find out gets graphs of how many times it's being used around the world that sort of thing so um just just to conclude uh on on this part is just the taxonomy I think it gives us a way to think and you can think of groups as being your vle's you can think of networks as being your web 2.0 tools and you can see collectives as emerging in in the in now and in the future on really net centric kind of learning applications and at the at the middle of that of course is a personal learning environment and people have been talking about it and we've seen a new one launched at this conference so I think that where there's exciting times ahead as we get our heads around what a personal learning environment really is and john and I have also drawn some article in 2008 probably can't read any of that but talk about you know how you use it in education what kind of typical tools time frames commitment scalability of those three types so you might be interested in getting that article if you want to follow up and also don't just think of groups networks and collectives in terms of formal education you can think of your own learning and the own groups that you're a member of and networks and you can think of your institution what groups does it have a part of and what is it sponsoring and what networks and how is it using collectives so i'm going to switch gears now and conclude the talk by focusing on on openness and it's in got me thinking because open access week is just around the corner and we were planning a series of activities at the basket for it and I stumbled upon some work by Gideon Burton from Utah from his blog and he talked about what the open scholar is and it started me thinking well what is an open scholar and what are its characteristics and Gideon starts by saying the open scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of their work at any stage of its development so Gideon had a couple of ideas and I've sort of expanded them and I hope that we can use this as not that any of us are perfect open scholars but it gives you some of the personal things that we can walk away with and think about our commitment to higher educational learning around the world so open scholars they created new type of education maximizing learning media richness connectivist participatory ubiquity all the words we've been talking about earlier and what do they do well first of all of course the most common conception of the open scholar is that they're producing educate open educational resources and it is heartening to see all of the resources if you go on to any of these search engines and there's many others and I see that Alta started a repository as well and it's becoming to me is you're almost a negligent academic if you don't go out and look for the education open educational resources before you start developing things and it's we have finally at our university we've had two people employed full time to be the copyright police and basically we're paying them to maintain the rights of other people that we have to pay for and the more they can find we pay the better they feel about their jobs you know this is completely ludicrous but now we have one person whose job is to go through our curriculum and find substitutes of open education resources of various levels of granularity and start making or giving us opportunity to to use those so people you know the question that came up in the the interesting role playing session about well why what's in it for me you know it's too hard to do the metadata this that and everything else but really what does it do it saves time and I think yeah I have to go to South Africa next spring and do a three day workshop on OER and I thought oh man I'm going to have to prepare all these resources and all these activities and then I thought well I got to walk to talk and go look in the repositories and sure enough there's a wonderful manual that just you know solves my problem all I have to do is arrive down there with it and instead of me trying to remember what are creative common attributes and all of this stuff it's all laid out by Dave Wiley and his colleagues from Utah there's a whole Moodle course that I can just download into a Moodle environment if I wanted to so there's all kinds of resources and this will save me you know hours and hours of time so you know the time it takes me to take some of my original stuff and add metadata to it and upload it is well compensated whenever I come across a resource such as that the second thing that I want to talk about open scholars is that they self archive and I'm sure you've seen these maybe you're fortunate enough well it'll be interesting to see here how many people here are involved in in organizations that have a self-archiving or a repository of your research data or your contributions you put your hand up if you have okay that's at least 40% how many people actually put their stuff up there about half of that many okay well we got some bludgeon virgining open scholars it you know the problem with open publications is you have to give away your copyright all the time and I know that alt is struggling with this with alt j about who owns this content but almost all of the publishers now allow and sometimes with a quarantine period but they allow you to put your information up and make it available and and some of the old ones that I don't have copyright I put up anyways and if I get asked about it I will put it down if I really have to but I doubt whether the publishers are going to come after me so I would strongly encourage you to to use the institutional repositories or get one for your institution open scholars apply their research I think that there's all kinds of opportunities especially for people in our discipline to help not NGOs to help you know various communities this whole idea of how to use networks effectively is needed by all of our churches our social organizations our NGOs and I think we've got lots of skill that we can we can use the the knowledge that we acquire in our professions to help to change your world in numerous ways I in thinking and reading about open scholars and searching on the net I found what I would didn't know the idea of open notebooks where it's mostly used in the science world but they talk about an open laboratory notebook so that as you're gathering your data everything is transparent it all comes in it's permanent it's visible to the whole world and I know we when we do research we have kind of ethical things when you're dealing with human subjects that might make that quite as easy to do but I think the whole idea of opening our research process to make it easier for other people to follow to replicate uh to to move forward that way is is really important uh open scholars filter and share with others and that's of course the the blogging environment I don't know how many of you follow Stevens OL daily but you know he does a tremendous filter job for and every every working day I get an email from him a big shot of Stevens personality comes along with their recommendations but they're they're worth it it's a great filter open scholars support emerging open learning alternatives and you've probably heard in the press about the university of people opening this month the headquartered in the states but it's basically talking about a tuition free university based on volunteer work and more importantly really focusing on helping students to get into groups getting them to help each other getting them to know how to help each other how to reference each other how to help each other solve problems and the peer to peer university of courses had a number of births and but it is enrolling students now so I think we're starting to see some real pure kind of open education or educational learning alternatives um this one's especially dear to my heart uh as an editor of an open access journal um the uh I remember when I first started publishing 15 or 20 years ago it was considered to be you know next to useless to publishing an online journal or an open access journal that just was worth nothing and uh so uh Olaf Zachie Richard and I have been doing some real interesting work where we took 12 of the distance education journals around the world the the 12 most famous six of whom happened to be proprietary commercial operations and six were open access and we used this really fun tool uh by a woman from Australia an open access tool called publisher perish if you google that you'll you'll get it unfortunately it only runs in a piece in a windows environment but what it does is you can punch in your name or your colleague's name or somebody you have to make a recommendation and it searches through google scholar and it gives you a uh an impact factor of that individual or you can punch in a journal and it'll give you the the number of citations per article and uh and it's very interesting it it's a little bit not as transparent as we want because it uses google scholar and google doesn't really talk about how they how citations get in there but it it's it's real fun to do and to play with but what we're finding in the first halfway through this work is that uh about five or six years ago the proprietary journals were being cited more often than the open access journals within the last two years that's completely changed around and now the open access journals are out performing or are out promoting and being cited higher than the the closed ones and that's in the specific field and I don't know whether it generalizes to other disciplines but it does show that you're not only you know share your your your documents your your knowledge with the world but you can actually get more reputation more citations the more kinds of things that count at research orientated promotion hearings uh open scholars create open access books i'm really proud to be uh a part of at the basking university press where Canada's first anyway is open access press and that means that every book we produce is also made available on open access and this uh the theory and practice of online learning the second edition that I edited I was really quite delightfully surprised last month when I got a a check for $640 of royalties and they had sold 402 copies of it during the first year and it had 26 000 downloads of the book so you know it's sort of a win-win situation from my point of view I never make a lot of money in books anyways so I would encourage others who who want to get out of the closed proprietary publishing system and there is an upcoming emergency emerging technologies in distance education edited by George Vellatsiano from the university of Manchester who's probably here right now so I look forward to that and you can get any of those today open scholars comment openly on the works of others you've all seen the the the sort of social bookmarking a brainify is a Canadian web2o social bookmarking specifically designed for classes and for education and so it's got a it's done by Murray Goldberg the guy who invented webct but I won't hold that against this product in this version it's kind of neat and also vle editions this is a a plug-in that can plug into at least Moodle and I don't know if it plugs into other VLEs but marginalia and it allows people to comment on threaded discussions and I think it's a useful skill to get students to have that option of you know annotating talking adding value to an original work by talking about it and commenting on it. Of course open scholars build networks and we heard about the scope network in Canada but they're these are mostly Canadian ones but I'll see it would be another one and I think there's a really important for us open scholars lobby for copyright reform I love this one we've done it perfect copy protection a cd that self destructs after only one play and I think that this is it's very unclear at least in Canada in the US and I imagine in the UK what is copyright what is it all about who is it for why are we doing it and there is a huge lobby from the entertainment industry which I think is dead set against the aims of further and higher education so I think that we have to lend our voice in this really turbulent turbulent times of copyright reform open scholars assign open textbooks there's a whole growing list of resources flat world maybe the most well-known you if you want it in paper you can buy it if you want it online it's free for all the textbooks that they have or you can buy it in an audio version so you sort of pay for what you want if you want to knock down and kill a few trees you pay for it and I think that's fine open scholars induce open students getting them to be co-creators to create content put it up there annotate other people's content and maybe we'll be able to get over the fact that people use them but they don't contribute enough to open education resources open scholars support open students there's a whole open student movement with their bill of rights open scholars teach open courses and I could only find really examples of three Canadians who are doing open courses what I mean by an open course is anybody can join it from anywhere in the world and I'm probably a few of you were in George Siemens and Stephen Downs connectivism and connective knowledge course last year they it's starting again in a couple of weeks but the course last year they had well they had I think it was over 2000 people enrolled in the course they had 18 people who paid for it and got credentials from it so it shows that you know there's a certain amount of voyeurism and it's trying to see what these are all about but these are all open access courses that invite people from all over the world to join in the course and some of them are transferring their experience into other formal educational applications and some of them are paying money and being certified and being tested by these teachers open scholars research openness I see there's an international journal of open educational resources and I love the telus incubator where they're talking about you know giving money to people to try openness to develop open educational applications I think it's a huge opportunity and real nice thing for us to apply our scholarly skills open scholars are change agents open scholars develop tools and techniques to help cross-pollinate sustain and grow effective learning networks and of course open scholars are always battling with time you know there is never enough time we haven't invented virtual time yet so it's a it's probably going to be an ongoing struggle for for all of us but remember that we save time by using the efforts of others and finally open scholars are involved in the future I'm one of the comments that I heard in one of the sessions was you know well we you know we have an obligation to you know to develop to refine to test new educational applications even if they might be a little bit more expensive this year if they have opportunities or learning potential affordances we really have to be involved in them because of our future obligations so going back to Gideon Burton I'll let him conclude his quote from the academic evolution blog was open access is more than a new model of publishing it's the only ethical move available to scholars who take their own work seriously enough to believe its value lies in how well it gauges many publics and not just a few peers so thank you very much I hope you've enjoyed these I have posted the slides to the crowd vine and I would certainly welcome many comments or questions many questions Michael just coming over Terry you've just given a very persuasive account of what it might be to be an open scholar in the context of our educational institutions would you like to give us a few indicators about what an open institution might look like well we have an open university well I think that's a challenge for all of us to think about what what what or I guess the thing is what does the institution need to do to afford all those activities to support scholars to become open scholars and you know I guess you could think of you could look at each of those affordances and I'm sure people can think of other characteristics of the open scholar and think what does it what does it take to be in an environment that this is going to happen and we've heard well I always hear at these conferences the fact that you know how can I be actively engaged in scholarship and doing research and and and innovating teaching I can't do everything at once so we really have to think of how we can change the reward structures and it's a long term process and how we can make it so that open scholarship you know really lives and thrives in our institutions and if I had a simple answer I might start an open university and invite you to join but it isn't that simple. Mark Johnson University of Bolton I'm very interested in what you've said it strikes me that to achieve this vision requires a huge amount of change for people working in institutions and for learners and to me changing people is really really hard yeah changing their technological habits is really hard we we we like to stay or you know doing the things that we're used to doing and how do you how do you get people to shift how do you get people to use a PLE rather than the VLE how do you get people to become more open about the things that they do these these are very deep sort of emotional issues where would you start to change people well you know I come from a real strong Baptist background and we've been sending missionaries around the world and what do they do they run around and start churches and they have a lot of personal commitment so I I think what what they do to those I always talk about living by example and I think that we have to make sure that these tools actually have an advantage for our faculty members and it that's was really hard to prove 10 years ago I think the technologies are getting easier to use they are getting cheaper but most of our faculty members have not been exposed to them and they haven't been exposed to them in the context of something that makes sense within their discipline and within their own life world so I think like all of the change networks that we need to start at our institutions all the you know the big debate about centralized versus decentralized I'm a real proponent for getting people living out in the faculties to sitting down beside them on a one to one basis to you know trying to instill a lot of sort of here's the way I do it kind of thing because I think that too many of us we people we just talked to our own buddies and our own friends and that goes as the question that had how are these ideas received outside of learning technologies well sometimes they're not received very well inside of learning technologies but I think that you know like there are sparks of interest in in open scholarship in and we have to you know fan support and blow on those things and be patient I mean it's a it's a long win for the long haul but again let's not discount death and retirement any any other questions from the hall thank you you've been very careful to a credit all of your quotations and references how meaningful is this in the context of reusable information and knowledge communities and networks is it important to cite and quote ideas to individuals anymore would you say I'm sorry I had trouble finding where you were to even but could you just give me another go at that question yeah sorry and well it's really a question about referencing and citation and and ownership of ideas by individuals in all of your talk you've given the names and references for the people that you've cited and their ideas you've credited them and in the world that you've described knowledge is created collaboratively we're in networks and communities does it matter who's who owned an idea or is it relevant what's what's happening to that it what's your view yeah yeah well I think it is I think it's maybe even more important I mean the way we've we've we've tried to legalize that recognition through through a copyright system that has really disbound us and it inhibits contribution in the development of the arts you know the first copyright legislation one of the statue of st ann from here in the UK it wasn't designed to protect the rights of of the producers it was designed to stimulate by giving them a temporary period of time and I think that what we've seen from studies of networks and who's contributing and why are they contributing if they're doing it to build social capital and if you don't credit the people then that doesn't it doesn't provide an incentive for them so I think it's really important to to do that and and I know maybe it's just part of my academic background too that we're and hammering it into students so I can't help doing it myself but but I must confess that you didn't see the attributions on all of those clip art there either so maybe I have sinned on that one but we're we're all moving in as we grow in our openness I think and but I do think attribution is really important still and not that hard to do thanks for the question okay I'll just there's a lot of questions coming in on sort of online I just I'm including quite a lot from the auditorium and I'll sort of paraphrase this one which is actually from jelly salmon we said but paraphrase it it says really can institutions afford open scholars but what it actually says is what do institutions need to do to afford to have open scholars well I think I guess that that there's a subtext there that open scholarship costs more and I I guess I'd have to think about each of those characteristics the the open the giving the course away allowing other people into it who may or may not be registered that may not increase fact that there's evidence to suggest that increases the number of people who actually actually come into your courses we've seen with you know some of the open OER things around around the world so I guess I'm not convinced that it is more expensive I think that the the the added value that open scholars bring to that institution well I don't think anybody has to really done a cost comparison study but I guess that's one for Julie maybe to answer for me and let let me know okay I'm just before time for a few more questions but just before I we do those can I just say that when we're finished with the keynote we've got a few minutes for some quite interesting stuff at the end of the conference including an introduction to next year's conference so when you clap don't just all rush out okay okay any question here in the middle it's in the ignorance actually you referred earlier in your talk you used the terms complexity and chaos which I've also seen used by Michael Fuller so I don't know if it's like a Canadian connection I'm never quite sure what you go as a meaning by this and I think it may be because I have some existing meanings from dynamic persistence theory that that kind of clash with them so I wonder when you talk about complexity and when you talk about chaos is it possible for you to say briefly what do you mean by those terms in the context of your work? Yeah yeah well and then you may know more about systems theory than I but I guess a complex system is one that's it cannot be predetermined in any precise way so there's all sorts of variables that are interacting in very complex ways and creating complexity and what I think we have to do as educators and the way I use the term is for have it to allow emergent behaviours to come out of that complexity and that will suit the needs of those participants in that so complex system is just one that you know is basically indeterminate on a number of different levels and how does one then you know work within that environment to to get educational aims fulfilled and the chaos piece is just the fact that as as one pushes towards an era where or a part where where certain activities or variables can come to the fore and and become real and become instantiated that's the that that happens when things are in flux and when things are moving and shifting and new ideas are allowed to bubble up and to happen and I guess we have I think that it's to be comfortable with that and to let that happen in your in your in your learning designs and not to be afraid of it and to let it emerge kind of thing maybe a kind of folksy rather than a scholarly application in the list the last questions will do again in some of the audience coming in online it's actually a slightly almost a dice thing of cold water but not quite that it's a sort of challenging question it says what's important for learners so what's really important for learners that the learning process or staff stuck in the past who don't want to engage in you guys of learning what are the students really going to adapt their behaviour to it well it is a complex system and I think they adapt to us and we adapt to them and but I I I guess I think we need to have that student leadership we need to have that teacher leadership we need to merge them together in a in a complex environment and they will they are adapting to to us and they will continue to do so but at the same time you know we can't deny our influence on the system and I think we have to make it so that they they achieve both of our goals and I think it's possible okay at that point we need to finish the keynote I'll save you can stay for a couple more minutes can we thank Terry again