 It's time for our next keynote speaker, Ellen Smith from the University of Oxford. I'm very pleased that Ellen is here with us this week. She is the busiest woman in the world, and the lead up to the 400th anniversary. I'm going to take this, that Ellen is a professor of Shakespeare study at the University, and a professor at the heart of her college. In the comfort part of her life as a man, it was part of that we were launching Oxford University into iTunes 2, that was back in 2008. We had some early disclosures for early offer of this, 2008, 2009, and for Oxford Origins, Oxford podcast, we became one of the largest growing connections of the licensed university lectures online continues to grow. Since 2008, Oxford podcast, we have 1,000 audio and video platforms. 50% of that content is live on iTunes. It comes from 6,000 individual presenters, and it has more than 23 million episodes downward, more than 10 million episodes streamed, that is a massive online open connection for terrible people. Ellen was one of the first of the Oxford podcasters, and the first of our influencers to record the podcast himself. He just does it, he just gets on with it. Today, she's published 48 episodes of part of the 700th series. Her biggest successes are a series called Approaching Shakespeare, and a series called Nocturne Shakespeare. Approaching Shakespeare has had more than half a million episodes, and we think that a total number of red 700,000 episodes be regularly featured in the ITU Global of Ed. She also championed the publication of early art, version of what we did in the first public, complete with a visual field, frame one to one series. That in itself has had nine three types of reviews. Ellen was one of the cast that wrote a small part of her work. Whenever I hear discussions about open academic practice or colleagues who make the choice to make their materials open, I think about Emma and other colleagues of Oxford who share generosity, and always with a wise watching eye as to what might happen at the result of that series and how that might be back into their work. And let's talk in terms of pre-elimination. Last year, didn't she not build this? I must switch the mic on. Thank you, Melissa. And of course, what Melissa doesn't say in that introduction is I would never have done it had she not been at the University of Oxford then, and that was a set of quite happenstance decisions about what I would do with my undergraduate lectures which have changed my professional life and lots of things I do quite without my planning. What I'm going to do today is go through some of those early art activities that Melissa outlined. From the point of view, not of an expert in learning technologies and not as somebody who has researched in some ways how these things work. So I've learned actually already an enormous amount today about the work many of you do. But from the point of view of an academic doing this sort of on the side, or doing this as part of my everyday work, and reflecting a bit on what I've learned during the course of that. So I guess I've got a kind of subtitle. One of the things I wanted to try and talk about with you this afternoon was why academics, including me, are worried about this. You know this already, you encounter them. Some of you are maybe in that category as well. What it is that we are worried about and how those worries might be counteracted or repurposed in some ways to be helpful and reflective ways about using OER resources. But I want to start with a kind of parable from my own work. And this is a parable about OERs and openness, I think. This is a story about the Bodleian Library. The Bodleian Library was founded at the beginning of the 17th century as a repository for all books published in English due to an arrangement with the stationers company. In fact, they didn't want all books. They only wanted good and respectable books. And one category of books they did not want was plays. So 1603, this is right in the middle of Shakespeare's career. It's probably the most golden period ever in English literary culture. And what's happening goldenly is happening in the theatre and Oxford with a actually rather familiar to be looking back, a capacity to miss what's right under its nose. Decided no, they wouldn't go for that. But they do make a decision to go for the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the first folio in 1623. And you know that book, but there's a picture of it there and a picture of the original 17th century library in which it was stored. It was stored in a chained environment. Something quite interesting to me about that in terms of our interest now in openness. And you can see on the bottom of the closed book the notch, the nibble that the chain has taken out of the cover. So this is a book that became part of the university library which had some aims to be open to be open to certain categories of people and we've been talking all day, I think, about how openness means different things in different contexts. By the middle of the 17th century, though, this most important of English books had disappeared from the library. And one of the things I've been interested in in a lot of my work is how apparent repositories, places where things are kept safe, are actually very permeable. Things move in and out of them all the time. And that's actually quite helpful for me for thinking about ongoing questions we have about how we might preserve the digital material that we're creating now. I kind of think we won't probably and that's probably fine. But maybe a bit cooler about that. So this book, just as a sort of forerunner to that, this book had left the library by the middle of the 17th century. And it seems to have left it because there had been a new edition of Shakespeare, the so-called third folio, and the Bodleian, again, with an airing ability to do the wrong thing, thought that it now had a new shiny version and it didn't need the old one anymore. So this book was sold off as a kind of piece of spare kind of scrap. Let's just have a look at that. I don't think that was exactly the thing, but you understand it was a bit like that. Okay, so the first folio goes from the Bodleian and it's missing from its collection for two centuries. We fast forward to the beginning of the 20th century when a young man, a student at one of the Oxford colleges, comes with a book in a bag to the librarian saying, we've got this old book and my dad is wondering about having it rebound. As soon as the librarian opens the bag, he sees that book with that nibble out of its cover and realizes this is the copy that we let go from the library 150 years ago. This then starts an enormously interesting chain of events and it will come round to open as I promise. Firstly, the librarians are so pleased to have got this book back that they begin to trumpet in an enormously bragging way how wonderful a book it is. They think that it is the most perfect copy of this book in the world. It's not and actually that doesn't exist. There's no such thing but they trumpet that and that attracts a rather unfortunate piece of interest. The man there in the cartoon with a copy of Shakespeare's first folio under his arm and a Gainsborough painting under the other arm is a man called Henry Folger. He's an executive with Standard Oil in New York at the beginning of the 20th century and he is a monomaniac for first folios. At the point when the Bodleian first folio returns to Oxford or re-emerges from loss, he has bought 30 copies of this book and he's on his way to getting another 51. So he circles around, attracted by the idea that this is the best copy of this book he could ever have a completely unfeasible sum to buy it, 3,000 pounds. It's at least 10 times what it was worth or rather perhaps we should say what it would have cost on the open market, what it's worth is a much more difficult question but it's very, very expensive. What happens is that the Bodleian begins rather haphazardly a fundraising campaign, essentially a crowdsourcing campaign to get 3,000 pounds to keep the book. It writes to, it attempts to write to alumni this is the first university development activity ever in the UK. It's enormously laborious and sometimes when I've talked to our development colleagues they feel we haven't got much better at this but they write to people, they write to, they put adverts in the times, they try to activate local pride and particularly national pride. Nobody knows that it's Henry Folger who wants to buy it but they're pretty clear it's an American and this point is one of the letters that comes back up there in the top corner hoping it's possible to raise the sum required and to prevent this treasure going the way of all our English treasures to America. There's a massive transfer of English cultural property to the US at the beginning of the 20th century and it's really, really fascinating. Lots of that property had already been expropriated by the English in the first place so it's things like Italian Renaissance paintings. Nobody could get too worried about that but Shakespeare seemed so Englishly English that his book became the standard bearer for this cultural inferiority complex. The Bodleian raises this money through a number of very small gifts. In the end there are more than 100 contributors and most of them give relatively small sums of money. So it's a really sort of ground up kind of kind of fundraising campaign. I think rather counter to what they expected I think they thought that some wealthy person would put up a lot of the money. So we get a lot of letters in the archive about ordinary people saying here's half a crown, here's a guinea, here's 50 pounds, in fact one man writes to say I did send you a guinea but could I have it back because I've fallen on hard time since then and I think they do send it back. But these are small sums of money from people who are not very well off and the book is bought for the Bodleian and it comes back to the library. Now this is a great, Freud would have a field day with this, this is an amazing story for the Bodleian of sort of loss and return. They have done a very good job in suggesting that this was a sort of accident somehow that it was ever lost rather than an absolute committed error. And they've also done a good job in suggesting that while it was away from them it was just really not being appreciated and not loved at all and really it was just waiting to come back home. So it's an important narrative for them and for their sort of institutional identity. If we fast forward another century by the beginning of the 21st century when I wanted to look at this book it was judged too fragile to be consulted. And it was part of, during that time I was working on the first folio, the history of the first folio and I was invited to give a lecture to the friends of the Bodleian library who are a rather conservative group of people who raise money for the library and I decided that I was going to go into this with guns blazing so I told the story of how the Bodleian had got this book back and then my coup de grace at the end was to say and the thing is it would have been better if Folger had bought it because he would have looked after it better than we have. It would still be possible to open it to turn the pages and the fact that it isn't means that we have completely squandered this gift that was given back to us by the generosity of our donors. This went down very badly as you might imagine. Very, very badly indeed. But it did galvanise one really important project a project to digitise the book and to try and make our digital surrogate the best one that we could at that time, the most responsive the best quality images the most able to turn the pages the most able to search and also of course openly accessible and reusable. We can look at that in fact we'll go straight to that we can look at that now the website is firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk It's a great project and I'm really proud of it and I'm proud that a huge number of people made that happen and made that book available in a way which spoke to its history in a particularly appropriate way. We did actually refund this digital digitisation project by repeating the appeal to people to buy the book back and repeating the appeal to get small donations which we did in 2012 where we got we asked for a donation of £20 to make up £20,000 which was the cost of digitising. This has been quite an interesting story about how open access works has worked in my case very much as part of an institutional context and I was thinking from our question really great keynote this morning and our question time afterwards the thing I'm really able to talk about is content and a little bit about how content shapes open educational practices and is shaped by them in turn but I also need to think about sort of privilege which I think was importantly highlighted right at the beginning of the conference. I work and I'm very conscious that I work at the intersection of lots of different kinds of privilege I work in a privileged university I have the privilege of quite a lot of control over my own professional time I can do if I want to do this kind of thing that nobody's stopping me and similarly nobody's making me do it but I also more problematically work at an institution which is associated sometimes justifiably with social privilege and has been for centuries. That makes openness and the language of openness important to us but it also means that we can I think Oxford is in a particular position that it can be dishonest about the extent to which openness really re-orders hierarchies and I thought about that a lot to do with this particular project what we did was to put this big book, this 900 page book you can scroll through it, you can turn the pages you can search for particular words as a transcript you can download image sets you can do all kinds of things but I still think that you need to know quite a lot in order to make use of it in any way other than the most superficial superficiality is not bad not again superficiality I'm deeply superficial myself if that's not a contradiction in terms but if you actually want this to be a resource that people can use in a more scholarly way or can develop their own understandings of Shakespeare it needs more material around it and one of the things I've come to think about open education resources in my own discipline literature and humanities more generally is that they've been much more comfortable with putting up other people's material than with putting up our own that's to say humanities scholars are very interested in how you might put up documents copies of early books playbills, archives those kind of material from university collections and so on what we've been much less good at is putting up interpretive material teaching material the kind of stuff that humanities academics are producing all the time for their day job of teaching and working with students which I think is pretty much lost to the wider community and to individual learners who might be accessing that material I think there's more to do with this site and more to do with this as a resource a couple of things that we did was to have workshops with teachers talking about how you might use this in the classroom and that made me think that there's a sort of hybrid model with which you're probably already quite familiar but we needed to stumble on a kind of hybrid model which puts a digital and online material next to some kind of face-to-face interaction which helps people think that which walks people through what's there and what they might do with it now I know you can walk people through what to do in a remote way but something about the difference between the online experience and the face-to-face experience seemed to work for us in doing those teacher workshops I'm just going to go back one just in case you're interested in more first folios that get lost it seems to be an occupational hazard for rich people who have these books and don't look after them too well just in case you're interested in the Scottish first folio which we authenticated just last week it's on display on the Isle of Butte over this summer it's a beautiful place to go and they are very keen I think that this very kind of charismatic book that they have in their library might help to leverage some of the tourism potential that there is on Butte sometimes when I look at this slide this would be my in some ways my answer to Catherine's question before if open is the answer what's the question I kind of feel this is the question I mean it's a question about private ownership isn't it and what that means private ownership in all kinds of ways in economic ways but also in intellectual ways I'm just going to move on to another project which we did as part of OER this great writer has inspired and I wanted to bring this up to try and reflect a bit on something I already touched on which is sustainability what lifespan we think OER items should have what's their kind of natural life lifespan and what do we do with them can we euthanise them what do we just wait for them to kind of dwindle away are we waiting for technical changes to make them stop working or do we actually put them out of their misery earlier on you see where I'm going this is a great site and we worked with school teachers particularly on how to manage a transition between school level English literature work and university literature work not just for Oxford although obviously with a strong sense of our own potential benefit from this you don't need me to tell you that undergraduate access kind of social justice in sort of high elite university admissions is the biggest single problem I think facing Oxford and other places at the moment so anything we can do that actually does make it possible for people to come to meet the requirements of our quite difficult academic courses I think is a plus what we did was to bundle together here quite a lot of resources that already existed as e-books in order to sort of try and develop able students beyond the set texts that they might study in the classroom we tried to package these up with kind of author specific themes but also some more critical themes ideas about feminism or how literature and history might relate to each other we recorded some new lectures short lectures from university academics to try and sort of bring the whole thing together so this was a project which was partly reusing stuff we already had and trying to make it more visible make it more intelligible and then trying to develop some new material which helped people to understand how they could navigate through it and what kind of things that they were looking for it was a really successful project and for those of you who are involved in this kind of thing it was presented by the English faculty as one of its REF case studies and REF impact case studies were a strong part of the English submission mixed feelings about that kind of instrumentalization of impact case studies which I'm sure many of you have had experience of but we gathered a lot of statistics and we had a lot of feedback and a lot of again we did the thing of going into schools and working with people on this material showing them again we felt that it didn't quite fly on its own and I just think still don't think you quite got that right how you could self teach in a way which is not completely linear how you could self teach with a load of OER resources I haven't seen that done really well yet but I think a lot of us are trying to do that better so Great Writers Inspire was doing really what was doing really well we had some GISC funding the funding ran out for that it's maintained in that the links are kept going but we're not adding material yet and that's quite an interesting point I think now to think what do we do with it do we wait to get another little bit of money a lot of the money in this field you'll know this better than I do seems to be very very much project oriented is the assumption that we will just absorb the projects and their ongoing maintenance into what we normally do when that funding is dried up or that somehow the project is over when the funding is over I think a lot of resources kind of hanging about still that perhaps nobody is really looking after and maybe we ought to think about culling them in a more rigorous way I think that unless we put some more material into Great Writers Inspire in the next 18 months or something probably this is something we should think about disaggregating and putting back into a general disaggregating all the items and putting it back into a general kind of OER pod the last thing I want to talk about because I wanted to bring up the idea about academics fear and the fear of openness Catherine started us off with quite an emotional definition when one of the definitions she picked out on that slide was quite an emotional one being not hidden emotionally being not closed off emotionally and I think there is a really useful definition of open to have in mind when identifying what it is that people find worrying about this as a step what it is that academics find worrying and although this for me has been the most transformative thing that I've done simply putting my undergraduate lectures on iTunes this is not a technical miracle I do understand that this is a thing that is really ordinary and that lots of people do it's not a thing that so many people have done in my environment but it's a thing which has completely transformed my sense of the audience to whom I might be speaking I began doing this by really just in broadcast mode I was already lecturing two undergraduates one of the things about my environment is that we don't really do centralized timetabling you can often be lecturing at a time which for very legitimate reasons is not very convenient for students I thought that my own students would benefit from being able to pick up the lecture at a point which is convenient to them as Melissa said it was the point when Oxford was thinking about iTunes and that seemed as good a format as any to make that possible for them I didn't really imagine at that point that there would be a wider readership and I couldn't really imagine a wider listenership and I couldn't really imagine how anybody found anything really on iTunes or would sort of come across it it seemed very very unlikely once it was clear that they were being listened to by a much wider cohort there was one very very good outcome which has been a good outcome for me all the way through this process which is people wrote to me and said thanks for doing it it's really nice to have them which is just an unalloyed nice thing occasionally they asked a question about something not in a way which was burdensome or couldn't be managed there may be some iTunes superstars who can't manage their mail bag but I'm certainly not one of them so that was a good thing the bad thing was it made me terribly nervous about lecturing so things that you would just say off the cuff or that you would feel quite happy with you will know this sometimes your lecture is good you just kind of go with it really and it's just one week and you're back the next week or you've got another chance to do it if you're recording them well you sort of have to go with that I suppose but it's magnified and its impact is magnified I found that very difficult to think about and I also found it difficult to kind of be in the moment in the lecture while thinking this is going to be listened to well sometimes that was quite funny somebody told me that the bishop of Sathak listened to my iTunes lectures and I suddenly heard myself a few weeks later talking about how Midsummer Night's Dream was really about bestiality and I started to get the giggles thinking about the bishop of Sathak so I did say I don't know if the bishop of Sathak is listening but shut your ears shut your ears bishop so sometimes that had a funny aspect to it thinking there are people listening who are not here in this room but sometimes it had a kind of more a more paralyzing aspect to it and I did have a gap between some of the series of the lectures that I put up on iTunes U when I went back to recording lectures I realized the style I used had changed and in some ways the style I used in the lectures was less interactive than it would have been it was more, slightly more so in some ways I was making a step forward by making this material available in some ways I was making a step backwards by making a certain kind of rather old fashioned lecture that you know someone like A.J.P. Taylor would have done in the 1950s or something and I hope not with the same content but no questions within the sort of recorded period because it's a bit too complicated to get people to agree permissions and so on and no I did smuggle in a handout I usually lecture to a handout for students but I started to have to stop mentioning the handout because people who would listen to the lectures this sounds a tiny thing I know but people who would listen to the lectures would email me and say maybe I could have that handout and then I'd be trying to find it and I'd be worried about the pictures and what did I have permissions for the whole thing and it all was too much too complicated so I did change those in certain ways but what I didn't change and what I don't think I would change is that these were real lectures in real time with a real often coughing and disruptive audience and as Melissa said I recorded them first on my iPod and then I think I'll record them on an iPhone now so they're not wonderful products they are and so sometimes people write to me and say these aren't wonderful products but more often they write and say we love the idea that we were in an Oxford lecture and that this was a real thing I also feel that maybe making quite a rough cut set of lectures slightly endures me from one of the problems that being in a position of privilege in this OER world gives you which is the idea that your institution might somehow crush other ones so I think of this as the kind of Michael Sandbell problem where the philosophers from San Jose University wrote to him to say we're really glad you've done your mook but we're really upset that our dean wants us to use it in our teaching, in our university and that probably means we'll be sacked ultimately because we'll be using you instead and there are all kinds of problems about that my lectures would never be a kind of they would never be taken up by anybody else in that way partly because they're on slightly random topics and they're designed to make people think about plays rather than to go through a kind of syllabus and partly because as I say the quality is not good enough so there's something a bit secondary about them as artifacts and I actually like that that's true to the process we've been through I think and that's something I would like to retain so I suppose thinking through that the most exposing thing then about being involved in OER has been to put up lectures it's really easy and fun to coordinate all kinds of other resources and other material it's been fabulous to work with collections and to think about how you might make that material more accessible but there's no risk in that really there's no personal risk at all in that the risk is all about when you put your own material up there but I really increasingly think that in the humanities that's what we must do we must put up the interpretive material, the more tactile kind of haptic sort of material which helps people to do the job that the humanities are about which is the job of questioning and interpreting we are not a data driven discipline and I think we have been lured by big data kind of ideas from the sciences, the idea of the database every humanities academic I know wants to make a database of something and you think yeah well that's kind of great but not really that's not really what we do and it's not really all that the internet can do and it's not really all the open educational resources can do but just to conclude what I've been saying then I think what the difficulty is is how we reward people for putting their material up and that comes back to questions of privilege it's not too difficult for me to do it in fact it's very easy for me to do it and I get quite a lot of approbation for having done so I already have a tenured job I'm enormously fortunate in a very difficult academic environment it's not so difficult then for me to do this there's more gain than loss but that's still about using and leveraging a reputation which needs to be made in the academy as it works at the moment by other means you cannot as a modern scholar academic I don't think you can make your name in OER material I still don't think that works either in scholarship or in teaching and I think that there is an aspect of modern academic life which has made us as academics more and more unwilling to risk material which we don't think is complete or to risk the kind of peephole into our teaching which retains a kind of mystery that nobody sort of wants to or what wants to penetrate I think that's a step change for us that we need to make as academics and the thing that I keep telling my colleagues and you must encounter this too is that often when you talk about how to make material more accessible how to make it more available people present with a technical issue about why they can't do it it's absolutely clear to me that there are no technical issues absolutely nothing at all are they, that technical issues almost always are proxies for deep anxieties some of which are entirely justified about the way the academic world works and others which are just you've kind of just got to get over yourself you can't be as private teaching is not as private it's public duty you should let other people see what you're doing and I think if we could get past the idea that OER is somehow a kind of technical or a technological phenomenon and to think of it as a pedagogical one but really as a kind of ethical one I think we may be able to pressurise I think that is the right word we may be able to pressurise more academics to centre it in their practice teachers and as scholars thank you do you want to take this one and then we'll go to the back I'm more of a lay person who lives in the University of Oxford I'm just wondering if you have any advice for those of us who are working with technologists trying to get academic students engaged with projects like the one that you have done because I know I don't know what the rest of you guys are doing sometimes it's like when you get them to try and do these digital work it was very nice to be able to do that I completely see the question and one way one of the many ways I feel fraudulent standing here talking to this particular group is that I have had almost no effect whatsoever in my own institution in making more people do this and that's something for me to ponder I suppose the question for me is to try and understand why it is that people feel they can't make this step and as I was saying I think that sometimes it seems too complicated to manage and there are ways of stripping out that complication but really this is about a kind of perfectionism in academics I think academics quite often are perfectionists they want something, they need something to be absolutely finished before they do it so then we've never really got in my discipline we've never got work in progress going as an idea if you advertise the work in progress you get some completely finished sort of book manuscript I think people say I just thought this is where I am with my thinking now and you think that's just going to be published you're not going to change what you think so I don't think we're very good at revealing that our process is actually and maybe that's what's stopping your academics doing it and many people feel under an enormous amount of pressure don't they as I'm sure you do in your roles but feel under a lot of pressure to do lots of things in different directions and maybe feel exposed and bringing us to do things that they don't feel they'd be very good at in the humanities which is really hard to understand because I think people who are white essentially want to be red and they would take millions out of years and to me it's this institution of culture that stops them from doing that it's the fear of not having been like impact rating or something like that so I wonder if you have any thoughts around how that culture might be changed for the better I know you've been to some of these things already and what do you think in the humanities especially there's so much to gain from being open? I think you're absolutely right in the course of your question I think the academic humanities has failed in finding an alternative model which it itself can believe in for academic publishing so we've continued to give our labour as reviewers and editors of journals and then we have also been curiously unconvinced by various kind of open access requirements there's an enormous amount of resistance to that in the academy as I see it which I sort of understand but I feel actually I don't understand but I wonder if you're absolutely right and I don't mean this entirely facetiously I wonder if you're absolutely right to say people want their work to be red there is a slight sort of inverse relationship between readers and value I think in the humanities which has always had English literature perhaps particularly has always had an inferiority complex about whether it's difficult enough and a lot of the history of English literature is about trying to make it more difficult or more scientific or more closed in order to give it the kind of cache of a proper academic discipline so it may be quite hard for us in a way to get back from that and to acknowledge how much close kin we have with non-specialist readers and that we are not really a separate kind of ontologically different kind of academic being so I feel that the question of I was thinking of using and then I thought there were too many gender problems with this but there's a something which is often quoted in book history it's a Venetian judge in a trial which is partly involved of Gutenberg printing press the sort of proverb is the pen is a virgin the printing press a whore there is a sort of ongoing sense through the history of technology that too much spread too much openness I started to wonder whether openness is one of those words which is slightly differently gendered or comes an open woman slightly different person from an open man or the connotations of open are a bit different then I think that's been touched on quite a lot I think there is a worry that you can be too lots of people have reasonably kind of good humbly kind of tweeted me for saying all those people listening to your lectures there must be something wrong with them either them or the lectures to give a lecture that nobody wants to go to is the sign that you're actually really quite an elite quite an elite person great