 Hello everybody and you're very welcome to our first of our parallel sessions and today I'd like to introduce Mark Brown from Dublin City University who will be introducing his first session and we've got 20 minutes so Mark would you like to take it away. Well, thank you very much. Hello everyone. Nice to get things underway after the introduction this morning. This is a joint paper with Maread and Ayman but for simplicity reasons I'll present on their behalf. You can see that I've customised my badge and those of you who want to figure out what ARCO means, A-K-O, then I suggest you do a Google search but it has a little bit of a link to the Māori language in New Zealand, my country of birth. We have an interesting title and it's borrowed from Dr Seuss. Of course Dr Seuss is a little controversial at the moment so we were very pleased to note that the book that we've borrowed this title as a metaphor is not one of the ones that was identified as containing racist images but it might be something we have to be mindful of in the future and also tells us that we have to also be very careful about the kind of metaphors we choose and the language we choose because what today might be seen acceptable in times in the future may well not. The particular book and the metaphor we've borrowed here is about how reading, how knowledge if you like opens the world and takes you places. In this context though we're really referring to sort of open scholarship and we want to share with you a study we've been doing for the last five years but just to put a little bit more context on the title the particular page from the text that is our inspiration is I'll read it to you. I can read in red, I can read in blue, I can read in pickle colour too and then the next page says you'll learn about Jake the pillow snake and all about Fufu the snoo. So what we want to do is try to demystify a little bit about Fufu the snoo and the time available. I don't have the chat box in front of me now so we'll pick many feedback up at the end but I have a little task, second task, you've already done hopefully done a Google search on Akko what's your number one go to source for professional reading to keep you up to date. Share that resource with each other in the chat box as I keep talking here. What I want to begin with is by establishing that open access publications in the field shall we say of educational technology I'll use that as a catchall for e-learning open education technology enhanced learning and so forth has a well I guess you could say we're just drowning in the number of open access publications. This particular journal article which analyzed them identified 270 it's a few years old now and just last week I added two more new journals to this list that we keep on our website if you haven't come across previously of course there's lots of different websites with these listings what we don't do on this website is try to identify the ones we think might be more useful for particularly doctoral students. So we're drowning in openness in many respects and all of us need to develop filtering strategies because there's just no possible way you could read all that literature let alone even just glance through the index or contents pages of the journals but at the same time it's essential that we do have a scholarly culture of academic reading and that's part of how we build community and share knowledge and disseminate new information new ideas and insights so that reason way back in 2016 the team we have in the National Institute here in Dublin at DCU just paused for a minute because I should have put in the embedded sponsorship piece there but I'll keep going since I've now done it anyway in 2016 we launched an activity where we said to ourselves so what would be the top 10 journal articles that we've read open access articles for the year. Truthfully at the time I was a little concerned that we didn't have enough reading going on amongst our team we were experimenting with having reading groups and having a hot topic monthly sort of talk but I'm not sure that people were aware of actually the literature they should be reading so we went through this exercise identified 10 articles posted them on our blog with a little bit explanation and then the following year we wanted to continue this but it raised a number of questions about the criteria the methodology who we actually involved and we've written about this on our blogs that the criteria are published and we've continued to do this in quite an inclusive way amongst our team with an internal strategy of trying to get more people engaged in the literature and an external strategy of hopefully making a contribution to the community by the hundreds of articles that we go through to identify what we call our top 10 we're not going to say that these are the 10 best articles they're the 10 that we've selected that we think are in inverted commas good reads I don't know if you've seen last year's we published it in early January if not I invite you to take a look and I'm just going to quickly go over a few of the publications from what we identified last year actually what we did was we had two lists of top 10 because there were so many articles coming out focused on COVID-19 or the COVID pandemic that we didn't want to skew our regular top 10 list from those publications of course even in the first three months of this year there'd be many more publications so we had two dedicated lists on the website what we've done on our blog we've created why we've chosen them but just from quick facts and because we've done this for five years we have a nice set of aggregated data that we'll be working with in a future publication forthcoming but in this year's list of top 10 good reads there are 28 authors more women than men that's been a trend actually originally there were more men than women of course you have to take these things with a green assault given the small sample albeit that we looked at a larger population of articles so of around about 250 that went into the selection of the top 10 a little US centered this year only three from Europe only two single authored publications and that's been a very common trend that most of the articles we select are jointly authored this is the very first year that the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology and not due to my down under roots but it's the first year it hasn't taken the number one place so for four years running it had the top journal that we rated and this year there were four new journals fresh to the list although our methodology and criteria does place a focus on finding fresh and new content so here's what we chose as our number one article for those of you who have more of a research focus or for those with a practitioner focus we chose this you can see the little bit of the creation that comes from our blog because of the call for research that actually matters that research actually has a practical application rather than just theoretical research and I think that resonates with many people that the practice focus still our number two and three articles similarly coming out of US based journals a review of 10 years of research through co-citation in part we selected that article with a very innovative methodology in its literature review current trends and missing links our criteria is always looking for things that are missing things that you might not come across because we see that as our contribution two more just to share with you very briefly the first one now number four was very interesting because again in many respects we selected this because it taught us a lesson it looked in an innovative way at low or unsighted publications we tend when we do literature reviews to look for the highly sighted publications this look for the things that hadn't come out of the shadows so very interesting analysis and again in the spirit of saying let's find where the new and fresh ideas are perhaps the last comment before I move on is in this slide we wanted to emphasize again consistent with looking for fresh ideas here's a UK based journal and a new journal contrasted with our number eight which is the international journal for educational technology and higher education if you're not familiar with that journal that is now the number one ranked open access journal in the field based on Scopus rankings it's actually now the number 27 journal ranked in all education publications I'm quite proud that we sponsored the journal and co-edit that journal but the reason I've got it there only one publication showed up from that journal compared to the other ones that we've shown you so we were not privileged if you like with the mainstream a takeaway message just on the time with about five minutes to go so I think I'm alright on time is that despite our strong focus here on open access publications and those publications as widely as we can it is a commentary that much of the literature that we might want to be reading is still restricted or behind close firewalls subscription models that many developing countries would perhaps not have access to and this is just one example and then another aspect to it is despite what I said about the journal that we support most of these open access journals are not rated from a Scopus point of view and an academic promotion point of view so there's a real tension here between the open and the restricted apart from the fact another takeaway message is we're seeing a blurring of the boundaries some clever scholars are beginning to make available their pre-publication journal articles as open access before they go behind the firewall so I think there's a lesson there for you because ultimately why do all this work if no one reads it and the truth is that many of these restricted publications actually get very little readership very briefly to kind of come towards the end probably talk too fast I just wanted to share some of the COVID articles that we selected we didn't put these into a rank order for 1 to 10 and I can tell you that rank order causes us no end of angst amongst our team and debate but that's actually also the good part of why we have this exercise we just didn't think it would be appropriate to rank them but to share you our top article and you might want to I invite you to read the reason why we ranked this number one partly because it came out on the 27th of March very early in the pandemic and gave very good advice from a learning design perspective on how we move perhaps beyond emergency remote teaching to online learning many of you are familiar with this publication it's been widely cited at the same time tongue and cheek in the curation in our blog for this what I'm cited as saying is I just wonder if we flipped things around I'm a little bit weary of all these top 10 checklists actually there are dozens of them we have a website that lists them all these top 10 checklists if all of a sudden we were at the norm teaching online and we had to move in a crisis to suddenly have it teach face to face I wonder how comfortable we would be with turning face to face teaching into a handy checklist of 10 items given how challenging and idiosyncratic and so forth it is so the message for me there in a critical sense is good teaching can't be reduced to a handy checklist of hints it's a socio cognitive process a couple of the articles we selected one you might be familiar with it was done quite early and it's a case study I think about 30 different country case studies there's a small piece on Ireland that I contributed to there and on the other side of it we wanted to single out what we considered to be one of the most interesting and thought provoking provocative journals post-digital science and education which I hope you're following because there's some excellent publications coming through in that relatively new journal returning with a couple of minutes to spare to the metaphor of foo foo the snoo this exercises I've indicated to you we've done for five years we've done it initially because we wanted to get some conversations internally in our team but over the five years we've had a lot of feedback on our top 10s it's actually the single most popular blog based on analytics every single year but my question for you is to post a link to what was your top read from 2020 it's a pretty difficult question to answer it's actually often a question I ask when I'm interviewing candidates for a job what is it that you used to filter your analysis your reading of the literature is it the name of the journal is it the author of the publication in my case I frequently all scan through the references to just see if there's anything I haven't seen but the trap is that if you stick with what you know in terms of the mainstream publications including Alts Journal then maybe you'll miss a real gem that's published somewhere of course this whole exercise is biased towards English speaking publications which is something we acknowledge and then what tip would you provide particularly for new and emerging scholars, scholar practitioners PhD students to help them engage with the literature without getting drowned and that's I guess an ongoing conversation in many respects but it's certainly one that we want to support our colleagues and then in a wider sense our community so wrapping up on the places you'll go well we really want people to be reading more to be writing more of course telling their stories and I shouldn't ignore the fact that there's a lot of grey literature in addition to the journals that I've shared here as open access publications and perhaps that's what you've identified as your very best reading source so hopefully that's of interest and if you haven't seen the blog I'll post a link in the chat box now I can get back into the platform environment thank you thank you very much Mark loads to think about there I love this resource it's really really useful and I think I'll just let Mark catch up on the chat there if you can see it in the text window so we've got a couple of questions coming in already I think the first one was from Teresa was that around does looking for new ideas include those published in languages other than English and I think you've answered that but do you want to take that Mark yes indeed and I mentioned that and we acknowledged that as a bias our criteria which I didn't take time to show you the criteria what we tried to do is one of the criterion is around inclusivity and so we're looking for publications from developing world from journals that we may not or in the service that we're trying to offer here journals that you may not have come across previously so particularly one of the journals we chose in this year people probably may not see it as a top read but it had Terry Anderson everyone knows Terry Anderson but it had a doctoral student from Spain and it was published in a Spanish publication albeit in an English open access Spanish publication so that was one of the reasons we chose that publication great thanks I've got a question from Tom Farrelly as well are they listed on the DOAJ even if not on scopus well of course what we have to do is be careful we don't play the academic game here now I say that because those of you are in academic roles there are constraints that you face these are the sort of barriers that we need to push through the actually I think these are the things we need to challenge our sacred gals post camp COVID because the irony is someone like in my own role about being too egotistical about this at a professor level you tend to be allowed to play by different roles but I have colleagues and staff who are working their way through academic promotion where scopus rank publications seem to matter I couldn't give a damn in many respects about scopus rank publications I'm more interested in the impact and that doesn't mean the impact score that's about who reads it how they use the reading so there are lots of different metrics we can use I guess if you are caught in that bind between restricted publication and promotion guidelines you have to have a foot in both caps you can't ignore some of the traditional metrics great thanks yeah lots there around promotions around learning and teaching and how we measure impact my question mark would be around what do you have any then any reading groups is there any ways that you bring together your staff to kind of discuss and debate some of the reading that you're going to be implementing them towards yeah it's a a good question we've experimented over the years with a number of things just two weeks ago I think it would be I've probably got some colleagues here keeping me honest we reintroduced a reading group more focused on sort of mainstream teaching enhancement it's one of those paradoxes the time that it takes to do that and get people to read the article and engage with it when we are all busy but we all agreed when we did this two weeks ago wow that was great we saw so many different things in the article compared to if we just read it ourselves but the truth is we don't do enough of that and I would still be concerned my colleagues know that I'm an avid reader I'm constantly sharing publications with my team but at the same time I'm very conscious that actually can be very overwhelming for them and maybe less is more here and I would be very happy if everyone on our team read the top 10 and the top 10 COVID and I couldn't put my hand in my heart and say that everyone's done that to be truthful yeah absolutely and I think that I really like to get your point towards the end there but the problem with top 10 lists and I think there's a danger in when we're introducing colleagues who may not be familiar with this literature or indeed educational literature in general nevermind education technology stuff that they don't kind of accessing it through the top 10 lists and not actually understanding there's a wealth and a history of literature behind the practices and the research that have been going on so I think that's that this is a really good way to introduce people to the richness that is there we're just at 20 minutes past so I'm afraid I'm going to have to wrap that up sharp and sharp thank you very much Mark for keeping it to time we can move over to discord if anybody's got any further questions from Mark but other than just that thank you very much everybody thank you to all the people in the chat and we'll sign off from this session thank you