By Centre for Research Collections University of Edinburgh – Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, sive, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47041923
A 17th Century map of Iceland became our most popular OER for football fans during Euro 2016. The image ‘Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas, Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura ‘ which belongs to our Centre for Research Collections was added to Wikimedia in February as part of our Wikimedian in Residence partnership project. It was then used to illustrate an article about Iceland on English and German Wikipedia. It has now been viewed more than 2 million times.
Iceland’s Euro2016 matches were on 14 June (1-1 with Portugal), 18 June (1-1 Hungary), 22 June (2-1 victory over Austria), 27 June (2-1 win over England), and 3 July (2-5 defeat to France). Around each of these events people all over the world were keen to learn about this surprising nation. Viewing numbers ( numbers of hits) show appreciable spikes for the matches against Portugal, England, and France.
Happy news: OER16 Open Culture Conference was awarded Wikimedia UK Partnership of the Year. The conference was co-chaired by Lorna and me. In a letter of thanks Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive and Michael Maggs, Wikimedia UK Chair wrote:
We are delighted to award Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year to the University of Edinburgh, for the Open Educational Resources Conference in 2016. The strong presence of Wikimedia UK at OER16 was only made possible by your support as conference co-chairs. It gave a high level of visibility to the charity within a prestigious international conference, which will have an ongoing benefit for us as we develop our work within education. On a separate note, we are also delighted that the University of Edinburgh is hosting the first Wikimedian-in-Residence in the higher education sector in Scotland.
Lorna has also been appointed as a Wikimedia trustee.
Photograph of lillies taken by me in my house. No rights reserved by me.
I am sad to hear that Professor Andrew (Aggie) Booth has died. Aggie was a VLE pioneer. His work influenced mine and that of many colleagues. This news, coming as it does so soon after the recent loss of Sebastian Rahtz reminds me how much we owe to the original thinking of these clever, quirky, open practitioners.
Aggie Booth was one of the first, maybe THE first ‘Professor of e-learning’. If you have not heard of him, or perhaps have forgotten, here’s my story of Bodington at Leeds and Oxford:
Bodington was originally developed at University of Leeds by Jon Maber and Aggie in 1995. It was subsequently released as open source*. Oxford was the first HEI outside of Leeds to offer it as an institutional VLE . The University of the Highlands and Islands also used Bodington.
Bodington was a VLE ahead of its time**. This history of online learning lists the first scaled deployment of Bodington in 1997, the same year WebCT 1.0 was released and Blackboard was founded. A year later Martin Dougiamas began preliminary work on Moodle. I joined the learning technology team at Leeds in 2002. The Sakai project began in 2004.
The design of Bodington was based around a metaphor of space, people and place. It was originally developed as the ‘Nathan Bodington Building’. University of Leeds campus is full of buildings named for people. Sir Nathan Bodington was the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds having been Principal and Professor of Greek at the Yorkshire College since 1883. Jon and Aggie imagined that students would find/navigate to their materials and classes in ‘rooms’ on ‘floors’ in the virtual environment just as they did in the physical. Similar to the design of later virtual worlds such as SecondLife. When a proliferation of virtual buildings emerged at Leeds the virtual environment was renamed as Bodington Common.
For the open sourcing of software to be effective it is necessary to build a sufficiently large and vibrant community so that the product can become self-sustaining and progressively develop to include new ideas. Oxford was an early adopter of Bodington and was a keen supporter of a wide range of developments including various marketing exercises and attracting external funding for innovations; however, whilst the system was adopted by a wide range of institutions, the number of those prepared to commit development effort never reached a sustainable level.
The teams met in Oxford in 2005 to discuss development of Bodington in collaboration with Sakai. When Leeds University opted in 2006 to select a proprietary system for their next VLE, Oxford was left as the sole large-scale developer of Bodington and this situation was untenable. It was at this point that Oxford decided to seek an alternative platform (with a bigger and better community) and chose Sakai, deploying it as WebLearn in 2008. By this time I had moved from Leeds to join Oxford.
*On 3 October 2006 Bodington released version 2.8.0 on SourceForge. This brought good will with it from those in the open source community who may have felt Bodington had been trading on the open source moniker unfairly in the past.( OSSwatch)
Cover image of Spare Rib Issue 171. Check http://www.bl.uk/spare-rib for copyright details.
My trip to Sweden was enjoyable and informative, despite being very brief. What I learned though, was that the Scandinavians would rather the UK didn’t leave the EU. We also considered the challenges of figuring out how MOOCs fit in a higher education system which is already free and open to all and already offers online courses.
Once again, I continued my good work of pointing out to AV tech guys that not all keynote presenters wear pockets or a waistband, or wish to have a headset put into their hair. Universal design does not seem to include women 🙂
This week I’ll mostly be in Budapest for EDEN16. The conference is called ‘Re-imagining Learning Environments’. It’s my first time to EDEN, and I’ll be keynoting in the theme: ‘Opening up education’. I’ll be talking about the initiatives , projects, examples of good practice and the new business models we are championing at University of Edinburgh.
EU referendum MOOC https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/eu-referendum/1
What’s your favourite digital learning university doing in the face of the EU referendum? Another one of our just in time MOOCs, of course!
The EU can often be confusing and the UK’s relationship with the EU over the years has been complicated. This three-week course breaks down the key facts and guides you through the referendum.
We look at how the UK ended up having a referendum on EU membership. We then consider the campaign issues, public opinion and alternatives to being in the EU. After the vote, we reflect on what the result means for the UK and for the rest of Europe.
Cover image of BITS magazine. BITS Issue 14, Spring 2016 http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/about/edinburgh-bits
I am impressed that ALT have found my CMALT portfolio in their archives. I will share it as an example with colleagues engaging with our new CMALT programme.
When I wrote my initial CMALT application in 2008 I was just about to leave University of Leeds to embark on a new adventure in a new role as Head of Learning Technologies at University of Oxford. At that time there were so few CMALT persons in each university that the status of ‘University with the largest number of CMALT’ shifted from Leeds to Oxford when I moved. I stayed in that role at Oxford for 6 years, becoming Director of Academic IT as I expanded the teams, projects, scope and services.
Looking back at my portfolio submission from the time I am reminded of my commitment even then to blogging, learning design, VLEs, OER and my specialist subject: learning technology leadership.
In order to renew my CMALT portflio I am asked to reflect on how my career has developed over the past 3 years and how this relates to my work with learning technology.
I’ve been at Edinburgh for 2 years now. I know this because I’ve just attended my third elearning@ed forum. It’s been a vertiginous learning curve, and I’ve had to make some serious changes in the leadership of the Division. Grace Hopper said ‘ the most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’. I think that is *especially* dangerous for anyone in an industry like learning technology which requires, demands innovation.
As a woman who arrives from somewhere else to take over the management of a department, I hear it a lot.
The investment of time and effort is paying off though, Senior Vice Principal Charlie Jeffrey described us as ‘gripped in the throws of innovation’. Which is good, I think. I’ve also just been appointed Assistant Principal for Online Learning.
Having an Assistant Principal as part of the senior management team in ISG will ensure that we can align even more closely the activities of ISG to the mission of the University. This will contribute to the success of our service excellence and digital transformation programmes as well as planning for learning and teaching technology. My new role will bring added complexity for me as I manage the challenge of keeping my teams on track with these innovations while also giving a renewed focus myself to online and distance learning. Exciting times.
It was lovely to see you all at #OER16 in Edinburgh. It was a great personal pleasure to host the conference and to listen to the papers and speakers. For me it provided an excellent excuse to have so many friends and colleagues here.
When Lorna and I passed across to next year’s chairs it was a relief to know that the conference will survive and thrive for another year.
I gave the last keynote, the one usually punctuated by the poorly stifled sound of wheely suitcases escaping from the back of the room. Jim, Catherine, Emma and John are hard acts to follow.
One of the benefits of being the last keynote is that the many flavors of openness had already been rehearsed and debated by other people in the room. And that many of my excellent Edinburgh colleagues had already covered the detail of our services and projects. The keynote offered me a chance to reflect on the themes of the conference and why it made sense to have it in Edinburgh.
If you get a chance to watch all the keynotes, which I hope you will, you will see 5 very different people in very different jobs/contexts taking different approaches to identifying the value proposition for open. But none of them are doing it alone. That’s the beauty of the thing.
My keynote is mostly written, I know who I’m going to introduce and where I am chair. I’m looking forward to see you all there. Got your ticket?
My presentation is called ‘Open with Care: contents may have shifted during flight’. Emma Smith’s is called ‘Free Willy’. Last year Josie brought the dolphins, this year Emma brings the orca. A whale of a time will be had.
A recording of the event will be available soon, which is lucky, because there weren’t very many people in the room. Kate presented the story of the Great War Archive, an OER digitisation and community crowdsourcing initiative begun in 2008 which continues to grow and thrive. I merely set the scene for her by covering the basic underpinnings of the Oxford Community Collection model.
The RunCoCo project (2010-2011) supported the projects funded by JISC as part of their Developing Community Content call. “The suite of projects funded under the JISC’s Community Content call are aimed firstly at creating and enhance digital content collections by developing the engagement between content owners in the universities and specific, or general, groups of the external public. Secondly, they are intended to develop more strategic co-ordination within the universities, focusing on the relationship between digital collection curators and business and community engagement teams.”
RunCoCo was set up to offer advice, training and open source software to those interested in running a community collection online. The outcomes and lessons learned can be synthesised into a simple ABC of advice for projects and groups who aim to ‘crowdsource’ with sustainable success:
Aim for two-way engagement;
Be part of your community;
Challenge your assumptions.
The outputs of the project are available on the RunCoCo website for free. These include guides, workflows, reports, training materials and open source software.
The content of my presentation was based on the JISC report ‘Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources: The JISC eContent Programme 2009-11’. Our chapter is: Edwards and Highton (2011) ‘RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online‘.
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