OUseful.Info, the blog…

I suspect that most people over a certain age have some vague memory of OU programmes broadcast in support of OU courses taking over BBC2 at at various “off-peak” hours of the day (including Saturday mornings, if I recall correctly…)

These courses formed an important part of OU courses, and were also freely available to anyone who wanted to watch them. In certain respects, they allowed the OU to operate as a public service educator, bringing ideas from higher education to a wider audience. (A lot has been said about the role of the UK’s personal computer culture in the days of the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro in bootstrapping software skills development, and in particular the UK computer games industry; but we don’t hear much about the role the OU played in raising aspiration and introducing the very idea of what might be involved in higher education through free-to-air broadcasts of OU course materials, which I’m convinced it must have played. I certainly remember watching OU maths and physics programmes as a child, and wanting to know more about “that stuff” even if I couldn’t properly follow it at the time.)

The OU’s broadcast strategy has evolved since then, of course, moving into prime time broadcasts (Child of Our Time, Coast, various outings with James May, The Money Programme, and so on) as well as “online media”: podcasts on iTunes and video content on Youtube, for example.

The original OpenLearn experiment, which saw 10-20hr extracts of OU course material being released for free continues, but as I understand it, is now thought of in the context of a wider OpenLearn engagement strategy that will aggregate all the OU’s public output (from open courseware and OU podcasts to support for OU/BBC co-produced content) under a single banner: OpenLearn

I suspect there will continue to be forays into the world of “social media”, too:

A great benefit of the early days of OU programming on the BBC was that you couldn’t help but stumble across it. You can still stumble across OU co-produced broadcasts on the BBC now, of course, but they don’t fulfil the same role: they aren’t produced as academic programming designed to support particular learning outcomes and aren’t delivered in a particularly academic way. They’re more about entertainment. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I think it does influence the stance you take towards viewing the material.)

If we think of the originally produced TV programmes as “OERs”, open educational resources, what might we say about them?

- they were publicly available;
- they were authentic, relating to the delivery of actual OU courses;
- the material was viewed by OU students enrolled on the associated course, as well as viewers following a particular series out of general interest, and those who just happened to stumble by the programme;
- they provided pacing, and the opportunity for a continued level of engagement over a period of weeks, on a single academic topic;
- they provided a way of delivering lifelong higher education as part of the national conversation, albeit in the background. But it was always there…

In a sense, the broadcasts offered a way for the world to “follow along” parts of a higher education as it was being delivered.

In many ways, the “Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOCs), in which a for-credit course is also opened up to informal participants, and the various Stanford open courses that are about to start (Free computer science courses, new teaching technology reinvent online education), use a similar approach.

I generally see this as a Good Thing, as universities engaging in public service education whilst at the same time delivering additional support, resources, feedback, assessment and credit to students formally enrolled on the course.

What I’m not sure about is that initiatives like OpenLearn succeed in the “public service education” role, in part because of the discovery problem: you couldn’t help but stumble across OU/BBC Two broadcasts at certain times of the day. Nowadays, I’d be surprised if you ever stumbled across OpenLearn content while searching the web…

A recent JISC report on OER Impact focussed on the (re)use of OERs in higher education, identifying a major use case of OERs as enhancing teaching practice.

(NB I would have embedded the OER Impact project video here, but WordPress.com doesn’t seem to support embeds from Blip…; openness is not just about the licensing, it’s also about the practical ease of (re)use;-)

However, from my quick reading of the OER impact report, it doesn’t really seem to consider the “open course” use case demonstrated by MOOCs, the Stanford courses, or mid-70s OU course broadcasts. (Maybe this was out of scope…!;-)

Nor does it consider the production of OERs (I think that was definitely out of scope).

For the JISC OER3 funding call, I was hoping to put in a bid for a project based around an open “production-in-presentation” model of resource development targeted to a specific community. For a variety of reasons, (not least, I suspect, my lack of project management skills…) that’s unlikely to be submitted in time, so I thought I’d post the main chunk of the bid here as a way of trying to open up the debate a little more widely about the role of OERs, the utility of open production models, and the extent to they can be used to support cross-sector curriculum innovation/discovery as well as co-creation of resources and resource reuse (both within HE and into a target user community).

Outline
Rapid Resource Discovery and Development via Open Production Pair Teaching (ReDOPT) seeks to draft a set of openly licensed resources for potential (re)use in courses in two different institutions … through the real-time production and delivery of an open online short-course in the area of data handling and visualisation. This approach subverts the more traditional technique of developing materials for a course and then retrospectively making them open, by creating the materials in public and in an openly licensed way, in a way that makes them immediately available for informal study as well as open web discovery, embedding them in a target community, and then bringing them back into the closed setting for formal (re)use. The course will be promoted to the data journalism and open data communities as a free “MOOC” (Massive Online Open Course)/P2PU style course, with a view to establishing an immediate direct use by a practitioner community. The project will proceed as follows: over a 10-12 week period, the core project team will use a variant of the Pair Teaching approach to develop and publish an informal open, online course hosted on an .ac.uk domain via a set of narrative linked resources (each one about the length of a blog post and representing 10 minutes to 1 hour of learner activity) mapping out the project team’s own exploration/learning journey through the topic area. The course scope will be guided by a skeleton curriculum determined in advance from a review of current literature, informal interviews/questionnaires and perceived skills and knowledge gaps in the area. The created resources will contain openly licensed custom written/bespoke material, embedded third party content (audio, video, graphical, data), and selected links to relevant third party material. A public custom search engine in the topic area will also be curated during the course. Additional resources created by course participants (some of whom may themselves be part of the project team), will be integrated into the core course and added to the custom search engine by the project team. Part-time, hourly paid staff will also be funded to contribute additional resources into the evolving course. A second phase of the project will embed the resources as learning resources in the target community through the delivery of workshops based around and referring out to the created resources, as well as community building around the resources. Because of timescales involved, this proposal is limited to the production of the draft materials and embedding them as valuable and appropriate resources in the target community, and does not extend as far as the reuse/first formal use case. Success metrics will therefore be limited to impact evaluation, volume and reach of resources produced, community engagement with the live production of the materials, the extent to which project team members intend to directly reuse the materials produced as a result.

The Proposal
1. The aim of the project is to produce a set of educational resources in a practical topic area (data handling and visualisation), that are reusable by both teachers (as teaching resources) and independent learners (as learning resources), through the development of an openly produced online course in the style of an uncourse created in real time using a Pair Teaching approach as opposed to a traditional sole author or OU style course team production process, and to establish those materials as core reusable educational resources in the target community.

…

3. … : Extend OER through collaborations beyond HE: the proposal represents a collaboration between two HEIs in the production and anticipated formal (re)use of the materials created, as well as directly serving the needs of the fledgling data-driven journalism community and the open public data communities.

4. … : Addressing sector challenges (ii Involving academics on part-time, hourly-paid contracts): the open production model will seek to engage /part time, hourly paid staff/ in creating additional resources around the course themes that they can contribute back to the course under an open license and that cover a specific issue identified by the course lead or that the part-time staff themselves believe will add value to the course. (Note that the course model will also encourage participants in the course to create and share relevant resources without any financial recompense.) Paying hourly rate staff for the creation of additional resources (which may include quizzes or other informal assessment/feedback related resources), or in the role of editors of community produced resources, represents a middle ground between the centrally produced core resources and any freely submitted resources from the community. Incorporating the hourly paid contributor role is based on the assumption that payment may be appropriate for sourcing course enhancing contributions that are of a higher quality (and may take longer to produce) than community sourced contributions, as well as requiring the open licensing of materials so produced. The model also explores a model under which hourly staff can contribute to the shaping of the course on an ad hoc basis if they see opportunities to do so.

5. … Enhancing the student experience (ii Drawing on student-produced materials): The open production model will seek to engage with the community following the course and encourage them to develop and contribute resources back into the community under an open license. For example, the use of problem based exercises and activities will result in the production of resources that can be (re)used within the context of the uncourse itself as an output of the actual exercise or activity.

6. … The project seeks to explore practical solutions to two issues relating to the wider adoption of OERs by producers and consumers, and provide a case study that other projects may draw on. In the first case, how to improve the discoverablity and direct use of resources on the web by “learners” who do not know they are looking for OERs, or even what OERs are, through creating resources that are published as contributions to the development and support of a particular community and as such are likely to benefit from “implicit” search engine optimisation (SEO) resulting from this approach. In the second case, to explore a mechanism that identifies what resources a community might find useful through curriculum negotiation during presentation, and the extent to which “draft” resources might actually encourage reuse and revision.

7. Rather than publishing an open version of a predetermined, fixed set of resources that have already been produced as part of a closed process and then delivered in a formal setting, the intention is thus to develop an openly licensed set of “draft” resources through the “production in presentation” delivery of an informal open “uncourse” (in-project scope), and at a later date reuse those resources in a formally offered closed/for-credit course (out-of-project scope). The uncourse will not incorporate assessment elements, although community engagement and feedback in that context will be in scope. The uncourse approach draws on the idea of “teacher as learner”, with the “teacher” capturing and reflecting on meaningful learning episodes as they explore a topic area and then communicate these through the development of materials that others can learn from, as well as demonstrating authentic problem solving and self-directed learning behaviours that model the independent learning behaviours we are trying to develop in our students.

8. The quality of the resources will be assured at least to the level of fit-for-purpose at the time of release by combining the uncourse production style with a Pair Teaching approach. A quality improvement process will also operate through responding to any issues identified via the community based peer-review and developmental testing process that results from developing the materials in public.

9. The topic area was chosen based on several factors: a) the experience and expertise of the project team; b) the observation that there are no public education programmes around the increasing amounts of open public data; c) the observation that very few journalism academics have expertise in data journalism; d) the observation that practitioners engaged in data journalism do not have time or interest in to become academics, but do appear willing to share their knowledge.

10. The first uncourse will run over a 6-8 week period and result in the central/core development of circa 5 to 10 blog posts styled resources a week, each requiring 20-45 minutes of “student” activity, (approx. 2-6 hours study time per week equivalent) plus additional directed reading/media consumption time (ideally referencing free and openly licensed content). A second presentation of the uncourse will reuse and extend materials produced during the first presentation, as well as integrating resources, where possible, developed by the community in the first phase and monitoring the amount of time taken to revise/reversion them, as required, compared to the time taken to prepare resources from scratch centrally. Examples of real-time, interactive and graphical representations of data will be recorded as video screencasts and made available online. Participants will be encouraged to consider the information design merits of comparative visualisation methods for publication on different media platforms: print, video, interactive and mobile. In all, we hope to deliver up to 50 hours of centrally produced, openly licensed materials by the end of the course. The uncourse will also develop a custom search engine offering coverage of openly licensed and freely accessible resources related to the course topic area.

11. The course approach is inspired to a certain extent by the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) style courses pioneered by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Jim Groom et al. The MOOC approach encourages learners to explore a given topic space with the help of some wayfinders. Much of the benefit is derived from the connections participants make between each other and the content by sharing, reflecting, and building on the contributions of others across different media spaces, like blogs, Twitter, forums, YouTube, etc.

12. The course model also draws upon the idea of a uncourse, as demonstrated by Hirst in the creation of the Digital Worlds game development blog [ http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com ] that produced a series of resources as part of an openly blogged learning journey that have since been reused directly in an OU course (T151 Digital Worlds); and the Visual Gadgets blog ( http://visualgadgets.blogspot.com ) that drafted materials that later came to be reused in the OU course T215 Communication and information technologies, and then made available under open license as the OpenLearn unit Visualisation: Visual representations of data and information [ http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4442 ]

13. A second phase of the project will explore ways of improving the discovery of resources in an online context, as well as establishing them as important and relevant resources within the target community. Through face-to-face workshops and hack days, we will run a series of workshops at community events that draw on and extend the activities developed during the initial uncourse, and refer participants to the materials. A second presentation of the uncourse will be offered as a way of testing and demonstrating reuse of the resources, as well as providing an exit path from workshop activities. One possible exit path from the uncourse would be entry into formal academic courses.

14. Establishing the resources within the target community is an important aspect of the project. Participation in community events plays an important role in this, and also helps to prove the resources produced. Attendance at events such as the Open Government Data camp will allow us to promote the availability of the resources to the appropriate European community, further identify community needs, and also provide a backdrop for the development of a promotional video with vox pops from the community hopefully expressing support for the resources being produced. The extent to which materials do become adopted and used within the community will be form an important part of the project evaluation.

15. … By embedding resources in the target community, we aim to enhance the practical utility of the resources within that community as well as providing an academic consideration of the issues involved. A key part of the evaluation workpackage, …, will be to rate the quality of the materials produced and the level of engagement with and reuse of them by both educators and members of the target community.

Note that I am still keen on working this bid up a bit more for submission somewhere else…;-)

[Note that the opinions expressed herein are very much my own personal ones...]

PS see also COL-UNESCO consultation: Guidelines for OER in Higher Education – Request for comments: OER Guidelines for Higher Education Stakeholders

I’m on holiday, but I can’t stop pondering (again) how to make more of an OU flavoured collection of content currently on BBC iPlayer… Whilst bookmarking a few more BBC/OU co-pro series pages just now, I spotted one series at least has had clips posted in to the (new to me) BBC Learning Zone Class Clips:

Which got me wondering: if OU does fully funded co-pros of content that ends up in the Learning Zone Class Clips area, wouldn’t it be good if the clips listings also displayed the OU logo…?

Or maybe if the OU got a mention on the actual clips pages?

After all, the OU gets a mention, and a link, on the original programme page:

And arguably, we could do more to support learning journey related actions and resources at the more detailed, class clips level?

PS Hmmm, I wonder how things like Class Clips fit into OER space???

PPS QUIck note re: bookmarked series pages; there are also occasions when the OU co-pros an occasional episode in a longer running series, as in the case of BBC CLick Radio (World Service), which runs weekly but only has occasional OU co-pro’d episodes? From a series page linking to episode pages, how would I identify the OU co-pro’d programme pages? Or would I have to ignore series pages and just bookmark/index actual co-pro’d episode pages (if they exist?)?

PPPS Ah – this looks interesting (BBC prototype): THe Programme List (“Add entire shows, series or just episodes, See which of your programmes are available today”). So I should be able to add in lists of OU/BBC co-pros, and see a view over episodes that are currently available on iPlayer. Which makes me think: could something like The Programmes List also be used to publish and view 3rd party curated collection lists, opening up “scheduling” of BBC content to all-comers?

Ever since the Open University was founded, a relationship with the BBC has provided the OU with a route to broadcast through both television and radio. Some time ago, I posted a recipe for generating a page that showed current OU programmes on iPlayer (all rotted now…). Chatting to Liam last night, I started wondering about resurrecting this service, as well as pondering how I could easily begin to build up an archive of programme IDs for OU/BBC co-pros, so that whenever the fancy took me I could go to a current and comprehensive “OU on iPlayer” page and see what OU co-pro’d content was currently available to watch again.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious feed anywhere that gives access to this information, nor a simple directory page listing OU co-pros with links even to the parent series page or series identifier on the BBC site. (This would be lovely data to have in the OU’s open linked data store;-)

What caught my attention about this feed is that it’s focussed on growing audience around live broadcasts. This is fine if you’re tweeting added value* along with the live transmission and turning the programme into an event, but in general terms? I rarely watch live television any more, but I do watch a lot of iPlayer…

(* the Twitter commentary feed can than also be turned into expert commentary subtitles/captions, of course, using Martin Hawksey’s Twitter powered iPlayer subtitles recipe..)

There is also a “what’s on” feed available from OpenLearn (via a link – autodiscovery doesn’t seem to be enabled?), but it is rather horrible and it doesn’t contain BBC programme/series IDs (and I’m not sure the linked to pages necessarily do so, either?)

So – what to do? In the short term, as far as my tinkering goes, nothing (holidays…:-) But I think with a nice feed available, we could make quite a nice little view over OU co-pro’d content currently on iPlayer, and also start to have a think about linking in expert commentary, as well as linking out to additional resources…

See also:
Augmenting OU/BBC Co-Pro Programme Data With Semantic Tags
Linked Data Without the SPARQL – OU/BBC Programmes on iPlayer [this actually provides a crude recipe for getting access to OU/BBC programmes by bookmarking co-pro'd series pages on delicious...]

PS from @liamgh: “Just noticed that Wikipedia lists both BBC & OU as production co e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtu… RH Panel readable with dbpedia.” Interesting… so we should be able to pull down some OU/BBC co-pros by a query onto DBPedia…

PPS also from Liam – a handy recipe for generating an HTML5 leanback UI for video content identified via a SPARQL query: An HTML5 Leanback TV webapp that brings SPARQL to your living room

If you’re running a Youtube account, how might you collect Insights data for all your videos as spreadsheet entries that can be used in the preparation of reports about your social media effectiveness?

One way might be to go to each video in turn and download the separate CSV data files created for each video. Alternatively, you can grab the data via the YouTube/GData API (http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_insight.html).

I haven’t actually got round to getting any data out of my YouTube account and into a Google spreadsheet yet, but I have dome the first step, which is to set up the authentication using OAuth. Here’s the Google Apps script I used…

function youtube(){
  // Setup OAuthServiceConfig
  var oAuthConfig = UrlFetchApp.addOAuthService("youtube");
  oAuthConfig.setAccessTokenUrl("https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthGetAccessToken");
  oAuthConfig.setRequestTokenUrl("https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthGetRequestToken?scope=http%3A%2F%2Fgdata.youtube.com%2F");
  oAuthConfig.setAuthorizationUrl("https://www.google.com/accounts/OAuthAuthorizeToken");
  oAuthConfig.setConsumerKey("anonymous");
  oAuthConfig.setConsumerSecret("anonymous");

  // Setup optional parameters to point request at OAuthConfigService.  The "twitter"
  // value matches the argument to "addOAuthService" above.
  var options =
    {
      "oAuthServiceName" : "youtube",
      "oAuthUseToken" : "always"
    };

  var result = UrlFetchApp.fetch("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/default/favorites?v=2&alt=json", options);
  var o  = Utilities.jsonParse(result.getContentText());
  Logger.log(o)
}

The first time you run the script, it should request access from your YouTube account…

The next step is to work out what to pull from Youtube, and how to actually store it in the spreadsheet…

PS a couple more Youtube snippets of interest:
- YouTube documentation wizard: customise your YouTube API documentation view
- interactive YouTube API explorer

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to visit the F1 Marussia Virgin Racing factory at Dinnington, near Sheffield, as a result of “winning” a luck dip competition run via GoMotorSport (part of a series of National Motorsport week promotions being run by the F1 teams based in the UK).

[Thanks to @markhendy for the pic...]

Thanks to Finance Director Mark Hendy and engineer Shakey for the insight into the team’s operations:-)

Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll try to pick up on a few of the things I learned from the tour on the F1DataJunkie blog, tying them in to the corresponding technical regulations and other bits and pieces, but for now, here are some of the noticings I came away with…

- the engines aren’t that big, weighing 90kg or so and looking small than the engine in my own car…

- wheels are slotted onto the axles using a 3 pin mount on the front and a six(?) pin mount on the rear. (The engines are held on using a 6(?) point fixing.)

- the drivers aren’t that heavy either, weight wise (not that we met either of the drivers: neither Timo Glock nor Jerome D’Ambrosio are frequent visitors to the Dinnington factory, where the team’s cars are prepared fro before, and overhauled after, each race…): 70 kg or so. With cars prepared to meet racing weight regulations to a tolerance of 0.5kg or so, a large mixed grill and a couple of pints can make a big difference… (Hmm, I guess it would be easy enough to calculate the “big dinner weight effect” penalty on laptime?!)

I’m not sure if this was a “right-handed vs left-handed spanner” remark, but a comment was also made that the adhesive sponsor sticker can have a noticeable effect on the car’s aerodynamics as the corners become unstuck and start to flap. (Which made me wonder, of that is the case, is the shape of stickers taken into account? Is a leading edge on a label with a point/right angled corner rather than a smooth curve likely to come unstuck more easily, for example?!) Cars also need repainting every few races (stripping back to the carbon, and repainting afresh) because of pitting and chipping and other minor damage than can affect smooth airflow.

- side impact tubes are an integral part of the safety related design of the car:

- to track the usage of tyres during a race weekend, an FIA official scans a barcode on each tyre as it is used on the car:

The data junkie in me in part wonders whether this data could be made available in a timely fashion via the Pirelli website (or a Pirelli gadget on each team’s website) – or would that me giving away too much race intelligence to the other teams? That way, we could get an insight into the tyre usage over the course weekend…

- IT plays an increasingly important part of the the pit garage setup; local area networks (cabled and wifi?) are set up by each team for the weekend, the data engineers sitting behind the screen and viewing area in the garage (rather than having a fixed set up in one of the 5(?) trucks that attends each race.).

- the cars are rigged up with 60 or sensors; there is only redundancy on throttle and clutch sensors. Data analysis is in part provided through engineers provided by parts suppliers (McLaren Electronics, who supply the car’s ECU (and telemetry box(?)) provide a dedicated person(?) to support the team; data analysis is, in part, carried out using the Atlas (9?) Advanced Telemetry Linked Acquisition System from McLaren Electronic Systems. Data collected during a stint is transmitted under encryption back to the the pits, as well as being logged on the car itself. A full data dump is available to the team and the FIA scrutineers via an umbilical/wired connection when the car is pitted.

UST Global, one of the teams partners, also provide 3(?) data analysts to support the team during a race (presumably using UST Global’s “Race Management System”?).

- for design and testing, weekly reporting is required that conforms to a trade-off between the number of hours per week that each team can spend on wind tunnel testing (60 hours per week) and and CFD (“can’t find downforce”;-) simulation (40 teraflops per week). My first impression there was that efficient code could effectively mean more simulation testing?! (CFD via CSC? CSC expands relationship with Marussia Virgin Racing, doubling computing power for the team’s 2011 formula 1 season, or are things set to change with the replacement of Nick Wirth by Pat Symonds…?)

- the resource restriction agreement also limits the number of people who can work on the chassis. For a race weekend, teams are limited to 50 (47?) people. We were given a quick run down of at least (8?) engineer roles assigned to each car, but I forget them…

So – that’s a quick summary of some of the things I can remember off the top of my head…

…but here are a couple of other things to note that may be of interest…

Marussia Virgin are making the most of their Virgin partnership over the Silverstone race weekend with a camping party/Virgin Experience at Stowe School (Silverstone Weekend) and a hook-up with Joe Saward’s “An Audience With Joe“… (If you don’t listen to @sidepodcast’s An Aside With Joe podcast series, you should…;-)

The team has also got en education thing going with race ticket sweeteners for folk signing up to the course: Motorsport Management Online Course.

I can’t help thinking there may be a market for a “hardcore fans” course on F1 that could run over a race season and run as an informal, open online course… I still don’t really know how a car works, for example ;-)

Anyway – that’s by the by: thanks again to the GoMotorsport and the Marussia Virgin Racing team (esp. Mark Hendy and Shakey) for a great day out :-)

PS I think the @marussiavirgin team are trying to build up their social media presence too… to see who they’re listening to, here’s how their friends connect:

;-)

Some threads that I can see tangling:

• as Google starts to fight back against content farms such as Demand Media (e.g. New York Times on Google’s War on Nonsense), the Digger seems keen to get into education: Murdoch signals push into education;
• for a long time I’ve imagined some sort of sensemaking spectrum that leads from news stories, through analysis and feature articles, to a more academic take on subject (if I can get my act together, I’d like to try to pull a workshop together in the Autumn between media and education folk to look at this…); I’m not necessarily suggesting a bigger role for “celebrity academics”, more a consideration of how academics can make content available to the media to add depth and deepened engagement to a story, and how the media can provide timeliness and news hooks to education as a way of adding contextual relevance. Here are two short (2 minute) takes on it, one from Martin Bean, the OU VC, in hist ALT-C 2010 keynote, and the other from Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, on the Radio 4 Media Show:
  • Martin Bean, ALT-C 2010 Keynote

  • Alan Rusbridger, on BBC R4′s The Media Show

• the OU starts a new sort of campaign: Youtube learning campaigns, such as this one on The History of English…

So where’s all this going? And what role might openly licensed content created by academics as part of their daily duties have to play in it?

“A booktalk in the broadest terms is what is spoken with the intent to convince someone to read a book.” Wikipedia

Whilst putting together yesterday’s post about personal art collections online (for a wider take on this, see Mia Ridge’s The rise of the non-museum (and death by aggregation), which offers all manner of food for thought around personal collection building…), I started thinking again about how we might use recorded discussions or book talks focussing on particular books as a component in the “content scaffolding” around works that might be used as resources in an informal learning context.

(For an earlier foray in to the book talk world, see my post on BBC “In Our Time” Reading List using Linked Data.)

So the (really simple and obvious) idea is this (and I fully appreciate other sites out there may already exist that do this: if so, please let me know in the comments): how about we build a lookup service that allows you to search by author, book title, ISBN (or cross ISBN), and it returns details for the book as well as links to audio or video recordings of book talks around the book.

I’ve started trying to cobble together a few resources around this, setting up (a not yet complete set of) scrapers (in various states of disrepair) on Scraperwiki to collate books and book talk audio links from:

• TechNation (scraper)
• Authors@Google (scraper) [only author names? No book info? Maybe if the date of upload was captured we could guess at the book tour from the scheduling of it?]
• BBC Radio 4′s A Good Read (scraper)
• BBC Radio 4′s Book Club (scraper)
• BBC Radio 4′s Start The Week (scraper)
• BBC Radio 4′s In Our Time (scraper) [okay, this isn't strictly discussing books; but it is abut ideas and there are links to books in the programme notes]
• Philosophy Bites (scraper) [again, not about books per se, but a good context for conversational sensemaking around ideas contained in easily linked to books on the topic written by the author?]
• [probably untold other podcasts...]
• Guardian Books podcast
• BBC Combined book related podcasts

It might also be appropriate to try to pull in “quality” book reviews* to annotate book listings, given that part of my idea at least is to find ways of enriching reading book references with discussion around them that can help folk make sense of the big ideas contained within the book, as well as maybe encouraging them to buy the book (the all required sustainability model: in this case, Amazon referral fees! Note that several of the sites use Amazon referrals as part of their own sustainability model. So it would only be fair to use their affiliate codes at least part of the time if their playable audio content was embedded on the site (even if that content is openly licensed… Share and share alike, right?! That is, trickle back a portion of any income you do make off the work of others, even if it is openly licensed for commercial use;-)

Another strand to all of this, of course, is sensemaking annotations around books pulled from “OERs” (what is is about education that makes the sector want its content to be somehow regarded as “special” and deserving of all sorts of qualification?!;-)

*Maybe the Guardian Platform API or one of the New York Times APIs could play a role here?

So, as ever, I’ve made a start, and as ever, that’ll probably be the end of it…. Sigh… Nice thought while it lasted though…

PS if I were to do next steps, it would probably to take the scraped data and try to normalise it in some ad hoc way in a triple store, maybe on the Talis platform? Note that in the current incarnation, some of the scraped BBC data contains multiple book references in a single record, and thise should be spearated out; also note that a lot of book references are informal (author/title), though I did manage to grab ISBNs (I think?!) from the IT COnversations/Tech Nation pages.

PPS In passing, I note that some of the older archived episodes of A Good Read have been split into chapters covering the different books reviewed in the programme? Was this some sort of experimental enrichment, or just the start of a more general roll out of chapterisation…?

A few months ago, the art discovery website Artfinder appeared on the scene, providing a place to go to view art (online) from galleries around the world, build your own collections, receive recommendations about other artworks you might like to see (and maybe go and visit for real) and so on. A “Magic Tour” feature allows you to select three art works you like from sets of four, and then view a personalised art collection based on recommendations derived from your selection. Where quality prints of a work are available, there is an option to buy the print (for example, via MemoryPrints).

A couple of other related things that have crossed my radar over the course of the year include the Google Art Project, which offers very high definition reproductions of artworks from galleries around the world, and the JISC funded OpenART project, “a partnership between the University of York, the Tate and technical partners, Acuity Unlimited, will design and expose linked open data for an important research dataset entitled ‘The London Art World 1660-1735′”.

Today, I noticed the launch of a new BBC site, Your Paintings [announcement], which offers you the ability to create art collections, locate artworks by physical gallery location and so on… Hmmmm… (As yet, the URLs don’t seem to support content negotiation as a result of adding a .json or .xml suffix to pircture or gallery page; that is, as yet, the service doesn’t appear to be offering linkable data (hyperdata?) views over the content).

There was a time when Microsoft used to be charged with unfairly influencing the market, announcing it was about to release some feature or product that a rival was trying to market, effectively stifling competition through brand and market dominance. If you read the tech blogs, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, et al. currently find themselves in a regular situation where the services, applications or features they release are heralded as being likely to wipe out competition in a niche discovered, created, or developed by a startup elsewhere (only in many cases it doesn’t quite work out that way…Bit.ly surviced Twitter’s shortener, Google Buzz threatened no-one, Facebook Places or Google Latitude haven’t squashed Foursquare, etc.).

The BBC has itself faced challenges regarding “anticompetitive”/fair trading behaviour, for example in local online news (local news video), catchup services/internet TV (Canvas) or (BBC Jam).

Now I’m generally a fan of the BBC, but I do wonder what additional value Your Paintings brings, especially given that it’s not apparently being launched with any additional technical capacity building features (i.e. it’s not (yet?) making metadata freely available for others to build on, though a couple of recent tweets suggest this may be on the timeline…)?

Having come across aNobii today (via @maireadoconnor), a service that offers “an online reading community built by readers for readers allowing you to shelve, find and share books”, I wonder: is this another area where the BBC could just “step in”, presumably as a way of building community around the wide variety of programming it offers that have good hooks in to books?

[Disclaimer: I've ranted before about the BBC not making more use of structured markup around book identifiers, but if they were to get into reading groupsm this would presumably provide the technical underpinnings...? (e.g. BBC "In Our Time" Reading List using Linked Data.) So I maybe should be careful what I wish for...]

So the point of this post? Just to note my confusion about what it is the BBC actually does, and how it does it… I know that it’s not just about the telly and the radio, but I’m not sure what it is about when it comes to the web?

And it’s not just confusion about the BBC’s role. It also extends to the public facing role of the OU, which I personally view as having more a “public service education” remit than the rest of the UK HE sector (whether this is a view than can survive the increasingly businesslike culture of higher education I don’t know…). In other words: to what extent should the OU be doing more in the way of education related online public service broadcasting?

PS so I wonder:

How much has the BBC allocated to its opening salvo on a Your Paintings AdWords campaign…?

As the focus for this week’s episode [airs live Tues 21/6/11 at 19.32 UK time, or catch it via the podcast] in the OU co-produced season of programmes on openness with Click (radio), the BBC World Service radio programme formerly known as Digital Planet, we’re looking at one or two notions of diversity…

If you’re a follower of pop technology, over the last week or two you will probably have already come across Eli Pariser’s new book, The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You, or his TED Talk on the subject:

Eli Pariser, :The Filter Bubble”, TED Talks

It could be argued that this is the Filter Bubble in action… how likely is it, for example, that a randomly selected person on the street would have heard of this book?

To support the programme, presenter Gareth Mitchell has been running an informal experiment on the programmes Facebook page: Help us with our web personalisation experiment!! The idea? To see what effect changing personalisation settings on Google has on a Google search for the word “Platform”. (You can see results of the experiment from Click listeners around the world on the Facebook group wall… Maybe you’d like to contribute too?)

It might surprise you to learn that Google results pages – even for the same search word – do not necessarily always give the same results, something I’ve jokingly referred to previously as “the end of Google Ground Truth”, but is there maybe a benefit to having very specifically focussed web searches (that is, very specific filter bubbles)? I think in certain circumstances there may well be…

Take education, or research, for example. Sometimes, we want to get the right answer to a particular question. In times gone by, we might have asked a librarian for help, if not to such a particular book or reference source, at least to help us find one that might be appropriate for our needs. Nowadays, it’s often easier to turn to a web search engine than it is to find a librarian, but there are risks in doing that: after all, no-one really knows what secret sauce is used in the Google search ranking algorithm that determines which results get placed where in response to a particular search request. The results we get may be diverse in the sense that they are ranked in part by the behaviour of millions of other search engine users, but from that diversity do we just get – noise?

As part of the web personalisation/search experiment, we found that for many people, the effects of changing personalisation settings had no noticeable effect on the first page of results returned for a search on the word “platform”. But for some people, there were differences… From my own experience of making dozens of technology (and Formula One!) related searches a day, the results I get back for those topics hen I’m logged in to Google are very different to when I have disabled the personalised reslults. As far as my job goes, I have a supercharged version of Google that is tuned to return particular sorts of results – code snippets, results from sources I trust, and so on. In certain respects, the filter bubble is akin to my own personal librarian. In this particular case, the filter bubble (I believe), works to my benefit.

Indeed, I’ve even wondered before whether a “trained” Google account might actually be a valuable commodity: Could Librarians Be Influential Friends? And Who Owns Your Search Persona?. Being able to be an effective searcher requires several skills, including the phrasing of the search query itself, the ability to skim results and look for signals that suggest a result is reliable, and the ability to refine queries. (For a quick – and free – mini-course on how to improve your searching, check out the OU Library’s Safari course.) But I think it will increasingly rely on personalisation features…which means you need to have some idea about how the personalisation works in order to make the most of its benefits and mitigate the risks.

To take a silly example: if Google search results are in part influenced by the links you or your friends share on Twitter, and you follow hundreds of spam accounts, you might rightly expect your Google results to be filled with spam (because your friends have recommended them, and you trust your friends, right? That’s one of the key principles of why social search is deemed to be attractive.)

As well as the content we discover through search engines, content discovered through social networks is becoming of increasing importance. Something I’ve been looking at for some time is the structure of social networks on Twitter, in part as a “self-reflection” tool to help us see where we might be situated in a professional social sense based on the people we follow and who follow us. Of course, this can sometimes lead to incestuous behaviour, where the only people talking about a subject are people who know each other.

For example, when I looked at the connection of people chatting on twitter about Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace documentary, I was surpised to see it defined a large part of the UK’s “technology scene” that I am familiar with from my own echochamber…

#awobmolg echo chamber

So what do I mean by echochamber? In the case of Twitter, I take it to refer to a group of people chatting around a topic (as for example, identified by a hashtag) who are tightly connected in a social sense because they all follow one another anyway… (To see an example of this, for a previous OU/Click episode, I posted a simple application (it’s still there), to show the extent to which people who had recently used the #bbcClickRadio hashtag on Twitter were connected.)

As far as diversity goes, if you follow people who only follow each other, then it might be that the only ideas you come across are ideas that keep getting recycled by the same few people… Or it might be the case that a highly connected group of people shows a well defined special interest group on a particular topic….

To get a feel for what we can learn about our own filter bubbles in Twitterspace, I had a quick look at Gareth Mitchell’s context (@garethm on Twitter). One of the dangers of using public apps is that anyone can do this sort of analysis of course, but the ethics around my using Gareth as a guinea pig in this example is maybe the topic of another programme…!

So, to start with, let’s see how tightly connected Gareth’s Twitter friends are (that is, to what extent do the people Gareth follows on Twitter follow each other?):

The social graph showing how @garethm’s friends follow each other

The nodes represent people Gareth follows, and they have been organised into coloured groups based on a social network analysis measure that tries to identify groups of tightly interconnected individuals. The nodes are sized according to a metric known as “Authority”, which reflects the extent to which people are followed by other members of the network.

A crude first glance at the graph suggests a technology (purple) and science (fluorine-y yellowy green) cluster to me, but Gareth might be able to label those groups differently.

Something else I’ve started to explore is the extent to which other people might see us on Twitter. One way of doing this is to look at who follows you; another is to have a peek at what lists you’ve been included on, along with who else is on those lists. Here’s a snapshot of some of the lists (that actually have subscribers!) that Gareth is listed on:

The flowers are separate lists. People who are on several lists are caught on the spiderweb threads connecting the list flowers… In a sense, the lists are filter bubbles defined by other people into which Gareth has been placed. To the left in the image above, we see there are a few lists that appear to share quite a few members: convergent filters?!

In order to try to looking outside these filter bubbles, we can get an overview of the people that Gareth’s friends follow that Gareth doesn’t follow (these are the people Gareth is likely to encounter via retweets from his friends):

Who @garethm’s friends follow that @garethm doesn’t follow…

My original inspiration for this was to see whether or not this group of people would make sense as recommendations for who to follow, but if we look at the most highly followed people, we see this may not actually make sense (unless you want to follow celebrities!;-)

Popular friends of Gareth’s that he doesn’t follow…

By way of a passing observation, it’s also worth noting that the approach I have taken to constructing the “my friends friends who aren’t my friends” graph tends to place “me” at the centre of the universe, surrounded by folk who are a just a a friend of a friend away…

For extended interviews and additional material relating to the OU/Click series on openness, make sure you visit Click (#bbcClickRadio) on OpenLearn.

This week saw the latest episode in the OU/BBC World Service Click (radio) co-produced season on openness, with a focus this week on privacy… You can hear an extended version of the discussion between entrepeneurial journalism and openness advocate, Jeff Jarvis, and professional contrarian, Andrew Keen: Privacy in a connected world

Unfortunately, the episode aired just too early to pick up up on this week’s “Who needs privacy?!” news, and in particular the new iPhone’s “secret” location logging behaviour: iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go; (find out how to see where your iPhone thinks you’ve been here: Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves); but the discussion is a great one, so I encourage you to listen to it…(I’ll be asking questions later!;-)

The programme also saw the launch of its new hashtag: #bbcClickRadio

Whilst the Digital PlanetClick twitter audience is still dwarfed by the Digital Planet Listeners’ Facebook group, I’m keen to see if we can try to grow it… one way might be to show who’s recently been tweeting about the programme, and encourage people to start following each other and chatting about the issues raised in the programme a little bit more – something Gareth Mitchell (@garethm) can now pick up on at least on the first airing, as Click now goes out live…. So to that end, I’m going to try to work up a special version of my Twtter friendviz application that shows connections between folk who’ve recently tweeted a particular term, and in this case, the #bbcClickRadio hashtag. To see the map, visit http://bit.ly/bbcclickradiocommunity.

As a tease, here’s a rather more polished version of a map I grabbed recently…

(Unfortunately, the live one is unlikely to ever look like this!)

PS I wonder if the investigation into the iPhone tracking was inspired by the recent story about German politician Malte Spitz who managed to obtain a copy of the data his phone provider had stored about his location… Zeit Online: Tell-all telephone (If you want to play with the data, it’s available from there…)