Blogging for Bioscience

The recent start-up meeting gave all the project managers plenty of information to condense but in amongst this was a slight concern about the repository in the middle. JorumOpen is to be the vehicle for OER resources (and our projects are to shake down the problem areas as a sort of technical “crash-dummy”, not a pedagogical one) and we would obviously like to start a core bioscience community through our OER contributions. Jorum have quickly provided an upload service for JorumOpen but without some way of finding what has been uploaded we do not know if we have made the best of it - it’s like throwing it down a well and hearing no splash. Anyway, this has now been resolved - we are to get access to a test service from September. Bioscience is volunteering our project materials as samples (those that are already prepared for OER release)

Other matters from the startup (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/startupmeeting090609.aspx) I took home were;

1. The overall project goals - “To discover the issues” - needs to have a deliverable to the community, not just a social and technical challenge. I thought JISC left the subject centres with a fair amount of closure work to do as the final products have to be really useful to our community, not theoretically so. The seed has to be able to germinate.
2. The legal issues really need to be documented explicitly. Although many institutions will have no problem releasing small amounts on an semi-formal basis, winding this up to industrial scale would need a clear policy on OER. These projects should start the host institutions really thinking about the process. JISC legal are preparing materials and an OER toolkit may appear.
3. The Open University is making a better job of it than MIT in my opinion, even though MIT started OpenCourseware: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/ . I also hear they have secured considerable further funding since.
4. The gain is not just publicity for the host institution and academic but for the discipline itself. It needs a realistic framework to get contributions re-used and enhanced. However, protecting IPR looks complex. I see we now have a Minister for Higher Education and IP[Rights] so these are being linked at the highest level.
5. CETIS is still the best technical reference site (thanks Phil) and key developers write influential papers and blogs there. It needs to be bridged through to the disciplines collectively and this is where subject centres are essential translators. If we could get our community blogging then we would have better evidence to influence developments.
6. We did not get to hear enough about the other strands - the separate sessions lost an opportunity, although ours did raise some key priorities for our management.
7. Keep an eye on Cloudworks OER ‘clouds’ for discussions and ideas. e.g. http://cloudworks.open.ac.uk/node/1846
8. The Evaluation and Synthesis project will be working with the OER projects to discover more about practices and cultures within subjects, links between open curricula and open content and, finally, collective practices of content creation. I wrote a report about Bioscience habits called ‘Approaches to e-Learning in the Biosciences’ for our centre a few years ago to discover more about this as part of our DeL work. I don’t think my conclusions were too far off, although I have learned far more since.

Final plans and budgets have been returned to the Academy and I think we are now up and running. Looking forward to meeting our project partners towards the end of the month and discussing logistics. I have recieved a better breakdown of the content manifest from most as we will have to assess the volume of material in terms of its individual values as well as the sum of the parts. This is complicated.