The key motivator of Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. [...] And it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.
This is Isaac Mao in the essay Sharism: A Mind Revolution that he wrote for Joi Ito’s book Freesouls. While I like the music — I actually hum it myself every now an then — I find the lyrics hard to sing.
Don’t get me wrong: there are almost 2,000 of pieces of work that I am already sharing in this website, ranging from the simplest blog post to the latest version of a learning material, and including slides for presentations, articles, book chapters and so. Everything is (at this very moment) under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which has not stopped third parties from asking for permission to create derivative works, which has always been granted too.
The reasons for behaving like that are the ones that Isaac Mao is depicting in his essay, and many more, including both my own philosophy regarding the nature of the outputs derived from public funding or the ethos of scientists and their role in society. But this behaviour, while fostered by ideologies, is actually been made possible because my time is already paid: partly by tax payers, partly by students enrolled in my (public) university (tax payers too, after all).
When I wake up in the morning, my mortgage is already being paid. With that in mind, I have plenty of room for putting ideologies into practice.
Isaac Mao speaks about the positive results of Sharism:
You get comments and feedback in general that enrich your work.
You get access to all the other stuff being shared.
Anything you share can be forwarded, circulated and republished, which implies you get recognition and (namely) social status.
What you do, if shared, has a meaning not only for you, but for the whole of society.
But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.
This works 100% for me. As a scholar, a (mostly) publicly-funded scholar, this works 100%, especially the happiness part. I mean it. Since I began to blog in 2003, I only got benefits from sharing. Sometimes even in cash.
But.
I’ve done my homework (see below). I’ve read what I ought to. And still can’t I see how Sharism — or, closely related, a hacker ethic — can be applicable to the whole economy the way Mao’s portraying. Yes, we’ve got (some) examples in the free software community and (much less) examples in the open/free culture movement. But still, in a global economy where money comes from capturing the added value of an output (where “capturing” is a very broad term for a very complex set of practices, most of them related to restrained access to that output), Sharism will have hard times when it comes to paying a mortgage, which is paid in actual legal tender.
I will definitely bring all my questions on the table with the goal in mind to see whether we can shed some light on the many open topics that, in my opinion, Sharism still has to clarify.
Recommended readings
I previously said that I had done my homework. What follows is a brief collection of readings which I find very relevant for our discussion here. Enjoy.
A shift has happened one we can attend an event and everyone has a camera with which they are taking their own pictures, besides the official photographer. Everyone becomes a creator.
on the other hand, the Internet brings any kind of content to our homes, so not only the idea of the creator becomes drastically changed, but also the idea of space becomes irrelevant.
Feedback is enabled between (creative) people anytime, anywhere. The sole condition: openness. There are plenty of technologies that enable feedback at a very low financial cost, low risk, low maintenance and low costs of organization.
Openness can be understood in many ways:
Having access to the content.
Having access to the code of the content (relevant when multimedia).
Being able to change or contribute to the content.
Having the possibility to take the content away and embed or syndicate it elsewhere.
Not only about open content, but also about open structures.
Having the ability to create new platforms or sites very quickly, with most flexibility, with low technological thresholds.
Understanding the process how things are achieved, and not only accessing the final outcomes.
Having access to the source, data of the content.
But it is not about how the Web is changing Education, but how Education is changing the Web.
And part of this “educating the Web” includes the debate around Net Neutrality, with which Education has a close relationship.
Repositories of Open Educational Content: cases and paradigms. Ma Antònia Huertas.
Historically, the question has been how to get quality educational content that is available, reliable and that can be reused.
Nowadays availability might not be more an issue, maybe not the possibility of reusing, but reliability is still an unsolved matter.
Some of the “answers” to the question are:
Distributed open repositories.
Tools for the user to search, create, catalogue, publish.
MeRLí is a catalogue of digital educational resources developed by the Education Department of the Generalitat de Catalunya [Catalan Government]. Its aim is to thel p the educational community in cataloguing, indexing and searching learning materials.
Search engines are a norm amongst repositories, and it does an intensive usage of metadata that describe the content of the educational resources.
The community — though quite a passive one — is also a core component of the repository.
Content belongs to an educational curriculum, features its life cycle (creation, validation, modification history).
Edu3.cat is also a Catalan repository, but this time featuring only audiovisual content and with quite a restrictive source of content, mainly academic institutions.
The repository has over 7,000 learning objects integrated according to curricula, an own search engine and a certified process of acceptance of the learning content in the repository.
Unlike the previous two, Proyecto Agrega is a federation of institutional educational repositories around Spain, mainly belonging to regional governments. The good thing of Agrega is that it renders the individual repositories interoperable and integrable, so that searching or browsing becomes easier and more transparent for the end user.
The platform, notwithstanding, enables specific users to create and upload new content to the repository. The problem is that though the technology is a very advanced one, the community of active users (i.e. creators) is so small that the repository is almost empty — that is, besides what is syndicated from third parties’ repositories.
The critical elements of repositories are the users, not the technology. The weak links of the chain are the submitters, the managers, the curators and the end-users.
Open Educational Practices and Resources. Revisiting the OLCOS Roadmap 2012 César Córcoles.
The roadmap made (2007) several recommendations so that educational institutions could open their resources and apply them to their mainstream activities. What has happened with the recommendations of the OLCOS Roadmap for 2012?
Promote open education partnerships: there have been advances, but arguably not enough. Still closeness is the norm. Same with open educational resources.
Support the development and use of state-of-the art open access resources has quite often been translated on investing on lots of technology and little on training and usage. A bias towards sexy technology.
Public-private partnerships: still very difficult to achieve, especially because the public sector (e.g. Universities) are not in line with the pace of times. This has also been a barrier to switching away from teacher-centred knowledge transfer.
Sharing and reusing has also not been accomplished. Maybe because, most times, people rather create their own content instead of looking what is out of their own institution walls.
Of course, intellectual property and copyright have, definitely, been a huge barrier for the adoption of open educational resources and practices. Indeed the topic has neither been seriously or constructively addressed nor has the industry made any approach or move towards understanding.
Teachers are having hard times using open educational practices to help learners acquire competences for the knowledge society, partly because these competences are rapidly changing, and thus it is difficult to tell which content applies to what (changing) competences.
A key factor is the shift from the “know how” to the “know who”, and open educational practices should be able to support collaborative learning processes and learning communities. This should certainly be a very important reason for institutions to support openness.
From the students’ point of view, openness should be translated into ePortfolios, accessible to third parties.
César here presents the making of Curriculum de estándares web Opera, the Spanish (and Catalan) version of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, which was published with an open license and, thus, enabled its translation and reusage for educational purposes. The content has proven successful not only for educational purposes, but for a broad community of people interested in the field of Web Standards and that has found in the new version a resource for their own purposes.
The part of the “Preacher 2.0″: it’s not about technology, but methodology; open knowledge, the power of networks and the versatility of blogs, etc.
We are witnessing the convergence of our personnae and our environment, in part through mobility, augmented reality, etc.
The starting point, before exiting or circumventing institutions, is to operate a switch and make people (teachers, students) to work not in the framework of the textbook, but in the framework of tasks, of projects.
The profile of the (Aníbal’s) students is secondary education students that need studying from home: elite sportsmen, housewifes, etc. Thus, lots of new content has been created to adapt them to the new methodologies deployed to meet the needs of these students (circa 30,000). The repository will feature circa 2,000 learning objects by the end of the course 2010-2011.
An important realization is that, when the student is put in the centre of the educational methodology, the learning material becomes not irrelevant but an accessory: by no means the educational material is an important part of the equation. Indeed, the material is frequently updated and complemented with other materials and educational resources: the learning material is no more the central monolith around which the educational process goes around.
If the content is not the centre — though still important, of course — it is because the new centre is the student and working based on tasks and projects.
Taking 30,000 students as the base, it has been calculated that the average cost per student of providing them with all the open educational content they need is 1.50 €.
Some issues/problems:
Openness requires team-working. Individualism is not an option. And team-working requires hard work and commitment.
Assessment is extremely slow. While people have feedback of their actions almost immediately in their daily (digital) lives, the educational system provides them with feedback once a year at the end of the course. This has to be addressed.
Copyright still a hard barrier to overcome.
Openness has to be an institutional decision.
Public funding should absolutely imply openness.
Educational environments should have their own open licenses or legal frameworks to ease openness, authorship recognition, etc.
We should measure how users are doing, not how products are doing. Assessment of people, not products.
We have to explore how to assess learning performance with the same tools that learning takes place. E.g. we cannot teach with Internet in the classroom and make exams without it.
Encourage group- or team-work.
Learning by doing enables changing tasks, contents, syllabuses, etc. extremely easy.
Even if petition initiatives are interesting, there still is a very tiny minority that participate in any kind of petitioning, be it online or offline. Indeed, people do have the right to write letters to their governments or their representatives and actually nobody does.
[the speaker assumed that everyone at the audience had read his paper, included in the book of proceedings that was delivered yesterday, and based his speech upon that assumption — I wonder how many people could easily follow his reflections and without the help of visual support...]
Communication without borders Evgeniya Boklage
The political blogosphere is about political blogs dealing with political issues, from a professional or non-professional point of view.
Public sphere: open communication system, based on exchange of opinions, free type of participation, and that includes three functions: transparency (input), validation (throughput) and orientation (output).
Transparency requires openness. But transparency is not about journalism transparency, as transparent journalism can be embedded in a non-transparent (political) system.
Is the blogosphere a significant asset to the public sphere or is it information overload? Is the blogosphere citizen empowerment or is it merely a symbolic tool?
How can blogosphere enhance transparency?
Media-watchdogs
Shed light to obscure topics
Observation of mass media, the political system and the society
Navigation, creation of an embedding context, providing additional materials, raise awareness on immediate and noticeable impact
Access to the public discourse
A tribune for NGOs, advocacy groups and politically driven citizens
Throwing the Sheep’s Long Tail: Open Access Noella Edelmann and Peter Parycek
New Journal of eDemocracy (JeDEM), which will be an open access journal.
We can find a close relationship between open access publishing and e-democracy and transparency.
We can now publish all the information we can without anyone’s permission.
We have to force a policy change where openness is the default, and closeness the option you might choose.
Open Access to Research: Changing researcher behaviour through university and funder mandates Stevan Harnad, Université du Quebec à Montréal & University of Southampton
The common point between open access and democracy has a good example in Wikipedia’s outcome: though the mechanism of meritocracy is not that good. In Wikipedia, the criterion is not truth but notability. If everyone says that cows fly, this is what the Wikipedia will say, even if it is not true. We need some sort of mechanism, of metrics, to measure feedback. And open access can be a good base to that.
Open access means free, immediate, online access to the 2.5 million annual research articles that are published in all 25,000 peer-reviewed journals in all scholarly scientific disciplines. It is not about removing peer-review but, on the contrary, to bring access to scientific outcomes validated, legitimated, credited, certified by this peer-review system.
It is important to note that none of the authors of the 2.5 million articles wants money for their articles: it is attention and feedback they’re asking for. this is a radical difference from other authors that make a living from writing. And that is why open access focuses on scientific publications.
Other knowledge outputs as books, textbooks, magazine articles, newspaper articles, music, video, software, other “knowledge”, data, unrefereed preprints are just not a priority, because they are not peer-reviewed and because these are not all author give-aways, written only for usage and impact, or because the author’s choice to self-archive can only be encouraged, not required in all cases (the cases of data and preprints).
Two ways to provide open access.
Green OA: once the article is accepted, the pre-print referee-accepted version is made open.
Gold OA: open the published version, desirably the journal itself.
Reasons for open access: To maximise the uptake, usage, applications of a publication. Research open on the web has 25-50% more impact, and the better the article, the higher the impact of making that article open.
Surprisingly, despite the benefits still only a tiny fraction of researchers provide green access to their papers, and the only successful way so far has been mandates, mandates to provide green access enforced by funders and/or universities. Indeed, most researchers are for open access, but they just claim lack of time to do so, which means they would not oppose a mandate provided it came with the necessary resources to put it into practice.
Sample of candidate OA-era metrics: citations, CiteRank (like PageRank), co-citations, downloads, citations and downloads correlations, hub/authority index, chronometrics (latency, longevity), book index, endogamy/exogamy, links, tags, commentaries, journal impact factor, h-index (and variants), co-authorships, publication counts, number of publishing years, semiometrics (latent semantic indexing, text overlap, etc.), research funding, students, prizes, etc.
Discussion
Q: what is then the future of journal publishing? A: for the time being, even in the areas where OA is higher, there has been no journal cancellations. Once everything is open access, many journals will have to change their business models, and only peer-review will remain: no archiving, no paper publishing, no online publishing, etc. And they will only need a small fraction of the money to be sustainable, and they’ll get if from funders, governments, universities, authors or whatever.
Parallel session: Trends and advances before the digital divide: assessment systems and good practices Moderator: Concepción Colomer Revuelta, Subdirector at the Oficina de Planificación Sanitaria and Director del Observatorio de Salud de la Mujer del Ministerio de Sanidad y Política Social
Digital and informational divides in a context of digital, cultural, cognitive and generational convergence Marcelo D’Agostino, Consultant in Knowledge Management, Organización Panamericana de la Salud
Marcelo D’Agostino believes that the digital digital will shrink, necessarily, as the Internet won’t make steps backwards [he seems to forget that the digital divide is actually widening, especially if we take into account the quality of access, namely, broadband access, and what you can or cannot do with that different quality of access].
Advise to bridge the digital divide:
Don’t be intimidated by technical jargon
Don’t be afraid of technology
Nobody is an expert in everything
Trust first your capacity and then apply technologies
Be careful where you look for information
Benefits of ICTs for Public Health: a better link between patients and professionals; better and life-long training.
Open access to health and medical information: a challenge before the digital divide Helena Martín Rodero, Head of the Sección Bibliotecas Biosanitarias de la Universidad de Salamanca
Raghavendra Gadagkar: open-access more harm than good in developing world (published in Nature, comment by Peter Suber) stating the rich world patronising the poor world, in the sense that rich ones might be more interested in poor ones reading rather than publishing.
We are witnessing a crisis in the system of scientific diffusion, that has lead to the creation of the Open Access movement and several international declarations to foster scientific publishing in open access journals (gold access) or scientific self-archiving in open access repositories (green access).
Open access is compatible with peer-review, professional quality, prestige, preservation, intellectual property, profit, priced add-ons and print (originally in Open access to the scientific journal literature, by Peter Suber.
Access to knowledge will necessarily help to bridge the digital divide, and open access publications and repositories is a way to enable a better access to knowledge.
Web 2.0 and Medicine Dídac Margaix Arnal, Librarian at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
New generations (digital natives) have been born with new technologies and these are no strange to them. Have different skills towards technology and information, which they manage in different ways.
We might be in an age similar to the Renaissance, where technology feeds cultural and social change, and culture and society feed technological change.
Three kinds of Web 2.0 sites
The web as the platform: use the web instead of the desktop (e.g. Zoho)
Remix the web: use the web to mix different content (e.g. Google Maps)
The social web: it is users what counts, not visits. Users add value to the site (e.g. YouTube)
Medicine 2.0: use of a set of web tools by health professionals applying the principles of open source, open access, etc. It is different from e-Medicine, that is applying ICTs in health issues. There has been an inflexion point that has put humans into technology, from just ICTs to the dimension of community. It is a matter not of technology but of participation.
Some factors:
“Suppormediation”: support and mediation by non-professionals (in Spanish: Apomediación)
Collaboration
Transparency
There increasingly are websites that provide health information on the Internet. We should prescribe more information than pills (or, at least, as much information as pills).
Summing up: new agents, new tools, collaboration, personalization, training.
Internet and Health David Novillo Ortiz, Agencia de Calidad del Sistema Nacional de Salud. Ministerio de Sanidad y Política social
Related to health, increasingly people get their information from the Internet and less from TV, and more from blogs. In general, e-mail, search engines and social networking sites have entered with strength into the information landscape.
Search for health information in the Internet has gone from 19% in 2003 to 54% in 2008 (Spain, % of total Internet users). There is a gender gap where women score 10 points higher than men, probably due to their role as the person at home that cares for the family members.
In April 2007, the same search terms in 4 different search engines produced only 0.6% of overlap (only 0.6% of all results were the same in the 4 search engines). We should be careful about that, as the information that search engines produce is, by any means, the same one ever.
Indeed, we trust more the people we know that the ones we don’t, that’s why Google Social Search might be adding a lot of value as it will bring personal context to people’s searches.
On the other hand, we can access certified/verified health websites whose information is backed by the reputation of the institutions that publish those websites. E.g. excelenciaclinica.net, a metasearch engine that crawls the best health websites in Spanish.
I am professor at the School of Law and Political Science of the Open University of Catalonia, and researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute and the eLearn Center of that university.
