A free education world explored in a fortress by the sea

Leave a reply

iCommons has a talent for holding its conferences in beautiful places. Last year it was Copacabana Beach in Rio. This year we met in Dubrovnik, in the Revelin fortress on the edge of the centuries-old city walls. Very different to Rio, but some similarities – an intensely blue Adriatic sea, muggy heat, a laid-back atmosphere. But there the similarities ended. Dubrovnik is very much a European city, perhaps even surprisingly so, given its location on the far edge of a Mediterranean culture. In some ways it feels more Germanic than Southern, with its pristine city walls in blond stone, impeccably restored after the war with Serbia and Montenegro, and its gleaming polished marble streets in the old town. But then there are the villas climbing steep hills behind the old town, the patches of brilliant colour from flowering trees, the grape vine pergolas over sea-facing terraces, the scent of pine resin over cafe tables and the olive green foliage of the islands – all this is decidedly southern.

The conference rooms in the Revelin fortress were all in blond stone, with vaulted stone ceilings, soft light and shadows. Ironical perhaps that this was the setting for an often passionate discussion about the nature of free culture, often anarchic, never boring. It is hard to capture the spirit of what was this year a diverse event, from deep intellectual discussion to presentations by free culture radicals, to the workshop sessions of the Open Education stream. This challenged the formal conference structure of the rest of the Summit, with its more rigid panel discussions, where expert opinions provided a framework of authority and response. Instead, the nature of Open Education was explored in what some speculated might be a subversive symbolic setting, the Lazar-house set on the rocks over Dubrovnik’s most fashionable beach.

The discussions led with gusto by Allen Gunn revealed a wide diversity of views from a global patchwork of people. What emerged was the capacity to reconcile the sometimes extreme dogmatic views about what constitutes Open Education, whether the dogmatism be free content, open source software, collaborative communities, or whatever. The workshop context allowed discussion of these diverging views and, above all, the emergence of a much more complex and pedagogically-informed
tapestry of the potential that could be offered by Open Education in a variety of geographical and educational contexts. It is much more than just content, the participants agreed. Also, they concurred, there has been too little attention paid
to informal education and lifelong learning, the possibilities offered for mature learners.

The process was sometimes anarchic – go to Steve Foersters blog on the speed-geeking session on the iCommons website, or look at the podcast of the workshop participants acting out open education as a flight of geese. As is familiar to many educationists, a collaborative workshopping process like this one can be playful, but the results are often more serious and complex that earnest discussion can be. Perhaps this is a model for future Commons conferencing (along the lines that I believe Sakai has taken). This has opened up a blog discussion on the iCommons site – it will be interesting to see where this leads.

The workshop participants commented rather acerbically that the panel discussion on Open Education held in the main stream of the conference did not contain one teacher. But was acknowledged was that this was the one stream that produced a
series of concrete recommendations and projects for tracking in iCommons 2008 in Tokio.

There is a plethora of blog articles on the new iCommons site – see the education track on the iCommons blog for a wide-ranging discussion of the issues.

Fleeing the sun – and customer service airline-style

Leave a reply

Modern travel can be disjunctive. From the rich gold of autumn Cape Town, here I am in the grey light of early spring in London. At first the leafless trees are startling, but one soon gets used to the starkness and begins to notice the signs of renewal – tulips briliant in thin sunshine at the Tate Britain, branches of blossom shining white against the grey of the terraced houses.

The transition is not made easier by lack of sleep – thanks to SAA. There is an extraordinary quirk of airline marketing that means that the more you pay for your ticket, the worse the seat that you get allocated.

I had to book at the last minute, as many business passengers do. So my ticket was not exactly cheap. I am also in that class of passenger that keeps the airline in business, as I am due to make another three intercontinental trips in the next few months. So what seat do I get allocated? An aisle seat, yes, that I grant them. But towards the back of the plane, right next to the galley, so that every five minutes throughout the night we were blinded by flashes of brilliant light as people came and went through the galley curtain.

Then there were the seats themselves. I remember the days of my youth when airline seats reclined right back, days when there was more space between the rows than there is now. Well, in this elderly Jumbo, some still did. The one in front of me did. But not mine. So I had a sardine sliver of space between my seat and the lavishly reclined seat in front of me. It was sheer torture.

Then there was the entertainment system that was so aged that the symbols on the buttons had rubbed off, making the choice of programme a matter of guess-work…

The reason I am complaining is that I had paid probably double what a lot of other passengers had paid. And they were the ones with the good seats – up front, or in the upstairs cabin. So, from a marketing point of view, what the airline does is give its lower-paying customers a double benefit. They get a substantial reduction in their ticket price and then they get to choose all the best seats.

So why pay full fare? What do you get for it? What is the airline offering its best customers, the business people who travel regularly and pay a chunk more than the once-off cut-price tourist? Can SAA explain?

The future of universities in a digital age

Leave a reply

The Academic Commons blog is running a story about a collaborative project in brainstorming what a university could look like in a digital age. From the blog article:


The folks at the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory aka HASTAChttp://hastac.org) have posted a draft of a paper entitled “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” The paper will evolve through online collaboration and conversations, and will be published in its final form as part of the Occasional Paper Series on Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

It is framed by the following proposition: “We are faced today by a pressing question: How do institutions–social, civic, educational–transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?”

This provocative and difficult question–What does a peer-to-peer learning institution look like and how does it differ from what we understand our traditional learning institutions to be?–is only part of what makes this project exciting.

This project looks as if it is bringing together a number of cutting edge players, so it is well worth visiting the blog and the site for the paper. It should certainly stimulate discussion about what a South African university could develop into. Given the diversity of our university communities and the very rapid rate of transformation we face, this kind of forward thinking could offer us a lot.

New business models for film rights – an iCommons blog on Jonathan Lethem

Leave a reply

I blogged this post for the iCommons blog, happy to find an established author experimenting with new ways of promoting film rights, creating opportunities for smaller, independent film-makers. Perhaps we could experiment with something similar to generate more films from the work of South African writers.

Here is the first paragraph of the iCommons blog:

I scan the Open Access and Creative Commons blogs regularly for new developments, but it is gratifying when news of a new venture in commons thinking comes not from the open community, but from industry sources. I was interested, therefore, to see this piece from the Publishers Lunch Newsletter, a lively daily commentary on the publishing industry written by publisher Michael Cader. By the way, Publisher’s Lunch is itself a very successful example of a mixed business model – it provides a free daily online newsletter and a longer and more detailed version in return for a very low subscription ($15 a month).
Subscribers get access to a directory of literary agents, a rights trading market, and a database of book reviews. The site carries
advertising, but I will give it a free advertisement – for anyone who wants the low-down on what goes on in this very secretive industry, from a lively voice, this is the place to go.

Read the rest here.

The State of the Nation 3: Journal publishing in South Africa – the green or gold route in the country of gold?

Leave a reply

Quite a spat has broken out in open Access circles about whether it would be better to take the ‘green route’ to open access mandating open repositories, or more effective to go for the ‘gold route’ of developing open access journals. Stevan Harnad was infuriated by Jan Velterop’s statement that ‘the “cure” of open access publishing is to be preferred to the “palliative” of self-archiving’ and has written an angry reponse. I have followed with interest the preceding, more considered, debate in Velterop’s blog, The Parachute and Harnad’s Open Access Archivangelism, because I am, like Velterop, a publisher by background and appreciate his intelligent ability to balance the need for access and the realities of publishing and because I admire Harnad’s intellect and passion for the cause of Open Access.

The debate made me step back and rethink my approach to green and gold (the colours of our national sports teams, by the way) in this major gold-producing country. The ‘green’ route seems to have become the accepted orthodoxy as was evidenced n the Bangalore workshop late last year, which produced the Bangalore Open Access Policy for Developing Nations. This makes sense, as it is quick and easy way of providing access to scholarship published in international journals that is otherwise often inaccessible in its country of origin. This means a win-win for the universities that push for publication in accredited journals for the sake of personal and institutional prestige. I have noted that there is also a considerable emphasis among the funding agencies on the need for repositories as the first and best way of providing access to developing country research.

However, the debate between Harnad and Velterop has made me think that, when it comes to the very particular case of Africa, should we not make the growth of open access journals our first priority? In a perverse way, Africa’s potential to leap the technology divide and adopt more radical transformational of scholarly dissemination could be helped by its very low profile in the existing publishing systems. In a world in which the use of ICTs is drastically altering modes of knowledge dissemination, and in which scholarly publishing looks to be thoroughly shaken up, there is a paradoxical advantage in the marginalisation of African scholarly publishing. This is due to the fact that Africa has a very limited investment in the traditional print-based scholarly publication system and this frees policy-makers to engage with new trends in ways that their more privileged counterparts min the North may be constrained from doing.

The recent lobbying efforts of the large journal publishers against open access policy initiatives in the USA, UK and Europe are evidence of the conservative power of entrenched commercial interests. (Richard Poynder analyses the impact of this phenomenon in the EU in an interesting and provocative blog, not to be missed – Open Access: the War in Europe.) The vested interests that are at stake are substantial: for example the EU Communication on its proposed Open Access policy estimates that, of the 2,000 scientific publishing houses globally, nearly 800 are based in Europe, publishing close to 50% of research articles worldwide. These scientific publishers employ 36,000 people in the EU plus 10,000 freelancers. This is a constituency that cannot be ignored by governments in those countries with substantial scientific publishing industries.

In the same way, in northern countries where the majority of scholarly output is channelled through the dominant journal system, there is a backward drag on the transition to open access journals (the ‘gold route’ to open access). In a transitional period it could well be that institutions will land up paying twice, supporting open access publication, yet still having to maintain subscriptions to toll-access journals. As a result, the conventional wisdom in open access circles seems to be that the most reliable way to create access to research knowledge, in the first instance, is to mandate deposit in open access repositories. This is what Stevan Harnad argues.

I would suggest that this is not necessarily the case in Africa, where scholarly publishing is under-developed and, moreover, is clearly marginalised and disadvantaged by the global systems for the ranking of scholarship. South Africa is by far and away the highest-profile African country represented in the ISI system both in terms of the number of South African journals listed in the ISI and the number of articles published in ISI journals. According to the important Report on a Strategic Approach to Scholarly Publishing in South Africa by the Academy of Science of South Africa, commissioned by the Department of Science and Technology and published last year, 57% of South African journal articles published in ISI and locally-accredited journals between 1990 and 2002 appeared in in South African journals and 43% in international journals. Only 15% of the articles published appeared in South-African journals that are also listed in the ISI indexes (ASSAf 2006; 33). In other words, there are very few journals accredited in the international rating system, although a fair percentage of journal articles do get published overseas.

African countries do tend to focus their research publication policies on the need to get exposure in overseas indexed journals, for the sake of raising the international profile of African research. While this is happening, the majority of African print-based journals lead a hand-to-mouth existence, using voluntary editorial labour and with low subscription levels.

In particular, these publications, in common with African scholarly output in general, struggle to reach beyond national borders. As an ex-university press publisher, I am only too aware of the resistance of USA and UK libraries to taking publications from African publishers. This leads me to wonder if the creation of repositories alone is going to be enough to drive greater recognition of African scholarship. The HSRC Press, with its open access monograph publication programme, has demonstrated the importance of aggressive marketing to get local and international attention. In other words, publishing activities are needed.

Print runs for South African print-based journals are low: 54% of South African journals have print runs of below 500 and only around 20% have print runs of over 1,000, according to the ASSAf survey. Even the relatively well-resourced South African journals (at least by African standards) have had little success in achieving satisfactory levels of international subscriptions for their print editions. According to the ASSAf survey, 45% of South-African published journals had fewer than 25 international institutional subscriptions and only 6.2% have more than 200 international subscribers.

Given these leavels of international exposure, there is an obvious advantage in the increased and uninhibited reach of open access electronic delivery and it is interesting to note that there is already a high percentage of journals (about 70%) that already offer electronic access.

In these circumstances, the report argues, it is not surprising that government policy in South Africa appears to favour the growth of South African publications relative to publication in international journals.

The authors of the ASSAf report comment that South African policy-makers would tend to support policies that foster the growth of locally-produced journals and particularly, policies that would grow the percentage of journals that are both South African and on the international indexes.

It is also likely that such policy initiatives in South Africa would support open access publication. The South African government is committed to open systems and has recently adopted an open source software policy for government departments, according to a recent report in Business Day newspaper. The Academy of Science Report endorses open access journal publication (Recommendation no. 6) as the way forward and the Department of Science and Technology appears to endorse this recommendation.

Bearing in mind that South Africa has only 23 journals listed in the ISI indexes(most African countries have none and Kenya and Ethiopia have one each), it becomes clear that the African continent as a whole is hardly at all invested in the global scholarly publishing system. Add to that the fact that journals are not necessarily the best vehicle to disseminate African research effectively for development purposes and it would seem that Africa has real potential to leapfrog technological gaps using the ‘gold’ route – in fact this might be an imperative rather than an option.

When it comes to a choice between the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ routes to open access, one also needs to bear in mind the scale of things one is talking about. If South Africa were to adopt a policy to deposit pre-or post-prints of all journal articles published in foreign journals in the ISI indexes, this would represent, at current publication rates, around 3,500 articles a year – hardly an insurmountable task. So perhaps we could be greedy and go for both the green and gold routes for journal articles.