Annotum: At last, scholarly publishing with WordPress

Joss Winn / / Open Access, Open Source, Software

Google gave us Knol (we didn’t need it), now it’s taking it away (meh…), and instead has given us Annotum, something far more useful than Knol was ever going to be. Annotum is a free (as in speech and beer) theme for WordPress that turns a site into an open access publishing platform suited to scholarly journals. It’s more than just a theme though. It comes with several built-in plugins, too, which extend the functionality of WordPress significantly, including the introduction of a new workflow based around peer-review.

When I first read about Annotum this morning, I was both pleased and disappointed. Pleased to see that finally there was a decent attempt to turn WordPress into a journal publishing platform and disappointed that it didn’t come from the academic community itself. We’ve seen the utility of WordPress for scholarly publishing for a few years but never concentrated our efforts enough to actually deliver what Google and partners have done (significantly, the lead Developer, Carl Leubsdorf). Thankfully, Annotum is not only an open source theme for WordPress (and, perhaps more significantly, available to use on WordPress.com right now), but development is also taking place on Github, which is about the most collaborative development environment there is. It’s begging for academic input from developers, publishers, users and tinkerers like myself, with no barriers to participation from what I can see. I’ve made a couple of suggestions to start with. There’s a number of people doing work on scholarly publishing (e.g. #jiscPub, #scholarlyHTML) and I’m sure their work would make Annotum better for all of us.

Yesterday I had another academic ask me if I could help them set up a scholarly journal and so I pointed out the OJS system that I run. To be honest, while OJS is the gold standard for blind peer-reviewed open access scholarly journal publishing, the barriers to entry are high and, well, I agree with this guy. As of today, I’ll be recommending that we look at Annotum before jumping to OJS. I’m pretty sure the response will be positive from my colleagues.

Here’s a presentation from earlier in the year.

Hacking the Academy

Joss Winn / / Hacks, PhD, Publications, Student as Producer

An article I wrote with Mike Neary for the Guardian was published last week. It relates to my recent note about Hacking as an Academic Practice and is part of a longer journal article that I’m hoping to have finished by the end of the year about the importance of university culture to the history of hacking.

The publication of the article was nicely timed to coincide with DevXS, the national student developer conference we’re hosting next month. Last week there was a surge of registrations and we’re now fully booked. It should be a great event.

Hackers are vital to the university culture of openness and innovation

Have you noticed anything missing from the ongoing phone hacking scandal involving the News of the World? There are no hackers involved. This is the latest example of hacking’s troubled history with the mainstream media, which confuses the “playful cleverness” of expert computer programmers with the malicious meddling of computer crackers and criminal journalists. With this confusion, the rich and fruitful history of the true hackers is diminished and a thriving intellectual culture focused on problem solving, self-directed learning and the free exchange of knowledge is undermined.

Much has been written about hackers and hacking, but rarely is it contextualised as part of the scholarly tradition. Yet careful reading of the history of hacking reveals that it is very much a part of the work and values of universities and that the hacker ethic is shared, in part at least, by most academics working today.

Read more

Speaking in NYC

Joss Winn / / Open Education, PhD, Presentations, Projects, Student as Producer

Mike Neary and I were in New York City from the 11-16th October, speaking about Student as Producer. We held seminars at Adelphi University, Baruch College CUNY and were part of a panel at the Mobility Shifts Conference at The New School. Here is a recording of the CUNY event, where we had the pleasure of sharing the seminar with Jim Groom, someone who’s been an inspiration for my work on the university WordPress platform.

Tony Hirst – Senior Visiting Fellow

Joss Winn / / News

Yes, that’s right. Dr. Tony Hirst was recently made a Senior Fellow of the University of Lincoln and a Visiting Senior Fellow in Networked Teaching and Learning.

I was very keen to propose that Tony be recognised by the University of Lincoln for his important work over the last few years, as evidenced on his very popular OUseful blog. I also worked with Tony on the JISCPress project in 2009 and hope that this formal relationship he now has with Lincoln will lead to more, mutually beneficial collaboration with the LNCD group in the future.

Tony's annotated Twitter follower network: A new form of scholarly metric.

We’ll be seeing Tony in Lincoln next month as he’s a Keynote speaker at DevXS, the national student developer conference we’re hosting and helping to organise . A further visit is also planned in March, where he’ll be talking at our ‘Thinking Aloud’ seminar series. Outside the Centre for Educational Research and Development, where I work, there’s a lot of interest in Tony’s work in the School of Computing and School of Journalism, too, following his recent meeting with LNCD and LiSC.

Welcome to Lincoln, Tony!

Hacking as an academic practice

Joss Winn / / Hacks, Identity, PhD

Just a note to say that I think those of us working in universities should be defending the terms ‘hack’, ‘hacker‘ and ‘hacking’. Hacking has had some really bad press recently and as a consequence is terribly mis-understood, but is a term that was born out of the work ethic of pioneering academics and a practice that’s still worth defending. The history of EdTech has its roots in hacking culture. Stand up for it! Stand up for the Hackers!*

hacker: n.[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

  1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users’ Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
  2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
  3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
  4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
  5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in ‘a Unix hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
  6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
  7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
  8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. The correct term for this sense is cracker.

The term ‘hacker’ also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see the network. For discussion of some of the basics of this culture, see the How To Become A Hacker FAQ. It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic).

It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you’ll quickly be labeled bogus). See also geek, wannabee.

This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s by the hacker culture surrounding TMRC and the MIT AI Lab. We have a report that it was used in a sense close to this entry’s by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s.

In addition to the links above, here’s some worthwhile reading if you’re interested:

* Dedicated to Jim Groom, Tony Hirst, Alex Bilbie and Nick Jackson. Fine Hackers working in universities today.

LNCD, DevXS and Orbital

Joss Winn / / Funding, Projects

It’s been a busy summer, to say the least.

The DIVERSE project is up and running and the Linking You and Jerome projects came to a successful end. We were joined by Jamie Mahoney, a new full-time Web Developer Intern and established a new group (LNCD). We’re co-organising a national student developer conference (DevXS) and have just been awarded a £241,500 grant for Orbital, an 18 month project to develop and pilot a new research infrastructure for the School of Engineering. Orbital is a great opportunity to build on some of our earlier work and get stuck into the challenges of managing raw research data. Which reminds me: data.lincoln.ac.uk is live, too 🙂

Please do tell your students about DevXS.

    Orbital: A proposed Managing Research Data project

    Joss Winn / / Funding, Projects

    Following my usual tradition, I am dutifully posting a bid document that I submitted today to JISC’s Managing Research Data Programme. As you might already know, I do this in an attempt to open up the process of bid writing a bit more, in what is normally a competitive environment. I also hope that it might attract some interest from and possible future collaboration with other people in the university sector, whether we are successful in winning funding or not. We’ve been pretty successful with our bids over the last couple of years, too, and have received good feedback from JISC on the quality of our bids, so it seems like the decent thing to share good practice.

    Our proposed project is called Orbital because we’re intending to build services for managing research data that ‘orbit’ around Nucleus, the data store we built during the Total Recal and Jerome projects. The bid was a pretty easy one to write, to be honest. Everything felt right as soon as I read the call documentation because I could see a way of re-using and further developing the work we’ve been doing since I joined the university in 2007. Of course, we’ve set ourselves some new challenges with this project and much work needs to be done in all phases of the project, but having the experience of building web services around large institutional data sets, gives me the confidence that we can tackle what is a really important issue for us – for any university: managing a growing body of research data. It’s also a project that takes me back to my roots, having joined the university to work on our Institutional Repository project. Prior to that I was an Archivist at the BFI National Film and Television Archive and Project Manager for the development of Amnesty International’s Digital Asset Management system. It was good to revisit the the whole digital archiving domain again and I even re-discovered a blog I kept in 2006 while on JISC’s week-long Digital Preservation Training Programme.

    Although the bid has been sent off now, and who knows whether it will be funded or not, the process of writing the bid has been really useful. I had planned to spend much of July drafting a journal paper but seeing the call, switched into bid writing mode. Writing bids regularly, I try to get something out of them, despite knowing that they may not be funded. The idea of retrospectively viewing unfunded bids as a waste of time would depress the hell out of me and so I try to approach it as a reflective process, where I talk with colleagues about what we’ve done, where were are now and where we want to go with our work. Through writing this bid, it became really clear how the work we’ve been doing on other projects has brought us to the point where we have a good team of people who have developed a very modern, extensible and flexible technical framework which we can deploy in a number of domains, including managing research data. It’s all in the bid, so I won’t repeat it here, but it’s something we should be proud of.

    I think that one of the things that good developers do is identify and/or build the tools they need to do their job effectively. That’s what we’ve been doing with WordPress, the Common Web Design, OAuth, Nucleus, data dot lincoln,  the Jerome discovery tool and the Linking You toolkit, so that now we have the skills and the tools to tackle future work more efficiently and have fun, too. There’s nothing that kills the fun of development more than having to work with crap tools.

    A Pedagogy of Excess: Interventions in the poverty of student life

    Joss Winn / / PhD, Publications

    Below is an abstract that I’ve just submitted, to be considered for the special issue of Critical Studies in Peer Production. I was drawn to the call for papers for three reasons: 1) One of the co-editors, Johan Soderberg, wrote an excellent book, Hacking Capitalism: the free and open source software movement (it’s expensive to buy but worth it. His PhD thesis is here); 2) One of the ways I frame our new LNCD group, is around peer-production of technology for education by students and staff; 3) I’ve been planning to write this paper anyway but could do with a deadline. It’ll get written before the end of the year, one way or another. There’s just so much happening at the moment, I could do with a deadline.

    == //

    A Pedagogy of Excess: Interventions in the poverty of student life

    Despite the increasing marketisation of higher education, the generous practices of peer production have long been a characteristic of university life, giving rise, for example, to the emergence of the Free Software, Open Access and Open Education movements. These practices point towards a state of abundance that is not simply a Utopian vision but a real possibility of conditions already in existence within higher education where needs and capacities can be brought together (Kay and Mott, 1982). This possibility of abundance is at the heart of a critical political tradition that the University of Lincoln (UK) is engaged with through its institution-wide Student as Producer initiative (http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/), articulated through a ‘pedagogy of excess’ (Neary and Hagyard, 2010) where students are more than just students and become producers of their own social world.

    The possibility of a state of abundance in university life has been partially recognised by both the State (e.g. Lammy, 2009) and educators (e.g. Weller, 2011). In the world of Web 2.0, universities are being positioned as ‘edgeless’ resource providers through the funding of Open Access institutional repositories and and Open Educational Resources (Winn, 2011a). Student as Producer both challenges and leverages this abundance of open resources by articulating a pedagogy of excess, whereby the student is encouraged and supported in being not just a student-consumer but rather a critical, productive, social individual. In practice, a pedagogy of excess attempts to re-orientate the roles of staff and students against the marketisation of university life, to become producers of a really existing Utopian university and creators of social wealth (Neary and Winn, 2010).

    This paper will introduce the unique approach of Student as Producer at the University of Lincoln and the ways in which we are actively supporting the re-establishment of a ‘hacker culture’ within the university where students are invited to share their ideas, mash up university administrative data and build prototypes that improve, challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education. In doing so, I will discuss the theoretical and practical articulation of a pedagogy of excess in terms of the peer-production of technology for education (Winn 2011b) as well as highlight the limits of our approach within a capitalist social universe.

    379 words.

    Kay and Mott (1982) Political Order and the Law of Labour. The Macmillan Press.

    Lammy (2009) The Edgeless University.

    Neary, Mike and Hagyard, Andy (2010) Pedagogy of Excess: An Alternative Political Economy of Student Life. The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer. Eds. Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon. Routledge.

    Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London.

    Neary, Mike (2010) Student as Producer: A Pedgogy for the Avant-Garde. Learning Exchange,Vol 1, No 1.

    Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2010) Education Beyond the Property Relation: From Commons to Communism. Presented at the Open Education 2010 Conference, Barcelona, November 2010.

    Weller, Martin (2011). A pedagogy of abundance. Spanish Journal of Pedagogy, 249 pp. 223–236.

    Winn, Joss (2011a) Open Education: from the freedom of things to the freedom of people. In: Towards teaching in public: reshaping the modern university. Continuum, London. (In Press)

    Winn, Joss (2011b) Technology for education: A new group.