Tag: Academic Commons

We scream. Two grant proposals on ‘sustainability’ and education

Joss Winn / / Funding, PhD

As always, I think it is good practice to share what I am doing. Here are two ‘expressions of interest’ we made today for the HEA’s Small Education for Sustainable Development Interdisciplinary Grants.

UPDATE: Neither submissions were accepted. We were told that #1 was ‘not deemed transferable enough’ and that #2 was ‘not pedagogical enough’.

1. We scream. In and against the notion of sustainability

In the beginning is the scream. We scream. … This is our starting point: rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative. This is what we must cling to. (Holloway, 2002)

We propose to develop a course module that attempts to articulate Holloway’s notion of ‘the scream’ in student-academics and develop both a theoretical and practical framework for negativity that recognizes the unsustainability of our lives and leads to a negation of unsustainability that informs direct action. The proposed module would be research-engaged, scaffolded by the ‘pedagogy of excess’ (Neary & Hagyard 2010).

The pedagogy of excess involves a critique not only of the politics of consumption but the politics of production whereby student-academics recognize that the principle of capitalist excess is not adequate for the sustainability of human life. Informed by the history of struggle inside and outside of the academy, students as producers move beyond their anticipated experience of university education, exceeding their expectations about the potentials and possibilities of student life. (Neary & Winn 2009)

A curriculum for a pedagogy of excess engages participants with multiple critical discourses across disciplines and proposes research projects that, for example, establish new indices of well-being beyond monetary measures; new capacities for democratic planning afforded by technology and systems of allocation outside of wage-labour, which enrich a critical, political economy with ecological knowledge adequate to the scope of what a progressive and sustainable humanity might become (Dyer-Witheford 2005, 90-91).

(249 words)

References:

Dyer-Witheford, N. (2005) Cognitive Capitalism and the Contested Campus, European Journal of Higher Arts Education, 2.

Holloway, John (2002) Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London, Pluto Press

Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. London, Continuum, pp. 192-210.

Neary, Mike and Hagyard, Andy (In Press, 2010) Pedagogy of Excess: an alternative political economy of student life. In: The Marketisation of Higher Education: The Student as Consumer. Eds. Mike Molesworth, Lizzie Nixon, Richard Scullion. London, Routledge

Contacts:

Joss Winn, Mike Neary (NTF), Richard Hall (NTF)

2. The student as producer and the development of a ‘mass intellectuality in commons’

In an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons. (Neary and Winn, 2009)

This project asks, “How can we live in and against an unsustainable world? How can student-academics act against that which they know is not sustainable?”

We propose that universities and the nature of academic work are ecologically unsustainable and that a critique of the social relations of capitalist production is central to understanding the notion of ‘sustainability’ and living sustainably. This project will propose methods and tools for remodeling the idea of a student, from consumer to producer, undermining the organising principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced.

An exemplar alternative organising principle is already proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked collaborative initiatives, which at their most radical, attempt to ensure the free and creative use of research materials. Initiatives such as Open Access are attempts by academics and others to lever the Internet to ensure that research output is free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, social or technological restriction.

By participating in such subversive movements, the student-academic becomes a critical, socially and environmentally active individual, who works against the “systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property” (Noble 1998), acting within yet against an unsustainable world.

(250 words)

References:

Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London, pp. 192-210. ISBN 1847064728

Noble, David F. (1998) Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education. First Monday [Online], Volume 3 Number 1 (5 January 1998)

Contacts:

Joss Winn, Mike Neary (NTF), Richard Hall (NTF)

These days are full

Joss Winn / / Commons, Projects, Software

I am conscious that it’s been almost a month since I last wrote here but that is largely due to my work on other projects, websites and blogs.  Here’s an overview of some of the work I’m currently involved in. If you’re working on similar projects or want to discuss or collaborate on any of this, do get in touch.

The Learning Lab

I recently wrote a brief summary of the work I’ve been doing under the ‘Learning Lab’ banner, since I started my work as Technology Officer in the Centre for Educational Research and Development. WordPressMU occupied a large chunk of my summer, though I feel I have a good understanding of it now and can relax a little while supporting staff and students who wish to use it. It will soon be moving to the new, permanent home of http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk

One of the unexpected outcomes of working on WordPressMU was the realisation that not only training but a different model of support is key to sustaining and improving the use of blogs and other Web 2.0 tools.  I’m keen to advocate and support the user-to-user support model that most open source and social web services develop rather than the traditional user-to-professional, ‘Help Desk’ model that exists for much of the software provided by the university. Models of user support are not something I’ve taken much of an interest in until recently, but the reality is that I alone am unable to support the growing adoption of WordPressMU at the university and I need to encourage staff and students to help themselves wherever possible.

Having said that, with colleagues in the Library and Research Office, I’m also planning to offer regular staff training sessions on the use of Web 2.0 tools in education and I’m visiting classes to give one hour introductions to WordPress, which is a good opportunity to work with and learn from both students and staff. In addition to this, I’m contributing towards the revision of policy documents which ensure that these new tools are used effectively and appropriately.

Lincoln Academic Commons

This is something I’m developing to promote and support the various initiatives at the university which provide Open Access to our research, teaching and learning. I started working for the university on a JISC-funded project to develop an institutional repository, having been working as an Archivist and Project Manager of a Digital Asset Management system in my previous job. Then, a few months ago, I heard about the difficulties people in the Lincoln Business School were having trying to establish a series of ‘Occasional Working Papers’ (OWPS) using existing portal software provided by the university. At the same time, I was looking at the Open Journal System for publishing Open Access journals, so I suggested that we set up the OWPS using OJS. Seeing what a great piece of software OJS is, I then suggested we use it for NEO, a planned journal of student research which we intend to launch in the Spring. Finally (and this is where it gets really interesting for me), Mike Neary, Dean of Teaching and Learning and Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Development, is advocating a more critical engagement with the debates about the marketisation of higher education through teaching practice. He’s calling this critical engagement, ‘Teaching in Public’, which encompasses the idea of an Academic Commons.

Professor Neary argues the uncertainty over the university’s mission requires the notion of ‘the public’ to be reconceptualized, so as to remake the university as an academic project that confronts the negative consequences of academic capitalism, and the commodification of everyday life. He will present Karl Marx’s concept of the ‘general intellect’ as an idea through which the university might be remade.

I contributed to a book chapter Mike has recently written which elaborates on this in more detail. You can read more about that on a previous blog post.

Access Grid

A project I’ve been leading for some months now is the installation of an Access Grid node at the university. We were fortunate in being approached by the Mental Health Research Network (MHRN) several months ago who offered to fund the installation of an AG node at the university to support their staff who work at the university and provide a facility that is otherwise missing in Lincolnshire. It’s been a really interesting and useful project for me as I learned about how the university undertakes a tendering exercise and I’ve been able to work with colleagues from across the university.  The node should be available to use sometime in January. The Access Grid project is yet another technology-based initiative at the university which further improves our research infrastructure and supports collaboration and the wider exchange of ideas among colleagues worldwide.

Anytime, Anywhere Computing

This is a new project that brings together three, originally separate proposals, that the ICT department and CERD were proposing to take forward. It covers:

  1. ubiquitous wireless networking
  2. so called ‘thin client’ technology as an alternative to desktop PCs and the management of software applications and resources
  3. access via user-owned devices, such as low-cost and increasingly popular ‘netbook’ hardware

We’re just starting to look at how we might offer the same user experience and services on our wireless network as we provide on our wired network. Currently the wireless network only offers Internet access. At the same time, we’re interested in evaluating new virtualisation technologies for the desktop. The ICT department are concluding a server consolidation project which is virtualising much of our server infrastructure. This brings many benefits and allows the ICT department to provide a more flexible service to users.  Our new study will look at whether similar virtualisation technology can bring benefits to desktop users, too. The third part of this project is based on a proposal I made a few months ago to evaluate the user experience and support issues that the new generation of ‘netbooks‘ introduces. Smaller screens, Linux operating systems, an emphasis on web-based applications and the rapid adoption of these low-cost devices often aimed at the education sector, require a better understanding of the impact of this technology and the influence it may have on driving students to use more and more web-based applications.

Are you working on similar initiatives? If so, please leave a comment and share your experiences.

Academic Commons: Learning from FLOSS

Joss Winn / / Commons, PhD, Presentations

While preparing my ‘Thinking Aloud’ seminar on Academic Commons, I was pleased to see that the Wikipedia entry for Open Educational Resources notes:

What has still not become clear by now to most actors in the OER domain is that there are further links between the OER and the Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movements, beyond the principles of “FREE” and “OPEN”. The FLOSS model stands for more than this and, like e.g. Wikipedia, shows how users can become active “resource” creators and how those resources can be re-used and freely maintained. In OER on the other hand a focus is still on the traditional way of resource creation and role distributions. [my emphasis]

As it happens, this is a significant interest of mine and one I touch upon in a forthcoming book chapter I contributed to.  We conclude:

The idea of student as producer encourages the development of collaborative relations between student and academic for the production of knowledge. However, if this idea is to connect to the project of refashioning in fundamental ways the nature of the university, then further attention needs to be paid to the framework by which the student as producer contributes towards mass intellectuality. This requires academics and students to do more than simply redesign their curricula, but go further and redesign the organizing principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced. An exemplar alternative organizing principle is already proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked collaborative initiatives which are not intrinsically anti-capital but, fundamentally, ensure the free and creative use of research materials. Initiatives such as Science Commons, Open Knowledge and Open Access, are attempts by academics and others to lever the Internet to ensure that research output is free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, social or technological restriction (www.opendefinition.org). Through these efforts, the organizing principle is being redressed creating a teaching, learning and research environment which promotes the values of openness and creativity, engenders equity among academics and students and thereby offers an opportunity to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In an environment where knowledge is free, the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons. ((Neary, M. with Winn, J. (2009) ‘Student as Producer: Reinventing the Undergraduate Curriculum‘ in M. Neary, H. Stevenson, and L. Bell, (eds) (2009) The Future of Higher Education: Policy, Pedagogy and the Student Experience, Continuum, London))

I’d be interested in discussing these ideas with anyone who has similar interests. I don’t doubt I have a lot to learn from others.

Having been part of the open source community for the last eight years, I am utterly convinced there’s a lot to learn from the collaborative and highly productive social and creative processes that allow software developers, documentation writers and application end-users to work together so effectively. Over decades, they have developed tools to aid this process (mailing lists, IRC, revision control, the GPL and other licenses, etc.). Isn’t it time that more of us worked and learned in this way? Creative Commons is our license to do so; the Internet is our means of connecting with others. The tools are mostly available to us and where they are inappropriate for our discpilines, we should modify them. In the FLOSS community, knowledge is free and the community is thriving.

As the Wikipedia OER article states, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner is slowly being freed, but the social processes of knowledge production remain largely the same. Students are still largely positioned as consumers of knowledge and the hierarchical relationship between teacher and learner is increasingly contractual rather than personal. There are exceptions, I know, but there are few genuine opportunities for teacher and learner to work together productively, especially on a group scale. Institutions, like my own, are making some efforts to change the ‘Learning Landscape’ but I don’t think it is necessarily an institutional responsiblility. It’s the responsiblity of individuals (especially in an environment so relatively loosely controlled as a university) to work out the social relations and processes of peer production for themselves, looking for support from others when they need it.

How can the model by which the FLOSS community works so productively and openly be translated to every academic discipline and change the way that knowledge is both produced and transmitted? Technology is at this core of this enterprise and I suspect many teachers and learners feel alientated and divided by it.

By the way, here’s my Thinking Aloud presentation.

The Lincoln Academic Commons

View more presentations from Joss Winn.