edna.edu.au

What goes up ...................

I was catching up with reaction to GLAMwiki. One of the really energetic attendees is GLUM. Not surprising considering how far up we were taken by her and others = "a unique opportunity to consider new partnerships which on the face of it seem to the mutual benefit of all." It's always a tricky thing, looking at tommorrow and having to rearrange old conceptions. First the hope outside the box of routines, and then,,,, back to institutional reality.

These glamerous people are quick. It took (i think it is the writer) three entries to follow her intuition and one more to have confirmed that the WIKI+ GLAM thing is about just offering institutional stuff to a global community as a resource, not a programme. I guess she might not know how many pennies have been spent on OER's or the two models that the OER approach throws up.

It's not suprising there's some hesitation because the institutions have to take the first step first, and do like Seb has been intuitive enough to do = get the resources out there. It's pretty hard to see of what will happen after that until an institution gives up control of "their" goodies; that is, unless you understand what drives a wikimedian to donate their time and efforts.

Funny part is, with a little looking around, she offered me something which makes the new learning model clearer. It's sitting on para 4 and 5 below Michael's question, How can we open up scientific culture?

Let me describe two strategies that have been successful in the past, and that offer a template for future success.

The first is a top-down strategy that has been successfully used by the open access (OA) movement [3]. The goal of the OA movement is to make scientific research freely available online to everyone in the world. It’s an inspiring goal, and the OA movement has achieved some amazing successes. Perhaps most notably, in April 2008 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated that every paper written with the support of their grants must eventually be made open access. The NIH is the world’s largest grant agency; this decision is the scientific equivalent of successfully storming the Bastille.

The second strategy is bottom-up. It is for the people building the new online tools to also develop and boldly evangelize ways of measuring the contributions made with the tools. To understand what this means, imagine you’re a scientist sitting on a hiring committee that’s deciding whether or not to hire some scientist. Their curriculum vitae reports that they’ve helped build an open science wiki, and also write a blog. Unfortunately, the committee has no easy way of understanding the significance of these contributions, since as yet there are no broadly accepted metrics for assessing such contributions. The natural consequence is that such contributions are typically undervalued.

 It's pretty easy to see that GLAM's are just going through the top down decisions, just like the journals glamerous people must write for because, as she says, " Writing for anything other than a refereed journal/conference is simply not recognised".

As these old mastheads, these old aggregations of subsidized peer reviewing reduce in value = cost, there is an aggregation in the other direction. It's still embrionic. As Michael says, "as yet there are no broadly accepted metrics for assessing such contributions" (writing for on a wiki, blog, etc). But this sytmization will become clearer as peers who share spaces like our GLUM lady find ways to share bigger spaces with their national and global peers, and drive a stake into some cybernetic point, outside their institutions.

But first step first, we need open access for every GLAM's 'resources'.

Tags: wmf
Posted at 10:22AM Aug 24, 2009 by simon fenton - jones  |  Comments[0]

GLAMERous

Well, the GLAMwiki conference has come and gone.The most comfortable get together I've ever been to.

It's fascinating to watch an old institution meet a new one. All the old arrogance and hubris (in the GLAMs) everporated at the site of a small group of Wikimedians, who represented a huge diversity of Australian society, talking about what they do and how, with a little cooperation, they could help the old professions remain relevant to a new generation. N.B When I talk about institution I'm not talking about the US definition = architecture and process. I'm talking about culture.

The reports are coming in. This email thread helps to make sense of the usual swim in sewerage. Just a little background to the first reporter. Tim is my idea of an computing engineer; quiet, perceptive, rational and brilliant, which IS the new culture wikimedians seem to share. No institutionalists can resist it, from what I saw.

There still are quite a few obstacles in giving old thinkers in places like the learning federation and curriculum corporation get over the concept that they can deliver a meaningful education by producing curriculum content = using The Le@rning Federation digital curriculum resources to enhance the education = but as their pennies run out and they get folded into education.au even their hubis might be overcome.

At least their imagination bypass will become more obvious to inhabitants of GLAMs = Galleries, Libraries, Archives AND Museums.

Tags: wmf
Posted at 07:08AM Aug 21, 2009 by simon fenton - jones  |  Comments[0]