I have been very interested in the work of Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) for a long time. It’s one of the mega-universities in the world, perhaps the biggest, with close to two million students. I wrote a very excited post earlier about how they have opened almost all of their educational material, and I continue to believe that this is one of the most under-reported OER stories. Therefore, I was very excited to be able to meet with Dr. Uma Kanjilal, who is head of the IGNOU eGyankosh, and Dr Sanjaya Mishra, to learn more about their future plans for eGyankosh, share some of my ideas, and also discuss the Peer2Peer University.
I am planning to write more about what I learnt later, but for now, I wanted to share the presentation that I gave to a group of people at IGNOU. I focused on three areas: The purposes of OER, the value of openness, and the Peer2Peer University. It was an honor to share my thoughts with such an engaging and intelligent audience, and I really hope I get a chance to go back and spend more time with IGNOU in the future.
The presentation below has been synced audio+slides, so you can listen to the audio, and the slides will turn automatically. You can also download the MP3 directly.
I have been thinking about the issue of “equitable access to governance in globally distributed multilingual organizations” for several years now. That’s a mouth-full, but basically the idea is that you have organizations like Wikipedia, the KDE project (an open-source desktop) or iCommons. Although these kind of organizations are often legally based in the US or another given country (KDE is in Germany), anyone are invited to contribute from around the world, and they often also have chapters based on language or nationality, where people can make huge contributions without speaking English (Wikipedia is the classic example).
However, even though each Wikipedia version has a lot of freedom to set its own policies, it is still part of a much larger movement. The decisions on movement-wide changes, on what the Wikimedia Foundation should work on, etc, are mostly conducted in English. Whether it be on mailing lists, discussion pages, or international conferences. This excludes many people from participating, however solving it is a very thorny question. When I was invited to the Critical Point of View: WikiWars conference in Bangalore recently (see my tweets), I thought it would be a good chance for me to think more deeply and constructively about these issues, and see if I could come up with some suggestions.
This is doubly relevant because of the Peer2Peer University, which is planning to expand to offer courses in more languages. How can we ensure that the course-organizers and students in those courses still feel like empowered parts of the community?
With this presentation, I try to make two points. First of all, to make people cognizant that there is a problem. Secondly, to realize that there is no simple solution, but that we might be able to mitigate the problem, if we put our best minds to it.
I have embedded below the presentation I gave (15 minutes), with synched audio. You can also download only the audio MP3 (5MB). Video will be published later, and I’ll link to it at that time. Below the presentation (mostly below the fold) I’ve also included my detailed “note of interest” for the conference. We are hoping to develop this further into a book-chapter or a part of a book-chapter, so I would love any kind of feedback, more ideas, or criticism from people!
Equitable Governance in Multilingual Wikipedia Detailed interest note for WikiWars 2010 by Stian Håklev
Wikipedia began as an English-language project, but rapidly became a very international project, with editions in 270+ languages. Initially, each language was hosted on the same website, but soon, individual wikis were set up for each language. Thus, each language fostered its own community, with all communication happening in the given language on a localized Mediawiki platform. When visiting different Wikipedias, it is interesting to see the different community norms and standards that have emerged, for example different criteria for featured articles, notability, gaining admin status, etc.
I am just back from Bangalore, where I had the good fortune to participate in the Critical Point of View: WikiWars conference – a critical reflection on Wikipedia from a number of point of views. I will probably write more about some of the most interesting presentations, my own presentation, and other thoughts, but I thought I’d start by posting my tweets.
It varies how much I tweet from conferences (or in general), but during this conference, I found myself using Twitter quite frequently. It serves as both a note taking function, a way to communicate with some of the others in the room, a way to focus on the content of the talk (rather than letting thoughts wander), and a conduit for people who are not participating.
I am not sure how useful this collection of Tweets are for people who were not present, but I am posting them here as a collection. Earlier I posted the tweets from the OAI6 conference, and also mentioned how I created the list.
Here they are, all 130 of them:
In Bangalore at Centre for Internet and Society for #wikiwars conference. Bangalore seems nice, a small-town busy feel.
Just back from Avatar – good movie, but all the criticisms about the noble savage etc are right on. Looking forward to #wikiwars tmrw.
@StevenWalling That’s kind of nice – new voices. I love Doctorow and Lessig, but we’ve all heard from them before. #wikiwars
#wikiwars 3d wiki art installation – open space idea. First discussion starting: Wikipedia theory.
#wikiwars “WP has gotten big enough that it deserves a research conference that is entirely external to WikiMedia Foundation.”
Using new Google Live Search to follow #wikiwars updates in real-time (automatically updating) http://bit.ly/8Cvc1i (expand)
Challenge @ #wikiwars: since we’ve all circulated 2k word abstracts, how to structure 15 min presentation to still be engaging to everyone?
@ilya Cool, I’m very interested in Wikipedias in Indic languages. #wikiwars
#wikiwars Stuart Geiger presenting on bots in WP governance. I find his work very interesting.
#wikiwars Wisdom of crowds vs wisdom of bots?
WP works bec. vandals outnumbered by good users? NO – 500-100 ppl banned every day! #wikiwars
@tinucherian Cool! Random spot check: “Norway” 2 paras, but “Democracy” and “Physics” both good length. :) (Can’t check quality) #wikiwars
#wikiwars @tinucherian Quick tool for checking articles in other languages http://bit.ly/7KmqJN (expand). Used it to check ML article length.
#wikiwars Geiger: bots help reinstitute traditional features of the old style of production (gatekeepers, quality control, authority)
#wikiwars Geiger: bot “nominated itself” for adminship – very convincing :) the machines are taking over! :)
#wikiwars: Geiger: Are academics given epistemic roles in addition to academic. Do academics need to know coding to make headway in WP?
#wikiwars Automatically redirect to the longest article in any of the official languages in India: http://pastebin.com/f5a21b4db
@wirefire Yes, but is there any difference between stylistic choices in WP and other trad encyclopedias? #wikiwars
#wikiwars Comment from audience: presentations give idea that Wikipedia is 1984′ish alienating modern nightmare…
#wikiwars Geiger: Some of my best friends are bots. Pseudonymity is not equal to anonymity!
“Do we need to know who has written something to be able to trust it? Or do we want to know who is it when we DON’T trust sb?” #wikiwars
#wikiwars Wonder what the usage of bots is in other language versions (non-English)… Are there active bots on HI WP, ML WP?
RT @thewikipedian: More @staeiou gems: I”f Wikipedia is a battleground, the footnotes [citations] are the bullets.” #wikiwars
#wikiwars Dror: Syrians much more sensitive abt what is in Arabic Wikipedia, than English. I think the Chinese feel the same abt ZH WP.
@williambeutler (Abt Nandi and French quote). I’m all for that. Maybe I’ll give my entire prez tomorrow in Indonesian. #wikiwars
Lot’s of interesting epistemological discussions at #wikiwars, is there objective knowledge? is NPOV possible? 很有意思的认识论的讨论 – 中立的知识存在吗?
@gkjohn 5:30 I think. There’s a dinner at 7:30, maybe you could sneak in :) #wikiwars
#wikiwars Dror: Wikipedia exposed me to new ideas/facts that I didn’t hear in “politically correct” school.
#wikiwars Dror: It _is_ possible to get near objective knowledge, and it’s needed in conflict topics, we shouldn’t just give up!
#wikiwars Question: What would you do if WP wasn’t there? Answer: It _wasn’t_ there…
Dror: When learning Arabic, talking to A-speakers, amazed how different our knowledge was. Excited by WP – this is what we needed! #wikiwars
#wikiwars Internet as a distributed network, and Wikipedia as _one_ place.
#wikiwars Are articles about Pokemon frivolous/don’t matter? Should this disqualify from adminship?
#wikiwars Dror: Difference between writing _about_ a narrative, and adopting it. We can and should do the first, and not the second.
#wikiwars Dror: East and West cult. difference of neutrality and objectivity? When working w/ Arab editors, noticed difference in standards.
#wikiwars Dror: Do we not only need different language versions, but also WPs written from different epistemic traditions?
@cormaggio you would have been an obvius guest. although exclusively wp, not all wmf projs. #wikiwars
#wikiwars very excited abt #hfordsa talk. disillusioned, next 8 yrs to work out what went wrong. want more impact in dev’l countries
#wikiwars cc as political artefact, and what are the other options?
#wikiwars lessig: ways of regulating: market, law, norms, artefacts. which work better where?
#wikiwars no more laptop batt, using ipod. i suck at typing fast
#wikiwars sunil and hfordsa are both disillusioned/critical of open movenents. hm, what are alternatives? how do we move forward?
#wikiwars hfordsa: by choosing cc we’re reinforcing copyright, commodification of culture…?
@ilya I’ve made a list for #WikiWars. See http://twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars. (via @jackerhack)
#wikiwars @hfordsa sth i wrote earlier related to encouraging sharing w/o bogged down w/ law http://bit.ly/71lFdi (expand)
#wikiwars A very interesting first day is over. A lot of criticism about openness, licenses. The idea of an objective truth.
#wikiwars Quite a few things that I will pick up in my presentation tomorrow. Great with so much time for debate and questions!
I dreamt I was invited to give a presentation about open licenses and OER to a primary school assembly. Weird. #wikiwars
#wikiwars Ready for day two of WikiWars. Today – with power! :) May the games begin.
#wikiwars “It’s scary that we all agree that we need to be critical to Wikipedia?” Being critical doesn’t mean being negative…
RT @thewikipedian: I’ve heard of “greenwashing” and recently, “localwashing”, but @sunil_abraham offers a new one: “openwashing” #wikiwars
#wikiwars @sunil_abraham: You kill local/traditional knowledge by encoding it?
#wikiwars Sunil: Apparently Bangalore hasn’t changed name to Bengaluuru yet, lost in bureaucracy and politics. Surprising.
#wikiwars Dror: Is there a consensus in this panel that Wikipedia is _not_ a revolution?
#wikiwars Geert: WP is traditional in its understand of what knowledge is. Very biased towards Western idea. Epistemological and geographic.
#wikiwars I don’t see the geographical divide as critical. It can be solved by added more articles – rather than fundamentally changing.
#wikiwars Stuart: Revolution is an empty signifier.
#wikiwars “Trying to defend wiki part by clinging to the pedia part.”
RT @hfordsa: ‘Wikipedia might be revolutionary but not in the way that Wikipedia defines itself’ NishantShah #wikiwars
@fuzheado You guys should do a Wikipedia Weekly episode on the #WikiWars conference going on in Bangalore. Lot’s of interesting discussions.
#wikiwars Apparently Indian teachers want handwritten instead of printed, to avoid copy+paste. Interesting.
RT @wirefire: http://bit.ly/71BHKK (expand) — how often does Indian law refer to wikipedia? Shocking revelations #wikiwars
Sad how many people could not make it to #wikiwars. But still a great crowd.
#wikiwars @williambeutler Starts presentation about why people join/leave WP, and what to do about it. Doors and windows. Or sth.
#wikiwars Bill: Who reads WP? Most people. But very low WP literacy – how does project work, talk pages, warning tags, etc.
#wikiwars Bill: Hard to how many contribute to WP. Most edits by small amnt of ppl, but if those are only tiny changes, does it mean anyth?
#wikiwars Bill: Look at a few articles – most edit counts, made smallest contrib. Biggest contrib by accts that did not have many edits.
#wikiwars Bill: more reasons to leave WP than to stay there.
#wikiwars Bill: 50 policies, 150+ site guidelines, advisory essays. WP is _complicated_. (ENWP, what about other langs? Less bureaucracy?)
#wikiwars Bill: Some people who leave Wikipedia leave “suicide notes”.
#wikiwars Any good working tools to animate WP edit history? Most tools here http://waxy.org/2005/06/automating_wiki/ broken links.
It’s incredible the stuff you can find on the internet, how everything is linked together. So I’m in our little apartment in Beijing trying to clean up before my wife comes back, and put on a collection of Norwegian 60’s music which I have downloaded. The first song is cute, the story of some woman living on a little conservative place in Norway, and getting called to church by the “council for high moral”, because she was wearing too low-cut dresses. But she ends up teaching them all a lesson.
I thought the song was cute, so I wanted to know more. I googled a line of the song, and found out that it was called Fru Johnsen (Mrs. Johnsen), and was written by Terje Mosnes and performed by the still famous Anne Lise Rypdal in 1967. Apparently it caused enough consternation that it was for a period banned from playing on the national broadcaster (lyric here, video here).
However, this song wasn’t original – in fact, it was an adaptation of a very well-known American country song called “Harper Valley PTA” (Wikipedia entry). This song was written by Tom T. Hall, and performed by Jeannie C. Riley, but has still been covered many times, including by Dolly Parton, and recently in an episode of Desperate Housewives! The story is roughly similar, although here our heroine is up against a small-town PTA (parents-teachers association). One video is here, lyrics here.
But, we’re still not done! Because according to the Wikipedia-entry above, it was also adapted into a Swedish version, called Fröken Fredriksson (Ms. Fredriksson). I think this was originally performed by the Hootenanny Singers (a Swedish group), but later it was covered by the well-known ABBA. In this song, the story is quite different – the young unfortunate miss is seen watering plants in a nightie that is opened by the wind. Shocked by this sight, her busybody neighbor begins spreading rumors, and Fredriksson eventually has to leave town – right after calling out her neighbor as a hypocrite. The song can be heard here, and the lyrics are here.
It’s a fun song to listen to, and it was a fun story to unravel. I love the ability of the Internet to bring together many different cases, and analyze them together. When the song came out, probably few in Norway had ever heard the “original”, and if they wanted to listen to it, they would depend on it being offered for sale in Norwegian record stores. Now, it just takes a few minutes to find it.
It’s also interesting how the versions differ. I listened to a lecture at the University of Oslo once, by an anthropologist who also played in a punk rock band, he had spent time researching the punk culture in Korea. He made the point that by looking at what the songs protest against, you can learn something about the culture. In England and the US, the songs are often against the “system”, the “man”, the government, the police. In Korea, it was more often against ones own parents, and the schools.
Thus, in the Norwegian version, the church is the oppressor, but in the US, it’s a more generalized small-town oppressiveness. And the Swedish one (if it’s really a remake, you can’t always trust Wikipedia), it’s common people’s pettiness. However, that’s also the saddest one, because in the other two, the protagonist gets the upper hand in the end, and “shows them all”, whereas in the Swedish, she is still forced to leave town.
Update, I found a version from the film/tv series that was built on the song:
In October, University of Toronto participated in the world-wide Open Access Week with a number of different events. I got the honor of starting off with the first event (although I believe there was one event the week before), with a presentation about Innovative projects in the publishing of OER. I’ve always been interested in how different institutions and countries around the world approach the production of OER, and have given presentations in the past about the incredible wealth and diversity and projects out there. In these presentations (linked from my presentations page), I usually discuss the projects from a resource perspective – what is out there, and how can we use it. This time, I decided to focus more on why these different projects were set up, what their purpose is, who runs them, and how they are sustained financially.
The entire presentation was recorded with Adobe Connect, and can be seen here, with both audio and slides synchronized. Since that doesn’t work for everyone, I also put up an MP3 of the presentation, and put the slides on Slideshare.
A lot of this is new ground, and in some cases I don’t know all the details behind these projects and the decisions they have made. If you have any examples of other interesting models for OER projects, or you want to correct anything I stated in the presentation, I’d love to hear from you.
In September, someone called from L’Actualité, a weekly magazine based in Montreal, and wanted to interview me about Peer2Peer University. The final article keeps mentioning us in the same sentence as University of the People, whereas I think we are quite different, but it’s great to get the word out to the over one million readers (according to Wikipedia). You can read the entire article by clicking on the picture thumbnail, and I’ve also pasted in the OCRed version after the break.
I’ve previously written about how I used interwiki links in Wikipedia to extract dictionary information (here and here). After talking with a friend, I got another idea for how I could extract even more dictionary information – localization files. You might know that open source projects like KDE are available in many different languages, translated by (usually) volunteers. In order to make translation easy, and enable volunteers who might not know anything about programming to help out, the text strings to be translated are extracted from the source code, and translated in separate files, often using a library called gettext.
Given that there are these large databases of strings translated into different languages out there, I wondered if I could use that as an addition to a dictionary. I am pretty sure I am not the first to have this idea, in fact, I seem to remember some website where you could search translation strings, but I don’t remember where I found that. Anyway, I decided to give it a try.
First I had to find the files. I began by downloading some Debian localization packages, but then remembered that in the finished product, the files (with .mo extension) have been “compiled”, so that the program can access them more rapidly, and are not plain text anymore. There might be tools that can extract the strings from the .mo files, but it’s much easier to go straight to the “source”, and get the localization projects from the SVN repository.
KDE has very nice and helpful pages for their translation teams, for example the page for simplified Chinese tells me clearly how I should go about to download this project, simply enter the command:
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/
trunk/l10n-kde4/zh_CN/messages
and a bit over a thousand files will be downloaded, with names like koffice/kivio.po. After some initial metadata, these files look like this:
There is some metadata about where in the code this string comes from, then the key string in English, which will be the same in all translation projects, and then the translation into Chinese. If all we wanted was an English-Chinese dictionary, it would be quite easy to run some regexps to compile this data. However, we would like to make a dictionary of for example Norwegian and Chinese. The corresponding Norwegian file looks like this:
So I wrote a simple program that takes two paths, and opens every file in those two paths, and you can download that script here. If you download the Chinese files into a directory called zh, and the Norwegian files into a directory called no, you can run the program like this:
and you get a file containing more than a 100,000 lines like this:
Lydstyrke
音量
Tone inn/ut-kurve
曲线淡出
Tone til volum
淡出到音量
Tonetid
淡出时间
Start toning
开始淡出
…which is what we were looking for. You can then easily grep this file to find words you are looking for – many of which won’t be in normal dictionaries (especially not Chinese-Norwegian or Esperanto-Urdu or whatever interesting combinations you cook up).
This script can be used for any language combinations, with one caveat. Right now, it is hardcoded to only accept entries that contain at least one Chinese character from the second file, because there is now point to get an entry telling you that XML in Norwegian is XML in Chinese. I do that by adding this:
trans[0][0] =~ /[⾰-⾿]/
which is a regular expression that checks for the existence of Chinese characters. You'd want to remove that, if you were not using it with Chinese.
Stian
PS: I realize that calling this a "dictionary" is perhaps not very accurate, they are collocated sentences, not words. However, if the target language is a language that you speak a bit of, you can very often easily isolate the word you are looking for.
As I was walking home tonight, I listened to Migrapolis on my iPod. It’s a Norwegian radio show about multiculture, identity and immigrants. Last week they interviewed the daughter of the “king of the gypsies” in Norway, who never went to school, and grew up to become a drug addict. Finally, she decided to kick the habit cold, and moved to Sri Lanka, where she staid for 15 years. Now she is back, and uses the strength she gained from buddhism to be able to acknowledge and value her own heritage, and work with gypsy (she says she prefers that word) communities to increase the opportunities of children.
That was last week, this week they talked to a number of people, but they also played a really neat rap song about children who feel trapped between two cultures. They are called Karpe Diem, and were established in 2000. The group consists of Magdi Omar Ytreeide Abdelmaguid, Chirag Rashmikant Patel og DJ Marius Thingvald. I ended up buying two CDs by them on iTunes store, which is my first music purchase from iTunes. But I figured I wanted to support them, and iTunes doesn’t do DRM anymore, which was important to me.
To share them with you, I found the song that was played in the program, and I’ve embedded it below. I will also paste in the Norwegian lyrics, and translate them to English. Enjoy.
We determine who we are by what we look like. And when we look in the mirrors like this, we ask ourself a question: Who am I? Wo am I on this jurney called life? Who am I? I hope, that you haven’t bought into the idea that you are what you look like, or your worth is determined by what your outwards appearance looks like. Or about what you do.
I hope, that you figured out by now, that if you lived you life that way, you would constibly be looking at you self, and be thinking “I am not good enough. I’m not tall enough. I’m not buff enough. I’m not pretty enough, I am not beautiful enough. I’m not anybody.”
Er både svart og hvit, er både glad og trist, er både fattig og rik, en dåre valkemist
Is both black and white, is both happy and sad, is both poor and rich, a fool valkemist
Er både ja til slå tilbake, og pasifist og. Du tror du kjenner meg, for du kanskje visste at jeg er både svart og hvitt, jeg er både glad og trist, jeg er både fattig og rik, en dåre valkemist. Er både ja til slå tilbake, og pasifist og. Du tror du kjenner meg, for du kanskje visste at:
Is both yes to hit back, and pacifist, and. You think you know, because maybe you knew that I am both black and white, I am both happy and sad, I am both poor and rich, a fool valkemist. Is both yes to hit back, and pacifist, and. You think you know me, because maybe you knew that:
han er halv norsk, han er halvt egypter
Han går på fester, han er alltid nykter
Han bor hos faren sin, han bor hos mamma
Han spiser brunost, falefel og shawarma
he is half Norwegian, he is half Egyptian
he goes to parties, he is always sober
he lives with his father, he lives with mum
he eats goatcheese, falafel and shawarma
Han bor i åsen, (Hei) han bor i blokk, (men)
han kan arabisk, han snakker norsk
Men han er brun, hei please; han er hvit!
Han feirer jul, det er høytid når det er hit
He lives in the hill, (hi) he lives in a high-rise, (but)
he speaks Arabic, he speaks Norwegian
but he is brown, hey please, he is white!
he celebrates Christmas, it’s holiday when it’s Eid
men han er rik, kom igjen a; han er fattig!
Hei, han er hvit, nei, se på’n; han er svarting!
han ser fordeler, og han ser ulemper
Han er hva du sier, han veit hva du tenker
Og her hjemme, kaller de han utlending
og der borte, kaller de han utlending
but he is rich, now come on, he is poor!
Hey, no he is white, no, look at him, he’s a nigger!
he sees advantages, and he sees disadvantages
he is what you say, he knows what you think
and here at home, they call him foreigner
and over there, they call him foreigner
Men vi er enig om at vi blir fresh selv om identitet lett dreper med en strek mellom.
But we agree that we become fresh, even if identity can easily kill by drawing a line between.
I just finished reading “My freshman year”, an ethnographic book about a professor enrolling as a student at her own university, and spending a year living in the dormitory, to try to understand why she feels so disconnected from the contemporary student culture. The book was published under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan, but a journalist in the New York Sun was able to piece together her real identity – Cathy Small from Northern Arizona University. The book is quite short, and although she does quote from national surveys and some previous research, it’s written in a very popular voice, with very little theory.
For various reasons, the book made me think of a lot of different topics. It made me think of many other ethnographic studies that I read during my undergrad, and how I often had the feeling: “is this all you came up with?” The book has some interesting points, but it still seems little after a year of immersing oneself in a community – furthermore a community of which she already had some knowledge. From her own comments, it seems that she decided not to use a large amount of her collected materials, because of concern with ethics.
Ethics
Which leads me to the question of research ethics, which is something I have thought a lot about recently – not the least having had to go through the Ethical Review Board protocol myself for my field work in China. I was curious to see how the ethics of her fieldwork was received, and I found a long – and quite vitriolic – debate in the comment field under an article by Inside Higher Ed. Most of the people on the list had not yet read the book – nor did they know (until towards the end of the comment thread) her real identity. Most readers were appalled at her use of deception (not telling the other students that she was doing research), although she did use informed consent for her formal interviews, and her IRB approved of the research.
One of the things that surprised me was that she chose to do the research at her own campus. It might have been closer to home, and easier to organize from the university, but it seems to make things much more complicated. I am surprised that she wasn’t recognized more, for a university with only 10,000 students, although from what she describes, it’s very large and dispersed, and perhaps the anthropologi professors just drive to the anthro building, and stay there. If she had been at UofT Scarborough, she would have ran into colleagues all the time. In addition, it is much easier to discover which university she talked about, and she will probably run into students she lived with (especially since they were freshman, and had three years left), maybe even teach some of them, or meet them in other capacities.
I failed to find any serious discussion about the ethics of her approach (the debate mentioned above was high on temper, low on facts), which would have been interesting – but clearly it worked out, since she is not only still in her job, but also has been travelling around and lecturing about the student experience.
I think that the demand for anonymity, for example, sometimes goes too far — or is unworkable. I remember another example of a student at my school who was working as a teacher (many of our students are part-time, mid-career). She wrote her thesis on the process of internationalizing the curriculum at her school. She would change the name of the school, but of course, everyone could google her and find out where she lived — and anyone involved at that school could look up her thesis, and that is probably what’s the most relevant. Another recent example is a student who just defended her PhD thesis, and presented on it in our class (taught by her supervisor). She discussed the policies toward internationalization by two different universities, one in Ontario and one in British Columbia. According to her supervisor: “We all understand that this refers to X and Y university, because of their characteristics, but for ethical reasons, we couldn’t name them in the thesis”. What ethical reasons, if anyone familiar with the Canadian context can immediately deduce which universities are in question?
I guess my biggest problem with elaborate ERB protocols is that they do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do: incite debate, reflection and continued care. Instead, with their 20 page protocols that take months to get through, people focus on writing to get approved, not daring to take chances with new research methods, for example, because it might delay their project for too long. Instead of allowing you to go to a new country, spend time understanding the situation deeper, and then modifying your research plan accordingly, it binds you to a rigid structure, or forces you to go through months waiting to have the new proposal approved. It would be interesting with studies of how people have modified their research designs to be “safe”, to not challenge the review board, because they cannot risk having their approval delayed. I’d also like to know about the implementation of the ethics requirements across Canada, I know they are based on the tri-councils who fund research in Canada, but it would be interesting to look at how interpretation and execution differs across institutions.
In January this year, University Affairs reported that there were changes afoot to make the ethics process more responsive to the concern of social science researchers, whereas it traditionally has been very much oriented towards the biomedical sciences and their concerns. It will be interesting to see the changes, and how quickly they trickle down to the institutional level.
I love when different “open” movements can come together and mutually enhance each other, whether it’s using open source software for the production of open educational materials, or using CC-licensed music when creating a CC-licensed documentary. John Willinsky, who recently gave a talk at OISE as part of OA week 2009, has written an article for First Monday called “What open access research can do for Wikipedia”. In this article, he finds that very few articles currently contain links to OA articles, and that we should make a real effort to link to these, since they provide jump-off points for people who want to research a topic more in-depth, and are more useful than references to closed articles, or physical books, because they are available to anyone online. I thought it was a great idea at the time. Whenever I talk about open educational resources, I also mention OA research as an important source of information, and I hope that the OER movement and the OA movement can work even more together in the future.
Recently, I came across another very interesting Wikipedia project. The user EconoPhysicist writes on his userpage: “Many of my contributions have been related to the OpenCourseWare movement, initiatives by universities to make video and other course materials freely available on the web.” Starting in January this year, EconoPhysicist has made more than 350 edits, almost all of them adding open educational videos from universities to relevant articles. Users who go to to the articles for the Euler–Lagrange equation, Flow network or Democracy in America can find at the bottom a link to relevant videolectures from Yale, MIT, Stanford and other universities that make their lectures available in this way.
I think this is a brilliant initiative! It’s a great way to improve the “findability” of these resources, and contributes to demolish the idea that Wikipedia is not suitable to education. The point is of course (and has always been) that you don’t stop at the Wikipedia article, you start from it. During my talk last week, we discussed the problem with having OCW materials “siloed” off in separate institutional sites, rather than aggregated, and I pointed out that the open nature of these materials means that even if MIT or Stanford themselves haven’t created interesting ways to access and aggregate their materials – other users can. So you can have websites like Videolectures.net, which aggregate lecture videos and provide Web 2.0 features, you can link resources to Wikipedia, you can create open curricula that include links to lecture videos, etc.
It would be really useful if it was easier to link to a specific segment in a video, or to easily choose a video, trim it, and upload it to Wikimedia Commons (although most of the videos are non-commercial, which means that they could not be included in Wikipedia, only linked to). It might also make sense to make a series of shorter videos, rather than one long one – it would make reuse much more feasible.
However, this song wasn’t original – in fact, it was an adaptation of a very well-known American country song called “Harper Valley PTA” (
As I was walking home tonight, I listened to 
