Abstract
This article overviews an action-inquiry-based experimentation with an emancipatory approach to academic work in the 21st century electronic age. Universities generally request of academic staff the pursuit of three (inter-related) missions: teaching, research, and service. This article suggests four pillars which could help to support authentic pursuit of these missions: the use of free software
Pursuit of emancipatory teaching in an electronic age
Mt. Everest may have been well and truly climbed, but there's no shortage of other mountains to be tackled with a spirit of adventure
and for the potential benefit of humanity and ecomanity. Within the context of academia, I imagine myself somewhere half-up, half-down stumbling around in the wilds in search of providing authentic teaching, research, and service. Along the way, I have been developing my developing a teaching philosophy which includes four practical information technology principles which help guide a significant part of my teaching, research and service endeavors. These principles involve the use of: - Free software
- Open file formats
- Open access materials, and
- Open licensing.
Figure. Four principles of emancipatory teaching in a 21st century electronic age
Free software
I have been experimenting with a range of free software
and (FOSS) for university teaching. Its not that free and open source softwareproprietary software is necessarily inherently evil, its just that the free software and open source software movements offer a fundamentally better model for the future of a fair, sustainable human and natural world. If you're in need of convincing, I recommend Richard Stallman's "Why schools should use exclusively free software" as a starting point.The ways in which people go about switching to free software vary and depend on individual circumstances. Some people go "cold turkey" and switch quickly. I'm moving slowly and enjoying doing so.
So, I'm currently using Windows XP and at various stages of transitioning teaching-related applications to free software. Each semester I switch over more functionality to free software and somewhere down the track I'll transition to a free software operating system.
A particularly strong consideration for me is to strive to teach using tools which students can freely obtain ongoing access to, beyond their short-term period of access to the institutional IT system. Thus, educators I believe need to be teaching more within the external context of students' lives, and less within the artificial setting of the university.
With Australian student fees having been hiked higher than ever relative to CPI over the past two decades, we should not be compounding the issue by locking students into being primarily dependent on proprietary software during their professional education when there are reasonable alternatives available. Prescribing proprietary software serves to constrain and disempower, and is indicative of ivory towerism
Open file formats and open access
In addition to teaching using free software, I also consider it basic pedagogy to:
- Maximise the flexibility and availability of learning materials
(part of which is to use open file formats - Share knowledge, questions, and projects, with enrolled students, the institution, colleagues, and broader society
(part of which is to provide open access
Preparing materials in open formats and providing open access gives the material added social value. For example, the unit materials can be readily utilised in other settings (such as in developing countries), particularly where proprietary software and access to specialist knowledge is nigh impossible. Locally, the student and institution benefits because open access material fosters feedback and collaboration. Some would say that such sharing leads to good karma
Regardless of one's philosophical orientation, there is little question that information shared online has. and stands to have, a greater impact than information only shared via hard-copy. It is becoming increasingly well recognised, for example, that citation rates for online studies are in the order to two to five times higher than hard copy only studies. Open access peer-reviewed publications and open access teaching materials clearly offer greater potential for global academic advancement than exclusive knowledge-sharing amongst the economically privileged. This quiet revolution has been underway since the early days of the internet age:
The Open Access Movement, if you could call it a "movement", can be traced back to an email message called a Subversive Proposal
Open licensing
One may use free software, open file formats, and provide open access, but may still impose restrictions on the use of the material by asserting copyright. A user should be free to access, redistribute, change and modify the material. Otherwise the sharing of the information is only partial, imposing inconvenient and unnecessary restrictions on the reader. Copyright law was in fact developed to protect the public from having limited use of useful information - hence, "fair use
The first place we should look for such an open attitude to be modeled are academics and universities, whose livelihood is generally supported at least in significant part by the state, the philanthropic community, and its students. The minimum to be expected by society in return for the privilege of being an academic is free , open, electronic sharing of each academic's teaching and research work. Thus, the fourth pillar of emancipatory university teaching in an electronic age is to place all teaching and research materials in the public domain
Copyleft is a general term to indicate an opposite attitude to the significant restrictions which copyright imposes on the reader (despite the allowances of "fair use"). In fact, a copyleft license uses copyright law to assert that the material can only be further distributed under a similar license. Some have argued that this restricts further usage of material and that therefore copyleft licenses are too severe. Whatever the nuances, an author can choose from a range of licenses (or make up his or her own) which are far more open and preferable to copyright. However, I think the simplest and best solution is to simply put one's materials in the public domain. It all ends up in the public domain once you've been dead long enough, so why wait? Modern technology has heralded the death of copyright, it's high time to march to a different beat.
Tools, functions and applications
I search for the best free software to meet each desired functionality for sharing unit materials and fostering electronic communication. All solutions ultimately need some level of customising, and occasionally a bit of hacking. I also use proprietary software where no reasonable alternatives exist or where I haven't sufficiently experimented yet to commit to an alternative in a production teaching environment.
The main tools I use in my day-to-day teaching-related work are outlined below, as are various issues associated with their use.
Learning management systems
Open Academic
Open Academic
This is not to say I wouldn't use OA in the future - it has considerable potential.
It should also be pointed out that OA encompasses much more than a Drupal hack. It has the vision of being integrated with other free software packages, including:
- Moodle
- MediaWiki
- OpenID
All of this sounded attractive and represents the possibility of many teaching tools coming together under a single umbrella. However, the practical implementation is rather nascent, and with time running out before semester got underway I opted out from frustrations I envisage would ensue from expecting too much of the early implementation of OA.
Google groups
Initially I had problems signing students up because GG rejected my attempts to bulk add my 80 student email addresses (part of their anti-spam efforts). However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it made students sign up using their preferred email address, which are usually not their university email addresses.
I had no ambition to do anything other than provide a simple, basic mechanism for email and web-forum style communications amongst staff and students. An important criteria which led me to choose GG was that I found no other way (other than equivalent sites such as Yahoo Groups) which provided a free web-based and email-based discussion tool.
I valued highly the goal of a simple electronic discussion medium which could accessed via email or web. I think its inadequate in this day and age to have email only or web only electronic communications for tertiary teaching. Email remains the key electronic communication device in students' lives (along with mobile phones). GG provides a simple, easy and effective electronic announcement mechanism, with students able to customise their email address and the format and regularity of delivery of group messages to their email accounts.
GG has expanded well beyond group email and could be used as an entire LMS. This is an interesting possibility which I would pursue further except that for the fact that, much as I love Google's free products and their "do no evil" philosophy, they are a profit-making company (e.g., ads display on the GG interface) and their software is not free software.
Firefox
Web-browsing and email are two key ways that students interact electronically. A third is via mobile devices. Thus, transitioning students to using a free software browser is an important step towards creating a free software platform.
Open office
There are several free software packages now available which essentially replicate and extend the functionality of MS Office and which can read and store files in open formats. The most popular is Open Office
- Writer
- Calc
- Impress
- Draw
- Math
To date, I'm using OO Writer for keeping notes (where I once used MS Word) and switching over old spreadsheets and create new spreadsheets in Calc (where I once used MS Excel).
Next semester I will making a similar transition to use of Impress (where I currently use MS PowerPoint). I've requested OO be installed on the university disk image so that in teaching we start to use open document formats
Screen capture
MW Snap
I also use some proprietary software for image editing, including PhotoStudio2000 and Adobe Illustrator, but eventually plan to transition to a free software alternative such as GIMP.
Screen recording
CamStudio
For watching videos and listening to audio on a desktop, VLC media player
Lecture recording
Lecture screencasts (.wmv) and audio (.wma) were automatically captured and online via student or staff login. This was provided by the UC digital recording service, a homegrown application which works quite well. There is, however, a project underway to find a commercial, enterprise replacement package with greater functionality.
Access to the recordings is via UC staff or student password. I would have liked to make the audio and video more widely available, but I lack sufficient bandwidth and server space, as well as administrative time for transferring these externally. They can't easily be transferred to video hosting sites such as YouTube because those videos are limited to ~5 to 10 minutes in length.
I am hopefully and will be lobbying for UC's search for new enterprise software for lecture recording will lead to digital recordings with customisable licenses and levels of access. Or for the system to be integrable with a new digital learning object management system which allows different levels of license and access.
It would also be desirable to see the university move towards allowing the creation of open format digital media (e.g., .ogg files for audio).
Statistical analysis
In psychology, we traditionally use SPSS for statistical analysis. SPSS is powerful, but the licenses are expensive. This is a significant issue because off-campus access for students for a full version is over $1000 or for dumbed-down studentware versions ($100 to $300).
Free software alternatives are few and limited, but at this stage include:
- R
- Open Office Calc - spreadsheet-style
- Many more to be explored - Free Statistical Softwar
Readings and textbooks
I am moving towards teaching courses with open access materials, but still find textbooks useful and also electronic readings which are copyrighted and delivered via e-reserve. Eventually, I will transition to only using entirely copyright-free materials. Textbooks remain helpful adjuncts to electronic materials, however their cost has risen disproportionately to CPI over the last decade and they are basically a rip-off to which most academics unthinkingly pander. (Like drug companies giving doctors free drugs, etc. publishers lure academics with free books).As academics, we should be campaigning and taking action to help students get access to full-text materials at cost-price. With the erosion of student unions, the responsibility falls more than ever on academic staff to provide open and accessible materials. There is quite a journey still ahead, however, in weaning academics off their manipulated reliance on prescribing overpriced commercial textbooks and proprietary learning materials. Instead, its time to go the other way, and to work collaboratives on high quality, open access, online knowledge. The technology for pursuing this is readily available (e.g., see Wikiversity
. HTML editing
I personally think there's still much to be said for presenting information via simple html pages and equipping students with the skills to do so. Chances are, in their future careers, knowing some basic html editing will be handy. LMSs and CMSs are basically just hosted WYSIWIG html editors. Just as students are expected to have basic word processing and spreadsheet competence, so to I think it would valuable to consider more widespread teaching of html coding and also wiki markup. These two techniques empower people with the electronic language tools to communicate effectively via the web.
I've learnt that its important to keep the html stripped down to its bare bones, with minimal formatting, and to 'skin' the html content via cascading style sheets (CSS). Among other efficiencies, this enhances the portability and ease for reuse of information.
The critical feature of web-based text is of course the use of hyperlinks. This article makes use hyperlinking in effort to facilitate a more meaningful experience for the reader than would probably occur through hard copy only reading. So, html allows more than simply putting information online, its really about interconnecting, sharing, and interweaving information.
For these reasons, and in the absence of finding a suitable LMS or CMS, I simply present the webpages for my units as interlinked html or php pages. This is a somewhat old, basic approach, but for me its fast, reliable, light-weight and effective. The main feature it lacks in my mind is the ability for students to comment on or edit pages. That's why Web2.0 tools such as wikis are promising and high on my priority list for further experimentation.
Hosting
UC does not provide staff with admin access to servers, so I pay for an externally hosted virtual server where I place unit materials. This is primarily because I can get near full control over how the material will be presented. The external host provides a virtually hosted Apache web server with mysql and phpadmin. The rest can be configured.
Despite the exciting possibilities of Web2.0 principles and applications for learning, I have a strong orientation towards simplicity and usability. Thus, for example, it is important to me that content is:
- Not hidden behind passwords
- Fast to download, with
- Clean interface
- Simple navigation
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
FTP
Gradebook
An online gradebook is the one functionality which I continue to rely on an institutional LMS to perform. The UC OA implementation of Drupal doesn't yet have a gradebook. There is one in Moodle, but an installation of Moodle just for its gradebook seems excessive. This illustrates why LMSs might be better constructed as stand-alone, but integrable modules. Even when an a gradebook package is identified, there will be the issue of getting institutional permission to automatically register students via LDAP. Academic staff do not have direct access to LDAP and therefore rely on institutionally customised LMS packages for access to automatic student registration. However, this could be overcome and in future, I hope to find a free software online gradebook solution because its a fairly straight-forward yet widely needed function.
Wiki
A wiki, among other uses, provides arguably the quickest and simplest way of creating collaborative online content. UC has implemented Confluence
Confluence is a highly functional wiki and potentially could be be used as a primitive but functional LMS. However, I am hesitant to pursue Confluence much beyond its potential for UC-related note-taking and file-sharing tool because it is not free software and I don't see much point in teaching with software which students aren't likely to have ready access to in their future and nor might I once I leave employment of the institution. Confluence is nevertheless a fully functional wiki which could be used to foster valuable electronic collaboration between staff, students, and the outside world, particularly for to local and short to medium-term projects.
Unfortunately UC hasn't rolled Confluence out with much gusto in the way of training or support. Uptake is progressing slowly, but at least the institution, including students and staff, have have a powerful wiki readily available. Confluence content can also be opened to public access and editing, so it provides the most openly enabled electronic interface for UC members to share and develop electronic content.
There are currently some technical limitations with using in teaching, such as it is only possible to bulk add students to a name space on its creation (not subsequently). The blog tool is not producing proper RSS feeds, etc. I written a separate article about my initial assessment of UCSpace)
I have created several open access name spaces on Confluence, including ones for each of the units I teach:
I use these spaces to collect administrative information and links, mostly for teaching staff. The content is open access in order to provide transparency and opportunities for peer review and collaboration.
In the future, I intend to experiment more with MediaWiki
Social bookmarking
I think free social bookmarking
To create bookmarks, I use the del.icio.us extension for firefox
Concept mapping
For constructing diagrams, I've primarily been using OO Draw, but have also been exploring various concept mapping
My other concern/caution about concept mapping software is mainly the portability of the text and relationships into other formats. This is becoming less of an issue, with concept mapping software programs increasingly able, for example, to be rendered in html and xml.
I have started experimentation with two free programs,FreeMind
Quizzes and exams
Previously I've experimented with online quizzes and exams, building test banks using Respondus and delivering the quizzes through WebCT. Both are proprietary systems, so I'm on the hunt for an alternative. Hot Potatoes
For other various reasons (including less tutorial lab time due to a reduction in credit points from 4 to 3 per unit), I've opted to revert for the moment to a more traditional style mid-semester and exam of semester using hard-copy multi-choice exams with automatic marking sheets. The scanning and marking is performed by the university Print Room. They are very efficient and return all the data, including each person's response to each item and scores, in a .csv spreadsheet.
Down the track, I hope to switch back to online quizzes and exams because it offers additional features, such as the potential for immediate feedback and help to students. However, there are hurdles, such as hardware and invigilation. Ideally, we need a room full of 100 or so terminals configured to allow mass sitting of electronic exams. Or perhaps several rooms in Building 10 could be booked out - worth looking into. Or maybe we look more towards handheld devices.
Online surveys
Lime Survey
Insert Table plus Figure showing online survey results
I am coming now to appreciate that feedback should be sought throughout the process and in multiple modes, thus now that I have experimented with an end-of-semester online survey and confluence comment boards, I will seek to extend this functionality, for example, to allow commenting about each lecture.
For example, using wiki software and possibly also polling/rating functionality for unit materials will allow micro-comments by students on each learning object and section. I find I get some of this through direct emails and face to face comments from students during semester, but the mechanisms should be as easy as possible for students and allow anonymity.
Bigger picture needs
UC provides staff with limited access to survey creation software. There are quiz and survey tools within WebCT, but these can't readily be used for surveying people for research purposes outside of the context of a unit. For research purposes we need access to generic online survey software which can be used for research purposes and for tasks such as gathering student evaluations and feedback on teaching and educational quality. Currently, UC has a patchwork of separate data collection systems for specific purposes, but a distinct lack of such functionality is directly available to academic staff for a wide range of teaching and research purposes. Staff are not able to freely gather via the internet data via UC resources.
Thus, part of the bigger picture may be a the need for the university to examine the inter-relationship between the SFS, USS, and the CEQ, bearing in mind their different values and purposes. The university may also like to invite teaching staff to innovate with more dynamic methods of gathering evaluation and feedback information from students for their professional development, such as by using Web2.0 technology. Ultimately, a unit should have readily available, easy to use methods for student feedback since this is basic to good quality, democratic, emancipatory education.
Conclusions and recommended changes
Based on the evaluation and feedback from students this semester, the following conclusions and recommendations are drawn. By making these transparent and in the public domain, it is hoped it will help to enhance my professional accountability.
Insert table of conclusions and recommendations
I'm going to trial this semester collecting feedback via anonymous, private ratings and comments via an externally hosted Lime Survey and anonymous or non-anonymous public forum space comments on UCSpace.
Conclusion
The aim of this article has been to provide a sketch of my journey towards emancipatory use of free software, open file formats, open access, and openly licensed materials in university teaching, research, and service. None of what is described involves rocket-science. However, the approach does represent an ambitious humanitarian, values-based pedagogy. This approach emerges from my view of universities and university staff as having fundamental responsibilities to students, colleagues and broader society for sharing information and knowledge and for making open learning and research opportunities available.
I am experimenting with a variety of free and open source software tools and also continuing to use legacy proprietary software where its functionality isn't readily replicated by free software alternatives. Along the way various institutional enablements and limitations are encountered. Institutional support and encouragement to experiment with an open academic approach was critical to the progress which has been made.
However, I have become accustomed to sending requests to IT and Teaching Support in order to help work out how a problem might be solved. I have also begun to offer more feedback and suggestions up the management chain. Sometimes this makes a difference, but by and large universities seem to be slow moving, policy-laden beasts (often in contrast to the vibrancy of intellectual endeavour which engages rapid developments in technology and free software tools). Much help, however, can be found elsewhere. For example, I learned much through connecting with cutting-edge online educators via the Teach and Learn Online
discussion group (e.g., see my postings).For myself and others willing to live at the bleeding edge
and keen to teach within an authentic, emancipatory 21st century pedagogical context, the way forward for integrated and ethical teaching, research, and services appears to be action-experimentation with an increasingly free software toolbox, along with open file formats, open access, and open licensing which fundamentally boils down to a free and open philosophy.
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