#opened14 - third day keynote from John Willbanks
6 min read
John Willbanks currently works at Sage Bionetworks. He was asked to speak about open science and open data.
He started by cautioning against "open silos", different campaigns using common tools and approaches but not speaking to each other. Science effects education, and both are affected by wider culture, and the culture of prediction.
Yogi Berra - "predictions are hard. especially about the future". (It is now easy to find older books to source quotations via web seachers, though nothing from the last 25 years)
It *was* really hard to make predictions about the future. But predictions are increasingly accurate - especially predictions about ourselves. Every single website is trying to sell you the same thing - it's not like they know you, they literally know you. Mining things like email data to make predictions has exploded over the past 10 years.
This is about probability. And this is basic mathematics.
Increasingly fields are, or can be, data driven. Biology used to be a narrative science, now with the advent of cheap shared data, it is a predictive science. He gave the example of services like "23andMe", consumer genetics. Or Science Exchange - ebay for university science services.
It now costs $200 per sample to do RNA microarray. Tools for science and analysis are cheaper.
Not just hard science. In Archaeology there are huge amounts of archive data. Even etymology we can find the origin of quotes.
Everything is text. So every field has a data wave coming. Everything is increasingly measurable and indexable.
So probabilistic analysis is going to be the academic coin of the realm. And advertising is making the methods and tools more accessible.
Probability changes every time we add new information to the model. This changes educational culture, and changes the needs for training and skills. He said that current pedagogy is failing - there is no continuing education for sciences. So it is hard for academics to deal with the data flow.
In the sharing economy, a larger market makes for a better economy. Though these are rental economies, not good for labour or conditions. And service owners don't want you to be a buyer and a seller - in science, we want to be able to be both.
These markets are better (for buyers) than the terrible status quo. But this isn't good enough. Open multi-sided platforms allow individual actors to have multiple roles.
In the open movement, we don't focus on adding users. We need lightweight ways to move people in ways like shifting from being a wikipedia viewer to a wikipedia contributor. And getting value from both sides - increasingly as more people are involved.
It is not about the assets (or the license choices), it is about the users. And these may be people who don't agree with us philosophically. He gave the example of open source - methodologically and economically it succeeded. The philosophy is great, but it wasn't that that drives growth.
Willbanks asked of any "open" activity - "does it create more value than a closed version?". Openness is a methodology that gets assets and data in front of people.
So selling value rather than philosophy is selling a practice change. Work at Merck on cancer is open, via a non profit operation. It allows anyone to use genetic data.
Analytic tools to analyse this data need to be used alongside experience - so can we create an open multi-sided market to bring these together - not just solo labs (as the natural unit of science) but communities. Government funding now works to foster collaboration, and open approaches can simply play into this (eg TCGA Pan-Cancer Consortium).
In this example, open methods allowed the consortia to analyse data collaboratively, buy instigating a culture or sharing clear information. So science practice has improved via open approaches. Using approaches like version control for annotations and metadata. Allowing researchers to see every stage, allowing us to be confident in probabilistic analysis.
And for researchers not used to these ways of working, this practice sucks. It is new, and slow. But the value realised in terms of academic activity (papers etc) is immense. And this led it to gain users from across TCGA.
This was a community that was required to work together, but what about those that are not. In colon cancer we saw 4 (or more!) simultaneous papers postulating different genetic subtypes for the disease. Open approaches allowed groups to test their methods across all of the 13 data sets. So a consensus subtype, with high probabilistic confidence, emerged.
The approach is now exploding across research groups. And it makes challenges possible to widen communities - more eyes on the problem. For example computing the probability of cancer relapse. The winner (with the competition as peer review) gets a guaranteed high-impact journal publication, but code sharing is required to be eligible.
The winner actually got a cover, an opinion piece, a methods paper and a results paper. And an entire suite of tools was generated (even from outside medicine) for others attaching the problem - the winning entry was from the lab that invented the mp3 codec.
If you have an open player in the market, it changes and improves the market.Less immoral. Less asshole-y.
So we need to think about our practice - how do we govern open platforms? How do we design and cost them? Willbanks felt that the biggest challenge the open movement faced was platform design, to drive engagement. The iPhone was not designed around the idea of a closed ecosystem - it was designed around value to the user.
With an open platform, you are not just a buyer or a seller. You are a citizen. You are a member. And good design means you are the priority.
Licenses like BY and 0 give users more value. And a winning design can embed this into places where open had not been previously considered. He gave the example of informed consent (which reminded me of early UK work on the consent commons), claiming that better designed forms would make it easier to find research participants, allowing for larger scale (and thus more probabilistically confident findings).
This led to collections of noun, verb and sentence icons and animations, and storyboard templates, put into the public domain. Allowing the simple creation of stories that can properly inform consent. Using mobile technology and sensors to gather and analyse research data (for example gyroscopic sensors to measure hand tremors in Parkinsons patients).
As a fully open tool, these informed consent approaches can be used in a variety of contexts. Allowing other people to do things that the product creators cannot do, or had not considered. Again, an open method creates more value. Economic value, educational value.
In probability, adding more data refines the model. But what we "know" becomes less stable as more data is added, so pedagogy needs to change to reflect this emerging ontological instability. So the right to reuse becomes the right to be current, and to get better, and to create value.
And value is not just economic in open systems - it is social value and knowledge value.
So after an unaccountably excellent attempt at predicting the key news stories in education technology and higher education policy for this year, I feel compelled to have another stab – and suggest what 2015 may hold. I should note I’ve just spent some time #ConferenceCrashing at the superb SRHE2014 conference, and many of the ideas currently buzzing around my head will have come from conversations I had there.
1. Education policy in politics - I’m not going to win any points by predicting a UK general election next year, or an unusual result that is likely to mark a decisive shift away from the two party politics that have dominated the country since the second world war. Neither will it have escaped many peoples notice that none of the seven significant parties (eight if you count the Liberal Democrats) contesting seats have a clear policy to address the now widely recognised deficiencies in funding processes, quality assurance processes and legislation that make HE such a spectacular mess at the moment.
What I am predicting is HE policy being a point of clear distinction between parties. Unlike 2010, where everyone waited for the Browne Review, there is space now to generate policy positions that will reveal a lot about what kind of country each party believes we need to be. Access or elitism, internationalism or isolationism, economic engine or radical heart? The expanding network of great UK HE policy blogs (not least Wonkhe.com and Critical Education) will be a huge part of this national debate.
2. Academia against the institution – Battle lines are increasingly being drawn between students, academics, support and ancillary staff on the one hand, and institutional leaders and senior management on the others. Campaigns like #3cosas, #copsoffcampus and the myriad #freeeducation protests have taken the lead in challenging managerialism and the pursuit of cost savings above the welfare of human beings. The heart-breaking story of Professor Stephan Grimm at Imperial, the funding-target driven layoffs at Warwick, the bizarre saga of Professor Thomas Docherty (again at Warwick… seriously what is happening there…) are bellwethers for a wider culture of fear and control that have made working at a UK HE institution a series of compromises and an ever expanding job that eats into your health and your family life.
I’ve heard too many stories of senior institutional managers out of control and out of touch, the saga at Plymouth is as yet the most visible but there is a lot more to come out from institutions of all types. Our union (UCU) has a huge role to play in seeing that light and political heat is focused on this unfortunate tendency, and I think 2015 will be the year when many of these stories come to light. The struggles of academics and support staffs for fair pay and fair conditions are liable to take longer, but with students and (increasingly) public opinion on their side we should see some movement on this too. Expect more strikes, more protests, more hard questions asked of institutions – and hopefully some answers.
3. W(h)ither the MOOC – I’ll come straight out and predict that at least one major platform will either close entirely or move away from offering free and accessible online courses in 2015. (I know Udacity kind of mostly have, but another one) Investors have waited and waited for the disruptive moment that MOOCs promised, and I don’t think they will wait another twelve months without advocating some kind of a sustainable business model.
There is a lot of work to be done around accredited online instruction, and I predict that institutional offers will take up some of the latent demand for low-cost courses that the MOOC experiment has revealed. But these courses will compete on quality and value, rather than price.
4. Teaching quality enhancement metrics - the ongoing HEFCE work on “learning gain” was a surprise to many on announcement this year, and the findings may prove to be some of the most significant policy drivers in teaching quality enhancement next year. “Learning and Teaching” has had a difficult time over the last few years with the rise of the vocabulary of the “Student Experience”, and learning gain looks like a way of stifling the remainder still further with a faux-scientific focus on quantitative measures. Just this morning, Professor Richard Hall issued another of his barnstorming communiques – I demand you all watch the “dashboarding” video and read the text carefully.
Organisations like the SRHE and ALT (both which I intend to join next year, having been hugely impressed with their work this year) may be the two major vehicles of dissent to this agenda, and the combination of the theoretical rigour of the former and the pragmatism and history of the latter will be a powerful combination.
So I predict that: learning gain will inform the key policy arguments about learning technology in 2015, and that we will see a welcome collaboration between SRHE and ALT in response.
5. Independent researchers - (no Martin, I’m not saying “Guerilla Researchers“!) I am an independent researcher, so are most of the people that read these posts and work in these area. Grants and projects are now hard to come by, institutional support for non-income generating research is increasingly limited – and the likely funding decisions linked to the REF will limit this support further.
Like it or not, much of the significant work on education technology and education policy will be done by people in their own time, and with little or no external funding. My prediction here is that independent researchers in a number of non-science fields will begin to organise themselves for mutual support and benefit.
6. Authenticity - One of the most interesting sessions I sneaked into at the SRHE conference used the language of Queer Theory to examine various aspects of academic life. Though the vocabulary and conceptual framework were not familiar to me, the feeling in the room was incredible. We were talking about real lived experiences, not as data points but as artefacts on their own that could not be challenged or reduced to fit a pattern. And it was powerful.
Much of the wider cultural debate about austerity has shifted from measurement to the recounting experiences – government ministers can argue about statistics all day, but when greeted with the actuality of a life lived (or a life lost, all too often) it is more difficult to dismiss. Many of the most powerful arguments made about the condition of academia in 2015 will be not be framed in financial or statistical language. They will be pure, beautiful and true.
7. Students as ______ ? – The “student as consumer/customer” arguments are largely played out in the UK. Clearly students are paying, and have always paid, with their time and attention as well as their money. What we’ve not seen yet is a proper attempt to define the relationship of the student with their institution, with their subject and with their tutors in language that both encompasses and moves beyond the transactional language beloved by our government.
Sometime in 2015 we will see the development of a proper position that sees the consumer aspect of these interactions as one part of a very complex whole. And this will help us design institutions and processes that will support the entirety of the student experience – away from the “customer always knows best” reductions of the way the NSS has been implemented.
8. Uncapturing the lecture – It seems that lecture capture is capturing everything! Coupled with the increasing prevalence of the mandated deposit to the VLE, it seems we have reduced the lecture to an artefact rather than celebrating it as a performance. Journalists and dubious consultants line up to describe the lecture as dead, deficient or just plain dull. And this language is parroted and amplified by those looking to sell the content that is intended to replace it.
In musical terms, we can see the required .ppt as the score, the capture as a recording. But the live, interactive and responsive experience of the lecture (and lecture-style teaching techniques, just to be pedagogically neutral here) is of far greater value than any of the ways we have of capturing it. I predict a resurgence of the lecture – as outreach, as destination and as the cornerstone of the higher education experience.
9. Collaborative tools – I’ve struggled to find an actual education technology this year, because so much of edtech this year has been a glossy restatement of Taylorism and Skinnerism – a retreat to the very worst of instrumental education (or “skills delivery” to use the argot of the times).
But the things I do see that I like are the tools that enable distributed collaboration. Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki (popularised in my PLE by the ever-amazing Mike Caulfield ) is one such example – a very different one that I perhaps understand a little more is Known. As John Willbank’s superb keynote address at OpenEd14 impressed upon me the need for tools for collaborative research, so Kin Lane‘s advocacy opened my eyes to the possibilities and the concepts embodied by GitHub (cue Pat Lockley eyeroll as he’s been banging on about this to me for years).
So in 2015 the technologies that will impress us most will be collaboration tools of various purposes, returning perhaps to Tim Berniers-Lee’s original conceptualisation of a web that is readable, writeable and editable.
dkernohan, Dec 12 2014 on followersoftheapocalyp.se