Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you so
much for coming to the library workshop on exploring innovative
and open educational resources. My name is Anita Walls
. I know many of you and, um,
delighted that you're here. Delighted that we have a
a panel of three very talented professors who are working
on learning resources for their students and are going to
share with us some of their work before we get
started. And before I introduced them, I would
like to frame this conversation. Um, there are
a lot of different, um, a lot of
different people that are not here that fit within the
theme of open and innovative educational resources. And I
just want to talk about where we are and kind
of the continuum. Um, there are faculty at
the university, obviously who used many different types of
resources in their instruction, everything from off the shelf
textbooks to digital learning objects and beyond, um,
a number of faculty that are somewhere in the middle
, um, faculty that I talked to in preparation
for this panel, um, included some people who
are using custom textbooks. Um, they'll work with
the publisher to pull a certain number of chapters out
of a commercial textbook at their own and, um
, published and how students purchase the resulting product.
Um, I talked to people who are working on
interactive textbooks, and I talked to people who are
working on things that are not text books at all
that are for learning for students learning inside and outside
the classroom. Um, so this is a broader
discussion, and I think most of us are familiar
with the off the shelf and possibly custom. Um
, but where we are, the little star,
um, kind of shows you that we are very
far on the digital side of things. And,
um, we are not representing the other section.
So I just want to point that out that you
don't have to use computer code to participate in using
and developing digital learning objects. Um, another point
that I wanted to bring up is that there is
some cost shifting involved in the conversation about open educational
resources. Um, off the text off the shelf
textbook cost students money. Um, custom textbooks cost
student students money. Digital learning objects. Uh,
they could cost students money or some people give them
away. So who cares that cost. Um,
this is another, um, Continuum, another kind
of question that we see in, um in this
area. So we are somewhere along the spectrum here
, on the on the right hand side. In
terms of cost, the the digital objects that these
gentlemen have developed are either, um, much more
affordable than a regular textbook or are free, um
, or open in terms of their distribution of these
items. And then finally, um, open educational
resources include all different sorts of media you see around
the room that there are a lot of different media
examples. Um, we have textbooks in the back
. We have the rotating three d anatomy dog in
the corner. Um, on this side, um
, there are a number of interactive simulations that are
scrolling through. Um, some of these things can
be found, Can be evaluated, can be adopted
for use in the classroom. Um, others of
them are created. And so the people who are
not here today in that discussion are those who are
adopting and using other people's materials. But we have
the pleasure of these three gentlemen being here to share
with us. Um, their work in creating them
. So and then a final plug. Um,
pedagogical decisions are not optional. Any instructional material that
that you may adopt in your classroom? Uh huh
. Needs to Obviously we need to think of of
how you would actually use it. What are the
objectives? What's your philosophy In terms of of using
those, then lastly, um, I think we
have already talked. We have to kind of two
different groups. They have the people who are consuming
resources who are finding, evaluating, customizing, integrating
. And then we have people who are producing and
producers obviously are can use the materials to, um
so mhm. Just a quick word about the workshop
afterwards. I know some of you are staying,
and some of you are going, um, if
you are staying with us, we're going to have
a World Cafe style workshop for different stations around,
and depending on how the conversation goes, I have
some topics pre programmed into those computers for you to
discuss. Um, if you if we go in
a completely different direction, we can change those.
Um, if that's helpful, So we'll break into
that at 11 o'clock. So, yeah, we'd
like to introduce our speakers today and starting on my
right. Um, Dr Cliff Schafer is a professor
in the Department of computer Science at Virginia Tech.
His research interests include computational biology algorithm, visualization,
digital education, visualization, spatial data structures, algorithm
designed an analysis and data structures. He leads the
ALGO Algorithm Visualization Research group Averaging Antagonists been awarded multiple
NSF grants related to his work on algorithm visualization,
including, most recently, the Open de ESA Active
book project. Um, Dr. Bruce McKinnon is
a professor of music and serves as the director of
the Radford University Center for Music Technology composer and music
theorist. His work attempts to explain the parameters of
musical expression in modernist and postmodern music and its relationship
to visual art and poetry. His interest in technology
focuses on intelligent interactive systems, and his work with
algorithm composition models lead to the development of real time
interactive computer music systems, a CD ROM time chance
released on the Capstone Recordings label and an active performance
schedule. Dr. Martin has pioneered the development of
musical applications for mobile devices in an ongoing effort to
use emerging technologies as a core means of music distribution
. He currently has three applications available on the iTunes
App Store. Um, and Dr Benjamin Jansen is
assistant professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech. He received
his Ph. D. In logic, computation and
methodology from the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University
and holds degrees in philosophy, physics and biology.
His principal interest is in the contents and character of
the natural world. Most mostly, this amounts to
a concern with the interpretation of scientific theory and the
question of what, if anything, scientific theory licenses
us to say about un observable entities, processes and
events is currently authoring an interactive textbook for a new
course of Virginia Tech. Um, so thank you
very much for coming and well, hear from our
Panelists. It's bring you up first. The transition
is yeah, alright, we're almost there. Should
be it. All right, very good. So
she said, I'm in the computer science department,
and the courses I teach are usually related to data
structures and algorithms, which in computer science is one
of the recognized sort of big threads that typical students
take two or three courses in this area. And
it's some of the harder material that they take.
Its sort of typically is the bridge from people coming
into our discipline who start off basically learning to program
. And they become computer scientists through this for this
gateway. Typically in that they're learning about things about
how to analyze programs and design and so on.
And by its nature. Um, this content is
, uh, is about a dynamic process. Okay
, so an algorithm is a thing that goes through
states, right? And what is an algorithm?
It's a thing that does, Does the state transition
. How do you get that across? Well,
it's hard to do in a static textbook, right
, because it's all about change. It's all about
if you're going to sort something. It's all about
how the things move around in the array that you're
trying to sort. And because of this, for
since certainly since the eighties, people have attempted to
develop various visualizations computer based visualizations for showing how algorithms
work, and certainly since the mid nineties, when
Java came around, if there are lots of these
things being developed, and in fact there was so
much of it being developed, it's very hard to
tell what's worthwhile and what's not. So, um
, if you talk to uh, instructors or the
students who have any exposure to algorithm visualizations. They
all say this is a great idea, and we
really would like to use these, but starting,
um, with people doing surveys who work on this
topic developing algorithm visualizations. And they would go out
and they would survey instructors and they'd say, Yeah
, yeah, we think this is a great thing
that students all say, Yeah, this is a
great thing. Then you ask them where you're using
this in your class and so much they say,
Not so much. So they were trying to figure
out How do we, um So I've been working
for some time, developing my own algorithm, visualizations
and and getting to meet other people who do that
. And we realized that there was this mismatch between
how much people were using it and how much they
said they felt they ought to be using it.
And we basically got one first NSF grant I got
on this topic was for this project called Algarve is
, which is essentially a catalog site. So,
um, this is example Page and you can go
in here and it's meant to help you find and
search for various algorithm visualization. So there's a bunch
of topics you can look for and sort of narrow
down the field and, in fact, in some
topics, popular topics for this. There's hundreds of
these. This site here has over 500 of these
people have developed and they give away for free.
A lot of them aren't very good, frankly,
and some of them are very good. And so
we want to try and help people figure out which
is which. So there's an attempt to do rating
and so on. All right, so we developed
this site and we thought that this was going to
be very helpful to the instruction community in this area
in computer science, and it helps some, but
we continue to survey them, and we find that
well, still, people aren't using it so much
. So we asked them why. Basically, when
you ask them why there isn't so much use of
algorithm visualization the classroom, there's two clusters of of
of impediments that they have. One is finding good
stuff and knowing that it's good stuff, and that's
exactly what this site hopefully would resolve. And the
other is issues related to actually integrating into their course
, which I'll get to in a minute. Um
, I want to let me go back to this
, uh, from point of view of finding resources
, open resources. So this is an example of
of a site. That's that's its purpose. And
more broadly, I wanted to mention something called,
um ensemble. The computer science. There's some of
you are familiar with the NSF nsd l project.
Alright, We used to be National Science Digital Library
. I can't remember what they changed the acronym to
They decided they didn't like the term digital library for
some reason. But there are It's sort of discipline
specific. So think of all the disciplines the NSF
supports. And I think generally speaking, there is
a portal for each of those in the sense of
it's meant to be a thing that, um collects
together and disseminate and tells people about teaching materials within
that discipline. So this is an example of one
of them, Um, and so, you know
, if you're teaching any other science, physics,
biology, whatever, there should be portals for that
and should list the different different resources depending. I
don't know that much about the other portals. But
I put in a plug for this because Ed Fox
here is one of the copious on developing this project
, and Virginia Tech is sort of the technical lead
site. All right, so back to algorithm visualization
. So, as I said, one problem that
instructors had was, um, finding stuff. But
even if they know that, um, so one
topic that you might do a visualization on that we
get taught in in a second or third semester class
to be certain sorting algorithms, that's a pretty standard
thing that we teach. And there's lots of these
, and you might get told that. Okay,
this this one over here, this is a good
one that will teach certain sorting algorithms well, if
it doesn't really fit your textbook, there's this.
There's this dissonance that instruct that the students have to
overcome. The textbook shows the algorithm one way,
and the visualization may show it a little different way
, and the instructor probably has developed their course notes
and their materials, and they're teaching style. And
if you just take this thing and you tack it
on top of that, that's another 10 or 15
minutes out of your lecture to use that effectively that
you don't have. All of these are impediments about
actually fitting into their class. They just didn't just
have trouble overcoming. And that's, I think,
a universal issue that anyone trying to present a little
bits of class material has. How do people fit
that into their class? So we came to the
conclusion that the best way that we could actually get
people to adopt this is get them to adopt it
in the way that they adopt the textbook. That
is, it's a complete unit of instruction, and
instructors understand this concept of, you know if I
want to get a new textbook and it's got a
certain way of presenting it. I mean, some
people just put a textbook on their on their on
their list of things the beginning and then ignored for
the rest of the semester. But there's usually a
source of material that somebody is developing from, and
lots of instructors do that from their textbook and and
and it all fits together because it's a complete unit
. So we're thinking of giving a complete electronic textbook
that replaces all these words and images with the dynamic
process showing you what's going on. So visualization is
important. And actually, after we got into this
for a while, we found we came to the
conclusion. There's something more important than algorithm visualization,
and that is practice that these students need lots of
practice at the things that they're doing in these courses
. But traditionally, the types of things that are
best practices have also been the hardest degrade. And
so we have a number of collaborators, including a
group of Finland that pioneered certain types of exercises that
, um, students can use to show off to
demonstrate that they know how an algorithm works. So
we call that a proficiency exercise. So this open
de ESA project has a number of key features.
First of all, it's meant to be the textbook
, but it's meant to be much better than the
textbook, because all of the presentation involves showing you
dynamically what's going on. And then it integrates lots
of exercises that go beyond the exercises that people were
able to grade and do in their classes before.
And so those are the three sort of three themes
that this supports on. There's there's the content of
visualizations and the exercises and to show you an example
. There's a lot of these sort of these little
slide shows. So if this is a presentation on
linked lists, for example, one topic that might
be told in the second semester course then, um
, in the book you might see a couple a
picture or two. But a lot of pros we
try as much as we can, and we're not
completely there yet. We make progress on this,
but as much as we can, we want to
move away from blocks of pros, too. Short
bits of pros that have, uh, some kind
of image that goes with it. And students can
can move through this. And when they finish the
sideshow, they get little check mark to know they've
made some kind of progress. And so this idea
is that as they're learning this material, they're going
, they're being taken through this at their pace.
But once they have learned the material and see,
there's quite a few of these visualizations, once they've
learned the material, then there's exercises. And if
you're familiar with Khan Academy, I think a lot
of you okay a lot of you're familiar with that
? A lot of people know Khan Academy for their
videos, the groups of videos that they have.
But they also have a very nice infrastructure for building
of exercises that students can do. So we're using
that for some of our exercise types. But the
idea is that the student has to actually click on
things and manipulate this in one way or another.
Two. The show that they know how this works
and they click through and they make make things change
around and so on, and they're actually showing that
they have proficiency at this. So there's lots of
these visualizations I could show you that gives you the
gist of what's going on. All right, I
remember one presents, and then we'll do. Thank
you trying to start mhm. Yeah, I guess
I'm here representing market capitalism. Not necessarily has a
pro or con simply, I think that's that's kind
of what the way I'm looking at that open educational
resources. I'm a musician, and so I'll talk
a little bit more about that. I'm going to
hand out the CD, known as A as an
act of self promotion. But in the spirit of
open resources, handing out something that represents a tremendous
amount of of work. Yes, money, Uh
, and giving away. I'll have one mhm just
coming down to see if you make it. Yeah
. What? So I'll come back to the CD
in a minute, and I've got cards. If
you didn't get one and you want one, just
let me know after after the talk and I'll send
one to you. Um, I guess the way
I'm looking at a couple of things that I'd like
to address today I'm very interested in system evolution.
So I'm interested, You know, if we take
an idea like open resources, the questions that I
like to ask our well, if we make it
all the content available and freely available, what does
that do to the system and the system of content
generation, content, distribution? And, of course
, as an educational institution, that's what we're that's
the focus of our work is generating content and distributing
it to students. I'd like to use music as
an example because I think the music business music industry
has gone through an evolution over the last 25 years
that I think probably will be mimicked by the book
publishing industry and and other content distribution systems in the
next 10, 15, 20 years. So I
think music. I think there are some really important
direct parallels between music and just the whole idea of
content generation. Um, music is, of course
, a content, and it's it's a content that
is proprietary. Um, you know, whoever creates
the music and then performs and records it, um
, has created something that's very unique and it's in
demand. And it's It is an educational resource if
we think about music as something that enriches our lives
and expands our awareness of who we are and how
we fit into the world. So I think it
is very much an educational resource as well. So
I'd like to touch on sort of that evolution of
music business in the last 25 years. But I'd
also like to emphasise to that. I think we
can't talk about open educational resources without really thinking about
distance education and how the next 15 years are going
to change the way higher education looks, Um,
primarily, as we consolidate educational resources into distance learning
, uh, systems that will probably, um and
this is just my own personal opinion. Perhaps maybe
you disagree with this is fine, but I I
really think that we're moving toward a consolidation of instructors
who might be working at a central location. Our
current higher education system is based on localized universities,
and students go to given university, and they get
information from a unique point of view from a unique
instructor. And that instructor is generating content that's unique
to that classroom, probably even if even if he
or she is using off the shelf content is still
providing very unique source of information. And I think
if we go to a centralized source like a distance
education model, I think that what we have to
ask the question and what happens to all these unique
sources and these unique perspectives that exist at the localized
level do they become facilitators simply help great papers and
so on. And you know, the So I
do think that when we talk about content and open
content, we have to weigh the balance between how
do we support people who are providing unique content and
then distributing it? How do we support them?
How do we how we make sure that it continues
to be generated? And where does it come from
? Does it come from one individual source in the
whole state? Or does it come from 25 different
sources at all at all state universities? So those
are kind of some of the issues that I guess
I've been thinking about as well as I've been mulling
over this whole the issue of of content generation and
open resources. Um, going back to the record
, the business, the music business. Um,
you know, I think record companies historically succeeded as
a business model because they had access to content,
unique contact, and they had a protected distribution system
. With the advent of digital sharing Napster in the
eighties, the value of content was reduced significantly.
And with the advent of digital downloads and the rise
in high quality homebrewing homebrew recording systems, the the
distribution system became fluid and unprotected. Um, it
became it became someone in a basement, could produce
a grand equality song and distribute the song to millions
of people around the world. So the record,
the large record companies basically ceased to exist. There's
still a couple of two or three of them out
there, but they're really not very healthy corporate entities
anymore. And, um, maybe in the long
run, that probably will cease to exist completely.
The music industry magazine Billboard reports that for the first
time in 2000 and 13 since the iTunes store opened
its doors, the US music industry finished 2013,
with a decrease in digital music sales following 5% for
the year. Digital streaming numbers suggest that increases in
streaming revenues have offset revenues and digital downloads. So
, in essence, what's happening in the music industry
is that people are streaming music by paying a$5.10
dollars subscription service every month. They're getting that content
by paying a subscription service, Um, but they're
not buying it. They're not buying the music and
paying for it. And so we have to look
at the economics of that a little bit. The
impact on musicians as the producers of content is significant
. The monetary rewards for writing new songs for creating
new content has become have become minimal. For example
, musicians might earn if there if they talk about
digital downloads, they might earn 30 cents on a
digital download. Okay, so you sell enough of
those. Those 30 cents add up. You know
where in the past? A student? Uh,
they were selling whole albums, and the album might
cost$12 and they might earn$3 on an album
because the only way that somebody could buy that song
would be well, you could buy a single,
of course, but thinking about album sales, for
example, they would make$3 off of a$12
album. Now they're earning, say, a dollar
, because somebody downloads three songs from the album until
the economics there you can see are pretty obvious.
Now with digital streaming, digital streaming services pay copyright
owners about one cent per song per play. It
takes a lot of plays to add up to anything
, Really. I mean, really, the economics
for musicians are rather minimal for streaming, and it's
basically paid radio, isn't it? And and radio
has never been really a very economically uh, rewarding
for the producers. So no income really is generated
from these streaming services like YouTube either. And when
I talk to my students, you know they use
YouTube, probably more than any other service. Of
course, there's no revenue stream there for the musicians
unless they got advertising. There has been a significant
reduction, therefore in the number of big musical acts
. The idea that you go into a studio and
have a producer who gives you lots of health and
and the idea that a record company is supporting,
uh, an artist over a period of years to
develop a series of albums that then that's all basically
gone. Musicians tend to be making their living now
touring so, and that's pretty difficult life. The
quality, also arguably of recorded music, has diminished
over the last 20 years, while the availability of
cheap, mediocre music has florist because anybody can create
a recording and put it out there. So again
, we think about content and the value of content
. What does what does the freely available content due
to the quality of the content? Finally, I'd
like to just say a word or two about the
CD. Um, this CD basically took six years
from beginning to the end. If you look at
starting with the composing of the works all the way
up to the singers are Scottish opera singers, they're
employed by BBC and the Scottish Opera. So they
sing all over the world there really highly professional singers
. Some of the recordings were made in Glasgow somewhere
in Radford, so getting the singers, they had
two sessions in Radford at two different times. So
the cost involved in bringing those musicians to Radford you
can imagine, um, just not only their fees
, but the travel, the recording production. This
is a CD that that you put in the computer
and you'll get you can see all the scores you
get pictures you get. It's a CD, Ron
, basically. So it's a it's full of content
, and it's a huge project. So who pays
for that? You know, And the question is
, but it's free because, well, we might
sell 500. You know, it's you can get
it on Amazon and iTunes and Knox Knox is and
all those distribution worldwide distribution systems. But really,
ultimately, we were giving it away because we're not
gonna can you really sell it? Can you really
sell it? It's classical music. It's contemporary classical
music, so I'm just bringing, bringing up some
issues. I don't think I've answered a lot of
questions but maybe have provided a little back the time
. Will you show us your let your show something
? Oh, yeah. I'm sorry I didn't talk
about my my book. And this is actually and
I book. Uh huh. Mhm. Mhm.
I can't answer. And there's an app. Also
for the CD, it's 99 cents. And so
you're welcome. Please download that. If you like
it, it's on the iTunes store. It's an
ipad app. Um, this is this is a
book that is also an iBook that I think it
runs like$15. And I just wanted to sort
of show you if we can get the images to
load. Yeah, it it includes lots of musical
examples and scores, and and it's a standard,
but it's a nice example of an electronic textbook,
I think if we can Well, it's lot of
them. I guess it's a big site. I
suppose so. Yeah, that's on that. If
you go to the car, the cars I handed
out if you go to the website, you can
find it. Thank you very much. And I
also have a great You ready? Yeah, sure
. Um, before I show you my attempt at
an open source. Open access solution. I thought
I tried to explain the problem. Okay, so
in the philosophy department here we have, of course
, we call language and logic. Very much the
same sort, of course, is taught in many
other institutions. They go by names like critical thinking
, introduction to logic, argument analysis things along those
lines. And they all share the laudable goal of
helping students learn to critically analyze arguments to assess what
is and is not a compelling case for a particular
belief. Um, there's a great deal of similarity
across these courses, So I brought an old fashioned
visual aid. This is a textbook by baronet produced
by one of the big presses is Oxford. This
isn't excellent textbook. Uh, it's not the one
I used for the course, but you could tear
the table of contents out of this book and paste
into one that I did use and probably not notice
a problem. There's that much uniformity and how these
are produced. There are, I think, despite
the quality of the exercises and the examples, two
problems, both with these textbooks and with actually the
courses we've been teaching, it The problem is that
it doesn't seem to be serving either of two kinds
of students. Well, there are those students who
will go on in philosophy or in the study,
in particular deductive logic. And for those students,
this kind, of course, is not a sufficiently
rigorous introduction. In fact, we have another course
to do just that. We have an introduction of
symbolic logic. Most of the students are there for
really this. This will be the one course in
philosophy right there, one course and reasoning and argument
analysis. And for those students, the fact that
the bulk of the material emphasizes not just deductive logic
, which is a fairly modest subset of the kinds
of arguments are going to see in daily life.
But ancient deductive logic stuff that was in the curriculum
, you know, in the first universities in the
13th century. Uh, it's not tremendously useful for
those students. So the problem was, you know
, I step back and ask myself, Look,
if someone's gonna take just one class in argument analysis
, what is best going to serve the typical story
and what I decided the principal goal learning objective ought
to be is to make students competent consumers, if
not producers of the full, wild and woolly range
of arguments that they will likely encounter across the disciplines
in their daily lives. Most of those arguments are
not deductive. Most of those arguments are inductive in
one way or another, and most of those arguments
appeal to one or another formal apparatus. Think statistics
, think, uh, decision theory with the business
folks call multi criteria decision analysis, I have to
think of, well, actually algorithmic solutions to to
procedural sorts of problems. That's the material that would
have to be emphasised somehow would have to be drawn
out and presented in a way that students can learn
, how to recognize these things and how to at
least assess whether or not the conditions are met for
any instance of one of these arguments. For it
to be a strong argument, right? There's various
assumptions that have to be satisfied to give me a
good statistical argument that your drug works. What are
those assumptions? And so, as I thought about
how to organize this material, you know what bothered
me? A. I should have said the second
major problem with books of this sort aside from the
emphasis, is the way the material is organized.
It's more or less an arbitrary sequence of argument types
. I mean, they all filed more or less
the same story. What's an argument? What's the
deductive argument? Validity. Sound as possible? Ah
, but then, if there is a discussion of
inductive arguments, you're welcome to look through this at
the end. But it's usually just a handful of
topics the author happened to be comfortable with in no
particular order, and it's very hard when presenting that
material, to get students to retain any of the
classification of distinctions you're giving them. Another way to
say it is that this presentation doesn't model the expert
process by which one of us would quickly identify an
argument and assess what needs to be satisfied for it
to be strong. The the solution that I struck
upon in terms of structure, actually, this is
a wonderful example of it. So this is new
Combs, uh, wildflower guide. I don't know
if you've ever used field guides for identifying birds or
flowers, but there's two basic kinds. One is
something like Peterson's, which is very similar to this
logic textbook It's just a collection of birds grouped loosely
into, say, a common color scheme or size
. Um, and you know the way it works
. If you want to identify a bird, is
you kind of go to that section and flip through
and hope for the best. The way a guide
like this works is it uses an identification key.
So the 1st 10 pages or so of this guide
is a presentation of what they call the five questions
. But it's questions like, you know, look
at the plant. Are the leaves basil at the
bottom world? Alternate? I forget the fourth one
. Uh, you answer that question, it jumps
you to a new question, right? And every
time you answer one of these questions your paring down
the space of possibilities. But importantly, what you're
also doing is you learn to use a guide like
this is your very quickly internalizing the important distinctions,
the things that matter for botanists, genuine structural features
of the flower. And I decided this is how
I would structure the material on arguments. I've got
this huge range. This huge collection of stuff and
the way to hang it together is to build a
guide. In fact, actually, I'm building two
guides, one for argument types, Uh, and
one for common sorts of problems where there's a connection
between the two. So for certain recurring kinds of
problems, there is a typically one particular sort of
argument used to either justify or produce an answer to
that problem. Question. And, um, you
know, once you decide on a field guide sort
of structure, there's a question, of course,
of how you physically implement this. How do you
present this to students? I decided very quickly that
this ought to be done electronically. Um, there
we go. Well, am I pointing at?
Well, interesting. Give me one second. I
forget this defaults to showing you my other workspaces.
Um, Gibson actually got a better idea, not
just move this. Yeah. There you go.
And now let me see if I can do this
without looking at my monitor. I should have set
it up to mirror in advance. All right,
that's good vision. Okay. I decided that this
should be done electronically for a couple of reasons.
One, It's a little bit tedious to do it
on paper, particularly when you're the classification a little
bit trickier than it is for flowers. I'm gonna
have to have more than five main questions. Um
, so you can interact you Can you simply click
yes or no? Or choose your your answer from
the possibilities and jump to the next question. But
also, um, I decided that this is exactly
the sort of thing that would benefit most from a
collaborative development. I don't want to own this guide
. I want the community of those of us who
teach this material to own this guide. And so
from the outset, I knew that I wanted to
solicit contributions from other institutions. I wanted to make
this as usable for everybody as possible, both the
students and the instructors. So I've tried hard to
make this, um, accessible in a variety of
ways. This is what the site looks like at
the moment. Um, it might look a little
bit funny on the desktop, or at least not
as elegant as it as it could. That's in
part because I've designed this thing to be maximally portable
. So what you're looking at, you'll see that
if I shrink it, it doesn't break it.
What? You're looking at should display just fine on
pretty much any device that can show you HTML.
So I guess next year that include wristwatches uhh.
And this will re flow for those devices. So
if you want it, if I want to look
at this on my iPhone, I can. That's
why I built it to do, um, what
you'll see is here's the guy that I was talking
about. So it asks you a question, right
? So this is a big question. Number one
, you're looking at an inductive or deductive argument.
Well, if you know what that means, you
can quickly answer the question and choose one of these
. And off you go. If you have no
idea what that means, uh, you can expand
on the distinction. So this is where the important
pedagogical pieces as you look at an argument, try
to classify, you're forced to go through these sorts
of descriptions. What what is this Distinction is trying
to draw. And there's examples at the bottom where
it's worked out for a couple of problems. Um
shows you how to do it. When you get
down to a terminal leaf, you know where you're
where you're seeing a particular problem type. There's a
similar description. What what is this Or argument Type
? What is this kind of argument? What are
the assumptions that have to be in place for this
to work? But there's also interactive tools for many
of the kinds of things that I want students to
learn to use but not produce. Like statistical tests
. Students can feed data into the Web site itself
, and they'll get back out an answer. And
that's all done again on the server side so that
you can use this on your iPhone and put the
data in and get an answer out there. There's
no problems. Um, I ran out of time
and then I didn't great. All right, then
, Yeah. So Oh, as I said,
there's really a pair of guides here, so this
is, uh, for identifying arguments. But there
is also a field guide to problems and the to
connect with one another. So when you work your
way down to a specific problem type or argument type
, Rather says, You know this is good for
justifying or perhaps producing answers to this kind of a
problem, and it'll link you over to the to
the other guide. And, of course, there's
, uh, you know, tools for searching the
whole thing or for simply using an index if you
already know where you want to go, Um,
the intense ignore the copyright that you might see at
the bottom of the page. That's just because I
haven't gotten around to tweaking that part of the template
yet. This is all supposed to be out.
The content as well as the code that's built into
the page, is all supposed to be available on
a creative Commons license. Um and yeah, I
would love to show you that on mobile devices,
but actually, my machine here is acting as its
own server. Haven't moved it to the university server
yet. That will happen soon. Uh, and
I've already made connections with other institutions, uh,
to solicit contributions. Feedback. The aim is for
this to be a collaboratively developed textbook substitute advice book
. Go wanted to give you the opportunity that you
want to show. Oh, so we're talking.
Thank you. Um, thank you very much for
all of your comments. One of the things that
I'm hearing from all of you as a question about
quality. How do we make sure that there is
? There are quality resources that are findable that are
continuing to be developed that are supported? Um,
let's talk about that. I think all of all
of us are developing material that we it's as good
as we make it. Um, so in that
sense, I guess it's a little bit of a
there's all this stuff going to be out there and
people are going to pick what they think is good
. And if we've done a good job, it'll
get used. And if not, it won't get
used. Um, yeah, that's a That's a
really tough issue because certainly in the past, with
the algorithm visualizations, there were hundreds out there and
I'd say three quarters of them probably should never have
been out there because they just aren't something anybody should
use or the original or to use them. It
has to be in that specific context of that person
who developed them, and it really isn't General Izabal
. I don't know that there is a solution to
that. In a sense, we can't guarantee equality
. What you do is you find things in the
great mass out there that that is good for you
. Things that might might indicate a high probability of
good quality is if you've got If a number of
people are helping to develop it and are maintaining it
and a number of people have used it, that's
a good sign. I know that we have some
faculty and some instructional designers in the audience. Does
anyone want to talk about what they look for in
terms of quality? I'm sorry you had not.
One of the things that concerns is the loss of
peer review. Mhm to the cliff mentioned. It's
being used. Then we've got something good. That's
probably the ultimate peer review. I cannot count how
many symbolic logic textbooks they come out mess every year
, and they're not particularly peer reviewed. You could
argue the editor does, but not much. I've
been asked to give you a couple mhm and yeah
, it always comes out that it's not good enough
. I need to write my own, so it's
maintaining the quality that that is so hard as you
point out. And I think the ultimate answer to
that is what you just said. If it's being
used and being referred to. Yeah, kind of
following up on that. I mean, I think
they're in philosophy. A couple of interesting success stories
. I'm thinking of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy, and both of those,
particularly Stanford Encyclopedia, are respected enough sources that I've
seen, Uh, the citations for articles from the
SCP increased dramatically in the last couple of years,
so big names in the field are comfortable citing articles
from this Internet encyclopedia as primary sources. And I
think part of what drives that success is that it's
sort of a hybrid model. So these things are
freely accessible, but they aren't anonymous, and there's
a stable, identifiable editorship so that you have.
It's not just whether people use it is whether you
can use it and associate a name or brand with
that particular sort of product and you get comfortable with
it enough. Then you're comfortable. If you're willing
to take a gamble on the next thing that comes
out in that I think there's say one thing real
quick. There's another aspect to it, so open
. De Esa is called open de esa because it's
an open source project and What's significant about that is
it's not a textbook, it's a collection of material
, and it's meant to be highly configurable so that
an instructor can come in and configure their textbook from
the body of material. And if they want to
, depending on how much effort they want to put
in, they can make changes easy to make changes
to the wording of text. Harder to write your
own visualizations, but the system allows that and let
you put them together in different ways. Mhm,
Yes, sir, isn't I mean, the test
of the quality isn't the same. Weather is open
or whether it's virtually published. I see textbooks that
come out and there's one edition and you never see
it again. Another textbooks are under seven and eight
and 12 editions because people are using them and buying
, and it seems as though that's that's the review
. It doesn't matter if it's come out, really
that's available on the Internet, or if somebody's published
getting$150 for the sessions. Also, you're still
trying to get. Except that perhaps, if you
no one can use, you know, Traveler reviews
on Travelocity in finding a hotel as an example,
or perhaps the number of views on YouTube as an
indicator of whether something is really valuable. And I'm
not sure it's all. You have the right people
actually evaluating the content in those cases, you have
people who are not experts in the field, and
particularly as you move to levels of content that are
highly technical, the question is, if it only
gets a few views, does that mean it's not
that good? And, you know, I do
think the whole issue of quality is an important one
, and publishers have traditionally provided the the quality,
set the bar at a certain level for quality.
And I think open resources begs the question. Where
is that bar and really, how do we make
that distinction between something that's accurate and good quality versus
something that simply has achieved a lot of hits or
a Google engine simply finds, because it's vastly popular
? I understand that, but I would think that
whether the text book that's out there is open or
whether it's paid for it, you have experts reviewing
it, who are the instructors that are going to
use it? They are experts. They look at
that open access. They say this is crap.
They're not going to use it. Good. That's
the same thing they would do with a copy that
they're getting for examination. So there are experts.
They are looking at this. Indeed. In either
case, I want to add add one thing and
then take your questions. How many people in here
are familiar with faculty with textbook sales people coming to
your office to sell you things? Okay, um
, that's one thing that we do not have Open
resources don't have sales people, so I I just
want to throw that out there. I think there's
, um there's a lack of awareness. Sometimes in
in these cases where there is something good that is
freely available. Um, I'm okay. I'm gonna
argue with me. Cliff writes this thing and he
goes to a conference and he's talking to his colleagues
. He's saying, I've got this thing on the
internet, and I'd really like you to look at
it. Now if I'm a professor of computer science
, I'm gonna listen to him before I'm going to
listen to the rep from McGraw Hill telling you they
got there, so I think there is a sales
, I mean, exactly. So I think that
there are communities of practice now. Not everyone is
plugged into them. Especially, say some, you
know, new or adjunct professor or something who is
really connected. But experienced instructors generally a part of
community of of instructional practice. And they go to
those conferences and they talk to each other There on
the list serves good. Good. Yes, we
have done some research out Children healthier learning, but
which we can focus. Mhm, right. Okay
. And it's every lamp can allow this cliff talk
about, like for ensuring object, or maybe a
role model to have less the production. And we
have the content, and then your wife exercise or
practice for students that have assessed and then along this
land, with each component, you need to have
specific will have specific standards. For example, the
introduction probably need to produce what they're going to learn
. What they're going to get out of this and
very concise. And then you need to for the
content, you need to have multiple different format to
explain one idea, maybe textbook and maybe a nation
. Not that, um, so I forget that
the guide. And if people are interested, we
can share. This is a draft. There is
a benefit to anyone. We're on the stages of
trying to get family involved in identifying doctors. Of
course, because they mean those relate to develop.
We're working on some. Okay, Pretty. Right
. And but our focus is quality constructed exam,
the course people Mhm. What other questions? What
other themes are you seeing? Audience or panel in
these last few minutes? What are you guys getting
out? Seriously. Good question. Yeah, you
get boiled. I know, right? So yeah
. So and I've been on different sides of this
. I mean, I had a textbook published and
I made enough money to make it worth my while
from that, But Okay, so what I'm doing
here with this system and there's a fair number of
people involved, and there's a lot of many,
many, many, many hours involved in this.
Um, it's not a sustainable model. It's a
research project. Alright, I get NSF funding.
I get credit as a researcher, you know?
So, um okay. And I couldn't float it
if I didn't get those credits. And that funding
and so on right, even though a lot of
it's also volunteer. But all right, it fits
in with the model of what a faculty member does
. The 10th, one of these obviously can't use
that model. All right. Okay, so there's
another side of this. The computer gaming industry originally
was, you know, a couple of guys in
the garage making a fancy game and and somehow getting
it distributed. And over the years, the computer
gaming industry has turned into something that looks like the
movie industry. Right. Movies are built by big
groups of people. Computer games now are built by
big groups of people. Okay, as the sort
of thing we're talking about here of electronic textbooks with
a lot of support, their big ecosystems and infrastructure
, I imagine that they're going. The publishers are
going to start turning into movie houses. They're gonna
have groups of people working on it. Um,
now back to my own situation. So I'm hopefully
about to hit a big problem. And that big
problem is I'm hopefully going to be too successful that
I'm not gonna be able to do this as a
volunteer effort on in terms of my servers. Right
they're gonna overload my servers. All right, So
I'm talking to a textbook publisher, in essence,
all right, as a potential mechanism where this material
would still be open. Anybody who wants to go
to the website and do the practice exercises and look
at the content all they want for free. But
if a student wants credit from their instructor for having
done it, they may have to go to a
service provider, pay a textbook fee, not to
see the materials because they could, but to have
get credit for having done the exercises, done the
assignments, they would have to pay a fee for
that. And there's a value added because then they
give the spreadsheet back to the instructor, and so
on. That way I could unload the side of
things. I have no interest. I have no
interest in being a service provider, and I would
like to get out from under that so that may
be where it's going to that there are service providers
who provide access to content, and the content may
be developed under the auspices of some kind of publisher
and sustainable that may be sustainable. I want to
ask that question, too, because for me it's
a little bit different. I like that model.
But, uh, for me, the reason for
making this open source was a mutual benefit calculation.
Now I'm doing all the upfront work, which is
substantial. But if it achieves even modest success,
I glean there's the content in one of these things
is enormous, and what I'm suggesting to substitute is
even more enormous. It's more than I can reasonably
. For us, that book is probably 1/10 of
the work, right? Right, And I made
this open expressly so that I could build and draw
on a community. I benefit from the final product
as much as they do. I'm just trying to
get the ball rolling as it were, and,
uh, and have a framework set up. So
it's easy for people to contribute, and then I
want to sort of suck in everything that I can
, so I gain in my you know, I
have instructional needs. You gotta be satisfied one or
the other. Anyway, if I invest this this
amount of time, hopefully it pays off in content
. I could just add a postscript to that very
quickly, but Everyone who is involved in that collaborative
process is being supported by someone to do that work
. There is support coming from somewhere, and that
support may not always be there. And it's his
question is, where does it come from? Where
does that support come from? Right now, it
comes from Tech and the statement, I guess,
and I would just ask your assistant professor, How
is this playing in your 10 year decision? Very
well, you know. So there has to be
a department that's willing to accept this effort that you're
putting as research as research and as part of the
teaching component. Likewise, I'd be an advocate for
counting somebody who maintains a blog as contributing to research
effort. We've got to enter the 21st century for
pizza. Yes, I don't disagree. I just
think that there are a lot of places where that
I don't agree. I don't think I didn't worry
about that. But I mean, so you have
grants to support. I do not support. Yes
, yes, something, which is why it's happening
this semester, right? Because you know how much
work. It's not exactly a free time after dinner
kind of where that could be really useful for anyone
. I mean, a student I just wanted fell
deeper and deeper, and I was one of those
people. I took one logic course in college,
even though I'm a scientist, one and I loved
it. But I think I would. But you're
still wondering why you draw those Venn diagrams. Okay
. Um, yes, please. Let's let's keep
talking. And I don't want to get too much
into the nitty gritty, but you have a grant
to do this, Can you tell? Not nearly
enough. Actually, I'm I'm exhausting. My grant
were pretty well out of money, but we have
new grant proposals in for the next phase. So
if if if that grant if that next funding cycle
we get funded, then we'll be very happy campers
. And we'll be able to do this for next
several years. If we don't, Then I got
to figure out you know how much I can get
from volunteer efforts are obviously how much funding I get
limits. How much I can do. It's a
realities of academic life. So this just throw this
out, You know what I mean? The library
gets fees from students. And what if we took
$1 that from every season? That 5. 30,000
? Right? We said we went to a professor
. We'd like you to start developing$30,000. I
think there is that process in place. Actually,
would that be? Is that enough to make a
professor interested? Or is that just, um they
might get a naive professor interested. And once they
start, they may be stuck and have to keep
going. It's gonna be somebody's gotta Yeah. What
? Well, this isn't directly. I've been very
frustrated. Um, and it may simply be because
I'm ignorant of what's available, but I've tried.
So when I started to put this together, I
went to t loss and I asked them a simple
question to start with. Where can this live?
I don't I don't maintain a server in the department
. And if I wanted to, it would be
complicated for us because we just don't have the infrastructure
and expensive. So where could this live? And
and furthermore, you know, I wanted to ask
some questions about appropriate frameworks. Uh, I'm not
reinventing the wheel, and the answer was, Well
, that's a good question. Like that shouldn't be
the answer there needs to be. I would like
to see some resources not necessarily put into developing a
particular material, but having a very clear, uh
, place where someone who is willing or has funding
is motivated to produce such a project can get some
some guidance, uh, someone who's new to the
process. I mean, I at least have a
background in. You know, I've written a great
deal of code, not for Web development, but
at least I know my way around a machine like
this. But there are plenty of other professors who
might want to try something like this who don't and
they'd be even more lost at the beginning And that
that I found to be very trust to me.
I can tell you the fellow's name. He's the
director now. I guess, uh, I'll have
to look it up for you afterward. I've forgotten
Brian. Yeah, that's part of the problem,
right? They library a number of years ago started
something very called the Electronic Journals Project. It seems
to me that the life would be the ideal place
to have a digital tech center or something of that
sort and host the good. The server. It
means it's just a no brainer for me. I
wouldn't take money away from the library. Was still
not as popular. Yeah, for Major research University
. Never mind. Don't get, But it seems
to vibrate would be an ideal place, Damon.
Mhm. Thank you. Get well soon. We
have various partners around the university. So, um
, we would love as just speaking from the library
, but mainly myself. Um, we would love
to continue this conversation about how to assist faculty who
want to do more in these areas. So there
are a few of us left still, and I
would love for us to transition the the conversation into
some smaller groups around some specific topics. Um,
we would love for you all to stay. If
you feel like you need to go, please feel
free. Um, about we're going to spend the
next the next hour working on, um, some
specific questions in smaller groups going around the tables,
and we'll have probably uhh do it 10 to 12
minutes for for each group. And then what?
You can disband and move to different table with different
people or the same people, if you really were
, like hanging out with them. Um, so
let's move on to that And thank you very much
. Again for coming. All of you know what
you think? Yeah.