Simon Buckingham Shum & Anna De Liddo OLnet Project, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University UK

1. Collective Intelligence for
OER Sustainability
1
Simon Buckingham Shum & Anna De Liddo
OLnet Project, Knowledge Media Institute
Open University UK
Open Education 2010, Barcelona
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk

2. OLnet aims to search
out the evidence for
use and reuse
of OER
and
build a collec7ve
intelligence
infrastructure that
makes this a visible,
and evolving map of
the movement’s
knowledge and open
challenges
olnet.org

3. Examples of OER Collective Intelligence
 The following tend to be adoption obstacles for OER in
Africa…
 OER xyz failed to transfer to a new context because…
 There appear to be 5 main strategies to OER
sustainability, of which only 2 have robust evidence…
 The following arguments for OER have proven most
compelling to state educational boards…
 Successful OER initiatives seem to share these
competencies in the core team…

4. Examples of OER evidence
4

5. OER Sustainability
5

6. ~
Sustainability as a
property of ecosystems
6
OER Sustainability

7. Sustainability
 Resilience
 Resilience Thinking
 Resilience Platforms
 OER Threats/Opps
 OER Collective Intelligence
7
Complexity
Line of argument…

8. Resilience
 Walker, et al. (2004) define resilience as
“the capacity of a system to absorb
disturbance and reorganize while
undergoing change, so as to still
retain essentially the same function,
structure, identity, and feedbacks”
8

9. Resilience in Socio-Ecological Systems
 Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in
social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9, (2): 5. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5
9
Fig. 1a. Three-dimensional stability landscape with two basins of attraction showing, in one basin, the current
position of the system and three aspects of resilience, L = latitude, R = resistance, Pr = precariousness.
Latitude: the
maximum amount
the system can be
changed before
losing its ability to
recover
Resistance: the
ease or difficulty
of changing the
system
Precariousness:
the current
trajectory of the
system, and how
close it currently
is to a limit or
“threshold”

10. Resilience in Socio-Ecological Systems
 Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in
social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 9, (2): 5. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5
10
Fig. 1b. Changes in the stability landscape have resulted in a contraction of the basin the system was in and
an expansion of the alternate basin. Without itself changing, the system has changed basins.
It may not yet be possible to model a
human community in such quantitative
terms, but the broader principles of
Resilience Thinking apply to non-
ecological systems more clearly

11. Resilience
11
http://www.futureofed.org/driver/Platforms-for-Resilience.aspx
“System shocks and disruptions in the arenas of
energy, finance, climate, and health care are key
forces of destabilization in this century.
Institutional strategies that focus on resisting
disruption and maintaining the status quo will
not offer sufficient responses.”

12. Resilience Thinking (explosion of resources on this)
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
12
promotes biological, landscape, social and economic diversity
embraces and works with natural ecological cycles
consists of modular components
possesses tight feedbacks
promotes trust, well developed social networks and leadership
places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed
rules, and embracing change
has institutions with "redundancy" in governance structures
mixes common and private property with overlapping access rights
considers all nature’s un-priced services

13. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
13
promotes biological,
landscape, social and
economic diversity
Diversity is a major source of future options and of a
system's capacity to respond to change.

14. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
14
embraces and works with
natural ecological cycles
A forest that is never allowed to burn loses its fire-
resistant species and becomes very vulnerable to
fire.

15. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
15
consists of modular
components
When over-connected, shocks are rapidly
transmitted through the system - as a forest
connected by logging roads can allow a wild fire to
spread wider than it would otherwise.

16. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
16
possesses tight feedbacks
Feedbacks allow us to detect thresholds before we
cross them. Globalization is leading to delayed
feedbacks that were once tighter. For example,
people of the developed world receive weak
feedback signals about the consequences of their
consumption.

17. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
17
promotes trust, well
developed social networks
and leadership
Individually, these attributes contribute to what is
generally termed "social capital," but they need to
act in concert to effect adaptability - the capacity to
respond to change and disturbance.

18. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
18
places an emphasis on
learning, experimentation,
locally developed rules, and
embracing change
When rigid connections and behaviors are broken,
new opportunities open up and new resources are
made available for growth.

19. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
19
has institutions with
"redundancy" in governance
structures
Redundancy in institutions increases the diversity of
responses and the flexibility of a system.

20. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
20
mixes common and private
property with overlapping
access rights
Because access and property rights lie at the heart
of many resource-use tragedies, overlapping rights
and a mix of common and private property rights can
enhance the resilience of linked social-ecological
systems.

21. Resilience Thinking
 A resilient world (Walker, 2008)…
21
considers all nature’s un-
priced services
– such as carbon storage, water filtration and so on -
in development proposals and assessments. These
services are often the ones that change in a regime
shift – and are often only recognized and appreciated
when they are lost.

22. Resilience Platforms
22
http://www.futureofed.org/driver/Platforms-for-Resilience.aspx

23. Resilience Platforms
23
http://www.futureofed.org/driver/Platforms-for-Resilience.aspx
Creating flexibility and innovation amid system failures
“Platforms for resilience - enabling
responsive flexibility, distributed
collaboration, and transparency - will allow
institutions to meet such challenges
through innovation, adaptation, and
openness.”

24. Resilience in knowledge-intensive ecosystems
24
When knowledge and understanding are
key variables in the system, resilience
depends on the capacity for learning
e.g. awareness of discrepant evidence,
critical practice, reflection and dialogue
when confronted by challenges or shocks
to the system.

25. Resilience Thinking: OER opportunities + threats
25
Threat to established educational
paradigm?
(Opportunity for OER/Open
Social Learning?)

26. Resilience Thinking: OER opportunities + threats
26
Threat to established educational
paradigm?
(Opportunity for OER/Open
Social Learning?)

27. Resilience Thinking: OER opportunities + threats
27
Threat to OER/Open Social
Learning?
Threat to established educational
paradigm?
(Opportunity for OER/Open
Social Learning?)

28. Resilience Thinking: OER opportunities + threats
28
Public doc on SBS blog: http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/2010/10/resilience-thinking-edu

29. Resilience Thinking: OER opportunities + threats
29
Public doc on SBS blog: http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/2010/10/resilience-thinking-edu

30. Collective Intelligence for resilience?
30

31. Collective Intelligence for resilience?
31
Sources include: Weick (1995); Kurtz & Snowden (2003); Browning, L. and Boudès, T. (2005); Hagel et al (2010)

32. Collective Intelligence for resilience?
32
Sources include: Weick (1995); Kurtz & Snowden (2003); Browning, L. and Boudès, T. (2005); Hagel et al (2010)

33. the key idea…
sensemaking revolves around
conversations
perspective and context are key: we don’t
always agree
contested collective intelligence
33
Towards an OER Collective Intelligence
Infrastructure

34. How can we pool the OER evidence base and
debate open issues?...
34

35. How can we pool the OER evidence base and
debate open issues?...
35

36. How can we pool the OER evidence base and
debate open issues?...
36
interpretation
interpretation
interpretation
interpretation

37. How can we pool the OER evidence base and
debate open issues?...
37
interpretation
interpretationinterpretation
interpretation
interpretation
(a hunch – no
grounding
evidence yet)
interpretation

38. How can we pool the OER evidence base and
debate open issues?...
38
predictscauses
interpretation
interpretationinterpretation
interpretation
interpretation
(a hunch – no
grounding
evidence yet)
interpretation
Is pre-requisite for

39. How can we pool the OER evidence base and
debate open issues?...
39
prevents
predictscauses
interpretation
interpretationinterpretation
interpretation
interpretation
(a hunch – no
grounding
evidence yet)
Is inconsistent with
interpretation
challenges
Is pre-requisite for

40. Building the story that makes sense of the
evidence… i.e. plausible narrative and arguments
40
Question
Answer
Supporting
Argument…
Challenging
Argument…
challengessupports
responds to
Assumption
motivates

41. Building the story that makes sense of the
evidence… i.e. plausible narrative and arguments
41
Question
Answer
Supporting
Argument…
Challenging
Argument…
challengessupports
responds to
Hunch
motivates

42. Building the story that makes sense of the
evidence… i.e. plausible narrative and arguments
42
Question
Answer
Supporting
Argument…
Challenging
Argument…
challengessupports
responds to
Data
motivates

43. 43
http://cohere.open.ac.uk
Convergence of…
web annotation
social bookmarking
concept mapping
structured debate
a prototype infrastructure for
collective intelligence/social learning

44. Structured deliberation and debate in which
Questions, Evidence and Connections are
first class entities (linkable, addressable, embeddable, contestable…)
44

45. 45
Structured deliberation and debate in which
Questions, Evidence and Connections are
first class entities (linkable, addressable, embeddable, contestable…)

46. Analyst-defined visual connection language
46

47. 47
Structured deliberation and debate in which
Questions, Evidence and Connections are
first class entities (linkable, addressable, embeddable, contestable…)

48. — web annotation of OER (Firefox extension)

49. seeing the connections people make as
they annotate the web using Cohere
Visualizing all the connections that a
set of analysts have made
— but unfiltered, this may not be very
helpful

50. Visualizing multiple learners’
interpretations of global
warming sources
Connections have been filtered
by a set of semantic
relationships grouped as
Consistency
— semantic filtering of connections
De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2010). Cohere: A prototype for contested collective intelligence. In: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW 2010) - Workshop: Collective Intelligence In Organizations, February 6-10, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. http://oro.open.ac.uk/19554

51. — web annotation for sensemaking

52. Social
Network
Social
Discourse
Network
Concept
Network

53. — geospatial mashup of ideas
Nodes in the semantic
network containing
geolocation data can be
visualized in Google Maps

54. — timeline viz. mashup of ideas
Nodes in the semantic
network containing temporal
data can be visualized in MIT
Simile’s timeline

55. A large scale OER CI exercise:
Are you on the map? (whose map?...)
 120 OER project reports from Hewlett Foundation
 What is the evidence base around OER impact?
 What are the unresolved questions that help set the
roadmap?
 Reports analysed by OER researchers and via
computational linguistics engine…
…feeding into a set of multi-dimensional
interactive knowledge maps
 To be shared with the OER community Spring 2011,
inviting mass participation to update the evidence
base, and create a living conversation, generating
dynamic maps that we can collectively own
55

56. Sustainability
 Resilience
 Resilience Thinking
 Resilience Platforms
 OER Threats/Opps
 OER Collective Intelligence
56
Complexity
Summary

57. In more detail…
articles, books, news, movies, software, community…
57
http://cohere.open.ac.uk
http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/hyperdiscourse
http://OLnet.org