Open Access and an example of how it can work in education

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Open Access, Open Content and indeed Open Data for a while, they are all interrelated issues that were thinking about a lot at Talis. It’s true to say that the Open Data issue is probably the one we are focusing on primarily at the moment, in fact one of my colleagues Paul is giving a talk1 on that exact subject at XTech in a couple of weeks, and another of my colleagues, Rob, presented his thoughts2 on Open Data at EUSIDIC last month, and they’ll both be sitting on a panel discussing Open Data at WWW2007 next week in Banff.

Right now though I want to talk about Open Access and a little on Open Content.

Knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use – that’s something I believe.

There has always a been a desire amongst academics, in fact its more of a tradition, to publish their research in journals without payment but rather for sake of inquiry and sharing that knowledge. Is it altruism alone that motives these authors, these researchers? I like to believe that it is the main reason 🙂 . However I recognise that Open Access offers these individuals tangible benefits and advantages3. For one thing studies have shown4 that openly accessible articles and papers are more likely to be cited than those which are locked away behind subscriptions – accessible only to those either willing to pay for that privelege or belonging to a closed community able to gain access to them .

Open Access should make sense because openly accessible article can be harvested and indexed by search engines and can be viewed by anyone, anywhere. If your researching into a subject and come across a text you want to read there isnt a barrier preventing you from gaining access to that item.

Back in 1995 Steve Harnad wrote a seminal piece entitled the “Subversive Proposal”5 which called upon authors of esoteric writings to archive them for free online in anonymous FTP archives or on websites). His belief was that as soon as all research authors publicly self archived their refereed and unrefereed papers online, then research literature would be free and accessible to all. There was great debate around this proposal and at the time it was the commonly held view that what Harnad was asking for was naive and flawed, I managed to find an excellent retrospective piece by Richard Poynder that discusses the impact of the Subversive Proposal6 , and the history that lead up to it.

Over a decade later the Open Access movement has gained a great deal of momentum which is now threatening the entire scholarly publishing industry, there’s numerous Open Access inspired toolkits and services that are enabling authors to self archive content which is then freely available to all. Yet critics of Open Access still maintain that the pay-for-access model is necessary … but I guess when you consider that the scholarly publishing business is worth an estimated $6 billion, it’s not hard to understand why they are so opposed to this.

I felt compelled to share my thoughts today, after watching a TED Talk by Richard Baraniuk7, in which he passionately argues that textbooks and educational materials that are used in schools should be made available to all through a vast interconnected repository – allowing anyone to use the information, improve it, and not only bringing the authors, who are often academics, closer to those using their material but encouraging more people to share their knowledge in this new ecosystem. It’s not hard to see how you could abstract this out further to encompass all scholarly articles and not just textbooks. I guess this is were Open Access and Open Content become a little blurred for me but that’s only because what Richard is proposing is not only allowing people free access to these works but empowering users to mix content together to create customised works made up of different constituent parts whilst crediting the authors of each of those parts – and that’s really interesting!

Richard is the founder of Connexions which is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web under the Creative Commons8 license. I think it’s a wonderful example of how Open Access and Open Content can be successful. Connexions is focused entirely on developing teaching materials and whilst this is only a small subset of all scholarly publishing it’s still an extremely compelling and inspiring initiative which is gaining pace. Add to this the notion of on-demand publishing where students who want an up to date physical manifestation of a book can purchase one for a significantly cheaper price than they would have paid had the title been produced by a traditional publishing company, since the middle man is effectively cut out of the loop.

When you consider that most academics who write textbooks don’t actually make a significant amount from that it’s understandable why they might wish to participate in initiatives like Connexions, most of these individuals dont write textbooks necessarily for money but to make an impact, and this type of system makes their work accessible to more people thus increasing the potential impact.

Or is my naivety showing?

  1. Opening the Silos: sustainable models for open data[back]
  2. The outlook and the Future [back]
  3. Online or Invisible? [back]
  4. The effect of open access and downloads on citation impact [back]
  5. Subversive Proposal[back]
  6. Ten Years After by Richard Poynder[back]
  7. Goodbye Textbooks; hello, open source learning[back]
  8. Creative Commons[back]

Mythbusters Ask A Ninja

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Ok two of my favourite shows come together in this hilarious episode. The guys from Mythbusters attempt to bust some myths about Ninja’s … so they call in an expert the YouTube’s very own Award Winning … AskANinja!

Ask A Ninja is one of the funniest and original YouTube series out there.

Movie Review: Curse of the Golden Flower

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Had a wonderful evening, had a meal with Amanda, Maria and her sister Dora and then we went to The Electric to watch Curse of the Golden Flower. The Electric is a fantastic little cinema, you get large leather seats and drinks / refreshments served while you watch the movie. It’s a stunning venue and I’m positive we’ll be going there again … here’s a picture:

Amanda even managed to get me to scoff this huge slice of chocolate cake they do – well it is my birthday tomorrow so I guess it’s ok 😉


Image:Wikipedia

As for the film, as far as tragedy’s go this one might have driven Shakespeare to suicide! It’s one of the most bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. Yet the sets, costumes and cinematography are absolutely stunning. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is another Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because it couldn’t be futher from that. The story revolves around an Emperor who is secretly poisoning his wife, she in turn is plotting against him using his sons to overthrow him. It’s basically the story of a rotting family that destroys itself in one night.

I thought the film was very good, I struggled to keep up with the plot but the acting was superb.

Google Tech Talk: Faith, Evolution and Programming Languages

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Faith and evolution provide complementary–and sometimes conflicting–models of the world, and they also can model the adoption of programming languages. Adherents of competing paradigms, such as functional and object-oriented programming, often appear motivated by faith. Families of related languages, such as C, C++, Java, and C#, may arise from pressures of evolution. As designers of languages, adoption rates provide us with scientific data, but the belief that elegant designs are better is a matter of faith…

This is a wondeful talk by Phillip Wadler from the University of Edinburgh, he’s one of the individuals responsible for getting Generics into Java 5, and has worked on Haskell and very heavily on the development of functional programming languages throughout his career.

It’s suprising how well the evolution vs faith analogy applies to the way in which we, as developers, often adopt programming languages. For some reason the talk made me remember the old Java vs .NET arguments which were less about rationale differences in the semantics and philosophy of the programming language and more about which camp you belonged to and your unswerving faith and loyalty to it. In fact thats a poignant example of when multiculturalism went out of the window and fundementalism was very much in fashion.

The talk also provides a fair amount of history around some of the issues that polorised language designers, static vs dynamic typing, for example. I found this provided some wonderful background that I was never aware of.

If your interested in Programming Languages, their adoption and their evolution over time then this is a fascinating, and unique, talk that you should really watch.

Yod’m 3D – Virtual Desktop manager for windows

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Ok, I came across this new virtual desktop manager for windows which has a 3d rotating cube effect much like you get on Mac’s these days, or with Beryl on Linux.

I have to confess it looks really really nice, and is very quick to flick between desktops using CTRL+SHIFT and Left or Right arrow. You can change the transparency of the cube.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that moving items between desktops feels waaaaay more difficult than it should be.

It’s freeware and you can download it from here, if you really like the author accepts donations.

Google Tech Talk: Java on Guice: Dependency Injection, the Java Way

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Here’s a really interesting talk about how to use Guice, a new open source dependency injection framework for Java by Google. Here’s a link to the user-guide which explains, using a example, why Guice might be a great alternative to using static references, or factory patterns when writing unit tests. I haven’t used Guice yet but i have written many unit tests for services that need to pass in Mocked services using the factory pattern, so I can immediately see the benefit of a framework like Guice.

I’m going to delve deeper into it, but I recommend watching the tech talk, they work through a simple example and it does sound very useful.

End of sprint, SCRUM and why I’m feeling so good

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We’ve just reached the end of our eighth sprint on the project I’ve been working on. On Monday we’ll be doing our end of sprint demonstrations to customers as well as internally to the rest of the company and I have to say I’m feeling quite good about it. It’s a lovely day today feel like I need to chill (or as Rob suggested – maybe I need to get a life 😉 ) anyway I’ve been sitting here reflecting on this month and there’s a few things I want to talk about.

I’m fairly new to the SCRUM methodology, in fact this is the first project I’ve worked on that formally uses it. Our development group here at Talis has adopted the SCRUM process across all of our current projects with what I feel has been a great deal of success.

For me personally the transition from traditional waterfall approaches to agile methodologies has been a revelation in many ways. Before joining Talis I’d spent a number of years developing software based on traditional waterfall methodologies. What was frustrating with these traditional approaches was that you’d spend months capturing and documenting requirements, you’d then spend a while analysing these requirements and then designing your software product, before implementing it and then testing it. Any changes to the requirements invariably meant going through a process of change impact analysis and then going through the whole process again (for the changed requirements), which naturally increases the cost to the customer.

A side effect of which, from the perspective of the customer, was that changing requirements during the project was a bad idea, because of the extra costs it would incur. A consequence of this is that customers would often take delivery of systems which after a couple of years of development, don’t actually satisfy the requirements that they now have. These same customers would then have to take out a maintenance contract with the vendor to get the systems updated to satisfy their new requirements.

From a developers point of view, I often found this to be very demoralising, you knew you you were building something the customer didn’t really want, but the software house you work for wants to do that because they have a signed off requirements document and contract that guarantee’s them more money if the customer changes their mind. I often found that when we reached the end of a project, the delivery of that software to the customer was a very and nervous and stressful time. The customer at this point has not necessarily had any visibility of the product so there’s usually a couple of months when your organisation is trying to get them to accept the product – which invariably led to arguments over the interpretation of requirements – and sometimes scary looking meetings between lawyers from both sides.

There was always something very wrong with it.

Since joining Talis, and transitioning to agile methodologies I can finally see why it was so wrong, and why agile, and in this case SCRUM, work so well.

For one thing, I’m not nervous about the end of sprint demonstrations. 🙂 The customers have been involved all along, they’ve been using the system, constantly providing feedback, constantly letting us know what were doing well, and what we need to improve on.

Our sprints have been four weeks long, which means at the beginning of the sprint we agree which stories we are going to implement based on what the customers have asked us for, these can be new stories that have been identified, or stories from the backlog. The customers have an idea, from previous sprints, what our velocity is – in other words they, and we, know how much work we can get done in a sprint so when we pick the stories for the sprint we ensure we don’t exceed that limit. This keeps things realistic. Any story that doesn’t get scheduled in for the sprint because it was deemed less of a priority than the stories that are selected gets added to a backlog.

This iterative cycle is great! For one thing customer’s are encouraged to change their minds, to change their requirements, because they then have to prioritise whether that change is more important than the other items on the backlog. They are empowered to choose what means the most to them, and that’s what we give them ! The customer doesn’t feel like the enemy, but an integral part of the team, and for me that’s vital.

As a developer it feels great to know that your customers like your product … and why shouldn’t they, they’ve been involved every step of the way, they’ve been using it every step of the way.

I’ve only been here at Talis for ten months, and in that time I’ve had to constantly re-examine and re-evaluate not only what I think it means to be a good software developer but pretty much every facet of the process of building services and products for customers. For me it’s been an amazing journey of discovery and I’m pretty certain it’s going to continue to be for a very long time.

The really wonderful thing though is that in our development group I’m surrounded by a team of people who believe passionately that it’s the journey and how we deal with it that defines us, and not the destination. So we are constantly looking for ways to improve, that in itself can be inspiring.
So yeah … I feel good!

Our development group is always looking for talented developers who share our ethos and could fit into the culture we have here. If you’d like to be a part of this journey then get in touch with us. Some of us, including myself, will be at XTECH 2007 next month, so if your attending the conference come and have a chat with us.

Book Review: 40 Days and 40 Nights. by Matthew Chapman

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Actually the full title of Chapman’s book is 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania, and it has to be one of the most uniquely interesting and engrossing books I have read in a long time. I actually read the whole thing cover to cover over this weekend, I simply could not bring myself to put it down – in fact calling it engrossing simply doesn’t do it justice.


Image:Amazon.co.uk click for details

The book is about Kitzmiller vs Dover, the 2005 federal trial of a public school board’s attempt at getting Intelligent Design into the high school science curriculum as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution. In the end the plaintiff’s, comprised of concerned parents of students at the school successfully argued that Intelligent Design was a form of creationism, and the school boards policy thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

There’s two things that make this book so interesting. The first is that Matthew Chapman, the author, is the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin and I find this quite fascinating. It’s almost as though he is uniquely place to offer a perspective no-one else could, even though Chapman is not a scientist but a film director. The second is that although the book covers the trial and does discuss the scientific arguments presenting during the trial, the book isn’t about the science, but more about the people involved.

What Chapman offers through his in depth encounters with the people involved on both sides of the issue is at times a frightening, but also amusing, and above all a very moving story of ordinary people doing battle in America over the place of religion in science and modern life.

Chapman has also written an earlier book called Trials of Monkeys: An Accidental Memoir, that provided an account of the famous Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925 where school teacher John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for breaking a recently passed law which forbade the teaching, in any state funded school, of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man descended from a lower order of animals”. Chapman often contrasts the Kitzmiller trial with the earlier Scopes trial – in which all the expert witnesses for the defence ( scientists ) were not allowed to testify by the judge.

Fortunatly the Kitzmiller trial the expert witnesses from both side were allowed to testify and it’s fascinating to see how the Creationist arguments on the so-called theory Intelligent Design were torn to shreds under cross examination.

However fascinating the scientific arguments were what captivates the most are Chapman’s descriptions of the people involved – the Christian Fundamentalists on the school board who bullishly forced through their policies; the faculty members who opposed the board even in the face of intimidation; the parents of children who protested and eventually sued the board; and the two legal teams their respective expert witnesses.

It’s hard not to be disturbed by the description of how the school board went about installing ID into the curriculum. In effect they polarised the community into those who believed in God and Creation and branded everyone else atheist – even though many of the Plaintiff’s and teachers at the school were Christians. The threats of violence and intimidation against the plaintiffs and their families were frightening. Chapman’s descriptions of the families his accounts of conversations with them and the depth of their concerns is captivating. As is their willingness to stand up and fight this even if it meant they were ostracised by the very community they lived in. To get a feel for what I mean, during one Board meeting when concerned parents pointed out that teaching creationism could land the school into serious legal trouble one of the pro-intelligent design Board members stood up and shouted –

“2000 years ago someone died on a cross, can’t someone stand up for him now?”

One of the most amusing bit’s in the book is when Chapman describes the cross examination of Michael Behe the star witness for the defence – a fastidious proponent of Intelligent Design and author of Darwin’s Black Box and the man who coined the phrase “irreducible complexity”. In fact in a recent interview with New Scientist Chapman describes why this moment stood out:

The most disturbing element was how the intelligent-design crowd, many of whom I liked, would intellectually and morally contort themselves to cling to ideas one felt even they did not quite believe. The scientists among them seemed to have taken hold of small shards of the scientific whole that no one fully understands yet, and created a shield against reality. They were smart people, and at times it was painful to watch them. There was a moment when one intelligent-design scientist [Behe] was literally walled into the witness box by books and articles detailing an evolutionary process he said had not been described. And though they had had months to prepare, the school board members who advocated intelligent design still knew almost nothing about it. When asked to define intelligent design, one of them defined evolution.

You can read the book for the actual narrative, but the image of this ID Scientist who is arguing that no-one has ever been able to prove or been able to document how the Immune System in vertebrates could have possibly evolved through natural selection, a corner stone of his argument for Intelligent Design, being systematically walled into the witness box as the prosecuting lawyer literally buries him in papers, books, articles all discussing and describing precisely that evolutionary process … was as I said amusing … but at the same time deeply deeply worrying.

Behe also went on to admit that he had considered a possible test that would falsify intelligent design, when pressed on whether he had carried out the test he replied that he hadn’t and neither had anyone in the Intelligent Design movement. Here was a scientist arguing for his theory to be taught in schools and yet he could not be be bothered to test it. Or as Chapman puts it:

Wasn’t that the first thing you would do? Wasn’t this, in fact, exactly what science was?

Anyway I feel like I’m ranting, but it’s been a long time since a book really captivated me like this and opened my eyes to a number of truths, particularly about the creationist movement in America. For a while Rob and I have been discussing the whole Evolution vs Creationism phenomenon. In fact we’ve both done a fair bit of research into it and I was genuinely surprised whilst reading this book to find that many of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves about why it is the scientific community hasn’t been able to convince the Creationist’s that evolution is a real theory are actually answered – well in part.
If there’s one book you read this summer … read this one!