et tu mooc?

For the last century, the U.K. has had what is known as a legal deposit law requiring a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper to be sent to the British Library, and allowing five other major libraries to also request copies. Now the rules are being updated: from Saturday, the same will apply to digital content, including blogs and other content published online.

The idea, much as it was with printed content, is to archive the U.K.’s cultural and intellectual output. The libraries — including the British Library, the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, Trinity College Library Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries and Cambridge University Library — will be allowed to scrape and store everything on the .uk domain, and to demand copies of ebooks, e-journals and even CD-ROMs published in the U.K.

Here’s an interesting snippet from the FAQs:

“Legal Deposit Libraries will copy U.K.-published material from the internet, including freely accessible material on the open web. They are also entitled to harvest copies of password-protected or paid-for material, but are putting alternative arrangements in place for any publisher who prefers to deliver such material to them instead.”

A British Library spokesman confirmed to me on Friday that this was a reference to paywalled content. However, given that people will only be able to access the archive by physically visiting the libraries in question, and that there will be a seven-day lag between publication and archiving, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the publishers.

The spokesman said social media output would also be included, “as long as it is U.K.-based and openly available on the web,” and confirmed that this includes identifiably U.K.-based individuals’ Twitter feeds, although “we’d need to select people because it’s a .com” — no Library of Congress-style catch-all approach, then.

“The main thing we’re trying to capture first time round is .uk domain websites,” the spokesman added, while also stressing that no non-public social media material would be scraped.

On the book publishing side, The Bookseller reported that priority will be given to ebook-only publishers. This is presumably because those who aren’t ebook only are already submitting their books under the previously existing legal deposit scheme.

So why is this all happening? As my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out last year, digital content can often be ephemeral and easily lost. That sentiment was echoed on Friday by British Library chief executive Roly Keating:

“Ten years ago, there was a very real danger of a black hole opening up and swallowing our digital heritage, with millions of web pages, e-publications and other non-print items falling through the cracks of a system that was devised primarily to capture ink and paper.

The regulations now coming into force make digital legal deposit a reality, and ensure that the Legal Deposit Libraries themselves are able to evolve — collecting, preserving and providing long-term access to the profusion of cultural and intellectual content appearing online or in other digital formats.”

The U.K. is not the first country to update its legal deposit rules in this way – similar requirements are in place inDenmark, Finland, Sweden and New Zealand.

…or learning & time travel? Can I shoehorn this into an #introphil post? Tangle a few roots? Time, mind, post/transhuman (or was that another course?), learning, and identity too, for good measure.  Who am I? is the QUESTION standing behind the examined life’s green curtain, flowing into What do I know and How do I know it? 

Commentary on Paul Signorelli’s Learning Time and Heads That Spin at Building Creative Bridges how it connects with #introphil,  peripherally touching on #edcmooc and even the Fantasy/SF mooc

…I’m not sure what #etmooc topic this belongs to. Maybe “Connected Learning – Tools, Processes & Pedagogy.” Sooner or later online education talk, mooc or not, turns to analytics…

Choosing what data to collect takes insight; making good sense of it requires the classic methods: you still need a model, a theory, or intuition to find a cause.

…and email isn’t dead yet either. Between avalanches, tsunamis, revolution, attacks of what Jonathon Rees at More or Less Bunk calls the Freid-bot (and others, just a tool), and garden variety disruptions, there’s been rather a lot of disaster rhetoric. Can vampires and zombies be far behind? Mark Brynes writes,

What if we developed a technology that enabled an expert in a field of study to reach not dozens or even hundreds of learners but tens or even hundreds of thousands of learners?

That question was purposefully posed so as to make it sound profound in its potential possibilities. But if you think about it for a second, it’s actually kind of dumb. We have done this, many times. Gutenberg did it with the printing press. Edwin Howard Armstrong (the true father of the radio) did it. So did the pioneers of TV and the internet. There’s nothing fundamentally new about the idea.

Nonetheless, last week Thomas Friedman wrote one of his typically breathless columns on the promise of the new education technology tool 

Geof Cain, Brainstorm in progress, writes, 

Just as we need a new learning theory to account for new modalities in learning, we also need a new framework for instructional design, a rubric for MOOC development. New modalities of learning, content delivery, and engagement in online, hybrid courses and Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have required new learning theory: Connectivism. Given this new theory, this paper suggests that a new instructional design model is needed as well. According to my reading of Connnectivism, instructional design for MOOCs should… 

Read on…it’s interesting and relevant.

Later Cain quotes George Siemens:

…learning should be designed for adaptability, for “patterning, wayfinding, and sensemaking” and focus on “content, context, and connections.” Siemens says that it is difficult to take all of this and try to build some mechanistic formula for creating learning experiences.

So it’s no surprise if you are feeling disoriented. We’re all wandering in Terra Incognita. Rubrics and Instructional Design, maps and compasses, sound very appealing even if we’re not quite sure how to go about it. Difficult or not, that is what Cain proposes to do.

The old, familiar models don’t quite fit. Fortunately, Cain intends to use a broader (and presumably more flexible) definition of Instructional Design (Sheninger, 2010). He also plans extensive research into both connectivist theory and current MOOC practice.

Sounds promising ~  even if still a challenge to imagine “connectivist MOOC” and “organization” used in the same sentence…coherently. The potential outcome is worth the effort of supporting and more.