Martin Weller

The world is changing rapidly; is higher education adapting as fast? Martin Weller explores this topic in his book The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice*. I found this book to be prophetic as I watch what is happening around me in both higher education (HE) and Extension. As Weller pointed out, and I totally agree, we (HE) can be doing more to adapt to the effect that technology is having on the education profession. Read more… (más)

As an unrepentant MOOC addict and advocate of openness in the cultural heritage universe, this insider's view of openness in higher education was very interesting to me. Weller works for the Open University in the UK, which has had a long history of widening participation in education and of supporting its learners, so it is intriguing to see his take on where we are now in terms of increasing access to educational resources and to scholarly works of various kinds.

"There seems to be a clear trend that the majority of users of open education material are those who are experienced learners already." "...learners tended to be young, white, educated employed males." These findings are interesting to me: the people most likely to access free online learning opportunity already have a certain level of education and of employment. This raises important questions about what the point of these resources is, which Weller goes into in this book.

The book argues that we are at a turning point in the way that people access materials and their education. It analyses the development of Open Access publishing, MOOCs and Open Educational Resources, and open scholarship in general, with an assessment of the current state of play in all these areas. It is an accessible, well-written exploration of important issues.

It seems to me that there is a huge disconnect between the current management structure of universities, which are increasingly run as major business corporations (usually by accountants), and the desire of many of the people working within those institutions to share their work with others and advance research in their fields. It's certainly an interesting area to watch (particularly from the outside!). I definitely see more of a future for the kind of 'guerilla research' that Weller describes: perhaps with funding being directed to such researchers without the involvement of the university at all. Research without managerial interference? Now there's a radical idea.… (más)