Intro post to OCL4Ed

I'm just starting a new course! One more :)  I think I'm addicted to learn, and with my not too good time-management skills this sometimes become a problem.  The good bit of this new course I'm starting now is that it last just 2 weeks and it's very well structured with a very nice interface to follow up what you need to be done.  So, first of all: Congratulations to the team who put it together :)  Hip-hip! Hurra!!!

The first activity is just to set a blog, configure it, customise it and write the first post with the experience.  I'm not new to blogs, and I've been using it since long time... however my problem is keep it up.  Also, I've been planing for ever to create my own website and keep a blog with my updates in my work - so it helps me to improve my time-management skills.  The problem with that is that I keep looking up for the perfect tool and I never get to actually doing it... :(  Nevertheless, I think I've found what I want and hopefully in this austral winter I manage to get it up and running (and keep it running).  However, the settings of that site takes a bit longer than the ones from blogger or wordpress... so I'm going to use this semi-abandoned blog meanwhile and then in the near future move them to my new site.

So, let's go with what's asked for this first activity:

who am I?  I'm a researcher in Solar Physics (no, no solar panels - but the sun as an star).  I'm in my 3rd post-doc and during this one I've got to prepare a lot of teaching material.  Since long I've though that blogging helps to your learning experience - maybe because you have more pressure as people can follow you up (with encouraging comments to keep going :)).

Was it easy or difficult to set a blog? well, since the time I started bloging (2005) - when I was using it as a diary for my friends and family of my adventures in a new phase of my life, my PhD -, till now, I find it extremely easy.  As I said, the difficult part for me is to keep it up-to-date.  Now a days, I think there are a lot of tools that makes bloging (or sharing your experience with the world) a lot easier (twitter, facebook, g+, ...) But what I never liked from these and I still don't do is the limitations they have as you need to belong to a certain network to be able to participate.  My best example goes as: imagine you could just email (communicate) the people from your same email provider.  Thankfully this is not the case with email... but it's with a lot of other tools (skype, whatsup, ...).  I'm sad that people don't try to use better tools that are available to provide a better communication in the world (with many other advantages) just because... (put your excuse here).
That's in part what makes blogging still so nice! You share your thoughts with the world without making the people to belong to your network, and everyone can follows you with just using RSS! - I use theoldreader to keep track of what I want but there are many others.  Why do I want to go away from blogger? well, I think that will deserve a post by its own any other time.

I think I've got a bit more words that were required... so that's all for now :)

Upss... an CC image which is related with what is going to happen soon:

"Summer Solstice Sunrise over Stonehenge 2005". Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (by Solipsist) via Wikimedia Commons.

What does "openness" mean to me?

Let's be direct with this one. For me, openness, means a way of living. It can be seen from different perspectives, but openness is what it leads to take the best of us and make a better world.

In my life as a researcher I think of openness as the only possible way to do science.  I've mentioned in my introductory post to the course about how important open-access journals are for science... but that's not all, that's not even the tip of the iceberg.  Science is not a democracy as I've heard some people wishing for it, we cannot vote to see whether we "accept" the gravitational laws or not - now I may think that it's our fault to call them laws -.  Science is science because it works here, in Mars, in Andromeda galaxy and beyond. What I want to say with this? well, when we talk about openness in science we have to share everything we do, the data we use, the programs we wrote to read/analyse such data, and of course and quite important, the documentation of the data and the programs.  Otherwise, this is what, unfortunately, happens so frequently (via astrobetter):

I would go even further and say that we should all use open lab-books real time with our research, this will help a faster spread of knowledge and don't wait 3 years to someone publishing some results so you can use them (my last paper took more than 6 months to be refereed, and I got just one very minor comment!)

But, openness in science is just what covers my professional live.  I'm a huge supporter of open software (partly because the importance of it for science) and I've got really surprised when I've read this comment in the pad for the hangout discussion that happened today:

Digital divide - divide between those who can code and those who cannot. What good is open source software to those who cannot modify the software? 

-- For those who don't know how to code, using open source software vs closed is pretty much the same experience.

I must say that I disagree with such comment.  I would say that there's a misconception of  what open-source means for the final user experience. Open source opens to everyone a huge community, and not just to developers.  The final user gets a product with a confidence that there's a lot of people working in the development than just maybe 50 paid by a company, this will bring a more stable/less-buggy/secure code.  Think also on the information that the close product is taking from you without letting you know about it, how much can you trust it?  All right, you may not have the knowledge to look into, for example, Firefox code to see whether they are doing so, but there's a large amount of people that does and they have not found it.  Also, most of the open-source software have a wishlist where you can suggest improvements/ideas and track their evolution (likewise reporting bugs you may find).  And to leave this paragraph, the best of it, you can participate on it! Don't know how to program? don't worry, you can translate it, write tutorials, advertise it, etc...

After this parenthesis, I keep with my line of discussion of what openness means.  Openness should be also applied in the government of a country, a community, etc.  Think it in the smallest core of our society.  How would a couple be able to be as such if they hide things between themselves? I cannot approve a government which does not show where they are spending the money, what negotiations with companies they are having and so on (I'm Spanish and a bit sensible with the situation we are having in the moment).

I believe that with openness we won't have a lot of misunderstandings we have in many facets of our life.  This may be a too communist point of view, and I'm not in a situation where I depend of an idea which I should patent it, and get rich with it...  Though, after reading The Public Domain (by James Boyle) I see patents and intellectual property with better eyes... if they are used as they were designed.

I think this is enough for today, I have now a lot to read and comment from others (I'm 2 days behind). Be Open! :)

"Why Open?" - starting a new MOOC today!

I'm just starting another MOOC today, this one is called "Why Open?".

One of the requirements for this course is to have a blog and post about... I don't know yet, but I'm looking forward to fill the white pages of this little space in the net.  This is also pushing me to my never started blog about science, what I do in my sciency live and what I discover in my way. So, this will be also the place for my discussions about the Sun, Space weather and other stuff.

So, back to the course I'm starting today.

This MOOC is organized by P2PU, a really amazing project where people teach other people. They have a large variety of course, some of them you can started at any time, where others you have a starting date and commit with your peers.

Why Open is about Openness as sharing knowledge, ideas, etc. with the world.  I will keep you (my lovely reader) more about my learnings and how that affect me.  I have a very clear idea of what open means, but I find some times that I don't know to defend it really well with my colleagues.  I, as a scientist, think that all research should be available free of paywalls, and what's still more important, the data used (positive or negative) should also be available for future researchers.

That's all that I have to say now, 4 weeks of intense course await me :)