World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings

For this project we are explicitly creating OER, and possibly, in a constructivist approach this means we take certain steps and author our materials in a certain way. However, this is still based around a production model of author to consumer, even if a consumer in remixing becomes a new author. Innately, there will always be a consumer, but the roles offered by the traditional OER model as production and consumption – it is rare that poacher producers become consumer gamekeepers – there remain distinct roles in the system; akin to the lion and the donkey. How many OER sites have “share this content with a wealthy company!” buttons, but then don’t have “edit”, or “share your version”. The cathedral and the bazaar is the oft mentioned OS model, but even the bazaar has a distinct trading model – perhaps it is a more barter based currency? Or kibbutz?

Does this limitation in the publishing model remove a benefit from OER – that peer working (perhaps akin to crowdsourcing) improves material you share, for which you also gain? Perhaps also, in altering the production model to a more distributed approach (one with less role distinction) we can work towards common, required goals of communities, and not a centralised, institutionalised approach? So this is just crowdsourcing? Probably, but ever seen crowdsourcing and it not be a wiki? And what of the fact data changes? What of the fact some pieces, such as a World War One Blog on Arras and Wikipedia are tied to the date of creation – and we need to accept that content would be worth revisiting. So a repository can handle versioning, but can it handle viewing changes – so for this wikipedia data sets, the changes in data across the sets are as important data set as the data sets themselves. It would seem foolish to leave this content static; and static content seems to be against a lot of what is open about OER. Shouldn’t we move towards a concept of OER being continually published in that we aim to use frameworks which allow for others to contribute as equals, rather than just consumers?

Our @Arras95 campaign will look into how we can best crowd source some data, but we’ve also set up a github account for the project so we are conducting a series of experiments in this area – we’ll try to keep you up to date and it’d be great if you could contribute.

This week I gave our project its first public airing at the First World War Digital Commemoration Roundtable organised by JISC. This is the second event of its kind, and brings together a range of organisations to review and discuss plans for the creation and management of new digital content to mark the centenary of the First World War (2014 onwards). It seems that a great deal has happened since the last meeting. Meaningful ways are being developed for the public to engage with the War, reappraise it and understand it. Whilst teaching, learning and research lie at the heart of the new interfaces, resources and collections that are being created.

My presentation is available on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/ktlindsay/world-war-one-continuations-and-beginnings

http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/

One issue we have with our World War One project is that we need to be very aware of not being “British”, and presenting the resources in an almost nation-agnostic way. My last blog post featured the fact that the first “British Empire” shot in World War one was fired in what is now Togo. Even that sentence carries a fair burden of colonialism – we say British Empire as almost a sleight of hand, using the Empire as an almost conjectural trick. Arguably it reinforces the approach that the soldiers from the empire who fought weren’t the same as “British” soldiers.  As I am also not an academic of Western Africa, I don’t know if Togo’s borders now reflect an Africentric development of a nation state, or remain a relic of the days of empire – is “What is now Togo?” still a sign of a colonial mindset?

However, this is an OER blog post, and the concept of geography can be tied to OER – but how does the concept of the nation state? Often as developers we aim to present the website in the best possible way dependent on who the browser is, and their associated technology. We make the site accessible to people with screen readers, use style sheets for old browsers, smaller text for mobile browsers and aim to introduce new features where we can using HTML5 or various plugins. As a design principle, we call this either graceful degradation or progressive enhancement – and it is something we might wish to look into for OER content for one reason, the same reason in fact that we don’t want our viewpoint to be too “British”. A “British” OER, one with language embedded in it is decidedly less useful than an “International” OER. So how much of this can become a design consideration? I’ve worked on some visualisations for the project, but these are all JPEGs at present – and so to translate them requires a lot of work. They are British, and without a lot of effort always will be – OER as the xenophobic, dogmatic little englander – Teach Britiannia? We could produce translations for other languages, or we could take the text away from the resource and allow translation that way – making the remixing of the resource possible for as many languages as possible.

So this ties our content in with graceful degradation – hopefully – but perhaps leave open the idea of deliberately making a sub-optimal British OER so as to make some of the remixing internationally easier for people. You could envisage the OER not being the content on the site, but a form made available 2-3 steps back in the development process so as to maximise the scope in which redevelopers and remixers can work. These strike me as good design principles, but not something I’ve noticed in OER terms. The OER movement seems to be largely British and Spanish in terms of countries, but Spain has many languages, as does Britain – but you never really see a link with “See this OER in Welsh” or “See this OER in Catalan” link on a website.

It will be interesting to see as the site and content develops how thoughts on supporting translation as remix can be supported.

One of the themes that will be present in World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings is that of the ‘Unconventional Soldier’. This encompasses a range of figures who we do not necessarily associate with the gallant officer or Tommy on the front line. Pacifists, deserters, convicts, animals in battle (the popular ‘War Horse’) – they all were all given the name of soldier. And, a little known fact, there were women soldiers too.

The role of women in the War is largely associated with weeping, waiting and working: as wives, mothers and sweethearts; as factory, munitions and land workers (The United Kingdom used slogans like ‘National Service’ or ‘Women’s Land Army’ to encourage young women to join the work force); as nurses on the home front, red cross workers, VADs and WRNS who worked in all the Theatres of War. But military involvement, that’s something that doesn’t appear on the school curriculum.

Of course, women in the military have a history that extends over 4,000 years into the past, throughout a vast number of cultures and nations, from ancient warrior women to the women currently serving in conflicts, they have played many roles. Whilst military involvement in the First World War was rare it existed, and for International Women’s day we surface the existence of the World War One ‘She Soldiers’:

• Aviator Eugenie Mikhailovna Shakhovskaya (1889–1920) was the first woman to become a military pilot when she flew reconnaissance missions for the Czar in 1914.
• On March 17th 1917 Loretta Perfectus Walsh (1896 – 1925) became the first American active-duty Navy woman, and the first woman allowed to serve in any of the United States armed forces other than as a nurse, when she enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve. She subsequently became the first woman Navy petty officer when she was sworn in as Chief Yeoman. By the end of the War America had sworn in 11,274 female Yeomen to the Navy on the same status as men.
• In 1917, in a last-ditch effort to inspire the mass of war-weary soldiers to continue fighting in World War, the Russian Provisional Government created fifteen formations of women-only battalions. This included the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, commanded by Maria Bochkareva which were called into battle against the Germans during the Kerensky Offensive. The women performed well in combat , taking 200 prisoners and suffered few casualties.
• Flora Sandes (1876–1955) enlisted as a St Johns Ambulance volunteer and was stationed in Serbia to assist the humanitarian crisis there where she joined the Serbian Red Cross. Separated from her unit during the retreat into Albania, and joined a Serbian regiment for safety. Here she took up the rifle and became the first woman to be commissioned as an officer in the Serbian army and the only British woman to officially enlist as a soldier in World War I. In 1916 she was promoted to corporal then sergeant, and was wounded by an enemy grenade during hand-to-hand fighting. Awarded the King George Star (Serbia’s highest decoration) she was then promoted sergeant-major, and eventually reaching the station of captain.

An OER close to home. This afternoon I was exploring the wonderful Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library Archives on Flickr and I came across these great photographs of Oxford Town Hall during the War which, like many of the colleges, was used as a hospital. A great use of the Orchestra Room!