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Academic publishing – a rant
As I mentioned I had an article (The Distance from Isolation) accepted for publication in Computers and Education. It has now been ‘in press’ for over a year now, with no indication as to when it will actually be published. By the time it is, it will be out of date. I’m sure it’s not the case but it reminds me of Chelsea FC – they buy the best players not with an intention of playing them but simply to stop other teams having them. This is but one example of the very strange world of academic publishing. For those who don’t engage in it, the deal goes something like…
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Decentralisation of Higher Ed
John Naughton’s inaugural lecture last week reminded me of a paper I wrote about online communities Download distance_ho.doc (this is not a coincidence as some of the ideas in the paper were informed by a conversation I had with John once about the differences between broadcast media and the Net, and much of the knowledge of the net’s technical structure is derived from John’s book A Brief History of the Future). In it I argue that the key technological features of the internet are openness, decentralisation and robustness. These in turn became the social values of the internet also. If you want to know what technologies or approaches will succeed…
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The enthusiasm of the new convert
I was at the University of West England yesterday for a validation event. They are creating an online software engineering course. I was struck by the enthusiasm they had for e-learning in general. I forget that it can strike people this way. Back in 1999 I came across like some e-learning Billy Graham, but now I tend to think everyone knows it, or am wary of over-hyping it. But it was nice to be reminded of this. They were excited about how e-learning allowed them to do things they had always wanted to do, but the lecture format didn’t allow, for example getting students to do an activity immediately after…
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I (verb) therefore I am (annoying/important)
A friend of mine was commenting on the way in which verbs seem to hold more sway than any other catagory of word. People don’t mind if you invent a new noun, and will chuckle politely if you coin a new adjective, but to create a new verb is to invite the wrath of language purists everywhere. And related to this, you know a technology has become significant when you can use it as a verb and both be understood and escape physical abuse. So in any one day I may blog, google or skype. As yet I would hesitate in public to say I flickr or wiki, and I…
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Social social software
My friend and colleague John Naughton gave his inaugural lecture yesterday. Afterwards a few of us were invited to the Vice Chancellor’s house for dinner. There I met some people who I hadn’t seen for a while (such as Quentin Stafford-Fraser), and some I hadn’t met before. What struck me was that because I subscribe to John’s Blog I feel that I know a lot of these people already, or have maintained contact with them through their blogs or Flickr photostreams. This reminded me that when I was in Como last week, I often found myself thinking about the situation in terms of a prospective blog post, or taking photos…
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The constraint of choice (and a dodgy football analogy)
Watching England play on Saturday made me think about VLEs (that is not a sentence many people will write I expect). Whether that was an indication of my current VLE monomania as I complete the book, or an indictment of the quality of the game, I’m not sure. All football fans suffer from the ‘football as a metaphor for anything’ complaint, and here is another. I appreciate that to actually understand the analogy you need to have a good grasp of both VLEs and football, so it fails the first test of being a useful means of explaining one topic by mapping to another, but hey, how often do you…
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Notte Bianca
Tonight was the Notte Bianca (white night) festival in Como. Let it not be said that they don’t know how to party. Unfortunately I had to be up at 6 to get my flight home. I managed to get some sleep around 2.30 but was awoken by bed-rattling fireworks half an hour later. Still it was a lot of fun, and I have enjoyed Como – I think I’ll come back with my family when I don’t have any of that work stuff to do (although maybe I won’t stay on the main square during festival night next time). Houses in Como remind me of children trying to peak over…
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Watching england abroad
Today England play their first game in the world cup. I was determined to find a bar in Como to watch the game. Being a footballing country I thought this would be easy, but after an hour of trudging round Como I began to suspect their passion in this region. I asked in every bar if they would be showing the football and they greeted the request politely, but with an element of confusion, as if I’d gone into a hairdressers and asked for a bacon sandwich. It’s interesting how you take so many things for granted. Yesterday I was thinking Como represented some type of apogee of civilisation –…
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A reluctant traveller
Travelling to Como made me reflect that as I have got older, and particularly since becoming a father, I have become more reluctant to travel alone. I have begun to resemble Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist – I want to fly direct, get a taxi from the airport to the hotel, conduct business and get home. I also have the monoglots slight anxiety about travel in foreign countries. So having to get two planes and two trains to get to to Como was akin to a New world expedition for me. It all went smoothly, and like all Brits abroad, I sighed with admiration at the clinical operation of their train…
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Open Source conference
I am in Como for a conference on open source learning environments (FOSLET). The paper I am giving tries to set out three things: (Download wellerd2.pdf) i) The process of technology succession, which is analagous to plant succession. I argue that far from being detrimental many commercial VLEs have been beneficial because they have acted as primary colonizers, and have thus changed the environment so that other e-learning systems can now move in, e.g. portals and open source VLEs. ii) That open source VLEs represent a good compromise for the two groups of educators who are forced to co-exist in VLEs, what von Hippel terms lead and conventional users and…
