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SocialLearn presentation in Elluminate
I did a presentation for George Siemens last night on SocialLearn. It was an open (naturally!) session in Elluminate. George recorded it and you can relive it in all its mumbling glory here. I think it gives a reasonable overview of where we’re at, and I tried to broaden it to wider issues also. George tries manfully to make me sound coherent by asking intelligent questions, but in case you hadn’t twigged it, I’m a better writer than I am speaker, so it’s a bit rambling in places I fear. Enjoy?
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Digital literacies
I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I’d put them in a blog post. This isn’t the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies: Different voices – think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D’Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I’m not sure who they…
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Openness – catch my disease
Adblock Post title pinched from Ben Lee – Catch my disease I’m in Barcelona for the last FLOSScom meeting and I’m presenting at the Free Knowledge Free Transfer conference. The talk I was going to give was about using open source approaches in education, but I’ve changed it to one on how openness can be seen as a virus, which higher education is catching. The argument goes like this: once you start being open about content, it becomes contagious to all aspects of your life. There are different ways the open virus can spread, and some people are more ‘resistant’ to it than others. One highly infectious carrier is The…
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The weirdness of copyright
I’ve written a chapter for a book with James Dalziel and we are asked to sign a copyright form. Now, I usually just sign these, but I’ve been getting fussy about this stuff recently. So, I actually read this one, and when you analyse it, there are a number of really draconian measures in there. If you look at it rationally you think ‘no-one would invent a system like this now’. To be fair, they have said we can publish the chapter online if we ask permission, and this copyright form is fairly standard. But I think it’s an interesting exercise to go through it. “Author(s) agrees to, and does…
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A little corner that is forever edupunk
Last night I was part of a live internet radio show, run by Graham Attwell at Pontydysgu. The theme was edupunk, and the show featured Jim Groom and Mike Caulfield amongst others. I made the point that edupunk is a sort of metaphor, and like all metaphors we only map certain parts across to the new domain – in this case I thought it was the DIY, have-a-go approach of punk, and some of the anarchic nature of it. What we wouldn’t want to map across was the slightly Stalinist approach that came with punk where people were either punk or not, and anything that was not was decreed rubbish.…
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iCasting as new digital literacy
<Now Broadcasting Live, Jose: http://flickr.com/photos/raveneye/2473034500/> I was part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, where we looked at what broadcast meant to us in the internet age. The OU has partly defined itself by its relationship to broadcast, and so it seemed like a good time to reexamine that. You won’t be surprised to hear that my basic line was ‘forget traditional broadcast and put it all online’ (that was a step too far for most, but we made some progress). Anyway, there is a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting post being advertised. We struggled over the title – the broadcast part is appropriate if one views it…
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Future of content vid with annotations
Accusations of flogging dead horses may well be justified, but just in case you thought my Future of Content was some randomly assembled clips, the annotated version is now up on YouTube (again you have to click through to see the annotations). So, I’ve now done the article, made a video of it, then added textual annotation to explain the video. Erm, full circle anyone? Still, you do now have a choice of medium.
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The sweet spot in education
Adblock | View | Upload your own Above is a slidecast of a talk I gave to a JISC Emerge conference recently entitled ‘Finding the sweet spot between web 2 and education’. My basic argument is that new tools encourage this overlap between areas we used to keep distinct, for instance home and work,personal and professional, individual and institution. A lot of people see this as a ‘bad thing’, but I think it has enormous potential also. Why do I spend time blogging or in twitter? Because it is both fun and work, because it’s social and professional. I wouldn’t bother to spend as long in a discussion forum of…
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The eduWomble manifesto
Adblock For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you – eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment “Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #’Womble Strategy” For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children’s television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it’s the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor. The main theme is represented in…
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I heart Wordle
Given my fondness for tag clouds, it’s inevitable I would love Wordle – it generates word clouds from text you input. Nothing new there, but here’s the catch – it’s lovely. You can manipulate the text colour, orientation, layout, etc. I’m not sure tag clouds always add value, but I think we could use them a lot more – for instance at the OU we do a lot of student surveys, often with a free form comment section for students to fill out. As a course team chair I would get back lots of data, plus all of the comments. Wading through these was difficult and time-consuming. A simple tag…
