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Shiny show #4
The latest edition of the highly unanticipated Shiny Show. This month's shinies go to the following, who can bask in shiny glory. AudioBoo – sort of Flickr for audio, so you can upload audio clip, tag them, follow someone, sort by tags, embed clips, etc. It's restricted to iPhone and computer upload at the moment, but the mobile emphasis is interesting. You can imagine students using it in a number of ways:i) An audio reflective journal for thoughts, ideas, etcii) Gathering around a topic, for example agreeing a tag and then having global projects where students share audio clips ('What's the dawn chorus like where you are?')iii) Finding content from…
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A literacy, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little
I did a presentation for an online session on digital literacy hosted by Josie Fraser last Friday. Here is my slidecast: Digital literacy for educators Adblock View more presentations from mweller. It was well attended with some of my favourite online people and we had some good discussion. A few things occurred to me: i) We forget the literacies we wear in life – it's a broad term, and we all come to it with different sets of skills and concerns. If you're interested in schools, then digital literacy has a whole different set of connotations and issues than for higher education. It is debatable even whether lumping all of…
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On the demise of the scheduler
In one of my favourite novels, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, a TV producer gives this advice: "Scheduling is everything. A programme stands or falls by its scheduling. Understand that, and you'll already have a march on all the other bright young candidates you'll be competing with." This is 1969 – no producer would give such advice today. The VCR dented it a bit, but you still had to remember to record programmes. The digital, or personal video recorder, Sky+ and Tivo, were a major blow to the status of the scheduler: now recording was really easy and you could series link whole programmes. But what really did for…
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Organisations may have to live with ‘Cisco fatty’ moments
In case you've missed this one, there was another of those inevitable '[New technology of choice] gets person fired' stories. In this case a Cisco employee with the id theconnor tweeted "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work" Inevitably, someone else picks up on it. The strange thing is that it then goes viral. There is something of a pack mentality then. Helen Popkin gives a good account of the unfolding story here. She describes how: "Before the work day ended, Web sleuths revealed "theconnor's" true identity. "Theconnor" was…
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Universities as copyright warriors
mollyali http://www.flickr.com/photos/mollyali/3101921963/> To follow up on my last past and clarify a few points. I wasn't arguing that universities should ignore copyright because they think they're special, or that they should advocate wholesale piracy. Rather it was that universities are in a privileged position. They can fight on behalf of the general populace. In oppressive regimes it is often universities who form the opposition. They are the harbour for free thought and legitimate protest. It is the students and academics who fight on behalf of higher ideals. Copyright and the large organisations who seek to enforce it can be seen as the oppressive regime of the creative net. So in…
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Should universities break copyright law?
[Note – I know others have expressed this, David Wiley and Lawrence Lessig I think, but couldn't find their quotes, so if anyone has them, please let me know and I'll work them in] A few things coalesced for me today. For a start Alan Cann sent me a link to this video on Boing Boing. It's a remix of Rip! Brett Gaylor's documentary on remixing and copyright, and makes the point about the ludicrous nature of copyright very well. The essential argument is that copyright is now used to prevent creativity, not protect the creators. It is a control mechanism. The culture clashes it reveals are truly revealing (the…
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Why the future of journalism is interesting
Hamed Saber http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamed/512309138/> John Naughton has an excellent post in which he reflects on some recent pieces on the future of journalism. One of these is Clay Shirky's article Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, which if you haven't read already, I heartily recommend. Shirky has that rare ability to crystalize all the current debate and hype around a subject and get to the core of an argument (sort of the antithesis of what I do). He examines the economics of newspapers and argues this is why they are essentially rendered redundant by digital media. The point he makes is that we confuse function with form: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What…
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Rewarding digital scholarship (or Here comes the spoilsport)
Rewarding Digital Scholarship Adblock View more presentations from mweller. I'm involved in a bit of work at the OU at the moment which is attempting to look at how digital/e-/online activity can be recognised in the formal promotion system. Some quick thoughts It's a much more fluid environment – we know about journal articles, and apart from some new journals, nothing much changes. Online it's all change. The blogosphere is different today than it was a couple of years ago (partly because of Twitter), and so what you were measuring then may not be appropriate now. So you have to stay on top of things and not have a fixed…
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Celebrity as social object
<image: Flowing Systems by exper http://www.flickr.com/photos/exper/2016537402/> Having bemoaned the influx of celebrities on to Twitter and the manner in which it warps dialogue, this post is about a more positive impact of celebrities. I've noticed that a few celebs seem to act as a focus around which conversation and dialogue concentrates. The ex-England rugby captain Will Carling is one such. During the rugby people who follow him on twitter use his tweets as a backchannel and counterpoint to the official commentary. I've seen a similar effect with ex-footballer, Stan Collymore, (I didn't say the celebs were nice or anything), and during Comic Relief one of the few places for discussion…
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Zombify it
Adblock (Warning: this post contains no educational technology benefit whatsoever). As friends on Twitter will know, I have a bit of a zombie film obsession. Sure, I like arthouse cinema, The Double Life of Veronique and Wages of Fear are amongst my favourite films, but given the choice, I'd opt for a Romero most nights. Anyway, the other night, rather than watch some rubbish TV, I created my top ten zombie films in a wiki. A small point – this is why TV is in trouble, because people can do this kind of thing easily, and it's much more fun. I also commented in a tweet that there were very…
