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OU 40th vids
It was the Open University's 40th Birthday today. Lots of people wished it (us?) happy birthday via Twitter, so I grabbed these, plus some official photos from the image bank (am I allowed to use these?), and put them into Animoto to create a virtual birthday card. Below are two versions, see which one you like best:
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I’m aggregating, aggregating (a shiny show special)
Image: Different uses of tools from last post, created in Gliffy Following on from my last post, I have been looking at tools which allow users to collect together different online resources for sharing. What I'm interested in is aggregating and sequencing content together so you can distribute your sequence to others easily, a kind of flash mini-course creator. Scott Leslie twittered the other day, asking a similar thing and pointed me at the wiki scratchpad for his upcoming educator as DJ talk. So I worked through some of these, and here si my experience: Tumblr – as I mentioned in my previous post, I've rather taken to Tumblr. It's…
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I’m disaggregating, disaggregating
Adblock I had a play around with different sites for aggregating together different resources and social profiles recently (see next post for comparison). As a result I have started using Tumblr quite a bit. As a result I have found a new slice of my online identity which a) I didn't know needed expressing and b) is distinct from other parts of my online identity which are currently satisfied mainly by this blog and twitter with a bit of Facebook, LastFM, delicious, etc thrown in. So how am I using Tumblr? Pretty much as you'd expect, it's my online dump for anything interesting I come across, any half thoughts I…
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VLE vs PLE fight club
<Image Pirate Test by Danksy http://www.flickr.com/photos/petedanks/2770208173/> I did a debate with Niall Sclater for the upcoming OU course Technology enhanced learning around PLEs and VLEs, 'refereed' by John Pettit. We pitched it as me being the PLE guy and Niall the VLE man, for the sake of discussion, but we're probably closer in agreement than this would suggest. You can listen to the audio here (including jazzy intro and fade-out music). [Update, jazzy music is courtesy of http://www.oliverledbury.co.uk/] For a one take shot, I think it comes out reasonably well, although I am the least coherent of the three.
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G20, media and trust
<Image – G20-London-Protest by Room1834 http://www.flickr.com/photos/0742/3405203655/> There are so many lessons, pointers, revelations, areas of concern and epiphanies from the G20 protests that blogging about them seems almost superfluous. But to add to the comment mountain, here are my thoughts. Social vs Traditional mediaI listened and watched the coverage on the BBC and Sky, while simultaneously tracking events on twitter and Flickr. At the time the traditional coverage seemed biased against the protestors. Traditional media needs to go after a 'story', a narrative it can use to conveniently bundle events together, and it had decided crowd trouble would be that story. Some of the commentators on the traditional media bordered…
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On economy as metaphor
Stephen Downes takes me to task over the reciprocity economy, stating that "One thing people tend to get wrong about networks is to interpret them as some sort of economy or value proposition… I think this metaphor is really misleading. As I write in the comments, "It's not about reciprocity. It's about sharing. Completely different concept." I'll defend the post against these counter-arguments in a couple of ways. Firstly by talking about the nature of metaphor and secondly by exploring the role of sharing. I knew Stephen, being the lovable old socialist he is, wouldn't like an economy metaphor. But we don't have to like, or take all of the…
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Someone Once Told Me (format matters)
Via Sam Easterby-Smith I came across a site called Someone Once Told Me. The idea is simple: the photographer, Mario Cacciottolo, either takes, or gets people to send in, a black and white photograph with the person holding a sign on which is written something someone once told them. It's simple, yet this format throws up a lot of interesting photographs and comments. I told my daughter about it, and asked her what she would put on a sign. Her instant response was 'It's against the law to sing Christmas songs when it isn't Christmas.' Turns out a friend at school had imparted this piece of knowledge to her, and…
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Course to Dis-course
As part of my Year of Future Learning thang (yes, you hoped it'd gone away), I've organised with George Siemens an online mini-conference called 'From Course to Dis-course', runs May 14th – 15th. The aim is to look at the future of the course in a digital world. I think that the course, as we know it, provides a nice tight focus, but at the same time it is the base unit of education – it's something we all understand. So using it as the means to explore the impact of digital technologies will provide a useful indication of changes in higher education overall. And what a line-up we have…
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OpenEd conference – be afraid
Scott asked me to be on the committee for the Open Ed conference, which is in Vancouver this August. These are dangerous people – unfortunately I can't go, so I urge other right thinking Europeans to submit papers so they can go undercover and report on their activities. [For non-UK readers this is a remix of the current paranoia posters in the UK. See Boing Boing for better remixes.]
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The Reciprocal Times
Following on from the previous post about The Reciprocity Economy, I am going to try another of my rarely successful experiments. This time I want to test whether Twitter can act as an easy aggregator for examples of the reciprocity economy in action. So, I've set up a Twitter account: @reciprocaltimes (see, it's like the Financial Times for the reciprocity economy?). I will use it to tweet examples of when I encounter the reciprocity economy in action. But also, by sending a reply to @reciprocaltimes you, yes YOU, can also help collate them. We can then analyse them and see if there are any common themes and if the reciprocity…
