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An interview with the future
I am one of the ‘presenters’ at the JISC 09 online conference. I don’t actually present, but instead have been asked to create a short video for the session looking at Do educational institutions have a future? Graham Attwell and Rob Howe are the other presenters. We had a chat about the session and I mentioned that I had considered doing an interview with a future version of myself, as a means of exploring the issues. They liked the idea so we have decided all to adopt it, with myself taking the academic perspective, Rob the learner one and Graham the institutional view. Below is my video, although it’s meant…
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Remote conference participation – flash debate
<Image Waiting for it all to begin by Unhindered by Talent http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2380602382/> One of the things I am interested in is the subtle ways in which new technology begins to alter standard practice over time, and without these changes being planned. In the academic world I think the conference is one such area. The academic conference can be seen as one of the core practices in higher education. It achieves many vital functions in academic practice, including: Knowledge sharing – you get to present and listen to other talks Validation – by sharing research and ideas within a subject community you get validation Networking – you establish a network of…
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The REF – a digital scholarship perspective
Having given an overview of the REF in my last post, in this one I will provide a commentary on it from a digital scholarship perspective. As readers will probably know, I’m not a fan of such exercises in general – the inevitable experimenter’s effect phenomena comes into play, particularly when there is considerable money involved, with the result that we don’t encourage new, exploratory types of behaviour. But let’s put aside these more general reservations, and look at the REF proposal itself. My particular take on this is to what extent does it reward, recognise, encourage activities which we might broadly term digital scholarship? From this perspective the REF…
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The REF – a user’s guide
This is the first of two posts looking at the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Apologies to non-UK readers, this is a bit parochial. I needed to look through the REF in relation to the digital scholarship work I am doing. In the next post I will comment on it from a digital scholarship perspective, but having read it all, I thought I'd give an overview of the key points in this post, just to provide a quick review for those who can't be bothered to read the whole thing (ie, any sane person). So in this post I'm not commenting on the REF itself, either in detail, or as an…
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Becoming a multi-blogger
One of the (vague, ill-defined, unstructured) tasks I set myself this year was to see if my blogging/social networking activity could be bent some way to a more focused institutional benefit. I can make lots of (unsupported, wildly inaccurate, ego-driven) claims about the benefit of this blog to the Open University, for example it acts as a form of staff development, it forms part of an institutional dialogue, it raises the university's profile, it demonstrates the university's engagement with new media, etc. But I also feel that my blogging activity has been well supported without any specific aim, and it has now reached a reasonably robust state where can I…
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Science 2.0 workshop
I spent a couple of days in Nice at the ECTEL Science 2.0 workshop organised by Peter Scott and Erik Duval. I've live-blogged it over in Cloudworks, and below is a video I shot over the course of it, just to give a flavour really: Erik has blogged some thoughts about it, I'll add a few here: i) We are only beginning to appreciate what this data might tell us. There were a few demos about visualisations and research on twitter use at conferences (good paper from Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt). I think we need to do more of this sort of work, because it will both push us…
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10 reasons to use open content
I gave this presentation to set the scene at a workshop recently at The Open University. The aim of the day was to promote the use of third party resources, so during the day the teams had to devise a learning activity based around third party content. I set out ten reasons (with an extra one for luck), in this slidecast below: 10 reasons to use open content (in teaching) View more presentations from mweller.
