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Facebook censorship – erm, no, probably not
I posted a couple of links on twitter yesterday, which is synched with my Facebook account. One of the links were to D'Arcy Norman's Things that are more fun than Blackboard. When it came through to Facebook and you clicked on it you got this message: And then any link I posted got reported as such. On a Friday night one's thoughts turn to conspiracy theories: Was someone from Blackboard amongst my friends and had taken offense and was now reporting every link? Or more sinister, was the part MS-owned Facebook looking out for criticism about the part-owned Blackboard and censoring it? Eh? Was it?! We demand to know!…
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Montaigne, the Godfather of blogging
I am reading Sarah Bakewell's marvellous 'How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer'. She uses Montaigne's essays as the basis for a biography and also to extract a number of lessons, such as 'Don't worry about death', 'Be convivial' and (my favourite) 'Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted'. Montaigne seems to me to have many of the characteristics in his writing which today we associate with good bloggers. Although, as Bakewell points out, every generation finds their own interpretation of Montaigne, so this is really more a reflection of my interests than perhaps some…
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OU lifer
This month marks 15 years since I joined the Open University, so indulge me in a little reflection (only ten more years and I get a letter and plaque!). My potted OU history goes like this: Joined 1995 as a Lecturer on a course in Artificial Intelligence, in the Technology Faculty. I had just finished my PhD (in AI) and the OU had a course which was about to launch, when one of its authors left, so needed someone fast. I got lucky here, I don't think you'd walk straight out of a PhD into a lectureship now. 1999 chaired T171, the OU's first major online course, working with…
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Those OER issues
The final session of the Fiji workshop was an organized debate between two teams, one taking the pro-OER case and the other the anti one. I led the anti- team with Frank Rennie leading the pro case. I ought to say that I was asked to do this, I’m not an anti-OER person. I think most of the argument I’m going to put have been said elsewhere, so there’s nothing particularly new in this post for people who follow the OER movement, but having been through the process of collating the arguments, I thought I’d put them here too. So my main arguments were: Sustainability – this is the daddy…
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Aggregation not adaptation
Tony Bates gave a keynote at the Fijian workshop I was at. It was, as always, good value as he covered changes in technology and their implications. I was in broad agreement with him but one element had me questioning him afterwards. He repeatedly stated that if he were doing this presentation as a set of OERs he would chunk it up, stop at certain points and introduce a learning activity. He’d set it out with learning objectives at the start. In his advice he suggested that educators shouldn’t do it themselves (‘you’ll get hurt’, he joked) and should seek support from instructional designers and technical staff. These two things…
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Violinists and OERs
This is the first in a trio of OER related posts. I’m in Fiji currently, for the final meeting of the Sidecap project which has been looking at OER use in developing countries/regions (specifically in this project, Mauritius, West Indies and South Pacific). I’m sure many of you will know this story, it’s the kind of thing that gets passed around on email, but it was new to me (I checked and it’s true, not an urban myth). This is the common account, from Hoax Slayer: A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six…
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When reflection goes AWOL
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/eryda23/284475315/ by eryda23> I was talking with a colleague the other day about the difficulties of integrating reflection as practice into education. We know being reflective generally makes for a good practitioner, but it's difficult to force people to be reflective. Schon's observations could be result of correlation, not causality, ie good practitioners tend to be reflective, but making someone reflective won't necessarily make them a good practitioner. Anyway, there was much furore at the time about bankers and their bonuses. In much of the discussion that followed and particularly the types of statements that came from bankers and their bosses, it struck me that reflection is almost the…
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Launching podstars
As part of the digital scholarship which I'm heading up at the OU, we have a small pilot project called 'podstars'. We've asked for volunteers across the university, who might be interested in exploring new methods of output. We've got thirteen of these, and yesterday we had our kick-off meeting. We gave each of them a Flip camera, showed them how it worked and discussed some ideas. I gave a brief project overview, and there was an activity, which is in the slidecast below if anyone is interested. Podstars View more presentations from Martin Weller. It's a pilot project so what we want to find out is: Do people go…
