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If social media had been first…
I'm sure someone else has done this before and better, but let's imagine a parallel universe where social media had come before face to face socialisation. Our writer, Richard Liitleinsight for the Maily Blog takes up the story… The sad truth about 'f2f' I've never tried face to face (or f2f as it's known by the sad geeks who participate in it), but I know I don't need to in order to understand that it is a facile, shallow form of interaction compared with the rich dialogue we have built up over centuries in social media. F2F gatherings often take place in specially designed physical spaces. The spaces cannot be…
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Eduflow
I recently signed up for the new music service Mflow. It works like this: You find people to follow, like in any social network, you can play 30 seconds of a track, and you then flow it, which means it will turn up in your followers' inboxes. They can play the full track, but only once. If they choose to purchase it, then as the person who flowed it (I guess we can't use the term 'flower') you get a percentage in revenue. As a music service I found it a bit frustrating – only being able to play 30 seconds of a track, and then only play those in…
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The future of ed – my contribution
George Siemens and Dave Cormier are running an open course on the Future of Education. They have asked for contributions on this topic, so my musical slideshare is below. As well as the various angles you might expect, I think the answer is the presentation itself – when you think about why have I created a presentation for two people I have never met, on a course I won’t teach on? The answers are because it’s easy, because I have a social connection, and because I think it’s fun (and there’s probably a bit of ego in there too). And as I say at the end, that we can do…
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Is public engagement an old media concept?
"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert…" The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought. In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave…
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What might cuts really mean for higher ed
John Naughton pointed me at this piece in the London Review of Books by John Lanchester on the great British economy disaster, which is long and thoughtful. Not to mention depressing and scary. He covers the political and economic repercussions of the proposed cuts, and points out that the reason both main parties are being unspecific about cuts is because they will be so dramatic as to be 'electoral suicide' to spell out. Here he is at his scariest: "Both parties have said that they will ring-fence spending on health, education and overseas development. Plug in those numbers and we are looking at cuts everywhere else of 16 per cent……
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Call for papers – you know you want to
I am editing a special issue of the RUSC (a journal from the University of Catalonia) with George Siemens. The Special Issue is concerned with the Impact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning. The language of the special issue is English. George has posted the details here. The topics we want to address are: The role of the educator in social networks Adaptation of learning theories for digital environments Systemic change in education in response to affordances of social networks Social network analysis in courses and learning environments Mobile devices in social learning Personal learning environments and networks Learning design – methods and models of designing for social networks…
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Openness as economic strategy
To borrow from Douglas Adams, this is the fourth in my trilogy of OER related posts. In the last one, I stated some of the issues for OER (as I'd been forced to address them for a debate). Patrick McAndrew gave a good rebuttal to most of these in his post, which I'd pretty much agree with. His response to my first point about sustainability was the strongest I think, where he argues: "pricing OER as if it was a completely separate activity makes no more sense than if we started to cost giving a lecture as if that was all a “lecturer” did. Rather working with OER has an…
