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Digital Scholarship – the DJ set
I have a vague idea of maybe one day doing a keynote as a DJ set (I think Brian Lamb did this once), but of course, I have never done a DJ set, and it would be a painful affair. So in lieu of that, I decided to create a DJ set to accompany my book. I used Soundcloud, to produce the set below. Lots of tracks were disallowed because they had restricted rights, so my 30 odd track set came down to 12. I've added in a little explanation in between. My mic started dodgy and then packed up altogether, so the quality of these (both in technical and…
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Job selection and the paradox of choice
<Image by Ted Percival http://www.flickr.com/photos/tedpercival/3115404982/> I read Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice recently (after Erik Duval recommended it). The title kind of tells you all you need to know, but his basic argument is that, contrary to what we might think, greater choice isn't always a good thing. As we get more and more choice, we become either paralysed by the possibility of making the wrong choice, or we revert to standard, old practice, ignoring the choice we have. This came to mind recently when both selecting people for a job interview and talking to someone else who was trying to shortlist. The 'problem' is that in times of financial…
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Space – The purpose of education
<image http://www.flickr.com/photos/see-through-the-eye-of-g/5414817728/ by GollyGForce> This is my contribution for the Purpos/Ed blog In this post my default interpretation of education is that which I’m closest to, namely formal, tertiary education, although some of my points will be valid for other levels of education (primary and secondary) and informal, personal learning. I’ve been writing about digital scholarship a lot recently, so one way to think of the purpose of education is to turn this on its head, and rather than consider what functions scholars perform, to suggest that the purpose of education is to have a place where these functions reside. Not all of them relate directly to teaching, but they can be…
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Open writing and the integrity of the book
This is the last of my reflections on the book writing process, for now anyway, so you can all stand down now. In this post I want to explore a bit of the tension between being generally open and the book as artifact. I have blogged small sections of the book as I have gone along, and also parts of the book are based on existing posts. I have wondered whether this open pre-publication approach will undermine the book itself. In an earlier post I mentioned how the book could be seen as being one element in a wider set of resources, and how my online network had been so valuable in the writing process. So…
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5 things I think about Learning Analytics
<Ed Techs go in search of data in the wild> I am at the 1st Learning Analytics conference in Banff, which has been interesting. I came not sure of what it was, or what my take on it was. The conference has been good, very interdisciplinary in nature (for which you can read 'I didn't understand some of it'). I'm still not sure about a lot of it, but here are five things that have occurred to me over the course of the past few days. I don't believe they're strong enough to say I've learnt them, but rather they are things I now have come to a tentative viewpoing…
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References are like airport security checks
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht> This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?). I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see: To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author…
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Book analytics
This is the fourth in my musings on the book writing process. When my book comes out it will be freely available online, in HTML (I think). I don't know how the site will be constructed, but it strikes me that as an author this is potentially very interesting. I'm at the Learning Analytics conference at the moment, and Tony has been talking about Google Analytics. I run this on my blog, and it's always interesting, but the type of data it might give a book author is more revealing. On my blog it tells me where people have come from, that most people tend to come from search, and come to one post…
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A tale of two books
Continuing my thoughts on the book writing process, this post is about how the process itself has changed, for me at least, over recent years. I start my book by comparing the process of writing this book with my last one about 6 years ago. Below is a list of some of the tools and resources I used to write this book: Books – via the library but increasingly as ebooks and on Kindle, and one audiobook E-journals – my university library has access to a wide range of databases, but I also made frequent use of others through tools such as Google Scholar and Mendeley Delicious/social bookmarking – as well…
