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A blogging downside
At one of the blogging talks I gave recently Niall Sclater asked me what were the downsides to academics blogging. I gave an unsatisfactory answer about it being a possible time sink and also you could get yourself in trouble saying things about people or projects. It occurred to me afterwards (I was always one of those people who had a witty reply two days after an event) that a very real downside for many academics is that it isn’t recognised as a legitimate academic activity. For instance, there is no allocation for ‘blogging’ in my annual work plan. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think I have…
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Blogging vid
I have given two blogging talks recently (or more acurately, the same talk twice). I have used the following YouTube video. The quality isn’t great and some people don’t find it funny, but I think it’s hilarious.
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What are you an analogue snob about?
I was contacted yesterday by someone writing a piece for The Times on parental snobbery. They had come across my posting on My Own Leisure Snobbery and wanted to know if they could use it. By the way, having just done two blogging talks this was a minor example of the economics of reputation concept – this person would never have contacted me normally. In my response I mentioned that I was an occassional anaologue snob, and that being an analogue snob was a sure giveaway of being a digital immigrant, to use Prensky’s term. I recounted the story of when we were in a restaurant recently and my daughter…
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Blogging workshop
I ran a blogging workshop the other day with Tony Hirst. It was only a small audience but seemed to go well. My main aim was to get across the idea that keeping a blog is both an academically valid activity and also really beneficial for the individual. I used most of the reasons I have listed before here and here. For me I would say the two strongest points are that it provides a useful means of engaging with technology, a base camp in the online world as it were, and that of all the academic activity I engage in, blogging is the one I probably enjoy the most…
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What does the Facebook API extravaganza tell us?
I know everyone has blogged about the recent openning up of Facebook to allow lots of new applications, but hey, it’s half term and I’ve only just got around to looking at it. Tony Hirst makes the point that it’s beginning to look like a learning environment. I’ve had a play with it, looked at the widgets, updated some stuff and here are some random thoughts on what it signifies: Technology acts as a pull factor – I’ve gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last…
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Academic publishing – what’s the point?
I had a message today saying that an article (The distance from isolation) I submitted to the journal Computers and Education has been published. Good news one might have thought, except check the date it was submitted – November 2004. That’s three years to publish an article (admittedly it was available online a year after submission). Now, it’s a good article and all that, but it’s hardly current. For a start I address three technologies, but web 2.0 doesn’t get a mention since the phrase hadn’t been coined then. If I was writing it now, this would certainly form the crux of my argument (which thankfully has held up reasonably…
