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When Reorgs strike
Chairs in boats by Stuck in Customs http://flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/216810101/ I work in the Institute of Educational Technology at the OU, where we’ve recently had a review. The result is something of a reorganisation. There are good and bad elements to it, as always. I’m not going to go into the review itself, but rather reorganisations in general. Reorgs were a feature of the early PC industry, partly I think to demonstrate that these type of companies were more fluid and dynamic than the highly structured, rigid companies that had come before them, e.g. Apple vs IBM. Reorgs weren’t always productive though. In his book, ‘Insanely Great‘ about the development of the…
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Broadcast Strategy Review – my screencast
I was involved in the Broadcast Strategy Review at the Open University. We produced a website as the output (not a 100 page report!), most of which is for internal viewing only. I’ve taken my bit though, and uploaded it to Blip.tv. I am talking here specifically about how the changes in broadcast affect OU academics, but most of what I say applies across the board. My aim was to emphasise how the changing nature of broadcast is an exciting opportunity for educators. Unfortunately, even at its most excitable pitch my voice has all the enthusiasm of Clement Freud on valium, but as Billy Bragg said ‘in a perfect world…
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FlatWorld Knowledge – the publisher I’ve been waiting for?
David Wiley is part of a startup called FlatWorld Knowledge. Their aim is to release digital textbooks free of charge, with students paying for the print copy if they want. What is more interesting though is the way they take the notion of the text book and make it more of a social object. So the educator can edit the book for their class, the student can interact with other students around it, and people can sell related services and content. In fact, when you view their little cartoons it makes you realise just how limited the traditional text book model is in education. Why didn’t we do this years…
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Crowdstatus and filtered twitter
In my Twitter stream I saw that Dan Taylor had created a crowdstatus page for BBC people. Crowdstatus basically takes public Twitter streams and compiles them on a page with some nice graphics. I had a go and did the same for OU people I know on Twitter (if I’ve missed anyone off, let me know, or if in fact you’re not an OU person and I’ve put you in). Firstly, a couple of things in crowdstatus I’d like: the ability for anyone to move the order around; automatic refreshing; can anyone join a crowd, or can only the originator add them in?; the option to have most recent updates…
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Inward and outward facing technology
Stephen Downes recently argued that we could classify communication as inward and outward facing, saying: a technology like Twitter is, in my mind, ‘inward facing’, because it reinforces communication with the group – ‘running with the herd,’ as I commented on Noon’s post, while I tend to favour ‘outward facing’ communications, those that look outside the group. And he has this diagram to sum it up: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/2379258809/ I’m not sure I agree with this analysis, as I think it comes down to your usage of the tools. Here is my reasoning: I don’t think many of us are outward facing in terms of the blogs we read. For instance, my…
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With protection like this…
Just in case any of you haven’t read David Wiley’s reaction and follow up to the story that a publisher (Faulkner Press) and a lecturer are claiming that student lecture notes infringe his copyright, you should do so. Instead of just shaking his head in disbelief, as I would have done, David does some digging and finds this jaw-dropping quote on the publisher’s page about the lawsuit (called, now get this ‘The Future of Higher Ed’): in this lawsuit Faulkner Press is proud to protect the rights of Professor Moulton and the rights of all professors. Of course, the ‘rights’ of students aren’t a concern here. David also enters into…
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Twittershow – I don’t know if I want it but it’s fun
Tony has gone all mashup in the head and developed an app for Twitter that takes your (or someone else’s) tweets and presents them as a slideshow, called Twittershow. I’ve had a play with it – I think this link will take you to my tweets as a slideshow. To use it you need the RSS url of your Twitter feed – to find this, go to your public Twitter page (e.g. http://twitter.com/mweller). At the bottom is a link that says RSS – this then gives you a page with a URL like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7127162.rss Slot this into Twittershow and away you go. Doing it made me laugh, because I’m…
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An eduglu learning scenario
I was part of an ad hoc Flashmeeting recently with David Wiley‘s team, plus some of the edugluers (Jim, Brian, D’Arcy and Scott), along with the OU social:learners (Tony, Simon, Patrick and Stuart). We batted some ideas around about the idea of eduglu, loosely coupled apps, open courses, etc. There was lots of common ground, but we don’t want to tie it up in consortium or anything – so we’re going to work in the open, in a loosely coupled manner. And of course, anyone else is free to join. We agreed to come up with some stories, or scenarios, as to what it might be like for a learner…
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Offsetting some of the dangers of outsourcing
Niall Sclater raises some issues around potential dangers of outsourcing your IT services, picking up on my recent decision to go all things Google. Niall is referring to a talk by Alan Bell and the two particular potential problems he raises are: 1. You tell your students to use a system hosted externally, maybe one which downloads client software to the learners’ machine. A student’s system gets corrupted and they claim that your institution is liable. 2. You use a free externally hosted collaboration system for audio conferencing for a tutorial and a student tells you during the session that they can’t complete an assignment due to a bereavement. You…
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Whither the blogosphere?
A few prominent bloggers have, of late, been talking about the move away from the blogosphere. For instance, Stowe Boyd says that: Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social. So, what are blogs going to be when the conversation moves away? They will be the place where we archive our posts, so that people can find them when they…
