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A bava birthday gift
Over at bavatuesdays Jim Groom recently celebrated his 1,000th post. Stephen Downes made a comment that maybe he should do a clip show, which set me thinking. Us bloggers don’t have much to give each other except links, so maybe we should honour those bloggers we admire with something more. So, below is my birthday gift for the bava, long may his insanity reign.
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The Zittrain manifesto
Following on from my last post, here are some of my thoughts on Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet. For those of you who haven't read it Zittrain sets out the argument that the key to the internet's success is what he terms 'generativity'. The PC and the internet are both largely open systems which can be built upon without recourse to the 'owners' of the system. He defines generativity as "a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences". He argues that this generativity is under threat from two possible forms of attack: An internet 9/11 – a cyber terrorist attack that…
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Reading club as course model?
As John has already mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I worked with him and Doug on a kind of online reading club experiment. This came out of some research money our Centre for Professional Development obtained for examining different ways in which higher education could support professional development. At the OU we have an occasional book club group, where influential books are taken by an academic and in an extended session we explore these. John has done Benkler's Wealth of Networks, Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and I've done Everything is Miscellaneous. So the idea was to attempt this online, a sort of 'extended reading club' where we…
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Social media learning principles
At the LAMS European conference I gave a talk in which I explored what we know about learning, and what I've deduced about social media. My conclusion was that we develop tools to represent the complexity of learning (such as LAMS), but that the social media/web 2.0 approach takes a different angle and instead of trying to represent complexity in the tool, creates simple tools and lets the network create the complexity.The presentation is below: Learning and social media View more presentations from mweller. I had 6 principles of social media which are: <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it. Simple with reach…
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The slideshare lessons
In my last couple of posts I have been thinking about sharing presentations, particularly through Slideshare, and I wanted to wrap up some thoughts about this. Slideshare has long been one of my favourite web 2.0/social media sites (I concede that slideboom and others may be as good, but it was Slideshare where I landed first). It isn’t particularly amazing in what it does, but what it does, it does well. What intrigues me about Slideshare is that I think it is beginning to become a case study in how new media can impact upon academic practice. This is varied, and I suspect we are only at the beginning of…
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The Keynote Equivalent?
I've been thinking a lot about recognition of digital output in formal systems, in short, can you get promotion for doing all this online stuff? One of the great things about being online is that as soon as you start to openly think these things through, people start to point you at stuff (mainly Tony). It seems a lot of people have been doing the same (and getting further than me). For example Eric Schnell says that The New Media Department and The University of Maine amended their promotion and tenure guidelines (all the way) back in 2007 with redefined criteria in the form of alternative recognition measures. Their documents…
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Arguments for social media engagement
In a comment on a previous post my colleague Chris Jones argued that establishing an online identity wasn't suitable for everyone: What of the bulk of other academics interested in research and publication? They may move to open access routes for publication but will they want to spend their time in developing a public persona? I am not sure they or I will. I haven't yet developed a blog, though I follow others, including yours. I am not sure that digital scholarship covers all or even the main aspects of intellectual endeavour. Sometimes it is a lone academic quarrying away obscurely on a narrow point that makes a difference. Some…
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We’re all studio bands now
Marieke, over at RemoteWorker, asked me to do a guest blog post around this issue of being a remote worker and establishing a profile at your work place, which you can read in full on her blog. I mixed up several issues, the first being the effectiveness of being an online worker, where I made a (tongue-in-cheek) comparison with the power-breakfasters of yore: In the 1980s in the heyday of the Yuppie, there was talk of the ‘power breakfast’ when Masters of the Universe would meet at breakfast to do business to show how tough they were. This is nothing – nowadays I get up and reply to some tweets,…
