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The network ate my newspaper
(So what do you think of David Cameron then Gordon?) So the UK televised Leaders Debates have now finished. I have to say, it’s been a blast. Not because they were good television (after the first one and the surprise Clegg factor they quickly reverted to saying the same things), but because of the back-channel on twitter. In 2008 I suggested that the Eurovision song contest was the perfect TV twitter event because “It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire…
- broadcast, conference, content, digital scholarship, higher ed, Long tail, Open content, Presentation, web 2.0
Academic output as collateral damage
Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was…
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Content may not be king anymore, but it has some influential friends
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a two day staff development workshop here at the OU. It had been very well organised by the Social Sciences Faculty and the aim was to get staff thinking about using new technologies to solve some of their problems in teaching. There had been some good initial work, so the groups came with problems they wanted to address, eg student retention from 1st to 2nd level, encouraging reflection, etc. I was asked to present on the use of blogs and wikis. I gave a brief whizz through and tried to convey my enthusiasm for them as educational tools (I ended with…
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Social media in society roundup
I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention: Rentokil news release – in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but…
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The Nessman Cometh
It comes to pass… Scott Leslie is coming to stay at the OU for a month under an OLNet fellowship. Scott is one of my long time blog/Twitter chums and his blog was one of the very first I started reading back when we used to say ‘blog is short for weblog’. As I commented in an earlier post, I don’t view online friendships as f2f ones waiting to happen, but even so it’ll be great to finally meet. So this is just to ask three sets of people if they fancy a meet-up with Scott while he’s here: OU people- I’ll try and get Scott to give a talk,…
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The Open University conference is Open
<Image OU Campus by Karen Cropper http://www.flickr.com/photos/dentonpotter/4480661125/in/set-72157623621643665/> Every year the OU has an internal conference focused around learning and technology. It's a chance for us to share research and projects, broadcast about big initiatives and discuss some interesting ideas. It's usually a two-day event on campus, aimed at OU staff. This year I have been given responsibility for organising it (I know! Who thought that was a good idea?) and changing it a bit. So, this year's OU conference is completely online and is open to all (not just OU people). It will have an OU focus, but anyone is welcome to join in. Theme The theme for the conference…
