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Online conferences & the legitimacy deficit
(Wordle of OU Conference – we asked participants to give us 3 words describing it) In the second post following up on the OU online conference, I want to explore some issues around perceptions of online conferences. The feedback from the conference thus far has been almost entirely positive (I'll blog the questionnaire results later), but I have also picked up a couple of issues which I think are worth pulling out. It strikes me that in some ways online conferences are in a similar position to distance learning 40 years ago, or elearning 10 years ago. They have a legitimacy deficit to some, and thus have to work extra…
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Some thoughts on open conference contributions
Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here. I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have…
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The ups & downs of embracing unpredictability
In a recent presentation I argued that producing low cost content as a by-product allowed institutions to embrace unpredictability, in a way they can't do when spending large sums of money on content. If you are spending a decent amount of money you need a project, with identified target customers, objectives, key performance indicators, a budget, lines of responsibility, etc. But a lot of the fun stuff online happens unpredictably. The makers of Downfall didn't intend for it to be an internet meme after all (and then blew their chance when it became one). As John Naughton puts it the net is "a global machine for springing surprises". In a…
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OU Conference – agenda (and backup)
Tomorrow is the OU Conference, which we're running in Elluminate and Cloudworks. The final agenda is below, if you haven't seen it. We're seeing this as an experiment this year and so will be evaluating it. An open online conference plays into a few agendas at the moment: economical; green ICT & impact. After the conference I am going to outline what we've done so others can use it. Oh, and this post is also acting as a backup in case Cloudworks should fall over. Note that each session has a separate Elluminate URL (so we can record them and release as separate resources), and the limit for each session…
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Open Conference video interviews
I conducted a set of interviews for the OU Conference. They all focused around the same 4 questions: What are the benefits of technology for learning? What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment? Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years? What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference? I interview our Vice Chancellor, Martin Bean, as well as Grainne Conole, Simon Buckingham-Shum and Andrew Law. They raise some great points, including the impact of social networks, dimensions of openness, moving beyond simple sharing of data, and changes in the nature of conferences. It was intriguing how the…
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The return on peer review
A while ago I took a decision to only publish in open access journals. I recently received two requests to review articles for journals. Peer-review is one of the great unseen tasks performed by academics. Most of us do some, for no particular reward, but out of a sense of duty towards the overall quality of research. It is probably a community norm also, as you become enculturated in the community of your discipline, there are a number of tasks you perform to achieve, and to demonstrate, this, a number of which are allied to publishing: Writing conference papers, writing journal articles, reviewing. So it's something we all do, isn't…
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For local people – new models for newspapers
In case you hadn't seen it, the Guardian is running an interesting model with some local versions. Cardiff Guardian is one of the first ones (Edinburgh and Leeds being the others). It is ostensibly run by one person (Hannah Waldram), who covers local news, and then pulls in Cardiff related stories from the existing Guardian stock material. Added to this there are guest posts from local people, some crowdsourced content (eg Flickr photos) plus third party tools, such as MySociety.Org and FixMyStreet. The outcome is a very useful site and, if you live in Cardiff, very engaging too. What is interesting about it is that it offers a potential model…
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Article on Digital Scholarship published
This is just because I like to keep track of 'traditional' publications here too. Along with some colleagues at the OU (the bulk of the writing was by Nick Pearce) I submitted an article, entitled Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work, to a special edition of In Education, edited by Alec Couros. It is (of course) open access, and has now been published (Technology & Social Media (Special Issue, Part 2), 2010, 16(1)). We took Boyer's framework of scholarship and reconsidered it in light of new technology, particularly with the lens 'openness' across each of the four components. It looks like a good edition overall, so…
