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The role of respectable idiots
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/6846455366/> I gave a talk at the Higher Education Academy 'New Places to Learn' seminar yesterday about openness and the institution. I was proposing that in order to facilitate openness you need a combination of a top-down and bottom-up process. So for example, OER projects such as OpenLearn, combined with creating the space for academics to generate and share their own content (eg by recognising digital artefacts in promotion). One aspect I raised for creating the environment within which academics engage in openness of their own free will is the role of the 'respectable idiot'. This is a person who has a degree of respect within the institution as a…
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What I learnt from a photo a day
I've blogged on this before, after I had done my first year of a photo a day, using Flickr. I stopped that in July 2011, and found that I wasn't taking any photographs. So after some encouragement from Karen Cropper to try blipfoto, I started again in Oct 2011. Today I ran a session at the OU along with Juliette Culver on what I learnt from a photo a day. It was a fun workshop and went down well. The slidecast is below, complete with sh**e photographs. What I learnt from a photo a day View another webinar from Martin Weller
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10 Digital Scholarship Lessons in 10 Videos
I’ve given a talk with this title 3 or 4 times recently, so thought I’d best get around to blogging it. In the presentation I caution that you shouldn’t really trust people who give lessons about the future – they’re usually trying to sell you something. But lessons is a nice way to frame it, so treat them more as opinions I’ve come to over the past couple of years. Lesson 1: It’s not just for geeks It is easy sometimes to get bogged down in conversations about the latest technology, API calls, RSS feeds, linked-data, etc and it seems very technical. Sometimes this has the effect of making academics…
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JIME relaunch
Last year I took on the role of co-editor of JIME (The Journal of Interactive Media in Education). JIME was founded in 1996 and was one of the first open access journals, and operated an innovative open peer review system. But it had been a bit neglected over the last few years, so we shifted it to OJS, worked through the backlog of review papers, tidied up the scope, reappointed an editorial board, and now I’m pleased to announce a new issue. This is a special issue focusing on OER, with guest editors Ester Ehiyazaryan and Alannah Fitzgerald. It’s a very good issue, even if I say so myself. It features…
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No country for old ideas, this
So, I've been in New Delhi this week as a keynote speaker at the EdgeX conference. It was great to catch up with George, Dave, Stephen and Grainne, and to meet Jay Cross, Clark Quinn and LesFoltos. Viplav Baxi and the team were the most amazing, hospitable hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to be here. I thought I'd share a few of my own perceptions from the visit, although one has to accept they are based on a very limited scope of India, but for what it's worth. Start-up fever – It feels like a very exciting place to be at the moment. The opening speaker said he felt…
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The research Hussites
[This is another from my catalogue of strained metaphors, and my grasp of religious history is rather tenuous, so I'm sure people who are better acquainted with the subtleties of Hussite history can point out lots of flaws with it. But take the surface points as of interest.] I've been giving a talk recently called "Digital Scholarship: 10 Lessons in 10 Videos". I'll blog these in detail later, but one of my lessons is that we should rethink research. By this I mean we have a certain attitude towards how research is conducted, which was shaped prior to the arrival of digital, networked and open technologies. Some of that attitude still…
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Meta Edtech Journal – new issue
You may recall that prior to Christmas I set up the Meta EdTech Journal, using Google's Annotum. It is a meta journal, where I periodically trawl through open access educational technology journals (using George Veletsianos's list), and create an 'issue' which links to a selection of these. Each has a comment from me, setting out what I think is interesting about the article. The second issue is now out, with, I think, a good range of articles. Please let me know if it's of any use whatsoever. And remember – if you want to curate/edit a special edition, just let me know. You need to be able to find 6…
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The vinyl lesson
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/fensterbme/102458936/> There has been a bit of a buzz recently that the sales of vinyl records are on the increase, and what does this mean. This isn't a 'the joy of vinyl' post, but rather that the rise of vinyl has some interesting lessons for what happens to an industry or artefact after the arrival of the digital, networked version. I think there are three main lessons: 1) The arrival of digital highlights the real value in the analogue version – in this case the vinyl wasn't about being a music distribution platform, but rather a complete art object. Its physical presence was its value. People now say that they…
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The cost of good bad ideas
There's a horror film, which I've never seen, called The Human Centipede (if you've never heard of it, I apologise for bringing it to your attention). Now, I like a horror film, but I really don't want to see this one. But here's the thing: the mere existence of the idea that the film contains has given me disturbed nights. In some respects the director deserves credit for this – he has conceived of an idea and then put it into a film, which you don't even need to see to give you nightmares. That's the power of a bad idea. I was thinking about this the other day in…
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Attack of the killer rhizomes
"Oh my God, it's full of stars" Dave "the rhizome" Cormier posted the other day about uncertainty and rhizomatic learning. If you don't know what the latter is, Dave says it's "A botanical metaphor, first posited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus(1987), may offer a more flexible conception of knowledge for the information age: therhizome. A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008)." In Dave's post he talked about habituation and how when you learn…
