-
A failure of ownership
In writing my digital scholarship book several themes keep recurring. One that I hadn't really set out to explore, but find depressingly persuasive is that of a failure of ownership by scholars over their own practice. This is particularly related to their use of technology to help refine their ways of working. Inevitably this has meant we have outsourced functions to for-profit companies. There may not be anything intrinsically wrong with this, I'm happy for a company to run the catering facilities for instance. But for complex activities that go to the heart of scholarship, once we outsourced them we became reliant on them, and effectively lost control. Here are…
-
Reductionism is your friend
<management of complexity - http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelheiss/3090102907/> Plenty of better qualified people than myself have made this point, but it's cropped up a few times in both Twitter and face to face conversations, where 'reductionist' has been used in a generally dismissive way, as if to be identified as such signifies the end of a discussion. So, partly because I want to clarify for myself, and also to get feedback in case I'm missing something, I thought I'd set down my take on reductionism. In general, I think reductionism is a sound approach. Anyone with a child will know that we are natural reductionists. When your child goes through the 'why?' phase what…
-
A conspiracy of sentiment
Yesterday Paul Chambers lost his appeal against his fine and conviction for posting a joke on twitter which was prosecuted under the anti-terrorist legislation. The case was so obviously ridiculous that everyone thought common-sense would prevail, but eschewing humour and reality, Judge Jacqueline Davies deemed the tweet "menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed." Any ordinary person would have seen it as a joke. I had previously thought this was simply a case of the law getting itself in a mess, escalating something and then being unable to climb down. Added…
-
The Lamb Formula = Good enough?
In my previous presentation one of the slides I didn't get to displayed the following Venn Diagram for what I term 'The Lamb formula' (Image created by crappygraphs) This is from Brian Lamb, who borrows the title from Errol Morris' documentary, to describe the kind of technology he likes, and thinks is useful. My take on these three elements (which may be different to Brian's) as they pertain to education is: Fast – Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This…
-
Let’s play OER Roulette!
(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney) This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts. For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way. I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed…
-
Am I done with conferencing?
This is no reflection on Open Ed, I’ve been moving away from conferences for a while. I enjoyed giving my presentation at Open Ed, and I managed to make it interactive to an extent. But I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m done with the traditional conference format. I had a couple of discussions with Brian and Scott around this and talked about how difficult it was to break away from the traditional format. The reason comes down to money essentially, although it’s tied up with a host of other issues. There is a circular logic in organising a conference that is difficult to escape, let’s call it the Conference…
-
The strange case of the unconnected conference
(An unexpected appearance by the Two Ronnies went some way to alleviate frustration about the lack of wifi at OpenEd 2010 – Richard Hall and Joss Winn in full flow). I was at the Open Ed 2010 conference last week. First off, I want to say that it was great to finally meet Brian Lamb and I really enjoyed presentations from Richard Hall, David Wiley, Erik Duval, Joss Winn and others. So this post is not a comment on the quality of the conference or the discussions I had there. The conference was held in the science museum CosmoCaixa. This is a great museum and my daughter loved it. It…
-
An unbundled publishing business proposal
For my digital scholarship book I have been reading about the tenure process a lot (I'll blog it soon). One of the issues that arises is that peer-review is always perceived as the gold standard. Promotion committees in universities, faced with the complexity of judging research in highly specialised fields, revert to using peer-review publication as a proxy. This is becoming problematic in the humanities in particular where the academic book is seen as the main evidence of excellence in research. Such monographs were often published by university presses. But in financially straitened times, many presses are closing, and if they are staying in business then they need to make…
-
Tenure, publishing and Tony
As Tony Hirst has blogged, his recent promotion case was unsuccessful. I'm obviously disappointed by this, for his sake, and because it was our first attempt at pushing through a digital scholarship case. We don't know why it was unsuccessful yet (detailed feedback will follow I suspect), but today I was reading an excellent report from the Center for Higher Education Studies at Berkeley titled "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Valuesand Needs in Seven Disciplines". There are several points it raises which I think reflect on Tony's experience and others like him. Here are some key quotes with my interpretation of each of them:…
-
The way I’m working is (kinda) working
I read Tony Schwartz's The Way We're Working Isn't Working recently (and after my last post, yes it was on the Kindle). Some of it irritated me and much of it I couldn't relate to (not being a high-powered AMERICAN executive who works 15 hour days), but after Scott blogged about the meditation app he found useful, I thought I'd post some thoughts on what I did take away from it. The first is that napping is good! I like an afternoon nap, but in an open plan office the sight of someone sprawled across their desk with a small puddle of drool congealing by the keyboard is, for some…
