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Kindle & the iTuning of book purchasing
Probably my favourite app on my iPad is, errm, Kindle. Yes, getting my £600 device to behave like a £100 one is where it's at. That aside, what is interesting about the Kindle is the way it is beginning to alter my book buying behaviour. In short it is iTuning my purchasing behaviour, in that I am tending to buy more on impulse – a recommendation or thought comes to me, and I don't add it to a wishlist, I buy it. This means I am adopting a more exploratory approach, buying books I wouldn't do otherwise, or ones I know I only want a section from. But this behaviour is…
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An open Open University course on openness
[Update – see James' comment below, and to clarify this is a course produced as a result of a research project in a collaboration with many others: the Hellenic Management Association, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, SPI in Portugal, ELIG, and UNU Merit. As such it's not an OU course that has been through the normal course production process, nor does it carry OU credit] Like Tony I think the OU has been a bit slow to start creating truly open courses – I'm partly to blame since I suggested doing one a couple of years back and then didn't do anything. Before that…
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Twitter as interdisciplinary tool & culture
I have been writing a chapter on interdisciplinarity for my book on digital scholarship, and thought I would share this section which explores the idea that social networks (Twitter in this case) can be viewed as interdisciplinary tools. One of the ideas I am particularly interested in is that a barrier to interdisciplinary work has been the existence of different cultures in various disciplines. It may be that tools such as Twitter and blogs have a culture of their own, which can to some degree, compensate for these other differences. Put simply, do bloggers in different disciplines have more in common than non-bloggers and bloggers in the same discipline? In…
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Bellow’s Law
In my talk for George last week, I proposed 'Bellow's Law', which I thought I'd share here. In that Great American Novel, The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow famously observes that ‘there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining'. When we look at the impact of new technologies, the reverse would seem to be true also: there is no targeting of liberation; if you release one thing, you also release the adjoining. It is this knock-on effect that creates the era of uncertainty we are in now. This can be seen as the law of unintended consequences,…
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The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers
Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below: Research, technology & networks View more presentations from Martin Weller. I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.…
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Why academic publishing is doomed
You may recall that a while ago I said I would only review for open access journals. Whenever I get asked to review for a journal now, I send back a polite reply saying telling them this, as I figure if they hear it enough it may encourage them to take an open access approach. After sending one such response to an editor, they forwarded it to the commercial publisher, to try and raise their awareness. The reply from the publisher set out a number of things they try to do, but this one caught my eye: "Sponsored articles: Over 350 [publisher's name] journals offer authors the option to pay…
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Understanding the attention economy
My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine. The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss. Bloglines is a…
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Everyday I write the book
I put together a proposal before the summer, for a book on digital scholarship. It's part-polemic and part academic monograph. I want to explore the changes to academic practice brought about by three key characteristics: digital, networked and open. I wanted to find an open access publisher, so I'm pleased to say that it's been accepted by Bloomsbury Academic. Their model is that they give away a free HTML version, you can buy a standard hard and paperback version, or you can buy a version that also gives you access to additional online content. I don't know how much this additional content line will work, but kudos to them for…
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Living in pregnant widow times
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/janrito/118498874/ black widow by Janrito Karamazov> For the title of his latest novel, Martin Amis borrows from this Alexander Herzen quote “The death of contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.” Amis is writing about the sexual revolution, but I think the same can be applied to the digital revolution. This is what causes so much angst in the popular press, and…
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The New Bereavements
In a Twitter chat with Josie Fraser yesterday, she said that the URL shortening service u.nu has closed down and joked that she wasn't sure of the correct etiquette for the passing of such a thing: u.nu url shortening service discontinued after constant spammer abuse http://u.nu/unu-discontinued so long, & thanks fr all the links.less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneJosie Fraserjosiefraser I have been pondering for a while that we face a new set of bereavements. We are probably going to face these more, so for example, how do you react when your favourite service disappears? Imagine, say, Slideshare disappeared tomorrow. How would I feel? Anger that I have…
