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My final offer is this: nothing
Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image. Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative. And this is the problem…
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Do you have to do social media to get social media?
Christian, aka Documentally has a post entitled "Understand Social Technology Through Participation", in which he says: "How much can you understand from just watching and not participating? Last night I met a Professor who although used Facebook and other platforms seemed proud to state he did not use twitter. His job was to study social Technology and although obviously a very smart chap It made me wonder.. Is it possible to comprehend something as complex as social Technology by not participating in a platform like twitter. Can you glean just as much insight from only using sites like Facebook?.. All of my insights into Social Technology have come from my…
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Idealism and Pragmatism
I've been pondering further after my previous post in response to George Siemens' call to arms for visionaries in the open education movement. It's the sign of how good George's post was that it has set many of us thinking around the issue. I mentioned in my last post that there was something of the pragmatist vs idealist in the debate, and I offer this up just because I'm trying to think it through myself. I'm in agreement about the need for debate and not letting it be overtaken by commercial interests. But I'd disagree with George's opening remark: "We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know,…
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Stepping gingerly into the ‘open’ debate
<Image Open by Mag3737 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/1914076277/> This is rather late to the party, but the changing nature of the term 'open' is one of my things, so I wanted to chip in. George Siemens kicked off an interesting debate around 'openness'. George argues that the term has been diluted so as to become almost meaningless, and that an ideological (rather than, say, a pragmatic) stance on openness is important: "We need some good ol’ radicals in open education. You know, the types that have a vision and an ideological orientation that defies the pragmatics of reality. Stubborn, irritating, aggravating visionaries…. Openness should mean something. It should be driven by ideology, rather…
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iPhone – the convergulator
You will remember, no doubt, that during the late nineties and the first part of the decade, there was much talk of 'convergence' in industry, ie that various industries such as music, news, film, games would 'converge' around the internet. This was in some respects, a dream of the big corporations who read it as 'merging' or 'take-over'. The industries still remained under the same basic model, they just used the internet as a delivery platform. But (I think Clay Shirky has argued this but can't find the quote now), convergence didn't happen like that – it was more like the internet took over these industries and transformed them. The…
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Real friendship
As it's coming up to Christmas, a nice post about the value of friendship. Many of you will have read William Deresiewicz's article in the Chronicle entitled Faux Friendship, which decries the loss of 'real' friendship in the social networking age. I ought to say that compared with most anti-social media pieces of journalism, it's well written and coherent. But it's still wrong, and based largely on ignorance. We get a sense of where the article is going early on: "The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form…
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On being (almost) a 1000 miler
(it's been a tough year on my trainers) At the start of the year I set myself a goal to run a 1000 miles this year. That works out at about 20 miles a week, so not too bad when you're going smoothly, but when things get in the way, it mounts up. After a slow start, I was well on target to achieving it at 950 miles at the start of December, when I developed hip bursitis and was told to lay off running for a few weeks. I found this really depressing – running is part of my identity, and not just any old exercise. I'm hoping I…
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Big OER and Little OER
I am in Eskisehir, Turkey currently for the final meeting of the Edushare project. This has partners from Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia and the Maldives. Two weeks ago I was in Jamaica for a meeting of the Sidecap project, which has partners from Mauritius, Fiji and the West Indies. I took over both of these projects when Robin Mason sadly passed away earlier this year. They both came from EU funding and are both looking at the use of OERs in higher education in what we might call 'developing' (though I'm not keen on the term) countries. Several things have struck me during these meetings, which I thought I'd share. Many…
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The value of content
It has often occurred to me that TV companies don't make enough of their content, particularly in relation to films. You will often come across a truly great film either sandwiched inbetween soap operas or tucked away at midnight on one of their smaller channels. This was brought home to me again recently when I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (Redux) on Film 4. It is a sumptuous film (and I haven't seen the original, which film buffs, naturally, say is vastly superior to the Redux version). Watching it I wanted to know more (partly to figure out what was going on, but also because you know it's a…
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A Pedagogy of Abundance take 2
I gave a presentation for George Siemens CCK09 course last night, which explored an idea I had proposed in this blog a while back, on the pedagogy of abundance. I wanted to explore the idea, so talked for half an hour and then we had a good discussion. You can see the recording of the session in Elluminate here. Below is a slidecast of the presentation. My main argument was that in economics previous models were based on an assumption of scarcity. In a digital world we have abundance and many of these models do not apply. There are two types of response to this, the abundance response which assumes…
