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How do you connect – the rise of serendipity
D'Arcy Norman has set up a project which asks the simple question 'How do you connect to people online'. He says we are free to interpret that how we want, and responses can be in any format. He is publishing the open responses as it goes along. Many people have chosen to respond in video format, and here is my offering: There different ways of interpreting the question, so I gave four answers. There is the purely technical, practical answer – so I connect mainly through twitter and this blog, plus a bunch of other tools. But there is also a set of behaviours associated with connecting, so you do…
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7 conversation starters
In a post about how twitter had changed my ALT-C experience I commented that we needed to find new social behaviours for when we meet people face to face who we know well on twitter. And Jim Groom is always saying how it's the personal element that makes blogs meaningful. So, in the spirit of those '7 things you didn't know about me' memes, although hopefully less annoying, I thought I'd give 7 conversation starters for occasions when I might meet people I know virtually, and we don't want to talk about blogging or twitter. I think everyone should have a social crib sheet, particularly with the advent of mobile…
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Remote conference participation – results
Last week I set up a discussion around the changing nature of conferences and particularly how remote, vicarious participation was impacting upon them and our practice. There has been some excellent discussion over in Cloudworks, so please check that out if the subject interests you. I also set up a quick 5 question survey on how people found remote participation. I had 53 responses (quite good I thought), so here are the results. The first three questions asked about how remote participation compared with face to face attendance on some of the main functions of conferences, namely networking, content and socialising. Here are the results: So for networking most people…
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An interview with the future
I am one of the ‘presenters’ at the JISC 09 online conference. I don’t actually present, but instead have been asked to create a short video for the session looking at Do educational institutions have a future? Graham Attwell and Rob Howe are the other presenters. We had a chat about the session and I mentioned that I had considered doing an interview with a future version of myself, as a means of exploring the issues. They liked the idea so we have decided all to adopt it, with myself taking the academic perspective, Rob the learner one and Graham the institutional view. Below is my video, although it’s meant…
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Remote conference participation – flash debate
<Image Waiting for it all to begin by Unhindered by Talent http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2380602382/> One of the things I am interested in is the subtle ways in which new technology begins to alter standard practice over time, and without these changes being planned. In the academic world I think the conference is one such area. The academic conference can be seen as one of the core practices in higher education. It achieves many vital functions in academic practice, including: Knowledge sharing – you get to present and listen to other talks Validation – by sharing research and ideas within a subject community you get validation Networking – you establish a network of…
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The REF – a digital scholarship perspective
Having given an overview of the REF in my last post, in this one I will provide a commentary on it from a digital scholarship perspective. As readers will probably know, I’m not a fan of such exercises in general – the inevitable experimenter’s effect phenomena comes into play, particularly when there is considerable money involved, with the result that we don’t encourage new, exploratory types of behaviour. But let’s put aside these more general reservations, and look at the REF proposal itself. My particular take on this is to what extent does it reward, recognise, encourage activities which we might broadly term digital scholarship? From this perspective the REF…
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The REF – a user’s guide
This is the first of two posts looking at the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Apologies to non-UK readers, this is a bit parochial. I needed to look through the REF in relation to the digital scholarship work I am doing. In the next post I will comment on it from a digital scholarship perspective, but having read it all, I thought I'd give an overview of the key points in this post, just to provide a quick review for those who can't be bothered to read the whole thing (ie, any sane person). So in this post I'm not commenting on the REF itself, either in detail, or as an…
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Becoming a multi-blogger
One of the (vague, ill-defined, unstructured) tasks I set myself this year was to see if my blogging/social networking activity could be bent some way to a more focused institutional benefit. I can make lots of (unsupported, wildly inaccurate, ego-driven) claims about the benefit of this blog to the Open University, for example it acts as a form of staff development, it forms part of an institutional dialogue, it raises the university's profile, it demonstrates the university's engagement with new media, etc. But I also feel that my blogging activity has been well supported without any specific aim, and it has now reached a reasonably robust state where can I…
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Science 2.0 workshop
I spent a couple of days in Nice at the ECTEL Science 2.0 workshop organised by Peter Scott and Erik Duval. I've live-blogged it over in Cloudworks, and below is a video I shot over the course of it, just to give a flavour really: Erik has blogged some thoughts about it, I'll add a few here: i) We are only beginning to appreciate what this data might tell us. There were a few demos about visualisations and research on twitter use at conferences (good paper from Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt). I think we need to do more of this sort of work, because it will both push us…
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10 reasons to use open content
I gave this presentation to set the scene at a workshop recently at The Open University. The aim of the day was to promote the use of third party resources, so during the day the teams had to devise a learning activity based around third party content. I set out ten reasons (with an extra one for luck), in this slidecast below: 10 reasons to use open content (in teaching) View more presentations from mweller.
