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A CogDog Franchise
Badge made with BadgeMaker from BigHugeLabs Cristina Costa has asked me (and I've agreed) to do a presentation on openness in education on the 14th September. I was thinking about this and on doing something that demonstrates the power of openness, when reading through my backlog on Google Reader I came across Alan Levine's presentation on openness at Open Ed. This is a) exactly what I want and b) much better than I'd manage. So here's my idea: Alan starts up a CogDog Franchise scheme. Franchisees pay him an annual subscription and get to have the CogDog seal (bark?) of approval which means they get to give his presentations (instead…
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Be a debaser
It's a boring truism that nearly every new technology is decried by certain parties (certain newspapers, self-appointed guardians of social mores, etc) as fundamentally undermining the fabric of society. From the first wave of communication and broadcast technology – radio, television, and telephones all had their dystopian critics. From my generation the social evil was the home video recorder. What havoc it would wreak, our juvenile minds rotted by video nasties, and our social skills stunted by spending all our times in front of screens. And of course come the PC and internet we've had enough scare stories about games, social networking, and hell, the internet as a whole, to…
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Running with the missus
<Image – Cardiff Clowns by Left-hand http://www.flickr.com/photos/left-hand/2964743595/> As some of you may know, at the end of last year my wife was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Some fairly horrific surgery ensued (grafts of arm skin onto tongue to create a pragmatically termed 'flap', neck dissection to remove lymph glands, further graft from belly to fill the patch on the arm). I'm a queasy male, so clipping toenails has me feeling a bit uneasy, so I have no idea how she endured this. Then a 6 week dose of radio and chemo-therapy followed. While there are surely no 'good' places to get cancer, one of the insidious elements of it being…
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Born again
Not being one of those, you know, obsessive bloggers, every summer my blogging activity takes a dip. This summer we went to France for an extended holiday, and I barely twittered, let alone blogged, for four weeks. This happens most summers as the graph below shows of my twitter activity (from tweetstats). Then every September I face the problem of getting started again. In this respect every year I get to be reminded how it feels to be a new blogger. When you are 'in the network' – you're reading blogs regularly, engaging with twitter, linking out to others, and blogging sufficiently to have comments and feedback then blogging itself…
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A bava birthday gift
Over at bavatuesdays Jim Groom recently celebrated his 1,000th post. Stephen Downes made a comment that maybe he should do a clip show, which set me thinking. Us bloggers don’t have much to give each other except links, so maybe we should honour those bloggers we admire with something more. So, below is my birthday gift for the bava, long may his insanity reign.
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The Zittrain manifesto
Following on from my last post, here are some of my thoughts on Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet. For those of you who haven't read it Zittrain sets out the argument that the key to the internet's success is what he terms 'generativity'. The PC and the internet are both largely open systems which can be built upon without recourse to the 'owners' of the system. He defines generativity as "a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences". He argues that this generativity is under threat from two possible forms of attack: An internet 9/11 – a cyber terrorist attack that…
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Reading club as course model?
As John has already mentioned, a couple of weeks ago I worked with him and Doug on a kind of online reading club experiment. This came out of some research money our Centre for Professional Development obtained for examining different ways in which higher education could support professional development. At the OU we have an occasional book club group, where influential books are taken by an academic and in an extended session we explore these. John has done Benkler's Wealth of Networks, Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and I've done Everything is Miscellaneous. So the idea was to attempt this online, a sort of 'extended reading club' where we…
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Social media learning principles
At the LAMS European conference I gave a talk in which I explored what we know about learning, and what I've deduced about social media. My conclusion was that we develop tools to represent the complexity of learning (such as LAMS), but that the social media/web 2.0 approach takes a different angle and instead of trying to represent complexity in the tool, creates simple tools and lets the network create the complexity.The presentation is below: Learning and social media View more presentations from mweller. I had 6 principles of social media which are: <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it. Simple with reach…
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The slideshare lessons
In my last couple of posts I have been thinking about sharing presentations, particularly through Slideshare, and I wanted to wrap up some thoughts about this. Slideshare has long been one of my favourite web 2.0/social media sites (I concede that slideboom and others may be as good, but it was Slideshare where I landed first). It isn’t particularly amazing in what it does, but what it does, it does well. What intrigues me about Slideshare is that I think it is beginning to become a case study in how new media can impact upon academic practice. This is varied, and I suspect we are only at the beginning of…
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The Keynote Equivalent?
I've been thinking a lot about recognition of digital output in formal systems, in short, can you get promotion for doing all this online stuff? One of the great things about being online is that as soon as you start to openly think these things through, people start to point you at stuff (mainly Tony). It seems a lot of people have been doing the same (and getting further than me). For example Eric Schnell says that The New Media Department and The University of Maine amended their promotion and tenure guidelines (all the way) back in 2007 with redefined criteria in the form of alternative recognition measures. Their documents…
