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Ed Tech posters – come get ’em
I'll do a slidecast of my broadcast talk in a few days, but thought I'd share a couple of the images I adapted from Flickr photos. They'll soon be adorning student bedroom walls everywhere. (Original image Kent Wang – We must liberate Taiwan: http://flickr.com/photos/kentwang/34405544/sizes/o/) And this one inspired by Brian Kelly's talk where he suggested we all have an inner geek, called Ellis: (Original image Mattham – Yoda Dog Costume: http://flickr.com/photos/matthamm/285952194/) And from my content video, James Boyle's Internet Holy Trinity: (Original image Zen – Fog birds telephone wire close: http://flickr.com/photos/zen/1209773/ Quote is John Perry Barlow) (original image Guille – Freedom http://flickr.com/photos/cguille/2556176764/ Quote is Stewart Brand) (Quote is…
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Your search is valuable to us
Tony was giving a talk yesterday as part of a workshop with me and Grainne, to the OU Library and he said something I hadn't really appreciated before – namely that because Google refines its search results based on your history (if you are signed in to Google), the results, say, that Tony gets will be different from the ones you or I get. I know it came out in 2005, I told you I was slow on the uptake. This made me think that your search history is actually valuable, because the results you get back are a product of the hours you have invested in previous searches and…
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Bush, digital scholarship and the price of reputation
Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation. In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity, and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the system – how to get publications out,…
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What does the credit crunch mean for ed tech?
<Image Wall Street by BreakDennis – http://flickr.com/photos/breakdennis/2093184009/> Brian Kelly had a post recently, entitled 'Web 2.0 in troubled economic times'. In it he stated: "In response to a recent post CodeGorilla pointed out that at a number of participants at the Repository Fringe event had felt that use of services such as Flickr and Google should be avoided because such companies were not as well-established as many Universities." He then goes on to suggest a number of issues we may need to address such as whether institutional IT services will be affected, whether user's expectations will change, etc. He makes the point that internally hosted services may be as much at…
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I was slow to get Qik
I'd seen a bit of chat about the video service Qik (mainly from Scoble's twitter feed), and AJ is always trying to get us converted to Seesmic, but I hadn't really been enthused, seeing at just another way of capturing video on the web. Then this week I had a chat with OU geek/EEE evangelist Liam and he wanted to show me Qik on the mobile. So we had a qik go with it, and minor epiphany moment – of course, it's only when you see it in conjunction with mobile technology that it makes sense. Nearly everyone has video capability on their phones, but the problem is that it…
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A new way of giving?
My colleague, Juliette Culver, is involved in an interesting project called Operation Sleeper Cell. It's an online multi-user game, with challenges, puzzles, etc. Juliette describes it thus: It’s free to play and there are puzzles, creative challenges, a story to follow, events in real life, and lots of top secret stuff that I’d love to tell you about but can’t. The game lasts ten weeks and there are new missions each week. If you enjoy things like treasure hunts, you should enjoy this I hope! Nothing particularly new there (although it looks a good example of its genre). The really interesting part is that they've developed it for Cancer Research.…
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Education is like freeze-dried coffee
(I'm writing a piece for On the Horizon, which Michael Feldstein is editing. In case it doesn't survive the cut, thought I'd share this analogy) <Image by roadsidepictures http://flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/2634835504/sizes/o/> The (higher) education process is largely one of enculturation, whereby students learn how to become members of the higher education community. This is appropriate for many domains and careers, but not for all and while inflexibility in the subject content may be addressed by using third party content, the inflexibility of the process is not, because the process is itself embodied in physical structures of universities. As it stands, higher education is rather akin to freeze-dried coffee – regardless of the…
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The power of sharing
I know there's tonnes on this, all that wikinomics stuff, but it's the small examples that always bring home to me the advantages of sharing. Take this week, I did a presentation on Twitter last Wednesday, and naturally let everyone know via Twitter. Turns out a twitter friend, Martin Ebner, was doing one on the same subject today. So he did a presentation, which borrowed a couple of my slides (with acknowledgement), and then shared his presentation, and let me know via Twitter. His is a definite improvement on mine: Microblogging & the consequences Adblock View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging) Added to that, when I…
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Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream
I hosted one of the technology coffee mornings at the OpenU (still trying that term) the other day, called "Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream". I talked about my use of twitter, and how we need to think of it as a different type of communication. My conclusion was that 'social is the new substratum'. A prize for anyone who can explain to me what I meant by that… Here is the slidecast, and you can download the Powerpoint from Slideshare: Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream Adblock View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging)
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Talis podcast
I did an interview with Paul Miller from Talis as part of their podcast series. It covers a wide range of topics: US politics, modernist literature, Babylonian horticulture, and 1920s cinema. Oh, okay it doesn't, we talked about usual stuff: web 2.0, higher education and SocialLearn. You can listen to it here: http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/2008/09/12/martin-weller-talks-with-talis-about-educational-technology-and-the-open-universitys-sociallearn-project/
