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The weirdness of copyright
I’ve written a chapter for a book with James Dalziel and we are asked to sign a copyright form. Now, I usually just sign these, but I’ve been getting fussy about this stuff recently. So, I actually read this one, and when you analyse it, there are a number of really draconian measures in there. If you look at it rationally you think ‘no-one would invent a system like this now’. To be fair, they have said we can publish the chapter online if we ask permission, and this copyright form is fairly standard. But I think it’s an interesting exercise to go through it. “Author(s) agrees to, and does…
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A little corner that is forever edupunk
Last night I was part of a live internet radio show, run by Graham Attwell at Pontydysgu. The theme was edupunk, and the show featured Jim Groom and Mike Caulfield amongst others. I made the point that edupunk is a sort of metaphor, and like all metaphors we only map certain parts across to the new domain – in this case I thought it was the DIY, have-a-go approach of punk, and some of the anarchic nature of it. What we wouldn’t want to map across was the slightly Stalinist approach that came with punk where people were either punk or not, and anything that was not was decreed rubbish.…
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iCasting as new digital literacy
<Now Broadcasting Live, Jose: http://flickr.com/photos/raveneye/2473034500/> I was part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, where we looked at what broadcast meant to us in the internet age. The OU has partly defined itself by its relationship to broadcast, and so it seemed like a good time to reexamine that. You won’t be surprised to hear that my basic line was ‘forget traditional broadcast and put it all online’ (that was a step too far for most, but we made some progress). Anyway, there is a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting post being advertised. We struggled over the title – the broadcast part is appropriate if one views it…
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Future of content vid with annotations
Accusations of flogging dead horses may well be justified, but just in case you thought my Future of Content was some randomly assembled clips, the annotated version is now up on YouTube (again you have to click through to see the annotations). So, I’ve now done the article, made a video of it, then added textual annotation to explain the video. Erm, full circle anyone? Still, you do now have a choice of medium.
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The sweet spot in education
Adblock | View | Upload your own Above is a slidecast of a talk I gave to a JISC Emerge conference recently entitled ‘Finding the sweet spot between web 2 and education’. My basic argument is that new tools encourage this overlap between areas we used to keep distinct, for instance home and work,personal and professional, individual and institution. A lot of people see this as a ‘bad thing’, but I think it has enormous potential also. Why do I spend time blogging or in twitter? Because it is both fun and work, because it’s social and professional. I wouldn’t bother to spend as long in a discussion forum of…
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The eduWomble manifesto
Adblock For those who have difficulties with the connotations of edupunk, straight of Wales we bring you – eduWomble! One of my twitter friends Griffithss4 tweeted yesterday that regarding their learning environment “Current approach can be summarised (and will be referred to) as the #’Womble Strategy” For those outside the UK, the Wombles was a children’s television programme set on Wimbledon Common about creatures who lived underground and made their homes and stuff by recycling the rubbish humans left around. The green message was very ahead of its time, but it’s the theme tune that offers itself up to us educational technologists as metaphor. The main theme is represented in…
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I heart Wordle
Given my fondness for tag clouds, it’s inevitable I would love Wordle – it generates word clouds from text you input. Nothing new there, but here’s the catch – it’s lovely. You can manipulate the text colour, orientation, layout, etc. I’m not sure tag clouds always add value, but I think we could use them a lot more – for instance at the OU we do a lot of student surveys, often with a free form comment section for students to fill out. As a course team chair I would get back lots of data, plus all of the comments. Wading through these was difficult and time-consuming. A simple tag…
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LAMS 08 Animoto
Just playing with Animoto – here is a movie from the LAMS conference
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The question around learning design
Intellectual powerhouses (and me) – Stephen Downes, James Dalziel, me, Grainne Conole I’m at the LAMS European Conference in Cadiz, where we’re presenting some of the work from the OU Learning Design project. Grainne gave a keynote on Thursday morning, along with Stephen Downes. Simon and Andrew presented their work in the afternoon, and I got co-opted (read press-ganged) onto the panel at the close. Stephen was talking about he made an Audacity recording of his presentation, and that constituted a learning object in his view, although it wouldn’t meet many of the strict definitions of one. Grainne was talking about our Cloudworks project (loosely based on the Flickr for…
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When organisations commit reputation suicide
Fellow UK edu-blogger Doug Belshaw had the unusual experience of being censored last week. He had done a post back in May looking at various VLEs. In it he had compared them and made one provider, TALMOS, had come out unfavourably on some accounts. Doug takes up the story: The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings. The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school. I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that…
