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SocialLearn workshop
We had a very good user workshop on SocialLearn last week (Jo and Nigel have both blogged about it). That one was for OU folk, but Simon Buckingham-Shum has organised another one for non-OU people (apparently they do exist I've been told), on the 1st and 2nd July. Details are here if you're interested: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/2008/06/20/sociallearn-workshop2/ (Apply there, not through me – I'll only lose it) A couple of thoughts from the last one: i) Organising successful workshops which have the right amount of interaction and information giving is a definite skill. I don't have it, Simon does, so thankfully he's organising these. ii) There was a very active backchannel in…
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Technology as metaphor (or I’m on e-Literate)
I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers – substitute with Leno). My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how…
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OU tops Facebook universities
Brian Kelly has a post about UK universities on Facebook. He states that the OU is the most popular university on Facebook: "The Open University Facebook page is the top of all University pages, with 7,539 fans (with the University of Michigan way behind in second place with 5,313 fans (up from a count of 2,874 a month ago). The other most popular UK Universities are Aston University (2,976 fans), Royal Holloway (1,765), Aberystwyth University (1,655 fans), University of Central Lancashire (1,475 fans), Keele University (1,420 fans), Cardiff University (1,357 fans) and the University of Surrey (1,166 fans)." Now we might quibble whether number of fans equals most popular, but…
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Ads won’t fund learning (as we know it)
http://flickr.com/photos/labanex/1572962316/ Following on from our business models discussion, Tony has a really interesting post on some back of a beermat calculations on what you would need to generate from ads to match current revenue for courses. It assumes there is no other income, ie students don't pay fees, no Government subsidy, no additional services, etc. It's a bit hard to follow, so here are a few headlines. Current course revenue: 800,000 GBP Each 'page' needs to generate 4 GBP To make the money back on click through advertising each course page would need 1million impressions per year. For an affiliate model we would need every student to click through once…
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The future of content – the eduVJ mix
Tony has posted a follow up to his original vid, so in the spirit of friendly competition, I’d best follow suit. I have taken my Future of Content post and done an eduVJ (as Patrick dubbed it) mix. I’m not sure it works as well as the first one, mainly because this is trying to make more of an academic point, so maybe the fit to the song isn’t as neat. I’m enjoying doing these though, and this one taught me some more about using Camtesia (such as save your file because it might crash out half way through). The last one was a Camtesia recording of Powerpoint, this one was…
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YouTube annotations (on edupunk video)
YouTube now allows you to add annotations to your uploaded videos. It's very easy to do (to go back to my previous post, another example of lowering the 'cost' to the user). So, I took my edupunk video, and added some annotations, see below. What adding comments does is potentially transform any video into an educational one. Much of teaching can be seen as providing commentary, analysis and interpretation on the world. YouTube annotation allows this second order decoding. If you combine that with the discussion permitted by comments and you've suddenly got a pretty compelling learning application. At the moment (I don't know if there are plans to change…
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Here comes everything
I've been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. In it he argues that organisations have costs that means they struggle to compete with masses because the masses can afford to have lots of failures, because the cost of failure is low, and the ease of organising is now drastically reduced. I made a similar argument in the Future of Content, by using natural selection as an analogy. Natural selection can afford to make lots of mistakes because it has thousands of individuals and millions of years to experiment over. An individual designer cannot afford to have so many dead-ends. But when it comes to producing complexity, this massively distributed process…
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D’Arcy’s Camus moment
D'Arcy Norman recently 'nuked' his blog, ie he took it all down and replaced it with the image of a nuclear explosion (he missed a fine opportunity for RickRolling there). As he says "At first, I was just doing it to make a point, but I quickly reached a point where I was almost convinced I was going to leave it nuked. I was going to toss the albatross overboard…But my blog is strictly just a bunch of words. Just a bunch of talk." This came on the back of some of the edupunk stuff and backlash which has rather gotten bogged down in dissecting the term. Interestingly, punk itself…
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One for the Edupunkers
I wasn't going to post on Jim's Edupunk stuff because although I think it's spot-on, it made me feel slightly left out, and too corporate (Edupunk's don't concern themselves with things like business models). I'm not radical enough to be part of it. This was a purely personal reaction, I applaud the notion of remixing, DIY edtech, openness, etc. I sit on things like steering committees, produce papers and write research bids after all. I may not be the Man, but I'm on nodding terms with him. But then I watched Tony's presentation on publishing, data and copyright and felt positively inspired. I don't use this word lightly (except when…
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OU on iTunes
As a member of the Broadcast Strategy Review, it's good to see some of that work coming in to being, with the OU now on iTunes U. I like the tag line "Warning: Content may transform your life". This is for the proper quality stuff, and provides a good outlet for OU material (not the sort of hashed together slidecasts I do). My hope is that its presence exerts a pressure back into the university, so that it makes more educators want to do podcasts, because they can get easily get a global audience for them. Anyway, have a browse there's some good stuff there (David Puttnam is always good…
