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Songs for a funeral
AJ has a post about using lettermelater (a means of posting future emails) to send a message about your funeral preferences. He limits himself to 3 songs, so here are my choices: 1. Pyramid song – radiohead. Get ’em all weepy and reflective. 2. Dress sexy at my funeral – Smog. C’mon, you’d have to go for this. 3. Bankrobber – The Clash. Leave ’em humming, and because there are no songs about being an educational technologist. Reminds me of an idea floated over at the half-bakery a few years back for the Fatal Auto Collision Song that would detect when you had been in a fatal crash and would…
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Logyourrun quick review
My running rather tailed off towards the end of last year (in favour of mince pies and beer) so for the new year have a new schedule set up. I came across a 2.0 running site – logyourrun. Here’s a quick review: The ability to share training schedules is useful. I created my own, but as is often the case, used others for inspiration. Having all your running tools in one place is really useful. I used to use gmap-pedometer to plot my routes, but logyourrun has Google maps embedded so you can create a set of routes to choose from. When you come to log your run you can…
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some iPod touch thoughts
I got an iPod touch for Christmas and using it has brought home a few things to me. These are all from the department of the bleeding obvious but for what it’s worth here they are: Firstly the interface is just lovely to use. It makes me want to pick it up and play with it. This goes beyond mere practicality – I could probably find other devices that offer me the same functionality, but I wouldn’t feel the same impulse to use them as I do with the touch. Next, being wi-fi enabled has really brought home the "web as platform" concept. I’ve talked about this lots of times…
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The Selfies – award your own blog
After the Eddies and the Downesies, and in the spirit of end of year reviews, I’ve decided to award myself some Selfies, ie awards for my own blog given by me. Here they are: Best post I think I’ll give this to the Future of Content debate. I’m not sure it worked as an integrated article, but I enjoyed the discussion and playing with the format. This is probably the closest I’ve come to something that compares with ‘proper’ scholarly output in my blog. Worst post Aside from this one, I think the Lexicon for real world/virtual world interaction was a naked bit of linkbaiting. And it didn’t even work.…
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The tension between out there and in here
Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I’ll list the ones I think are important here. I don’t have any answers to them, I just know they’re things we can’t ignore. I’ll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn’t directly integrated into the formal learning experience. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute…
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Not an Eddie, but a Downesy will do
Tony, Peter and I may have just missed out on getting an Edublog award for the OU, but bless Stephen Downes, he’s come up with his own alternative list. This time the OU Facebook Project gets an award for ‘Best educational use of a social networking service’. He says: What makes this different from the typical use of a social networking service is that it is substantially about using a social network service to support learning, rather than simply using it to connect the same old group of people together. What I mean by this is that it is intended for students and that it inserts a useful educational service…
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Readers’ favourite apps as mindmap
I asked recently which three web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose, and had a few responses. So, in the interest of playing with Compendium a bit more, here they are as a mindmap, with the size of the logo representing the number of responses for that category. I’ve bundled some together, and used a recognisable single product logo, so for example some people said ‘Bloglines’ and others ‘Google Reader’ but I’ve put these all together here. The same goes for the generic ‘blog’ – people didn’t usually specify which blogging tool, so this isn’t really an endorsement for Blogger, they just have a nice logo. It is…
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StumbleUpon – seeing democratisation in action
The traffic to this blog bumps along around 100-200 hits a day. Occasionally it goes up if someone like Stephen Downes links to me, and it goes down if I don’t post for a while, for example over the summer holidays. Overall though, it’s pretty constant (as an aside, I have the vague feeling that mentioning your traffic figures is a bit of a social faux pas, rather like stating your salary). Then on Sunday I had a massive spike of nearly 700. But it only lasted one day, on Monday it was back to normal. This is higher than I’ve had even when David Weinberger linked to me, but…
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The Christmas Twitter Game
I’m a (not very good) runner, and one of the discussions that often comes up this time of year is whether you will go for a run on Christmas day. The responses tend to fall into 5 categories: Of course, it’s just another day and I’ve got to stick to my training schedule. It’s great to get some exercise in before all that indulgence. No, it’s kind of showing off, declaring ‘look how committed I am, I run on Christmas day’ Yes, I like to show off and declare ‘look how committed I am, I run on Christmas day’ I’d like to but I’m too hung over from Christmas Eve…
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ELQ funding and the Brown psyche
As many in the UK will know the Government has decided to stop funding ELQ students (Equal or lower qualification), so if you are a student who is studying for a qualification equal or lower to one you already possess you have to pay the full fee. This is obviously vexing for a university such as the OU, which specialises in such qualifications. It’s also completely at odds with any agenda on lifelong learning, which the Government, and Gordon Brown in particular, claims to support. There has been some suggestion that lifelong learning will be funded in other ways, but just in case any Labour MPs are in any doubt,…
