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The best compliment
Dora/Silenciosa has translated my Future of content post into Brazilian Portugese. That someone would be bothered to do so without payment is flattering, so thankyou, but also speaks of the value in giving your stuff away to start with – in fact, it’s a perfect example of the fame vs fortune argument that the post discusses.
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Twitter guide
Next year I plan to get my students to sign up to Twitter at the start of the course (it won’t be compulsory though). My hope is that it will help with social presence, knowledge sharing, support and a form of micro-recording as they study. I have tried with IM before to promote this ‘I bumped into Jenny outside the refectory the other day and she mentioned this great paper’ type of dialogue, but ultimately IM is just a bit to instrusive I feel. So I’m hoping Twitter will be useful – I’ll let you know how it goes anyway. With this in mind, I was pleased to come across…
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Now, that’s security
Chip and Kerching Originally uploaded by Auntie P My wife went off in the car yesterday, with my wallet. I needed to get some stuff so she told me to use her card. The good thing about chip n pin is nobody looks at the name, you insert the card yourself. So I was able to spend happily in Toys R Us, BP, Threshers and then I went to Tesco. I needed to get some fireworks which were available from a special stand. To my discomfort they printed the receipt out and asked me to sign, no chip n pin. I tried to forge my wife’s signature and made a…
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Is academic referencing anachronistic?
One of the hallowed practices we teach students is how to properly reference sources. This is deeply entrenched in academic practice – we often give explicit marks for it in assessment, teach it as a key skill, give explicit methods to follow and demand it in publication. As such you could view it as a cornerstone of the enculturation process that is higher education – we are bringing people in to the culture of higher education and referencing is one means of exhibiting your membership of this club. Let’s think about why it’s important. There are two main reasons that I can see: To properly acknowledge the work of others.…
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Why it’s important that the Radiohead album is good
So I downloaded my copy of In Rainbows and have spent a lot of time listening to it in Australia. I should confess that I like the ‘difficult’ Radiohead albums (I rank Amnesiac just below OK Computer as best Radiohead albums), but I rather thought they were treading water by the time of Hail to the Thief. In Rainbows is great though, it contains at least four outstanding tracks which rank with any of their best. The reason I’m blogging about this is not because I’m a frustrated MySpace user who suddenly wants to do album reviews, but because it is really significant. Releasing your album free is fine if…
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Learning design as aspirin for the web 2.0 headache
In the last couple of posts I talked about some of the ways being online, and web 2.0 in particular, challenges some of our assumptions of higher education. The whole web 2.0 thing represents something of a problem, or headache if you will, for higher ed. On the one hand we can see how enthusiastic people are for it, and how it genuinely creates user participation, community, and quality content. All things we’d like to have in higher ed. And on the other we cherish lots of aspects of higher ed that seem at odds with it, such as the quality assurance of content, careful support and structure, hierarchical structures,…
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Academic discourse and another OU blogger
My colleague Grainne Conole has started blogging recently. There is something about blogging, it becomes a sort of benign religion you want to convert others to, so I’m always really pleased to see someone else take to it. And Grainne really seems to be enjoying it, she seems to have ‘got it’ (whatever it is), straight away. It reminds me of when I was younger and a band was breaking, you’d want to press the information on everyone else. I remember this most specifically with the Stone Roses in 1989/90 – it was a real viral spread, you’d lend someone the album and they’d come back two days later with…
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The topography of formality
Just as we think of learning being bundled into a convenient course package (see last post) so we think of the formalisation of learning being grouped into large chunks. Informal learning is difficult to recognise and accredit, and is thus often overlooked in favour of formal education. There is an intrinsic paradox with informal learning – in order to reward and recognise it, then it needs to be formalised in some manner. So, even if we accept that informal (or if you prefer non-formal) learning will be brought in to the fold increasingly, it still needs to be formalised in some manner. If we were to consider the formalisation of…
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The granularity of education
(slight apology for repeating elements from previous posts, but worth gathering in one place). One of the things I’ve been thinking about here in Sydney is how learning design can help bridge the gap between web 2.0 and higher education. I’m writing a paper on this which sets out the argument in detail, but I’ll post elements of it here as I go along. One issue I think web 2.0 raises for education is about the granularity of education. I’ve blogged before about the granularity of ideas, so this is extending that a little. The digitisation of content and its frictionless distribution on a global scale is challenging many of…
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In Sydney
I’m in Sydney at the moment, working with James Dalziel at MELCOE, Macquarie University. We’re having some good discussions around web 2.0, learning design, open educational resources and the implications for higher education, which I will work up in to a paper (and blog posts). I’ll be concentrating on the learning design aspect for a presentation at the LAMS conference (which by virtue of bad timing will be when I’m back in the UK, so will be via Skype). But all of this is really an excuse for me to show you my view:
