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Future learning environments (the talk I never gave)
I was supposed to give a keynote at University of London this week, but I was laid up with a really bad chest infection (I blog heroically today). If anyone from there is reading this, my apologies. Below is the talk I was going to give. It was about future learning environments. The first half is familiar stuff – looking at the current state of play and setting out the succession model. The main slide is the penultimate one. Here I wanted to demonstrate all the different dimensions to a future learning environment. So I have the following elements and examples: Open content – examples are iTunesU, Openlearn and Slideshare.…
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A blogging downside
At one of the blogging talks I gave recently Niall Sclater asked me what were the downsides to academics blogging. I gave an unsatisfactory answer about it being a possible time sink and also you could get yourself in trouble saying things about people or projects. It occurred to me afterwards (I was always one of those people who had a witty reply two days after an event) that a very real downside for many academics is that it isn’t recognised as a legitimate academic activity. For instance, there is no allocation for ‘blogging’ in my annual work plan. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think I have…
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Blogging vid
I have given two blogging talks recently (or more acurately, the same talk twice). I have used the following YouTube video. The quality isn’t great and some people don’t find it funny, but I think it’s hilarious.
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What are you an analogue snob about?
I was contacted yesterday by someone writing a piece for The Times on parental snobbery. They had come across my posting on My Own Leisure Snobbery and wanted to know if they could use it. By the way, having just done two blogging talks this was a minor example of the economics of reputation concept – this person would never have contacted me normally. In my response I mentioned that I was an occassional anaologue snob, and that being an analogue snob was a sure giveaway of being a digital immigrant, to use Prensky’s term. I recounted the story of when we were in a restaurant recently and my daughter…
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Blogging workshop
I ran a blogging workshop the other day with Tony Hirst. It was only a small audience but seemed to go well. My main aim was to get across the idea that keeping a blog is both an academically valid activity and also really beneficial for the individual. I used most of the reasons I have listed before here and here. For me I would say the two strongest points are that it provides a useful means of engaging with technology, a base camp in the online world as it were, and that of all the academic activity I engage in, blogging is the one I probably enjoy the most…
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What does the Facebook API extravaganza tell us?
I know everyone has blogged about the recent openning up of Facebook to allow lots of new applications, but hey, it’s half term and I’ve only just got around to looking at it. Tony Hirst makes the point that it’s beginning to look like a learning environment. I’ve had a play with it, looked at the widgets, updated some stuff and here are some random thoughts on what it signifies: Technology acts as a pull factor – I’ve gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last…
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Academic publishing – what’s the point?
I had a message today saying that an article (The distance from isolation) I submitted to the journal Computers and Education has been published. Good news one might have thought, except check the date it was submitted – November 2004. That’s three years to publish an article (admittedly it was available online a year after submission). Now, it’s a good article and all that, but it’s hardly current. For a start I address three technologies, but web 2.0 doesn’t get a mention since the phrase hadn’t been coined then. If I was writing it now, this would certainly form the crux of my argument (which thankfully has held up reasonably…
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Finding the message in medium
I had a play with medium the other day. It’s an interesting bit of software – it installs a sidepanel on your browser and then creates a visual radar of sites similar to the one you are visiting. You can see which other medium users are at these sites. You chat with them by putting out a general call on the bulletin board. I found it a bit disconcerting though, having these people watch the sites you visit. You can make yourself anonymous, but even so the thought of being observed feels rather intrusive, and so I turned it off and it has remained that way since. I also found…
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Is Nielsen a stickability kinda guy?
A few people (including Dawud Miracle) have blogged about Jacob Nielsen (it is law that I have to use the term ‘usability guru’ here) and his interview with the BBC where he suggested web 2.0 was neglecting good design. Nielsen speaks good sense sometimes (I particularly like his top 10 UI bloopers in Hollywood), but I’ve always found his design rules rather steadfast, or rather that people taken them and apply them too rigourously. I remember sitting in a meeting with the ill-fated UKeU and someone gave us a lecture on usability, based entirely on Nielsen, which was to form the basis of their VLE design. I pointed out that…
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When I missed the Gabbly bus
No. 2 in an occassional series of things I didn’t follow up on (see When I missed the wiki bus). A few years ago I suggested that we develop a tool that allowed instant messaging on a specific page, ie it showed you who was reading that page at the same time and you could chat with them. This was intended for study, so students reading the same page in a VLE could say ‘I don’t get this, do you?’. I even had a natty name for it – ‘StudyBuddy’. Of course, nothing ever came of it, but recently I’ve been looking at Gabbly (possibly as a tool for the…
