broadcast
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25 Years of OU: 2006 – broadcast review
via GIPHY Around this time I was asked by my OU colleague Tony Walton to join the Broadcast Strategy Review, which he was leading. The OU has a long, and innovative history with broadcast, having been set up with a collaboration with the BBC. For those of a certain age, when you mention the Open University people will say “oh, I remember those programmes in the middle of the night on BBC2”. The OU programmes used to be linked to specific courses and be broadcast in the ‘dead’ time of late night, before late night TV was a thing (we’re talking the 70s here). It was often the route by…
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25 Years of OU – 2005: OpenLearn
Around this time I was asked by my OU colleague Tony Walton to join the team preparing a bid to the Hewlett Foundation. They had funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare and we’d been in conversations with them about doing something similar for OU material – releasing it as OER. The thing about the early MIT stuff was that although it was open, it wasn’t that useful. A course syllabus, reading list and some notes is not a distance learning course that can be studied independently. The OU course materials are designed specifically for that purpose, and prior to open textbooks this looked like the best use of OER (it still is, I’d…
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The Podstars lessons
I mentioned a while back that I was running an internal project called 'Podstars'. This ties into the whole digital scholarship/new digital outputs agenda. The title is somewhat misleading since the aim of the project was not to create online broadcast celebrities, but rather to raise the profile of producing new kinds of stuff for academics. In the project we asked for volunteers, and then gave Flip cams to 16 academics. We got them together for an initial meeting, showed them the basic video editing software, talked through what they wanted to do and showed some good examples of videos and tools they might use. We then had a mid-project…
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The network ate my newspaper
(So what do you think of David Cameron then Gordon?) So the UK televised Leaders Debates have now finished. I have to say, it’s been a blast. Not because they were good television (after the first one and the surprise Clegg factor they quickly reverted to saying the same things), but because of the back-channel on twitter. In 2008 I suggested that the Eurovision song contest was the perfect TV twitter event because “It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire…
- broadcast, conference, content, digital scholarship, higher ed, Long tail, Open content, Presentation, web 2.0
Academic output as collateral damage
Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was…
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Social media in society roundup
I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention: Rentokil news release – in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but…
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Is public engagement an old media concept?
"In many ways the Roman Forum was a bit like a Lady Gaga concert…" The OU hosted an event today, in collaboration with the BBC and the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement called 'Engaging citizens: media, research and the public'. It was an interesting day with presentations from the excellent Mary Beard, the BBC's Martin Davidson and Tristram Hunt from Queen Mary's. All the speakers were engaging and talked about the relationship between academics and media and some of the tensions and benefits collaboration brought. In the panel session the issue of public engagement and particularly reach came up, and how could we get to 'non-BBC' audiences. Mary Beard gave…
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On the demise of the scheduler
In one of my favourite novels, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!, a TV producer gives this advice: "Scheduling is everything. A programme stands or falls by its scheduling. Understand that, and you'll already have a march on all the other bright young candidates you'll be competing with." This is 1969 – no producer would give such advice today. The VCR dented it a bit, but you still had to remember to record programmes. The digital, or personal video recorder, Sky+ and Tivo, were a major blow to the status of the scheduler: now recording was really easy and you could series link whole programmes. But what really did for…
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YouTube offline – who cares?
(via AJCann) So YouTube are going to allow people to download videos. Some, eg Stanford, will be free, and others you can pay for. Viewing online, ie streaming is still free. Isn't this a bit pointless really? I guess their model is iTunes, but I don't think people want to take their YouTube videos with them in the same way they do their music. And as I opined in a previous post, ownership ain't what it used to be – how often do I really need to access a YouTube clip but not have access? Not enough to make me want to buy anything surely? And it's not as if…
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Does ‘David after the Dentist’ tell us anything?
Many of you will have seen the YouTube clip of a seven year old boy, rather spaced out on his way back from the dentist: Adblock It's amusing, and bound to get a lot of hits as it is the sort of thing that 'goes viral' easily. But what's really interesting is the way it has set off a host of remixes. We have: Chad Vader (Darth's brother) after the dentist A funky electro remix A mashup of Christian Bale's swearathon and David A parody with Josh after the Boozer Translation Following on from the previous posts, this is just like a virus – it spreads and, more importantly, it…
