content
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No, Mr University, I expect you to die
via GIPHY George Siemens tweeted a link to this report the other day from HolonIQ, about Online Program Managers (OPMs), Online Program Enablers (OPEs), MOOC-as-an-OPM which they’re collectively calling OPX. I think it’s fair to say Brian Lamb wasn’t enamoured of this take. It’s difficult when reading such reports to disentangle one’s own eye-rolling response to language such as “we connected some dots by identifying OPX as a new meta-category. Collectively defining the entire spectrum of tech-enabled services models,” from some of the useful data analysis contained within. Whilst it may seem that the authors love acquisitions and mergers far more than any family members, the uptake of third party digital…
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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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Some thoughts on open conference contributions
Over the next few posts I'll be commenting on aspects of the Open University conference which I've just finished running. You can view the playback of all sessions from here. I'll cover reflections on the conference and what we did in separate posts. In this one I wanted to look at some of the contributions we got from people in Cloudworks. We had a fixed agenda of speakers (I thought multiple strands would be too confusing in Elluminate), but asked for multi-media contributions from anyone, highlighting their project. You can see all the contributions here. To be honest I don't think we used these as well as we could have…
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For local people – new models for newspapers
In case you hadn't seen it, the Guardian is running an interesting model with some local versions. Cardiff Guardian is one of the first ones (Edinburgh and Leeds being the others). It is ostensibly run by one person (Hannah Waldram), who covers local news, and then pulls in Cardiff related stories from the existing Guardian stock material. Added to this there are guest posts from local people, some crowdsourced content (eg Flickr photos) plus third party tools, such as MySociety.Org and FixMyStreet. The outcome is a very useful site and, if you live in Cardiff, very engaging too. What is interesting about it is that it offers a potential model…
- 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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Content may not be king anymore, but it has some influential friends
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a two day staff development workshop here at the OU. It had been very well organised by the Social Sciences Faculty and the aim was to get staff thinking about using new technologies to solve some of their problems in teaching. There had been some good initial work, so the groups came with problems they wanted to address, eg student retention from 1st to 2nd level, encouraging reflection, etc. I was asked to present on the use of blogs and wikis. I gave a brief whizz through and tried to convey my enthusiasm for them as educational tools (I ended with…
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The value of content
It has often occurred to me that TV companies don't make enough of their content, particularly in relation to films. You will often come across a truly great film either sandwiched inbetween soap operas or tucked away at midnight on one of their smaller channels. This was brought home to me again recently when I watched Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time (Redux) on Film 4. It is a sumptuous film (and I haven't seen the original, which film buffs, naturally, say is vastly superior to the Redux version). Watching it I wanted to know more (partly to figure out what was going on, but also because you know it's a…
