digital scholarship
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It’s all about me
(This is a picture of a fish. I don’t know why it’s here either) Like many of you, I get asked to do bits of ‘scholarship on the side” – webinars, interviews, podcasts etc. These seem to have come in a burst recently, after not much in the preceding six months. Some of them are parts of interesting series, so partly because you may find these interesting, and also as a means of collecting them for my own purposes, here is a list of recent ‘other stuff’: Open Education: What Now? – This was a webinar for part of European Distance Learning Week, along with Catherine Cronin. Although we didn’t…
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Social media, the academic & the university
If you follow me on Twitter you may be aware that it’s been an eventful weekend. The Vice Chancellor of the Open University made some injudicious remarks dismissing what OU academics did as “not teaching”. He has since apologised, and suggests he was trying to make a different point (that OU academics used to have direct contact with students through summer schools but now don’t, and a more online focus could reinstate that contact. This I agree with and have been promoting the benefits of online events since making the annual OU conference open and online in 2010). The point of this post is not to discuss the statement, but…
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Social media and the academic (through the medium of dog pictures)
Photo by Don Agnello on Unsplash I’m giving a presentation to OU staff on the use of social media. This was part of a broader social media training day, and they were interested in the potential impact of using social media. I chose to present it as a series of hypotheses. For many of these there is some evidence, but for a lot it is either very indirect, or we haven’t really gathered it yet. And just for the sake of it, I limited myself to only using pictures of dogs in the slidedeck. Because dogs. The hypotheses (some are more just statements if I’m honest), were as follows: Soc Med increases student…
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The Digital Scholar – ebook file
I’ve been doing some writing on revisiting my 2011 book The Digital Scholar. I’ve also got a couple of presentations planned around it. But on checking I note that the imprint of Bloomsbury that published it, Bloomsbury Academic, is no longer functioning and the titles have been rolled into the main Bloomsbury catalogue. My previous links to the free version don’t work any more, and you have to dig pretty hard to find the free version on their site. I think open access publishing was something they experimented with when Frances Pinter was there, but now she has moved on to Knowledge Unlatched, they’ve quietly abandoned it. Of course, the…
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The Digital Scholar revisited
I’m writing a paper at the moment which is revisiting my 2011 book The Digital Scholar, and asking ‘what has changed since then?’. Back in 2011, although elearning had entered the mainstream with widespread adoption of VLEs, much of the focus was on the potential of digital scholarship. A number of studies at the time indicated that adoption of new technology by academics was cautious and often greeted with suspicion. Proctor, Williams and Stewart (2010) summed up the prevailing attitude, finding ‘frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous’. Since then a lot…
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Cellini’s blood of digital scholarship
I was invited to Florence last week to give a keynote on Digital Scholarship. After the talk I had a walk around that beautiful city, and saw Cellini’s Perseus in the Plazza della Signoria. Looking at the statue with digital scholarship thoughts in my head, I regretted not having made it the springboard metaphor for my talk. It is, also I’ll admit, an attempt to irritate Jim Groom further with ridiculous metaphors. Like any great work of art Cellini’s Perseus can bear many different interpretations, many of them contradictory, and also suggest meanings that were never intended. So here is the talk I should have given: “Cellini’s Perseus – the…
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To the keepers of the flames
I’m late to all this, but I have recently started getting back into vinyl records. I got a cheapo turntable for my birthday (from me, I always know what I want). I’ve ben picking up the odd album since then. Mainly I’m restocking the albums I used to own – I gave these away in the mid-2000s because I hadn’t played them for about 17 years, and they were in the garage, getting warped and mouldy. “I’ll never play vinyl again” I thought, “my music consumption has shifted to digital. I’m not one of those muso nerds who goes on about the quality of the listening experience with vinyl.” And…
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Digital Scholar course
I may not have mentioned it, but I wrote a book called The Digital Scholar a few years back. It was published under a CC licence by Bloomsbury Academic. Last year a colleague of mine, Fernando Rosell, read it and suggested to the OpenLearn team that they should make a short course based on it. The OpenLearn team have developed a format of Badged Open Courses (BOCs). These are generally 8 weeks long, 3 hours per week, with a quiz halfway through and at the end, and a digital badge available. They’re openly licensed (CC-NC – don’t go all haterz on the NC people), professionally produced and open for continual…
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Dear reader, I blogged it
A couple of posts coming up about every blogger’s two favourite subjects: themselves and blogs. Since moving to Reclaim Hosting (slogan: We put the host in hosting) I’ve started creating blogs willy nilly. Partly this is because I can, and it’s a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon when you live on your own and have no friends when it’s raining. But I think it also reflects that I have a number of discrete interests now that qualify for blogs of their own. It started when Blipfoto, where I posted my photo a day, began having financial difficulties. I didn’t like the thought of losing that three year…
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The control of your network
(photo by some guy called Alan Levine) There was much anxiety this week about the possible move by Twitter to an algorithmic feed, where some magic (see previous post) determines what comes up in your timeline, instead of the chronological order of everything we’re used to. Whether it goes ahead or not, what this highlighted is the power we have given over to a commercial organisation to shape our community. There is a real dilemma here – this stuff (social media, online identity) is only worth investing time in if it has real value in your life. But then as soon as you invest that value in it, any changes…
