I gave this presentation to set the scene at a workshop recently at The Open University. The aim of the day was to promote the use of third party resources, so during the day the teams had to devise a learning activity based around third party content. I set out ten reasons (with an extra one for luck), in this slidecast below: 10 reasons to use open content (in teaching) View more presentations from mweller.

In my last couple of posts I have been thinking about sharing presentations, particularly through Slideshare, and I wanted to wrap up some thoughts about this. Slideshare has long been one of my favourite web 2.0/social media sites (I concede that slideboom and others may be as good, but it was Slideshare where I landed first). It isn’t particularly amazing in what it does, but what it does, it does well. What intrigues me about Slideshare is that I think it is beginning to become a case study in how new media can impact upon academic practice. This is varied, and I suspect we are only at the beginning of…

(I hope Robin's family and friends don't mind me posting this). I was deeply saddened to hear that my colleague, Robin Mason, passed away today. It was Robin who brought me to the Institute of Educational Technology (from the Technology Faculty). Robin was a pioneer in e-learning, and fabulously well connected in the educational world – everyone knew, and liked, Robin.  Like John Naughton, Robin was one of the big influences in my early academic career at the OU – I learnt from her how to tread the right balance between scholarly activity and practical application, and just plain have fun with new ideas. Interestingly I was warned against working…

A place to store various podcasts and files for use elsewhere.

Rewarding Digital Scholarship Adblock View more presentations from mweller. I'm involved in a bit of work at the OU at the moment which is attempting to look at how digital/e-/online activity can be recognised in the formal promotion system. Some quick thoughts It's a much more fluid environment – we know about journal articles, and apart from some new journals, nothing much changes. Online it's all change. The blogosphere is different today than it was a couple of years ago (partly because of Twitter), and so what you were measuring then may not be appropriate now. So you have to stay on top of things and not have a fixed…

Yesterday AJ Cann posted about his frustration with Seesmic, which he felt was going backwards in terms of usability. This led to an exchange in his comments via Seesmic (and cool, Seesmic founder Loic LeMuir joined in). If you haven't used it, Seesmic offers threaded video dialogue, much like the threaded text-based forums we have been so accustomed to in VLEs. Seesmic has had some financial problems recently, it'd be a shame to see it go under. The outcome might be that this type of functionality ends up as a YouTube add-on. Personally I think Seesmic should pitch themselves much more as a direct educational tool, rather than general use.…

I know there's tonnes on this, all that wikinomics stuff, but it's the small examples that always bring home to me the advantages of sharing. Take this week, I did a presentation on Twitter last Wednesday, and naturally let everyone know via Twitter. Turns out a twitter friend, Martin Ebner, was doing one on the same subject today. So he did a presentation, which borrowed a couple of my slides (with acknowledgement), and then shared his presentation, and let me know via Twitter. His is a definite improvement on mine: Microblogging & the consequences Adblock View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging) Added to that, when I…

Adblock | View | Upload your own Above is a slidecast of a talk I gave to a JISC Emerge conference recently entitled ‘Finding the sweet spot between web 2 and education’. My basic argument is that new tools encourage this overlap between areas we used to keep distinct, for instance home and work,personal and professional, individual and institution. A lot of people see this as a ‘bad thing’, but I think it has enormous potential also. Why do I spend time blogging or in twitter? Because it is both fun and work, because it’s social and professional. I wouldn’t bother to spend as long in a discussion forum of…

Ewan started something of a ding dong with his post on why bottom up alone doesn’t work in communities. The comments (building on my previous post) are worth reading here, so take a look. I appreciate Ewan’s thinking out in the open approach, my instinct is for bottom-up approaches, but I’ve had a mild rethink after reading this piece. Firstly, let’s get the A word out of the way. Ewan talked of an aristocracy, using Jimmy Wales’ term. Stephen Downes took umbrage with this. I accept that Ewan wasn’t defending the ‘real’ aristocracy, but rather arguing that communities require a degree of top-down input to form. Nevertheless, I still think…

This has been all over the web (I picked it up via John Connell) – Clay Shirky talking at the Supernova conference. He talks about a shinto shrine that was regulalry reconstructed from wood, and so UNESCO wouldn’t recognise it as being historical, because what they recognise is presence, whereas the Shinto shrine was about permanence of process. He argues that the latter is more significant. It’s a good metaphor for the open source community, he talks about PERL, and how the process, the community has proved far more endurable than the bricks and mortar of an organisation such as AT & T. You see this bias towards stuff over…