web 2.0
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25 Years of Edtech: 2006 – Web 2.0
(All you needed for a web 2.0 business was a logo, a disregard for users’ data, an aversion to vowels and a business plan that ended with “Get bought out”) [Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] The “web 2.0” tag gained popularity from Tim O’Reilly’s use in 2005, but not until around 2006 did the term begin to penetrate in educational usage, for example, this piece by Bryan Alexander highlighting the relevance of social and open aspects of its application. From one perspective it was simply a practical term to group together the user-generated content services, including YouTube, Flickr, and blogs. But it was also more than just…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2005: Video
[Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] YouTube was founded in 2005, which already seems surprisingly recent, so much has it become a part of the cultural landscape. As internet access began to improve and compression techniques along with it, the viability of streaming video reached a realistic point for many by 2005. YouTube and other video sharing services flourished, and the realisation that you could make your own video and share easily was the next step in the democratisation of broadcast that had begun with the web. While its use in education was often restricted to broadcast, this was instantiation probably comes closest to the original learning objects…
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Understanding OER in 10 videos
A long time ago, back when we still used the phrase 'web 2.0', I proposed an idea for a tool called "9 step" which sequenced online resources together, with connecting narrative. My proposal was that you can learn anything in 9 steps. I think Orson Welles once said he learnt everything he knew about cinematography in an hour, so 9 resources should be enough. Well, due to my inability to see things through and lack of commercial flair I never did anything with the idea. Since then similar things have been trialled, to not much success, but I won't let that deter me from declaring that it was a great…
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A Couros birthday and user generated content
I'm sure many of you will have seen this, but it's worth showing again. Below is a video that Dean Shareski compiled for blogger Alec Couros's 40th Birthday (Dean describes the process here). It's fun and heartwarming, but it's also a great example to show people about the power of the network. As I understand it someone suggested the idea on twitter, Dean then put together a Google Doc with the lyrics and contacted people in Alec's network to assign them lines. They then uploaded or emailed him the video clips, which he then compiled together. Here's why I think it's interesting, beyond it being for Alec who's a…
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The year of the backlash
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/frippy/1419020309/ by Frippy> This is hardly a marvel of prophecy, but bear with me… The signs are that this year will be one marked by something of a backlash against social media/ web 2.0/ any internet stuff. I don't mean from the traditional media, who've always been suspicious, but from people who know what they're talking about and have been advocates. In other words, increasingly 'us lot' will be declaring that this stuff is peripheral, uncool, over- rated, etc. I think this will often been focused on a particular technology, and Twitter will be the main candidate this year. I've already seen several people I know abandon it. But increasingly it…
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The scholar, their content & the cloud
by LeeLeFever After the wikileaks controversy which highlighted the dangers of placing political discourse in the cloud, we have had the news of Delicious apparently being abandoned by Yahoo. Not a good week for cloud computing. As John Naughton puts it "For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for." Does this signal the death knell for cloud computing? Should academics abandon it altogether (before most of them have even made the shift)? I think it's a more measured response than that. I would suggest a number of responses: i) Use the cloud…
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The Lamb Formula = Good enough?
In my previous presentation one of the slides I didn't get to displayed the following Venn Diagram for what I term 'The Lamb formula' (Image created by crappygraphs) This is from Brian Lamb, who borrows the title from Errol Morris' documentary, to describe the kind of technology he likes, and thinks is useful. My take on these three elements (which may be different to Brian's) as they pertain to education is: Fast – Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This…
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The lack of uptake of new technology by researchers
Yesterday I gave a presentation for George and Stephen's open course PLENK. You can see the recording of the session here. The slidedeck is below: Research, technology & networks View more presentations from Martin Weller. I have been writing a chapter on research and how researchers are (or rather aren't) using new technologies for my digital scholarship book. Several good surveys and reviews have been published recently looking at this, and the overall picture is a rather depressing one (see some references in my Mendeley list). While there are islands of innovation, generally researchers are making little use of new technologies and are very cautious and conservative in their adoption.…
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Understanding the attention economy
My iPad (which decided to stop connecting for a couple of weeks, but has now returned from its sabbatical) has made me appreciate anew the importance of good design and using media to grab people's attention. This was brought home first by the Flipboard app, which takes your Twitter & facebook feeds along with other feeds to convert social media into your own glossy magazine. The result is that it provides me with another 'in' to the stream. This isn't the only way I interact with these sources but it's a pleasant interface and pulls me into looking at links and articles I might otherwise miss. Bloglines is a…
- 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…
