web 2.0
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Call for papers – you know you want to
I am editing a special issue of the RUSC (a journal from the University of Catalonia) with George Siemens. The Special Issue is concerned with the Impact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning. The language of the special issue is English. George has posted the details here. The topics we want to address are: The role of the educator in social networks Adaptation of learning theories for digital environments Systemic change in education in response to affordances of social networks Social network analysis in courses and learning environments Mobile devices in social learning Personal learning environments and networks Learning design – methods and models of designing for social networks…
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Do you have to do social media to get social media?
Christian, aka Documentally has a post entitled "Understand Social Technology Through Participation", in which he says: "How much can you understand from just watching and not participating? Last night I met a Professor who although used Facebook and other platforms seemed proud to state he did not use twitter. His job was to study social Technology and although obviously a very smart chap It made me wonder.. Is it possible to comprehend something as complex as social Technology by not participating in a platform like twitter. Can you glean just as much insight from only using sites like Facebook?.. All of my insights into Social Technology have come from my…
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Remote conference participation – flash debate
<Image Waiting for it all to begin by Unhindered by Talent http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicmcphee/2380602382/> One of the things I am interested in is the subtle ways in which new technology begins to alter standard practice over time, and without these changes being planned. In the academic world I think the conference is one such area. The academic conference can be seen as one of the core practices in higher education. It achieves many vital functions in academic practice, including: Knowledge sharing – you get to present and listen to other talks Validation – by sharing research and ideas within a subject community you get validation Networking – you establish a network of…
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Science 2.0 workshop
I spent a couple of days in Nice at the ECTEL Science 2.0 workshop organised by Peter Scott and Erik Duval. I've live-blogged it over in Cloudworks, and below is a video I shot over the course of it, just to give a flavour really: Erik has blogged some thoughts about it, I'll add a few here: i) We are only beginning to appreciate what this data might tell us. There were a few demos about visualisations and research on twitter use at conferences (good paper from Martin Ebner and Wolfgang Reinhardt). I think we need to do more of this sort of work, because it will both push us…
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Is the revolution justified?
Please see my previous post on the process behind this post. I have created a PDF version and below the blog post version, so you have the format of your choice. [This is a draft version, the full version will be published in JIME. September 2009] Is the revolution justified? Introduction It is common for observers and bloggers (including myself) in educational technology to proclaim that current educational practice is, in some way, ‘broken’. It is seen as not delivering deep learning, or failing to meet the needs of students, and of potentially becoming irrelevant to a new generation of digital learners. For example, here I am arguing that the…
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The long-awaited ‘education as fruit’ metaphor
I have just returned from the ALT-C conference in Manchester, where I held a workshop with Brian Kelly called 'Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities'. My role was to present the future, and then for us to discuss what the obstacles were to realising it, and the related issues for educators, learners and IT services. Here is my presentation: Dreams of future learning View more presentations from mweller. In my talk I decided to use an extended (tortuous some might say) fruit based metaphor. It begins to get rather pained towards the end, but stick with it, I think it comes to fruition (ahem). It goes something like this: Current…
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Social media learning principles
At the LAMS European conference I gave a talk in which I explored what we know about learning, and what I've deduced about social media. My conclusion was that we develop tools to represent the complexity of learning (such as LAMS), but that the social media/web 2.0 approach takes a different angle and instead of trying to represent complexity in the tool, creates simple tools and lets the network create the complexity.The presentation is below: Learning and social media View more presentations from mweller. I had 6 principles of social media which are: <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it. Simple with reach…
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Bridging the gap – book chapter
A while ago, I wrote a chapter with James Dalziel on bridging the gap between web 2.0 and higher education. It was published in the Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, edited by Stylianos Hatzipanagos, & Steven Warburton, and published by IGI. There are some good chapters in this book, so it's definitely worth a read (despite the rather uninspiring title). I've had news that they are using it again in another book: E-Collaboration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. I wrote most of the chapter at the end of 2007, so it already feels a bit outdated, but I forgot to put the PDF up here…
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Bless my cotton socks I’m in the news
(yes, I have been waiting a long time to use that title) A couple of weeks ago, a journalist from The Guardian contacted me to talk about how a tweet from Stephen Fry had sent over 10,000 visitors to the OU's Devolve Me site. The angle was initially the power of new media, but quickly morphed into educational use of new twitter. I stressed the importance of one's personal network and new forms of digital scholarly activity. I didn't really have a single message though, and journalists like to have something to hang a report around, and it seemed clear that she wanted to go beyond the Fry story. So…
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Organisations may have to live with ‘Cisco fatty’ moments
In case you've missed this one, there was another of those inevitable '[New technology of choice] gets person fired' stories. In this case a Cisco employee with the id theconnor tweeted "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work" Inevitably, someone else picks up on it. The strange thing is that it then goes viral. There is something of a pack mentality then. Helen Popkin gives a good account of the unfolding story here. She describes how: "Before the work day ended, Web sleuths revealed "theconnor's" true identity. "Theconnor" was…
