RSSMix.com Mix ID 63196

Work In Progress Voting Treemaps

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:56:19 -0400

I’ve posted before about plotting the make-up of local council committees as treemaps using data from OpenlyLocal (e.g. Council Committee Treemaps From OpenlyLocal) to generate views such as this:I also posted recently about scraping election data from Lichfield Council (Screenscraping With Google Spreadsheets App Script and the =importHTML Formula), again prompted by work @countculture [...]

A Letter to My MP About the Digital Economy Bill

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:54:29 -0400

Just sent, via WriteToThem… It rambles a bit, which may be a problem… and it’s possibly a little bit confused – but then, if I’m confused about a law and break it, that’s no defence, right? (And the great thing about this bill is that if it’s enacted, it seems to pre-enable another bit of [...]

Oh, Sir Jasper

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:29:00 -0400

Links for 2010-03-16 [del.icio.us]

Twitter / Jay Rosen : Clay Shirky's big idea at ...
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. This does apply to the press.
How not to use Twitter, by Rentokil | Blog | Econsultancy
Rentokil created a blog post, Why is @Rentokil following me? in which it tried to explain its motivation.

Yes, it admitted, its trying to boost its social media marketing. Phase one of our twitter campaign was to find pest control related people to follow. Tick, complete.

Phase two, it claimed, is to find experts and interesting people outside of pest control and follow them although it doesnt explain why.

To make matters worse, the blogger then wrote: We have had a few nice messages, but also a few rude ones which personally I think is a little bit unnecessary.

Look, if people arent responding positively to your marketing efforts, you re-evaluate them and consider changing them. You dont gently chastise them like a tired mother with a sulky toddler.

Why understanding data must take its place in new media literacies

As a Commissioner with 4iP I'll admit to having struggled to convince those digital media producers around me that if only they could produce worthwhile data projects we'd fund them. "Why is data so important?" they'd ask, thinking of it as some kind of geeky pass-time, rather than something storytellers would use.

I'm going through the same process at the moment interviewing storytellers, one of whom will win 10.5k to spend six months uncovering stories the data tells us in the Revealing Stories programme I devised. Learning how to make data useful isn't easy - it's the latest digital storytelling skill with which the digital media world is struggling and for which the education systems of the world hold so much promise.

The above video, of Sir Tim Berners-Lee explaining in five minutes a few open-data-justifying stories, I think the reasons for us to rethink how we approach data are clear. Take just one example, where data revealed an American city was racist in its provision of drinking water. In schools, where does this lesson fit? It's not purely mathematics. It's not just language arts. It's not solely geography or history. It's not possible in the isolation of a graphics class.

For Scottish teachers open data represents the ultimate in Curriculum for Excellence opportunities. For educators the world over it represents cross-curricular projects with realworld application. For the digital media industries it represents another, emerging form of storytelling as important, and potentially as change-making, as film.

On the importance of being nice

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:28:00 -0400

Since I wrote Why would I want to share? and Sharing is a selfish act, I've been thinking about this topic. Practically, this has consisted of reading Robert Axelrod's excellent book, The Evolution of Cooperation. This has influenced my thinking significantly, and I have come to believe a thorough understanding of the prisoner's dilemma is key to social behavior. Fortunately, it is possible to summarize the book in three simple rules:

In a classical prisoner's dilemma (i.e. a one-time interaction), always defect.
In an iterated prisoner's dilemma (i.e. repeated interactions by the same partners), use Tit-For-Tat (respond in kind).
Be nice, i.e. do not defect on the first move. After that, use Tit-For-Tat. The more interactions there will be, the more important it is to be nice.

In the book, Axelrod provides abundant evidence to support these rules and examples of where they can be seen in operation in the real world. So how would we apply these rules to:

Teaching students: (Iterated) - be nice but firm, sticks are needed as well as carrots.
Open notebook science: It's not clear to me whether this is iterated or not, which makes a big difference.
Online identities: (Iterated) - be nice but stand your ground on principles.

You can fill in more cases for yourself - but only if you've read the book, which I strongly recommend.

Related:

We met, we tweeted, we archived... then what?

We're all getting increasingly used to using Twitter as a back-channel at events. Indeed, it is now relatively uncommon to turn up for an event at which there isn't both a pre-announced hashtag and an active circle of twitterers already in attendance.

Reader challenge: Creating Meaningful Vision, Not Missions

There is a continuing frustration amongst many that for the past decade we've talked so much about the potential of digital media for learning, but that it hasn't translated into enough action. I wonder whether this is to do with the way we're expressing our vision(s) of the way it could be.

I've been working recently with teachers and creative agents from the Creative Partnerships programme in England and with startups from Eastern Europe and the UK in The Difference Engine incubator. Between the worlds of schooling and startups we've been concentrating on the same thing: how do you find out what it is you are actually doing so you can communicate your goal most effectively?

Most people's answer to this is a long, winding mission statement of intent, full of abstract concepts that are impossible - or difficult - to translate into meaningful actions. My first post with Cisco's GETinsight blog is very much on this theme: if you want to bring people along with you on a big change, whether it requires digital media or not, everyone needs to understand what the vision means for them.

Firstly, Benjamin Zander's take as orchestra director and conductor is incredibly helpful (from his brilliant work, The Art Of Possibility):

A Vision might
   ...articulate a possibility
   ...fulfill a desire fundamental to humankind
   ...never leave someone asking "but what about me?"
   ...be a picture for all time
   ...use no numbers, dates, measurements, places, audiences, products
   ...not reference morality or ethics - there should be no right or wrong
   ...be freestanding - pointing neither to a rosier future or a past in need of improvement

When I got thinking about my old school's motto - "Striving for Excellence, Caring For All" - I saw the part I had always liked ("Caring for All") but found that it let itself down on the first part. "Caring for all" I get, and can be translated through every action every teacher and student takes (and you can certainly tell when it's not been carried through into action). But "Striving for Excellence" wrangles against Zander's framework:

"Excellence" is a state that is not possible for every student in every way (we are excellent at some things, less so at (most) others). It's also an abstract: what does excellence actually look or feel like?
Being "excellent" is not as fundamental a human desire as "caring for all" of those around us. Most of us don't value "excellence" above caring and comfort.
It is not the ambition of every student to be "excellent" in everything they (have to) do at school. Many want to "get through", say, Mathematics to excel in Art and Design, or vice versa.
If we are striving for excellence what do we do when we get there? "Excellence" is not a picture for all time; in theory, if our vision is actionable, we will get there at some point. If we can't get there at some point, then our vision is not actionable and our vision is, therefore, less powerful to make things happen.
While not pointing to a statistical advantage, the implication of "striving for excellence" is that what we are doing now is not excellent enough, that we are pointing to a past in need of improvement or, more optimistically, that the future is rosier.

The same way of looking at things, and checking ourselves against it when we express ourselves on what we desire, applies in business. Steve Jobs outlines Apple's vision quite succinctly, and in a way that completely fits with Zander's vision:

Apples goal isnt to make money. Our goal is to designand develop and bring to market good productsWe trust as a consequenceof that, people will like them, and as another consequence well makesome money. But were really clear about what our goals are.

They want to bring 'good' products to market - not excellent ones - and this goal is achievable. Nobody in the company can argue with this or their role in it.

If you're up for the challenge, share your school or company visions/missions in the comments below and have a go at reworking it along Zander's framework: does a new, more en-actionable vision emerge?

I've started bringing some of these thoughts together under the umbrella of national policy-making. Your thoughts would be incredibly valuable: is national policy destined to be uninspiring, visionless? What can we do to avoid that fate?

Thought Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:32:00 -0400

What I want:

A way to aggregate all the disparate bits and pieces I write online across many services - tweets, status updates, comments, etc.
Visual representation of this data with a semantic format - something like a non-random Wordle.
Auto text generation based on these themes to produce a semi-coherent narrative for final manual polishing.

I'm not sure how practical this is at the moment. The aggregation part is not unduly taxing, and the visualization part is clearly possible. Generating meaningful analysis is the hard part, but I'm not asking for a tool to write finished papers for me, just something to produce a rough draft and take the slog out of the early stages.

Wookie wins Dev8D BasicLTI challenge!

On February 26th, the winners were announced for a series of code challenges that were set during the Dev8D event in London - and one of the winners was a very cool Wookie demo put together by Dan Hagon and Mark Johnson (with a bit of help from me)

The challenge was to create the best learning tool/integration using IMS Basic LTI and Blackboard. For this I completed work on an IMS BasicLTI adapter forApache Wookie (incubating), Dan converted a Google Wave Gadget for collaborative molecule models into a W3C Widget running in Wookie, and Mark made a multi-user editor based on TinyMCE. Together these were added to a Moodle course on Chemistry - using both the Wookie API and also BasicLTI (they work a little differently, so its nice to see that).

Because the widgets were being made available through BasicLTI, they could also be added to Blackboard, WebCT, Desire2Learn and Sakai, which is nice!

You can find out more about the challenges and winners over on the Dev8D blog

offering a 100% natural gout control product since 1998.

offering a large selection of outdoor playground and accessories landscape timbers and wooden swing sets.

offering a large collection of backpacks including the High Sierra rolling backpacks , exercise DVDs, the old sled and also football cleats.

offering a self branded 30% and 50% Glycolic skin peel.

providing a collection that help you enjoy your backyard including party tents and metal sheds to store your outdoor equipment.

offering sterling silver chains from seven to 24 inches.

offering a large collection of products for the hearth including gas logs and wood burning stoves.

providing theme parties in the form of mystery parties that are packaged in multiple scenarios.

offering a selection of pine wholesale furniture including benches, tables, and mudroom furniture.

providing a large selections of superbowl commercials from 1967 to 2009 and see the latest 2010 superbowl commercials.

providing name brand work boots to police and the military.

supplying commercial and residential lighting including under cabinet lighting and fluorescent ballasts.

Links for 2010-03-15 [del.icio.us]

Obama Video Game Ads Featured In "Madden" And Others
Barack Obama's ads are now appearing in several sports video games, including the granddaddy of them all, Madden football.

Let us be social - lessons learned from The Digital Researcher #DR10

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:29:00 -0400

It is a common misconception that in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes said that life was nasty, brutish, and short. In fact, what he actually said was that life is the state of war of every man against every man:

solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

Let us be social.

Over the past couple of years I've been involved in a number of Web2.0 training events. All have suffered from the same difficulties: too big a differential between the least and most experienced attendees, and a multiplicity of tools leading to information overload. It's not entirely clear to me how you avoid these problems, but of all the events in this area I have participated in, The Digital Researcher shindig at the British Library yesterday was probably the most successful:

Data available at: http://twapperkeeper.com/dr10/

I think the main reason for this was that overall, in spite of the difficulties listed above, the content was well structured enough not to let the Why? get buried in the How? This may have meant that some of the less experienced participants went away with somewhat restricted view of what to do next, but at least we didn't drown them in information (although there was a lot for everyone to take in on the day). And hopefully, the more experienced attendees got something out of the day too.

Trailer for My eLC Talk on Wednesday

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:29:39 -0400

‘Nuff said…

Collaborative review, rating and assessment: Interactive Television 2.0

I've been fascinated by a new breed of truly interactive television that has been in the making for at least a year, and started to appear at the turn of 2010. From the UK, Dr Aleks Krotoski's Virtual Revolution has provided us not only with a fascinating snapshot of where the net is in 2010, and where it's come from, but she and her team have offered up their entire filming back catalogue for us to remix, bodge together, cut up and blend into new forms and formats.

Meanwhile, Stateside Henry Jenkins tells us about Digital Nation, a PBS programme which filmed him and other luminaries as "an extra" to the main television programme.

Digital Garnish vs Digital Beef
There's a difference, though, between the PBS "Digital Garnish" and the BBC "Digital Beef". Aleks points out that core to this difference is recognising that her product (a TV series) had at least two audiences:

From the start of the process in early 2009, The Virtual Revolutions production team envisaged two audiences: the first would be an online community who would help to develop the themes we would explore, clarify hard-to-grasp technological concepts, tell us when we were heading in the right or wrong directions, and really put their stamp on the finished programmes. In the tradition of the new breed of wikinovels, wikiarticles and wikifilms, this would be an open and collaborative project within a larger old media landscape that hoped to engage an increasingly disjointed and distracted audience in a new media way. In return, theyd have access to our rushes that they could use to spin their own documentaries about the web.
As someone who has spent my professional life flirting with old and new media, the openness and collaboration was one of the biggest draws when I was approached by the series producer last March. From my point of view, it would be a gross oversight to create something on this subject without the input of the online peanut gallery.
The second audience would be the BBC2 viewing public. They needed grabby content on rails, as game developers describe it, evoking images of a journey viewed through a window. This was the paydirt audience: watching the show that would get the reviews and the ratings. The complex concepts that we worked through with the online community would be presented in an easier-to-consume, more streamlined way. And, despite my interactive bias, it turned out that this was where the art of storytelling really emerged.

Normally, in the world of digital product marketing, focus is where it's at: find what you want to do first, execute it better than anyone else and then move on to take over other land. Amazon did books for sale at a cheaper price first, then personalised book recommendation followed by book recommendation for gifts to others and wishlists. Big Brother does, well, Big Brother.

What Aleks and her team produced is an emerging realisation that it's never as clear cut online as it might be in the world of "product marketing", where you're shifting a finished good to a client or customer. The process is where the innovation is most likely to happen, the final product (for the masses) is where the mainstream element comes in. However, the mainstream element that Aleks and her team produced was different, different because it was most definitely informed by the audience's reactions on the blog and, beautifully, by their own mashups of the filmed content the BBC gave away.

The task of creating a trailer for the programme led to many creative attempts being YouTubed: one of the cleverest is this device-switching-convergence-laden piece of art:

The video at the top of this post is amongst the most amusing, exploring the whitespace and cutaways that always end up on the virtual cutting room floor..

With Aleks it happened by accident, creating two separate projects: it wasn't an process without some turbulence:

"I was uploading a photo I had taken on the shoot to my Flickr site, or dispatching another update to my Twitter followers, when the director of photography asked: Why?

"For him and the rest of the crew, I was doing a lot of extra work that was distracting from the real reason we were there: to create a piece of non-interactive storytelling that would broadcast to a mainstream audience in a primetime slot."

In the future, this co-production approach should happen by design. The interactive early adopters will realise the beauty in linear storytelling, and those in the storytelling business will realise the power of editing with your audience:

Now imagine that for a breed of digital product with the potential to be mainstream but with the admission that there is a second, vital audience: the enthusiastic amateur that wants to rehash, remix, recut the original and make something not necessarily better, but certainly different. Take this further: the product your first audience produces is not merely a "nice to have", but core to how you cut your final product. The user-generated editing and user-generated content is but part of your wider editorial, production and developer team, all making a better product together.

Whether you're in the business of making television, designing digital products or designing curricula for the creatives of tomorrow, this co-production approach by design, not accident, should underpin the work we plan, because the results are not just more of a learning experience for the creators of content, but for the audience, too. Learning together, pushing and pulling on the content through digital platforms, ultimately makes for a better end-product that is reviewed, rated and assessed.

Links for 2010-03-14 [del.icio.us]

Creative use of typography in advertising | creativebits
NEVER take risks on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Note: this is bullshit advice.
Virtual Residency: Artist Not In Residence
Following Clare McEwan's artist residency with four Buckinhamshire Schools. From her studio, projects will develop via webcam, email, live chat, web album sharing as well as school interim visits. This project is being supported by Arts Council Creative Partnerships Slough.

OU Digipedia Bid Any Comments?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:58:48 -0400

On Thursday, I get to go down to the JISC offices to pitch our “vision” for the Digipedia website based on a submission earlier this year to the Strategic Content Alliance: Digipedia from Prototype to Pilot Service invitation to tender.The pitching will be competitive, so there’s all the more reason to post the application we [...]

Who Owns Knowledge? #DR10

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:30:00 -0400

A talk on intellectual property and social networks for The Digital Researcher: Managing your networks and building your profile

The Project Blog When The Project Is Over

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:49:57 -0400

Last year I asked the question “Should Projects Be Required To HaveBlogs?“. This generated a lively discussion with JISC Programme Manager Nicole Harris pointing out the potential dangers of a formal requirement that JISC-funded projects should be expected to provide a blog:“If a project has to have a blog, does it have to have a [...]

Data wells: one big index

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:55:28 -0400

I was interested to hear the concept of a 'data well' discussed when I was in Sweden the other week.

It seems to be used in the sense of an infrastructure to ingest, normalise and provide integrated access to multiple streams of data. In this way, library services can be built on a consolidated data resource, rather than having to actively manage the integration as a part of those services (as happens now in the metasearch model).

The idea of a data well is integral to the Ting project (mentioned in these pages the other day), collaboratively sourced data and systems infrastructure for Danish public libraries. It was also the subject of a tender from DEFF, the Danish Electronic Research Library, earlier this year. In the latter case, the starting point was metadata for journal articles and ebooks.

This is clearly in line with the trend we have seen recently towards consolidation of the fragmented database infrastructure to support a better user experience. Google Scholar was an important stimulus for this activity.

In thinking about this direction a few years ago I asked a question about where this was going to happen ...

Another approach is to consolidate data resources into larger reservoirs. This has the advantage of reducing the burden of integration, and enhancing the ability to create value-added services. But how and at what level could this be done? [Metasearch, Google and the rest]

The Danish examples are of national infrastructures (although the actual creation could be sourced with other suppliers). 'Data wells' of the type discussed here are also under construction by OCLC, Serials Solutions (Summon), Ebsco, Elsevier, and Ex Libris, among others. And Google Scholar continues to operate.

Two thoughts. One: the focus now is on integration; it will have to shift to creating value-added service over those integrated resources. Such added value may be created by the integrators, libraries and others. And two: how many such data wells are required?

I was interested that the two previous blog entries I was thinking of as I wrote this one are five years old! Here they are:

Dublin core: the first fifteen years ...

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:58:11 -0400

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative celebrated fifteen years of existence on March 1st.

The initiative began at a workshop in Dublin, Ohio, jointly organized by OCLC and NCSA. The second workshop inaugurated the series which has continued to this day morphing into the annual conference along the way. It was jointly organised by OCLC and UKOLN, at the University of Warwick.

I attended some of the earlier meetings as a participant, although my main involvement has been administrative, early on with UKOLN and latterly at OCLC. In addition to staff contributions, OCLC continued to financially support the initiative until last year when DCMI was established as an independent entity.

The Dublin Core is now widely used, and discussions about development, deployment and improvement continue. Many people and organizations around the world have worked on it. I am sure that they would all feel it is appropriate to acknowledge the central contribution of Stu Weibel. Stu's persistence, consensual skills and emotional investment, working with his then OCLC colleague, Eric Miller, was vital to the early momentum and continued existence of the initiative.

A note on involvement ....

QOTD: a new Alexandria

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:20:00 -0400

An interesting article - Toward a new Alexandria: imagining the future of libraries - by Lisbet Rausing has just appeared in The New Republic. It discusses the continuity of the scholarly record in a richly allusive text. I sensed three strands. First, the scholarly record is evermore diffused through media and formats, embracing source materials, and presents changes of identification and curation. Second, the licensed journal literature is enclosed behind paywalls, and current developments may extend that fate to the book literature. And third, the relevance of the scholarly record to the wider world and to future generations, and the influence of researchers, is diminished by this lack of access. Interestingly, in highlighting the responsibility of libraries, the author notes the necessity of collaborative attention and action. Here is a flavor:

Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West--our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data--as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world's civilizations, and many of the world's most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. ...

... It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good. A true public good itself, it probably needs to be largely governmentally funded. And, while a global and cooperative venture, it needs to be hosted by one organisation that is reputable, long-standing, nonprofit, and exists in a stable jurisdiction. The Library of Congress, the flagship institution of the world's only surviving Enlightenment republic, comes to mind. There might be other possibilities, such as the New York Public Library, or the British Library, or a consortium of the world's leading university libraries--UCLA, Harvard, Cambridge University, and so on. [Toward a new Alexandria: imagining the future of libraries]

She discusses the changing scholarly record and the challenges of assuring continuity of access ..

Scholars rightly argue that we cannot meaningfully analyze our peer-reviewed knowledge without also archiving its primary sources. But today's knowledge quest is universal: Our primary sources encompass all the knowledge, hopes, and dreams of humanity. Our Alexandria was not burnt, our Byzantium still stands, and our Athenian academies are blossoming. And in addition to the near-infinitude of our scholarly endeavours and their materials, we want to preserve that which we have not yet incorporated into our learned canons: the near-extinct and the barely remembered, the oral traditions and the dying languages, the esoteric and the sacred--the reviled, even--and the persecuted. We want the Nazi state papers and the Lodz ghetto archives, the Soviet encyclopedias and the samizdat literature, the Maimonides commentaries and the Genizah fragments, the Ethiopians' church songs and their memories of the recent famines....

... You see the problem. What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered? What is it when we no longer preserve only those fragments that time, fire, and barbarians have left us? When we are no longer are able to safeguard only remnants of our discourses on thought, memory, and images, but the thoughts, memories, and images themselves--complete? What do we do when we have not only the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but also Vasari's blog, wiki, twitter, texts, emails, chatroom, Facebook, radio interviews, TV appearances, and electronic notebooks? [Toward a new Alexandria: imagining the future of libraries]

She goes on to talk about publishing and the scholarly record: "their success in locking up and rendering irrelevant the output of academic research has been nothing less than astonishing". The article talks about open access and copyright. Interestingly, she positions the argument to scholars in terms of their relevance.

If scholars continue to hide away and lock up their knowledge, do they not risk their own irrelevance? An immediately important debate, I think, is to be had over how academics fail to engage with their natural constituency (and former students): journalists, business leaders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and civil servants. These people are the ruling classes, if you would like. They are the ones who house and feed professors. Is it really in academics' long-term interest to not let these well-educated and well-intentioned people as much as glance at, say, the Index of Christian Art? Is it really in their interest not to show the public their scholarly articles and academic monographs? What does this tell the public about who academics think is clubbable? And how will that affect how the public thinks about, say, federal research grants, or top-up fees? [Toward a new Alexandria: imagining the future of libraries]

Lisbet Rausing is a historian of science and philanthropist. Worth reading in full.

Two reasons for "teaching Facebook" in school

Will outlines a conversation with a superintendent, one of whose parents wanted her child pulled from a classroom where, frankly, some brilliant learning and teaching practice was taking place. The reason?

Our students dont need to be a part of a classroom experiment withall this technology stuff. They need to have a real teacher with realtextbooks and real tests.

My immediate thought is that "the real teacher" with "real textbooks" (not up-to-date student-curated wiki ones) that she refers to is increasingly a "fake education", one that does not prepare youngsters for the reality of life when they leave school at 18 years old, or a 4pm.

My killer example has to be that, in learning how to publish responsibly to a textbook wiki with a worldwide audience this teacher's students will not be making the same mistake as Kimberley Swann, pictured above, whose story shows a complete lack of understanding in how the real world actually works, or 'Lindsay', whose Facebook lifestream sums up her media illiteracy in one snap:

If Lindsay or Kimberley had been taught by a real "real teacher", maybe they'd have not only had a conversation at some point about how one uses social networks for both play and work, as part of your public face, they may also have had, subject to the filtering policies in their schools, some hands-on practical sessions in privacy settings and the art of communication on the net.

Topic and Event based Twittering Whos in Your Community?

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:57:30 -0500

Another passing observation from conference related Twitter activity.Earlier today this tweet passed me by:Due to an oversight in coding of of my hashtag community pipe, the community isn’t actually constructed around hashtag use – it’s based around a free text search……which means I can look for @jobsworth’s “hashtag” community around the terms “chris messina” OR [...]

Demonstrating Twitter in Conference Presentations

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:26:28 -0500

Every so often I see tweets go by along the lines of “demoing twitter – please say hi”, and I typically respond with a link to a Twittermap pipe I created some time ago that takes a URL for a set of Twitter search results and then tries to plot the location of each Twitterer [...]

Common Core Standards. Common Core Problem

It's interesting to see the mess that Obama is walking into with his backing of the States' new "Common Core Standards". In principle, it sounds as fudgy and wrapped up in abstract goals such as "excellence" and "world leading" as any other changing school curriculum in the world at the moment.

Until you read it.

And then you realise it's far from fudgy, but not in a good way. It's one of the most prescriptive curriculum outlines you could have asked for, and clearly few educators have touched it, seen it, or passed their metaphorical red pens over it in the drafting stage. Worse still, the conditions under which it is being adopted are, how do you put it, totalitarian. Susan Ohanian explains what's wrong in a superb piece at the Huff Post:

How about Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), presented as an Exemplar Text, for 9th graders? When I grappled with Wordsworth's great principle of emotion recollected in tranquility as a grad student, I figured I had only myself to blame.
According to the Burlington Free Press account, both Obama and Douglas offered toasts with glasses of water. One can only wonder what the people devising the Common Core were drinking. The Exemplar Text lists offered as an appendix to the Common Core are baffling -- and ludicrous -- at every grade level.
In order to qualify for the pots of money President Obama is eager to hand out, states must accept 100 percent of the Common Core standards document. They cannot pick and choose. Exercising any judgment based on what teachers and parents know about kids and about literature is forbidden.

The common core problem with these common core standards is based on two basic premises which, I believe, no curriculum should forget:

i) if you're wanting to change education you've got to involve education from the start. And, even when you think you've done enough collaboration, add a bit more: Scotland's curriculum has been in the making for at least eight years and still people want more time to reflect on what it means for them. The mistake we're making, I think, is not just getting on with it and tweaking as we go. Scotland has a problem with not "releasing early, releasing often" (in theory, at least - I think of the hundreds/thousands of educators I know about who have been teaching along these lines for years);
ii) curricula are there to provide framework and scaffolding. They are not there to do the choice of building materials, the types of brick, the layout of the rooms or the interior designing of our learning. Politicians abroad, and closer to home in our own education blood bath of impending elections, would do well to remember that.

As a side-note, I find it vaguely amusing that the Columbus Dispatch, citing Ohio as the first state to adopt the Core Standards (above), features an advertisement for the Titanic exhibition. How appropriate.

Links for 2010-03-11 [del.icio.us]

Donald Clark Plan B: Moodle: e-learning’s Frankenstein
Educationalists love to talk about learner-centric, constructivist models of learning but usually default back into a didactic, lecture-driven, I teach-you learn, behaviour. Stray too far from the current model and any LMS will collapse into a soup of collaborative connectivity.
Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management
18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First.

Customers continue to adopt social technologies at a blinding speed yet organizations are unable to keep up. Why? Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation. Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.
YouTube - DimensionM NYC Tournament
December 14, 2007 Tabula Digita Multiplayer Educational Gaming Tournament in New York City
Bridgewater Primary School » About Us
Primary school website built on Wordpress
Creating Value on the Vine: A [yellow tail] Case Study by William Kimbrell
Innovation and Identifying Blue Oceans

Instead of giving up, they sought to learn from experience. They rented a car and drove across America. They did not tour wine country in California, nor did they visit different wineries and vineyards.
Instead, they went the unconventional routegoing to honky-tonks, beer halls, drive-through liquor stores, mom-and-pop liquor stores, as well as big-box outlets, nightclubs and drugstores. They actually observed beer drinkers.

Casella Wines found that the mass of American adults saw wine as a turnoff. It was intimidating and pretentious and required cultivating a discerning taste. With these insights, they were ready to explore how to redraw the strategic profile of the U.S. wine industry. This is what we call a Blue Ocean Framework.

Social Bookmarking @ #DR10

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:30:00 -0500

The Digital Researcher: Managing your networks and building your profile

Screenscraping With Google Spreadsheets App Script and the =importHTML Formula

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:17:17 -0500

Exciting news: Google Apps script is now available for all Google spreadsheet users…, so it seems I was timely in starting to get to grips with playing with this stuff…;-)So what can we do with Google Apps Script? I’ve been posting a few ideas already, but here’s something I was working on last night – [...]

Writing 2D Data Arrays to a Google Spreadsheet from Google Apps Script Making an HTTP POST Request for CSV Data

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:28:16 -0500

Just a quick post to log another Google Apps script how to – this time how to grab a 2D array of CSV data from a URL and then paste it into a spreadsheet. For the trivial case, we could just as easily do this with an =importData() formula, but I’m still working out what [...]

Microblogging @ #DR10

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:50:00 -0500

The Digital Researcher: Managing your networks and building your profile

Links for 2010-03-10 [del.icio.us]

Slowcoast - Soundslide - Paul Smith, Clothes designer
My fave
Twitter / Ross C Brown: If you didn't know already ...
If you didn't know already, @mikecoulter and @ewanmcintosh are top blokes. Thanks for your help guys :-)
Where goes the river?
Arts and Culture Education is important. Prof Anne Bamford:

* Fashion is the 2nd biggest industry in the UK.
* You pay 4.00 for a coffee in a posh coffee house, but only 1.50 for the same coffee in a polystyrene cup on a train. That's over a 150% mark up because of design.
* Children who are taught arts and culture have better brains.
* An Arts-rich 26 year old is 5 times less likely to be dependant on state assistance than a non-arts-rich person of the same age.
* Schools with an arts rich education have better standards. They have a shared identity and ethos and perform better in the 'soft measures' that are increasingly being measured.
* Teaching arts badly actually stifles creativity. It's better to not teach arts at all than to pay lip service to it and do it badly - this places the teacher as the person of primary importance.
Evilini Quest
Online book publishing from an English Primary school: http://year4atwroxham.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/another-brilliant-book/
One of the first learning videos « Year 4 Blog
Learning logs, by video, form an English Primary School
FilmG
Gaelic film production featuring this from Islay High
Learner Evolution ~ Chris Harte: TeachmeetNe09-2 - Pedagogical paradise!
Once again, I am overwhelmed to be part of something amazing. I have, in the past, spent hundreds of pounds going to a conference and walked away poorer both in cash as well as in ideas. Somehow, some (not all!) professionally oprganised conferences actually mangage to suck ideas out of me rather than filling me with inspiration This was not the case with the second North East of England teachmeet this year! In fact...

Microsoft Wilfully Infringed i4is Patent

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:38:09 -0500

Last year i4i won an injunction preventing Microsoft from selling Word 2007 because of patent infringement. Microsoft, of course, appealed against this injunction – and, as described last night in the Guardian’s Technology blog, the court’s decision is:“a panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a revised [...]

Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research (3)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:59:32 -0500

Third (and final, you’ll be pleased to learn) set of liveblog notes from Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research a JISC-sponsored roadshow held on 10 March 2010 in the Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, The Open University.Martin Weller launched the OU’s DISCO site – a hub for [...]

The Quiet Zone At Conferences

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:29:41 -0500

Earlier today I booked a place on the Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University which will be held at the Royal College of Physicians in London on 13 May 2010.The online booking for the event uses the Eventbrite service – and as this Cloud service is free for free events it is ideal for [...]

Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research (2)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:46:00 -0500

Second set of liveblog notes from Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research a JISC-sponsored roadshow held on 10 March 2010 in the Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, The Open University.This one is Colin Smith on Institutional Repositories: Helping to bridge the gap between traditional and digital scholarship.Colin Smith – Open [...]

OU Facebook Apps, Reprise

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:27:22 -0500

I was at a meeting yesterday looking at rebooting the OU’s Facebook strategy. With a bit of luck, this means that we’ll be doing another push on the OU Facebook apps that were developed several years ago now and which I still believe provide a sound basis for a range of community building and social [...]

Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research (1)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:02:54 -0500

First set of liveblog notes from Digital scholarship: Advanced technologies for research – a JISC-sponsored roadshow held on 10 March 2010 in the Ambient Technology Lab, Jennie Lee Building, The Open University.Lots of examples of resources and projects doing new and exciting things with electronic resources supporting research from David Ferguson. Then presentation of a [...]

Ghosts

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:30:00 -0500

Peel eased the black Toyota Prius off the M11 and continued on across Essex. Thank God he didn't have to make this journey regularly like in the old days, before he started doing his programme via ISDN from Peel Acres. Still, it had been fun to visit some of the old watering holes in London. Walters would have enjoyed it. No-one had recognized him. Being dead had its compensations. Heart attack on a walking holiday in Peru? He'd thought no-one would ever believe that, but Pig said they would, and of course she was right. And no-one was going to look for him in the Essex badlands.

Pig would be asleep when he got back, but he'd get up early tomorrow and cook her breakfast. Couldn't afford to sleep in tomorrow anyway, had to get the March edition of Dandelion Radio online before the weekend. The music was the main thing of course, as always. All those new bands straining to be heard. But it was fun pretending to be all the different DJs, especially the occasional fake Dutch accent. A heck of a lot more fun than working for the BBC, that was for sure. It had just got worse and worse over the years. Home Truths was the killer, nice idea but eventually he just couldn't take the BBC bullshit any longer, and "death" had been a relief. Dandelion Radio was just about doing what he liked. A bit like the pirate days really, but totally legal. Of course, it didn't pay, but radio had never been about the money. And no more Top of the Pops bollocks either, although it had paid for the original Peel Acres. Yes, he wished he'd discovered this internet thing years earlier. It might have kept him alive.

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Well, sort of. Oh, and Dandelion Radio, that's real too.

Links for 2010-03-09 [del.icio.us]

Amazon Mechanical Turk - Welcome
HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks - are individual tasks that you work on. Find HITs now.
Give Work | Samasource
Connecting women, youth and refugees to life-changing work via the internet
Contact Center Software and Call Center Outsourcing from LiveOps
Open Innovation | Innovation Management
A site that calls you to action to solve challenges for prizes offered by large companies. IP Transfer
Internet Eyes, CCTV Monitoring
Registered Viewers anonymously monitor random video feeds. At no time can Viewers designate or control the video feeds they receive and the locations of the feeds are not disclosed. The instant a Viewer monitors an event, an alert is sent directly to the owner of that live camera feed along with a screen grab of the observed image.
Gift Ideas, Unique Gifts and Personalised Gifts | notonthehighstreet.com
Buy Food Gifts and Sell Artisan Food on Foodzie
Home page | Babelgum
Interesting UI for shuffling video
Twitter / Tristan Watson: Feedback

Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

how we do it | Space Unlimited
We help our clients identify and develop an effective Project Question. We recruit young people in partnership with schools and other youth organisations. We support the relationships between young people, educators and clients, and we manage all admin and logistics.

In Space Unlimited, we use the metaphor of a journey to describe the experience on our projects. Our illustration shows the three stages - the thoughtful beginning, creative middle and valuable ending - and the different participants.

I say Pub, you say Quiz

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:32:00 -0500

After dinner at the CFB Reps Forum last September, Peter Klappa gave us a practical demonstration of how pub quizzes can be used in an educational context. In spite of the hangover next day, I decided that this was still a good idea and that I wanted to try it out on one of my own courses.

In a nail-bitingly close finish (nineteen and a half point to nineteen), AIDS & Co managed to hold off a late push from the Vacant Virologists to unexpectedly claim the confectionery prize. The whole thing was clearly very engaging, and I will certainly be using this format again, although like all such interventions, it clearly needs to be used sparingly to remain effective.

Feedback:

1. Have you done this type of exercise before (if so, when)?
No (All)

2. Was this session useful?
I found it very useful - learnt a lot. I will be using the quizzes on blackboard more since doing questions has proved helpful. Very useful form of revision. I learned more than I expected to from it. It was a nice overview of the past few weeks (and it doesn't hurt that we had fun doing it).
It was quite useful to have it brought all the lecture material that you had taught together. It was also quite fun.
It was useful to see what small details we knew and it was also very enjoyable to take part in it.

3. Any other comments?
Can we have a copy of the answers please.
Very enjoyable. Would be nice to have a copy of the Q&As.
It would be quite useful to have the questions and answers. Or just the answers for use in revision.
[problematic - writing good questions is time consuming and I need to be able to reuse them]
Probably the best tutorial in all the 3 years Ive had.

Peter Klappa. Promoting active learning through pub quizzes as a method of teaching. Bioscience Education e-Journal, 14, December 2009

Information Librarians - what the heck are they for?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:30:00 -0500

Update: This post was an attempt to improve academic input into REF by establishing a curated list of the "best" journals to publish in. As is the house style for this blog, it was written in a "humorous" style as befits this medium. In an email message from a colleague, I have been informed that my clumsy attempts at humour have done "serious damage has been done to what was, we thought, a productive relationship". If I have caused any offence by this post, I apologize unreservedly. I have also been asked to take this post down, which I do not intend to do. I hope that the discussions arising from this post will make it possible to achieve the reasons for posting it here.

At the University of Leicester, we have these strange beings called Information Librarians. For many years, this confused me, because I though that all librarians were information librarians. But no, it turns out that most librarians are misinformation librarians, and the only librarian you can trust is a University of Leicester Information Librarian. Having figured that out, I need to ask a question. What the heck are Information Librarians for? To try to figure that out, I'm going to pose a hypothesis then test it.

The role of the Information Librarian is to help me find the information I need to do my job.

There it is, for better or for worse. So let's test it. What information do I need to do my job? You may have heard of something called the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Personally, I wish the REF and the people that invented it would crawl into a pox-ridden hole and die, but I suspect that's not going to happen. The bean counters love REF, and if there's one thing we're not short of in higher education it's bean counters. REF is going to work mainly on the spurious measurement of journal impact factors. (They say it's not. They say it hasn't been decided yet. They say it may never happen. They lie.) So I'm not able to publish my research in open access journals where I'd like to, instead I have to try to maximize my impact factor score. What information do I need to do that? I need an accurate, up to date list of the impact factors of all the journals where I might publish my research. I need the list maintained, curated, updated, stroked and given a saucer of milk. Do I currently have such a list? No. What are Information Librarians for?

Ting: collaboratively sourced library infrastructure

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:24:55 -0500

Ting is an initiative which is creating a shared systems and data infrastructure for Danish public libraries - and potentially others. At its heart is a 'data well', an enriched aggregate of data (see a list of data sources here). Another important component is Ding, a Drupal-based content management system for presenting library resources.

Libraries currently participating are Copenhagen and Aarhus public libraries. They are working with DBC, the provider of the Danish union catalog, bibliotek.dk, among other services,

Some features of the websites are described on the Ting blog. I liked the emphasis on the integration between website and database. Facets are on top of the results display rather than on the side. There is some work-based clustering. There is a nice suggestion feature on the search box.

Here is a high-level architectural view:

Ting is an interesting initiative. I do not have a lot of context to assess it. I do not know how well its aggregation of data will compare with others and I only spent a little while looking at the library websites. It provides an example of the shared approach I recently suggested would become more important. I was introduced to it last week in a nice presentation by Mats Hernvall at a meeting in Lund. He discussed the importance of scale and collaboration in developing library services and noted that DBC were interested in further partnerships.

Note: updated from beta to production URLs for the library websites.

Mission of the library redux

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:03:58 -0500

I heard Anders Sderbck of the Royal Library in Sweden speak in Lund last week on the perennial topic 'what is a library'. He reminded us of Daniel Dennett's remark:

This in turn reminded me of a post I did here a while ago about Dan Chudnov's definition of the mission of the library:

Dan Chudnov has an interesting post on the mission of the library. What is the all-consuming mission of the library? His answer is an interesting one, which on reflection works surprisingly well. He argues that his professional mission as a librarian is this:
Help people build their own libraries.
[Because this is the business we've chosen | One Big Library.]
What I like about this is that it - if I understand it correctly - covers emerging as well as current scenarios. Examples: to help with the creation, organization and curation of locally created materials, or to help with shared bookmarking/citation management/reading list services. As I suggest elsewhere we are developing a new vocabulary of collections: playlists, reading lists, repository, ... [Hedgehogs]

Here is Daniel Dennett in Worldcat Identities.

What is the library

The context web

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:18:03 -0500

In preparing some recent presentations I have been talking about three primary ways of experiencing the web which emerged successively and continue to work together. Here I will call them the site-web, the search-web, and the context-web (alternatives might be site-centric, network-centric, and user-centric).

Site-web. Our early experience of the web tended to focus on individual websites. Enumeration of websites was common, in lists, directories and guides.

Search-web. Attention soon shifted to the network of websites as a whole and search quickly emerged as central to our web experience. Google rose to prominence based on the insight - expressed in its pagerank algorithm - that not all websites are equal.

Search is now our primary way of finding resources and navigating the web. This was underlined, I think, by the introduction of the single box in the Chrome browser for both URL entry and search. A while ago, I was looking for something with my son. He was amused that I was typing in a longish URL - search is how he goes to everything, even where he knows the URL.

Context-web. It seems to me that we are now moving to what I call for my purposes here the context-web. Search remains important but is no longer enough. We expect services not only to know about resources on the web, but also to know about us. We are seeing servces contextualised by their knowledge of people using those services and their relationships. Think about how Google is incorporating location- and social-based results in their searches. If I search for cameras, I will be shown mapped results from near Dublin Ohio and I will be shown what people in my 'social circle' are saying about cameras (my 'social circle' is what Google knows about people in my social networks - Twitter and so on). As the recent controversy about Buzz showed, Google knows quite a bit about me through my use of is services (I regularly use Search, Reader and Gmail, and dip into other services).

Facebook and Twitter also know something about me. As does Microsoft, where I have a Zune profile where I can 'friend' my son who has an Xbox profile (and indeed I can see his Xbox friends).

Much of the current competition we see between the big web/media companies relates to the management of our context. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and Apple would like to be able to mobilize our context to provide more valuable services.

Maintaining a Google Calendar from a Google Spreadsheet, Reprise

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:06:09 -0500

In the post Updating Google Calendars from a Google Spreadsheet, I described a recipe for adding events to a Google Calendar from a Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script. After a quick chat with the person who was compiling a spreadsheet they wanted to use to populate a set of calendars, I revisited the script [...]

Where's the Open Science?

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:31:00 -0500

Since there are clearly too many hours in the day and I have nothing to fill most of them, there's a faint possibility that I might become involved in some laboratory science in the mid-future. Of course, this is dependent on funding (sigh), but there is some seed corn money available, so it's not just a pipe dream.

Two weeks ago I had what I thought, at the time, was a barnstorming idea, but after a two hour brainstorming session on Friday, things don't look so clear any more. We do though have two ideas which seem highly feasible, plus a number of other fainter prospects. One problem to be overcome is that to make at least one of these projects viable, we would need to set up a strategic collaboration with someone who has expertise we lack. The reality is that to attract any funding, we also need to work collaboratively to overcome our lack of track record in the specific area we are trying to apply our existing expertise to.

Musing about this on Saturday, my thoughts turned to open science. I haven't discussed the prospect of running any projects in an open way with any colleagues or funders, and I suspect there would be major difficulties, but there's no harm in thinking about it at this stage.

My first port of call was OpenWetWare (information), but I couldn't see much there that we would be usefully able to contribute to in the foreseeable future. That set me thinking about open notebook science, but the list of "active" practitioners on the Wikipedia page is discouraging - not exactly a vibrant field. Of course, there may be many projects not listed there, but it's not exactly encouraging or likely to convince my colleagues. I wonder if the slightly disorganized field of biological experiments fits into the exemplary model of Jean-Claude Bradley's UsefulChem wiki? I'm hoping that someone leaves me a comment saying that there's lots of relevant open science projects I've missed. I wonder. Open science is an iterated prisoner's dilemma, which is a messy and unpredictable business. Too unpredictable for most people to try to build a career on. Thinking about strategies which are likely to be successful leads me towards the concept of an open science community rather than unilateral complete openness - a long term multiplayer collaboration. Does such a community already exist? If not, how do we build one?

Friendfeed discussion:

Inspiring learners

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:20:00 -0500

A little bit of background to this one...

I work full time in a traditional brick university... but I'm also lucky enough to get to work part-time for the Open University, both as an Associate Lecturer and as a Moderator on a couple of their short courses. One of the latter is T189 - Digital Photography: Creating and sharing better images. Now, for this fully online course, students work for 10 weeks creating and sharing their images using a Flickr-esque OU system called 'OpenStudio'. They get used to posting images, commenting on them and for those that engage with the course, there's a real sense of community - even though the students never actually meet in person. What there also is, every single presentation of the course, is the spontaneous student-created groups on Flickr (just do a quick search on Flickr for T189 Groups and you'll find our students soon enough!). And what I love more than anything is that long after the course has finished, they're still there. Taking their photographs. Sharing their brilliant images. Constructively discussing and commenting. Setting each other challenges to develop their skills and maintain their interest. It really is just the most amazing thing to see and I love that years after the course - and just a 10 week course at that - the students are still there. Still learning. Still supporting. Still creating. For me, it exemplifies what learning can and should be. The seed was planted and given just the right amount of nourishment to grow into the future.

Anyway, take a look at this. These brilliant former T189 students have gone and set up their first online exhibition:

"After taking part in the Open University Course: "T189 Digital Photography: creating and sharing better images" course first run in May 2007 a number of the students have continued to share images through a Flickr group.

In late 2009 we realised that between us we had started to build up a collection of photographs that firstly we are quite proud of and secondly that we'd like to share with a wider audience.

Thus we conceived the idea of a joint exhibition of our work. In the spirit of the course, which is run on-line, the we decided that the exhibition should also take the form of a website and this is it. Thank you for taking the time to visit. We hope you enjoy it."

Isn't that just the most superb thing? This is what happens when learning extends beyond targets, quotas, learning outcomes and assessment. Deep, long lasting engagement. I feel extremely fortunate to have a connection with such an amazing group of students. All power to them!

Peer Review - A Love Poem by Google

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:35:00 -0500

see this

Peer Review - A Love Poem

Every here is the process of subjecting your
work and your ideas to your peers in other
words people
with the same level of qualifications that
you have
they've already done something to review about
essentially what's happening when you're doing
group work
but they refused recorded by almost everyone
I was in the central part all the scientific
process and certainly
if you're going to have a scientific career
you will be subjected to peer review annual
city taking part in peer review of other people's
work on a regular basis
throughout the course of the next week
what we'd like you to do
these two engaged in some the reviews
all of the work that's going on here on friend the
and what i'd like you to do to take to or
three all the people that you follow on friend feet
and to subject
their call for the haitians to
the review in other words
we want you to look at their coleman's
on their status updates and the like
and that pattern of activity over the past
few weeks old friend the
I want to right for them
your impressions old how they're getting
a loan compare it with
hello everyone else is going on for a fee
the reason we want you to do things
it's because by engaging in this process
you will inform yourself of have you were kidding
because peer review process or of mutual benefit
don't you think
we don't want is to just degenerate into
a from of on what people thought the bus
because that doesn't really have any value
that just wasting your time you could be spending
doing something useful
but on the other hand of this movie sins of
the room or the abrupt
so as with professional career years
a little bit of time and diplomacy
the school for which the oldest when you take
part in this process or it really doesn't
have any value
so take some of your
about the fortunate that face our friends
he doesn't call them friends that a printed
refers to the people you follow as the subscriptions
take some of your subscriptions
and I didn't hear review over the next week.

Caption Competition

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:32:00 -0500

You may have read that Google has turned on automatic "English language" captions on YouTube. Hmm. Watch the video above and read the captions below. "A video owner can download the auto-captions, clean them up, and upload a corrected transcript." Not that automatic then. How do you turn this option off (or, since we're talking Google here, can you)?

0:00:02.189,0:00:08.940
every here is the process of subjecting your
work and your ideas to your peers in other
0:00:08.940,0:00:10.080
words people
0:00:10.080,0:00:13.539
with the same level of qualifications that
you have
0:00:13.539,0:00:18.800
they've already done something to review about
essentially what's happening when you're doing
0:00:18.800,0:00:20.019
group work
0:00:20.019,0:00:23.580
but they refused recorded by almost everyone
0:00:23.580,0:00:27.450
I was in the central part all the scientific
process
0:00:27.450,0:00:28.510
and certainly
0:00:28.510,0:00:31.690
%uh if you're going to have a scientific career
0:00:31.690,0:00:37.510
%uh you will be subjected to peer review annual
city taking part in peer review of other people's
0:00:37.510,0:00:38.060
work
0:00:38.060,0:00:40.220
on a regular basis
0:00:40.220,0:00:42.240
throughout the course of the next week
0:00:42.240,0:00:43.820
what we'd like you to do
0:00:43.820,0:00:46.930
these two engaged in some the reviews
0:00:46.930,0:00:50.250
all of the work that's going on here on friend
the
0:00:50.250,0:00:53.920
and what i'd like you to do to take to or
three
0:00:53.920,0:00:57.460
all the people that you follow on friend feet
0:00:57.460,0:00:59.129
and to subject
0:00:59.129,0:01:01.100
their call for the haitians to
0:01:01.100,0:01:02.300
the review
0:01:02.300,0:01:03.300
in other words
0:01:03.300,0:01:09.119
%uh we want you to look at their coleman's
on their status updates and the like
0:01:09.119,0:01:12.770
and that pattern of activity over the past
few weeks old friend the
0:01:12.770,0:01:14.799
I want to right for them
0:01:14.799,0:01:19.549
%uh your impressions old how they're getting
a loan compare it with
0:01:19.549,0:01:21.799
hello everyone else is going on for a fee
0:01:21.799,0:01:23.719
the reason we want you to do things
0:01:23.719,0:01:26.370
it's because by engaging in this process
0:01:26.370,0:01:29.469
you will inform yourself of have you were
kidding
0:01:29.469,0:01:33.299
because peer review process or of mutual benefit
0:01:33.299,0:01:34.150
don't you think
0:01:34.150,0:01:40.039
%uh we don't want is to just degenerate into
a from of on what people thought the bus
0:01:40.039,0:01:43.920
because that doesn't really have any value
that just wasting your time you could be spending
0:01:43.920,0:01:45.420
doing something useful
0:01:45.420,0:01:48.870
but on the other hand of this movie sins of
the room
0:01:48.870,0:01:50.819
%uh or the abrupt
0:01:50.819,0:01:53.640
so as with professional career years
0:01:53.640,0:01:56.180
%uh a little bit of time and diplomacy
0:01:56.180,0:02:01.360
the school for which the oldest when you take
part in this process or it really doesn't
0:02:01.360,0:02:02.689
have any value
0:02:02.689,0:02:04.429
so take some of your
0:02:04.429,0:02:10.479
%uh about the fortunate that face our friends
he doesn't call them friends that a printed
0:02:10.479,0:02:13.340
refers to the people you follow as the subscriptions
0:02:13.340,0:02:15.779
take some of your subscriptions
0:02:15.779,0:02:18.479
and I didn't hear review over the next week

Interesting times

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:30:00 -0500

I had an interesting meeting recently with representatives from the Annals of Botany regarding social tools and publication channels. The plan is that we will collaborate to try to achieve some ~~commercialization~~ knowledge transfer involving aspects of the education research I have been doing for the past few years.

What I didn't know before the meeting is that AoB has recently spun out an online, open-access plant science journal, AoB Plants:

No open access fees to authors for an initial period
Double-blind refereeing
Published minimum acceptance criteria
Fast publication of accepted papers

and all that good stuff we like about open access. Although I was already interested in AoB, reading about the new journal has made me even more enthusiastic about working with Annals of Botany as a partner.

Links for 2010-03-03 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:00:00 -0500

Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Tell me it's not true... ;-) Heh heh...

Highwater Mark

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0500

To my shame, before today I had never set foot inside James Stirling's iconic 1959 Engineering Building here at the University of Leicester. I'm not proud of that.

It's even better on the inside than on the outside, reflecting the confidence and optimism of higher education in the 1960s.

50 years later, it feels like this was the highwater mark for UK higher education, from which we have been in constant retreat ever since.

The Digital Researcher #DR10

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:30:00 -0500

You know how it is. The meeting goes quiet, then you unexpectedly hear yourself volunteering to give not one, but three presentations at the Digital Researcher event at the British Library on March 15th.

The next thing you know, it's a couple of weeks before the event and you're trying to work out what you should say to a group of postgraduate researchers dipping their toes into the digital world, possibly for the first time.

I feel fairly confident about my first session, introducing the audience to microblogging, talking about networks and doing the housekeeping, such as the #DR10 hashtag we hope is going to hold the day together.

I'm a little more scared about my second session on social bookmarking, not because I don't have enough to say on the topic, but because I was the idiot that suggested we should run these info sessions in PechaKucha format, and I don't have much experience of presenting in this demanding way.

OK, I don't have any experience of presenting in this demanding way :-|

The session that worries me most is my last one on intellectual property (meaning, as far as I'm concerned, Open Access, Creative Commons and Open Source). Even though I have 30 minutes for this one, I'm worried that I'm going to leave important stuff out. Which is why, apart from the fact that if I believe in social tools I should crowdsource these sessions anyway, I'm asking for your help. Given 30 minutes, what would you tell postgraduate researchers about intellectual property, and what resources would you point them at?

Dear Old Bruce :-)

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:17:00 -0500

Plagiarism of online material may be proven using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (archive.org)
Med Hypotheses. 2009 Dec;73(6):875
Many writers and researchers are reluctant to publish online for fear that their work will be plagiarized and used without attribution elsewhere. For example, junior or freelance researchers may worry that their ideas will be 'stolen' and published under the name of professional or senior researchers; and that then it could be hard to convince people that in fact the idea had originated elsewhere. However, if this happens, plagiarism may be objectively proven by a service called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (archive.org). Archive.org permits clarification of the issue of dates and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about authorship, whether charitable or otherwise. In sum, archive.org is a little known, freely available and potentially very useful mechanism for defending intellectual property rights.

PMSL - Bruce discovers the interwebs :-)

Redundancy Notice

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:30:00 -0500

Friendfeed has wormed it's way so deeply into my consciousness that I can't have a f2f conversation any more without trying to click the Like link that isn't there.

What do you mean, get out more?

By the same token, I no longer wake up sweating at 3am wondering if I'll have a job next month. Right now it's, What is Facebook going to do to Friendfeed? This results in an irresistible compulsion to investigate alternatives to Friendfeed, hence recent interest in BuddyPress, and huge disappointment that a company with the resources of Google could turn out a piece of crap like Buzz (which is not to say that Buzz won't improve with time).

Fortunately, the fact that lots of other people (such as Cameron, Neil and others) are going through the same thing means that I have no doubts about my sanity. Still, I find myself jumping from site to site asking, Could this be the replacement for Friendfeed? So far, the answer is no. The closest I've come so far is probably Cliqset, although at present it falls short of Friendfeed.

That isn't crucial at this time, what matters is multiple tool redundancy, so that if one goes down or becomes unusable, another takes it's place. What is far more problematic is the fragmentation of the community which has built up around Friendfeed. Since we're all unlikely to agree on the same tool to migrate to, that's where decentralized semantic microblogging comes in, although that's even further away than a replacement for twitter at present. The future holds more and more of this redundant approach to online technologies, as any parent of a PS3-deprived teenager will currently tell you. With Friendfeed, I can switch to another service, with a PS3, I'm stuck. iPad? No thanks.

In the meantime, another day, another tool...

Links for 2010-03-01 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:00:00 -0500

Official Google Docs Blog: Using Google Docs as a data mashup platform
By me: a guest post on the Official Google Docs Blog :-)

Oh look... more fingers in the educational pie...

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:52:00 -0500

Just seen this little article in The Guardian...

Why David Cameron's schools policy is out of date | Politics | The Guardian:

"We can stop worrying about how to improve schools. It's simple, according to David Cameron. It's a good school if it's got a uniform, and children get up when an adult walks into the room, and teachers set and teach by ability. That clear? Good. But try telling Sean O'Regan that all good schools have uniforms. He runs Edith Neville primary school, with one of the most deprived intakes in London. Its results are brilliant, Ofsted calls it an outstanding school, and it has no uniform. 'People think a uniform is a shortcut to raising standards of behaviour,' O'Regan says, 'but it is not.'

School uniforms are a British obsession. In most of Europe and America, they don't bother. It always seems to be the apostles of economic liberalism who are keenest to dictate every inch of what our children wear. I'm not saying uniforms are always wrong. I've met heads who make good use of them. It's ignorant to make a simple rule out of it. The same applies to teaching by ability. There's a lot to be said for setting placing children in ability groups for different subjects though much less for streaming."

*shudder*

When, when, when will politics get its ugly, opinionated, ignorant backside out of learning? Actually, it often seems that the moment something goes mainstream - a practice that kinda worked in a particular context, extrapolated beyond all reason - dogma and ill-informed dictate overturn good intention. Reminds me of this xkcd cartoon:

What follows is my random musing. Feel free to switch off at this point, or go visit some more of those fab xkcd cartoons if you'd rather! :o)

Anyway, it often seems to me that politicians can't seem to steer away from an inherent belief that education is something which must be done to others. "Sit still!! Stand when an adult enters the room. Wear that tie. STRAIGHTEN THAT TIE!!!!! 6 sixes are 36, 7 sixes are 42..."

Real learning seems incidental or sidelined. Provided that predefined 'learning outcomes' and targets are achieved, who cares what really went on in that learner's head, huh? I'm also bothered by the idea of setting by ability as if ability remained static. As if ability was measured by volume. That somehow you're given a certain amount in this life. We'll teach to that ability, no more and no less. Just doesn't make sense to me that 'ability' is a label which is so happily bandied about. Label this child as 'gifted', that child as 'weak'. No get out of jail. No chance of parole. You are the ability you're allotted.

Education = Extrinsic motivation, carrot and stick, rules and requirements
Learning = Intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, creativity, expansion, curiosity etc...

How much easier to meddle with the former. How much damage to inflict on the potential of the latter? Today's musing is done. More pondering later no doubt!

PS They don't wear uniforms at my kids' school either. Shocker, huh? :o)

Derek Bok

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:04:00 -0500

In 2000 I was asked to give a plenary talk on microbiology education to the Australian Society for Microbiology about this new-fangled internet thing. I did, and as a concluding slide while I wittered to a gradual halt, I put up what has since become the strapline of this blog (ha, that'll sort the RSS subscribers out :-)

At the time, it was an original, though possibly not very, statement, but several years later someone said to me that that it was a quotation. In spite of searching, I couldn't find the source, but Steve Wheeler's post this morning finally led me to it's origin - Derek Bok.

Except that it didn't. I've never heard of Derek Bok before, and his famous quote is similar but not identical to my strapline. Now since Derek has date priority on me, I might have some difficultly in trademarking my strapline. Which is fine, because I don't want to. It's just a case of great minds thinking alike.

Call For Speakers For ILI 2010

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:06:39 -0500

I have spoken at all bar one of the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conferences and for a number of years have been a member of the ILI advisory group. So I am pleased to announce that the call for speakers for the Internet Librarian International 2010 conference is now open. The theme for this [...]

Links for 2010-02-28 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:00:00 -0500

Sconul Access
If you're a member of a UK HEI, you you can probably get user rights from other UK HE academic libraries...
An history of new technology at the Open University - The Schommunity Wiki
A timeline of technology adoption in the OU.

Working organizations

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 20:13:21 -0500

Via @psychemedia I saw this advert for a CIO at the Open University in the UK. I thought it was interesting for a couple of reasons. The first was the language which seemed more 'upbeat' than you normally see in academic institutions (but maybe I am just out of touch ;-). For example:

First-class communication skills must accompany a global mindset leveraging strategic skills but accompanying them with a real propensity to action. The obvious challenge of this role, in this organisation, will ignite your enthusiasms. [Job details - Chief Information Officer]

The second was the emphasis on being able to succeed in complex organizational settings, and the influencing skills required. As you would expect the job requests a focus on results, customer focus and a sense of strategic direction. But it was interesting to see how some of the organizational issues were discussed ...

This individual must be able to empathise with the differing demands of leadership where both commercial and social missions need to be clearly understood. They must possess a strong executive presence and be capable of engaging with, and,where appropriate, pushing back on business unit leaders in a way that is constructive and positive. They should not use the language of technology with their peers, but focus more on the implications for the University. They should naturally simplify the complex when they explain initiatives and projects.

And then the explicit mention of organizational boundaries:

Being prepared to break down existing organisational boundaries through collaboration and cross staffing by building strong relationships based on trust with peers. [Candidate brief - PDF]

I should note that I don't have any understanding of the internal specifics here.

A couple of obvious things. Getting things done in larger organizations - where an agreed direction may depend on buy-in from multiple stakeholders - is certainly very different than it is in smaller ones where decision-making ability may be more concentrated. At the same time, it seems to me that an ability to actually get things done, and to make organizations better able to get things done, are things that have come up more in the occasional discussions I have with recruiters.

The 2nd Linked Data London Meetup & trying to bridge a gap

On Wednesday I attended the 2nd London Linked Data Meetup, organised by Georgi Kobilarov and Silver Oliver and co-located with the JISC Dev8D 2010 event at ULU.

The morning session featured a series of presentations:

Tom Heath from Talis started the day with Linked Data: Implications and Applications. Tom introduced the RDF model, and planted the idea that the traditional "document" metaphor (and associated notions like the "desktop" and the "folder") were inappropriate and unnecessarily limiting in the context of Linked Data's Web of Things. Tom really just scratched the surface of this topic, I think, with a few examples of the sort of operations we might want to perform, and there was probably scope for a whole day of exploring it.
Tom Scott from the BBC on the Wildlife Finder, the ontology beind it, and some of the issues around generating and exposing the data.
Apis And APIs a wildlife ontology
View more presentations from Tom Scott.
I had heard Tom speak before, about the BBC Programmes and Music sites, and again this time I found myself admiring the way he covered potentially quite complex issues very clearly and concisely. The BBC examples provide great illustrations of how linked data is not (or at least should not be) something "apart from" a "Web site", but rather is an integral part of it: they are realisations of the "your Web site is your API" maxim. The BBC's use of Wikipedia as a data source also led into some interesting discussion of trust and provenance, and dealing with the risk of, say, an editor of a Wikipedia page creating malicious content which was then surfaced on the BBC page. At the time of the presentation, the wildlife data was still delivered only in HTML, but Tom announced yesterday that the RDF data was now being exposed, in a similar style to that of the Programmes and Music sites.
John Sheridan and Jeni Tennison described their work on initiatives to open up UK government data. This was really something of a whirlwind (or maybe given the presenters' choice of Wild West metaphors, that should be a "twister") tour through a rapidly evolving landscape of current work, but I was impressed by the way they emphasised the practical and pragmatic nature of their approaches, from guidance on URI design through work on provenance, to the current work on a "Linked Data API" (on which more below)
Lin Clark of DERI gave a quick summary of support for RDFa in Drupal 7. It was necessarily a very rapid overview, but it was enough to make me make a mental note to try to find the time to explore Drupal 7 in more detail.
Georgi Kobilarov and Silver Oliver presented Uberblic, which provides a single integrated point of access to a set of data sources. One of the very cool features of Uberblic is that updates to the sources (e.g. a Wikipedia edit) are reflected in the aggregator in real time.

The morning closed with a panel session chaired by Paul Miller, involving Jeni Tennison, Tom Scott, Ian Davis (Talis) and Timo Hannay (Nature Publishing) which picked up many of the threads from the preceding sessions. My notes (and memories!) from this session seem a bit thin (in my defence, it was just before lunch and we'd covered a lot of ground...), but I do recall discussion of the trade-offs between URI readability and opacity, and the impact on managing persistence, which I think spilled out into quite a lot of discussion on Twitter. IIRC, this session also produced my favourite quote of the day, from Tom Scott, which was something along the lines of, "The idea that doing linked data is really hard is a myth".

Perhaps the most interesting (and timely/topical) session of the day was the workshop at the end of the afternoon by Jeni Tennison, Leigh Dodds and Dave Reynolds, in which they introduced a proposal for what they call a "Linked Data API".

This defines a configurable "middleware" layer that sits in front of a SPARQL endpoint to support the provision of RESTful access to the data, including not only the provision of descriptions of individual identified resources, but also selection and filtering based on simple URI patterns rather than on SPARQL, and the delivery of multiple output formats (including a serialisation of RDF in JSON - and the ability to generate HTML or XHTML). (It only addresses read access, not updates.)

This initiative emerged at least in part out of responses to the data.gov.uk work, and comments on the UK Government Data Developers Google Group and elsewhere by developers unfamiliar with RDF and related technologies. It seeks to try to address the problem that the provision of queries only through SPARQL requires the developers of applications to engage directly with the SPARQL query language, the RDF model and the possibly unfamiliar formats provided by SPARQL. At the same time, this approach also seeks to retain the "essence" of the RDF model in the data - and to provide clients with access to the underlying queries if required: it complements the SPARQL approach, rather than replaces it.

The configurability offers a considerable degree of flexibility in the interface that can be provided - without the requirement to create new application code. Leigh made the important point that the API layer might be provided by the publisher of the SPARQL endpoint, or it might be provided by a third party, acting as an intermediary/proxy to a remote SPARQL endpoint.

IIRC, mentions were made of work in progress on implementations in Ruby, PHP and Java(?).

As a non-developer myself, I hope I haven't misrepresented any of the technical details in my attempt to summarise this. There was a lot of interest in this session at the meeting, and it seems to me this is potentially an important contribution to bridging the gap between the world of Linked Data and SPARQL on the one hand and Web developers on the other, both in terms of lowering immediate barriers to access and in terms of introducing SPARQL more gradually. There is now a Google Group for discussion of the API.

All in all it was an exciting if somewhat exhausting day. The sessions I attended were all pretty much full to capacity and generated a lot of discussion, and it generally felt like there is a great deal of excitement and optimism about what is becoming possible. The tools and infrastructure around linked data are still evolving, certainly, but I was particularly struck - through initiatives like the API project above - by the sense of willingness to respond to comments and criticisms and to try to "build bridges", and to do so in very real, practical ways.

Name, rank and serial number

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:53:02 -0500

As authors are recognised as resources to be discovered, managed, ranked, and tracked, an interest in names and identifiers will continue to grow. A focus on research evaluation, reputation management, publication management drive this, as well as general information management issues in a web environment.

Historically, national libraries have managed names within their jurisdictions. The LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control recognized that this was a partial activity, partial in two ways. First, a national approach may not make sense in a networked world: national scale policies and coverage do not work very well at webscale. Individual files are incomplete, and there is overlap between files, sometimes with different versions of names being established and so on. And second, we are interested in many more names than are captured in the cataloging process: some researchers, for example, may only publish articles and not get captured in authority work.

Working with several national libraries we manage the VIAF project which is a response to the first of these issues. As part of the VIAF process we match and link names across national authority files. This resource is then made available in several ways.

The second issue represents a different sort of challenge. We have recently seen two initiatives of importance emerge in the name identifier space, ISNI and ORCID. How the relationship between these evolves remains to be seen: they involve different players and starting motivations. OCLC is participating in each and we look forward to working with VIAF data to further their goals, and in turn to see how VIAF data might be enriched or extended in the process.

My colleague Thom Hickey - who manages VIAF - has a brief article about the project in a recent issue of NextSpace.

WWW 2010: Connect On Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:34:39 -0500

The World Wide Web (WWW) conference series was launched in 1994 and I have vivid memories of attending the conference, hosted in CERN, the birthplace of the Web, which was described as ‘the Woodstock of the 1990s‘.The conference is an important event for the Web research community. This year’s event, WWW 2010, is the nineteenth [...]

Attention is a River: Part 17

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:50:00 -0500

I had an interesting discussion yesterday afternoon with the students on the final year module I'm teaching. In addition to lectures, tutorials, online notes and all the materials on the VLE, I've been drip feeding them extra virology tidbits relevant to the lecture topics via the virology tag on MicrobiologyBytes and the MicrobiologyBytes Facebook page.

Or at least, I thought I had.

To make life easier for them, I put a link to these sites in the VLE sidebar from the course site. In class, we had a chat about Blackboard discussion boards - Do you use them on any of your modules? - No. How many of you have looked at the MicrobiologyBytes links? One.

Why not? Probably a number of reasons, but the basic one being - it didn't command their attention. Discussion, feedback, reading - all the good stuff in education - doesn't happen via links in the sidebar. It only happens when those activities take place in the river of attention. There is no learning in the silted up oxbow lakes on Blackboard. That's why the river design of Friendfeed is so powerful, and why I'm disappointed with the information puddles on BuddyPress and Ning. Of course, if you're used to splashing around in the shallow end, navigating a wide river of information is scary at first. When we talk about these things, most people say to me, I don't get Friendfeed. Neither did I , for a long time. That's where educational design comes in, and what we're currently working on.

Friendfolios update

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:32:00 -0500

Now that a month has gone by, I scraped some data via the friendfeed api to see how our first year students (n = 137) are getting on with their friendfolios.

Rather than total activity (including status updates), I looked at the level of interactivity via the number of comments and likes. The numbers of both follow a power law distribution, a classical web long tail. The median number of comments/likes is 17/7, maximum 115/93 (and minimum of course, zero). The way these graphs are drawn, the tail represents the high frequency users. This is a pretty crude analysis of interactivity and it won't be until we run the full network analysis in a few weeks time that we will have a good overall picture of what is going on, but it's clear that we have a small number of highly engaged users and a larger number of low frequency interactions - possibly no surprise. I also looked at gender influence on interactivity:

Although females make more comments/likes per head (37/16) than males (24/11), the difference is not statistically significant (Fisher's exact test, p = 1), which is good.

When the assessed phase of the project is over in a few weeks time, we will run a complete analysis of the data, including status updates, comments and likes, as well as network diagrams, but since we are unable to reveal any of the original data for ethical reasons, I know some people have been waiting for a sneak peek of the outcomes of the project.

#voteHE

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:54:00 -0500

Optimistically, I spent two hours online listening to the @timeshighered #voteHE "debate", hoping a politician seeking election might come up with something as radical as a policy. Any policy. But no. Apparently, we have to "wait and see".

The first ten minutes were the worst, when all three parties agreed that funding cuts already agreed were inevitable.

The second ten minutes were the worst as well, when they carried on talking in a policy vacuum.

After that, it all went downhill, enlivened only by David Lammy's gaffes, such as "In 1997 the capital budget for FE was zero. This year it's five and a half times what it was then", and that old favourite, "You don't know my sister...".

But at least the whole thing has cleared up the election problem. If you're concerned about UK higher education, the only sensible choice is Official Monster Raving Loony. All the other parties are a bit bonkers.

Science blogs and public engagement with science

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:29:00 -0500

Abstract:
Digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) are novelty tools that can be used to facilitate broader involvement of citizens in the discussions about science. The same tools can be used to reinforce the traditional top-down model of science communication. Empirical investigations of particular technologies can help to understand how these tools are used in the dissemination of information and knowledge as well as stimulate a dialog about better models and practices of science communication. This study focuses on one of the ICTs that have already been adopted in science communication, on science blogging. The findings from the analysis of eleven blogs are presented in an attempt to understand current practices of science blogging and to provide insight into the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive forms of science communication.

Conclusion:
This study examined posts and comments from eleven science blogs in an attempt to answer the question of whether they can facilitate public engagement with science. The findings suggest that the majority of individuals involved in science blogging as both authors and readers are professional scientists or future professional scientists. Science blogs are a virtual water cooler for graduate students, postdoctoral associates, faculty, and researchers from a variety of disciplines and areas of inquiry. The conversations in science blogs are also of water cooler quality. Bloggers alternate explanations and critical commentary with quick personal opinions, re-posting of content from news sources and other blogs, and humorous and sarcastic remarks. Readers respond with similar actions and in addition to topic developments offer quick personal judgments, insulting and sarcastic remarks, and personal details. To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public3. Science bloggers need to become more aware of their audience, welcome non-scientists, and focus on explanatory, interpretative, and critical modes of communication rather than on reporting and opinionating. An interesting practical experiment would also be to reverse the roles of writers and readers and invite the so called ordinary persons to create and publish science blogs, i.e., to engage them in the practices of science blog writing rather than reading or commenting.

Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities. Journal of Science Communication, 9 (1), March 2010

Comment: Hmm, not sure I entirely agree with the conclusions, but nice to see MicrobiologyBytes listed up there with the big boys :-)

Approaches To Debugging The DBpedia Query

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:29:44 -0500

My recent invitation to Linked Data developers to illustrate the potential benefits of Linked Data by providing an answer to a simple query using DBpedia as a data source generated a lot of subsequent discussion. A tweet by Frank van Harmelen (the Dutch Computer Scientist and Professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning, I assume) summarised [...]

The ePortfolio myth

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:50:00 -0500

Had a bit of a thought today about ePortfolios. Yes, I know... not many people have terribly many thoughts about ePortfolios they're probably doing something else more interesting instead, me, however... I think about this stuff. :o)

So... anyway... my thought. It concerns the oft touted phrase you hear in, oh, probably the second breath after the word ePortfolio and that is 'supporting lifelong learning'. Everyone's at it, from manufacturers of ePortfolios to bodies such as JISC. I wondered to myself what do we really mean by that? Lifelong? Seriously??? ePortfolios have been around for a blink of an eye in educational terms and yet... suddenly... they support or even better, they 'harness' lifelong learning. How can anyone make such grandiose claims?

I'm reminded a little of the BBC Doomsday Project which took place when I was a child in the 80s. There we were, writing about our local areas... storing photographs and other snippets to make our mark in history. It really was touted as a Doomsday Book Mark II from what I remember (I was one of the schoolchildren who participated in what was probably an early instance of wiki-esque generation of content!)... and yet... where is it now? Lost to incompatibility and data preservation issues. Published less than 25 years ago - hardly the average lifespan - and yet, gone. Whizz forward a quarter of a century and here we are again spouting about 'supporting lifelong learning' with a technology which is unproven and lacks the basic interoperability standards to help it move towards any kind of sustainability.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I put it to you that ePortfolio is being over-promoted off the back of an unsupportable claim, that of 'harnessing lifelong learning'. Furthermore, I pronounce it 'guilty' as charged.

PS I really don't care whatever it was I wrote for the Doomsday project back in 1984/85 - so, like old family photos, I'll leave leafing through my ancient bits of childhood work for dewy eyed relatives and continue moving forwards with an underpinning of experience, qualifications and confidence which doesn't need a 'lifelong' record of stuff to support.

PPS You didn't see me say this... right? ;o)

PPPS I have a whole other theory about the currency of learning and the expiry date of 'evidence'. But I'll save that ranty waffle for another day.

Let's play!

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:55:00 -0500

It's been a long time since I sat down and read an instruction manual cover to cover.

OK, I have never read an instruction manual cover to cover. This is partly due to the fact that I have a Y chromosome, but recently, it has a lot more to do with Web 2.0, the ethos of which says, If you need a training course, it ain't Web 2.0. So how do we learn Web 2.0? We tinker, or as I prefer to think of it, play. I haven't spent millions of years evolving play as the most significant learning mechanism in my lifespan to start reading instruction manuals now!

So when I want to learn how to use a new tool, I like to play with it. Which is fine, except that if it's a social tool, I need some friends to play with (which is where you come in). I'm trying to get my head around BuddyPress, the flavour of WordPress sometimes described as Facebook in a box. With the recent release of BuddyPress 1.2, the time to play is now.

So I've set up an account on the BuddyPress test site (it's all free - it's open source you see :-) and I'm asking you to be my friend. Let's kick the tyres and poke about under the bonnet to see what this thing can do for us.

Sourcing and scaling

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:18:14 -0500

One of the major issues facing libraries as the network reconfigures processes is how appropriately to source and scale activities. What does it make sense to do at institutional level, what does it make sense to source elsewhere (repository services in the cloud, for example, or insitutional email services from Google), and what should be left entirely to other providers?

I discussed 'scaling' from the supply side - what libraries do and how - a while ago when discussing a NISO report on resource management ..

Scalar emphasis has become an important question for libraries. At what scale should things be done as institution-scale is increasingly the wrong level for many activities? Oren [Beit-Arie] discusses the transitional effect of the network in broader collaborative settings, where the power of the network can be leveraged to improve services. Shared cataloging and resource sharing may be earlier instances of this. Consider now the potential for recommendations where circulation or other usage data is aggregated at a higher level. Consider incentives also in this context. Where are library users most likely to want to invest their effort? Kat Hagedorn [ppt] discusses a collaborative project of the HathiTrust, New York University, and the partners in the ReCAP shared print facility with the involvement of OCLC Research and CLIR. What policy and service apparatus needs to be in place to provide confidence of supply from HathiTrust and ReCAP sufficient to allow NYU relegate materials from its own collection? Such 'cloud library' provision will become more common as libraries seek to transfer resource away from 'infrastructure' and towards user engagement. Kyle Bannerjee describes [ppt] Orbis Cascade's work with OCLC on the integration of local, consortial and global discovery and delivery of resources. He suggests that such operations should move to the highest appropriate level in the network, and speculates about what other services should also move to the network level. Rachel Bruce [ppt] looks at library systems from the point of view of national-scale 'shared services'. What these and other presentations show is how decisions about level of operation - personal, local, consortial, national, global - are as important as particular discussions of functionality or sourcing. Libraries face interesting choices about sourcing - local, commercial, collaborative, public - as they look at how to achieve goals, and as shared approaches become more crucial as resources are stretched. [Untangling the library systems environment]

Such decisions are going to become more important, as externalization becomes more feasible and more attractive. There at least two dimensions which may be interesting to spell out.

Following from the note above, I label the first scalar emphasis: at what level is it appropriate to get things done. For simplicity here are three scales:

Institution-scale. Activity is managed within an institution with a local target audience.
Group-scale. Activity is managed within a supra-institutional domain whether this is a region, a consortium, or a state or a country. The audience is correspondingly grouped. In educational terms think of the activities of JISC in the UK or SurfNet in the Netherlands. In library terms think of the Hathi trust, or of Georgia Pines, or of OhioLink.
Web-scale. Activity is managed at the network level where we are now used to services like Amazon, Flickr, Google and YouTube provide e-commerce, collection, discovery and other functions. Here, the audience is potentially all web users.

We have seen more activity in 2 and 3 in recent years. There has been stronger consortial activity and libraries have been looking at how to exploit webscale services more (think of knowledge-base data in Google Scholar, for example, or links to special collections materials added to Wikipedia).

This then raises a sourcing decision. Again, consider three possible ways in which a product or service might be sourced:

Institutional. Activity is developed locally.
Collaborative. Activity is developed in concert with partners (e.g. purchasing consortium, shared offsite storage, open source software, ..).
Third party. Activity is secured from a third party service (e.g. e-journal access). A third party might be a commercial or not for profit supplier, or it might be a public provider, as a part of state or national provision. The latter is especially important in those jurisdictions where some library infrastructure may be provided as part of educational or cultural funding (see Rachel Bruce's presentation above, for example).

As the network reduces transaction costs, it is now simpler to externalize in this way. The reduced cost and effort of collaboration and of transacting with third parties for services has made these approaches more attractive and feasible. There are also scale advantages. Although it has become common to talk about moving services to the cloud it is important to remember that important choices still have to be made. And there may not always yet be good options as the environment continues to evolve. Decisions about scaling and sourcing will be interesting for several years to come.

Links for 2010-02-20 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:00:00 -0500

Google Can Now Buy & Sell Energy, What Next?
Google gets a license to trade energy in the US... question for me is, would the Google Power Meter [ http://www.google.org/powermeter/ ] give them advantageous data to play with if they every started dealing in energy as a utility company?
Course Syllabus Spring 2010 « Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into Language & Culture Courses
"Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into Language and Culture CoursesCourse Description: This course is designed to introduce students to web-based social networking environments and provide them with the resources and experiences to effectively integrate them into their teaching repertoire. "

In the clouds

So, the Repositories and the Cloud

All good things must end

noreply@blogger.com (AJC) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:30:00 -0500

Posterous is A Good Thing.
But Friendfeed is better.

As part of my postgraduate scientific writing project I needed to set up a site for a student who has been identified as needing extended writing support. To minimize my workload, my first thought was to set up a blog and get them to write about life in general at least once a week. The student wants the blog to be private. The supervisor wants the student to read/write about plant biology. No worries.

Whenever anyone asks me how to set up a blog (not that anyone does), Posterous is my first call (and WordPress my second, depending on what's required). Posterous is simple, flexible, and the workflow is good. But not as good as Friendfeed. I've set the student up with a (private) Friendfeed account. Into that I've dropped the PubMed Arabidopsis RSS feed and a few hyperlocal feeds to give it a flava. Plenty to read and write about. The student picks a paper and writes a few hundred words about it once a week. I subscribe to the Friendfeed comments RSS to monitor activity and respond with corrections and suggestions. No need to fiddle about with multiple logins on Google Reader and Posterous. Attention is focused in a single location. Simples. And scalable across the College.

Over the past couple of months, I've found myself posting less and less content to Son of SoTI and more and more to Friendfeed. I think the time has come to mothball SoSoTI, at least for the foreseeable future. I've removed the SoSoTI feed from my sidebar and added my Friendfeed activity. I may add my Buzz network at some point, but we'll see how Buzz develops for a while first.

Response To My Linked Data Challenge

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:00:02 -0500

The Linked Data ChallengeA week ago I issued a challenge to Linked Data developers – using a Linked Data service, such as DBpedia, tell me which town or city in the UK has the largest proportion of students. I’m pleased to say that a developer,Alejandra Garcia Rojas, has responded to my challenge and provided an [...]

Links for 2010-02-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:00:00 -0500

MASHe » Blog Archive » Twitter powered subtitles for BBC iPlayer
Hack for displaying twitter subtitles on iplayer content

Prezi for Educators

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:15:00 -0500

Now, I haven't quite made up my mind about Prezi. I've seen some really interesting presentations, but I've also seen a lot of seasickness-inducing efforts and since the latter outweighs the former, I've been struggling to get a sense of what I could do with it.

However... if you are interested in having more of a go with Prezi and you're a student or teacher... then have a look at the free Student / Teacher license upgrade option. All the stuff you can do with the free account, but an additional ability to make your Prezis private... remove the Prezi watermark... and get an additional 400MB of storage - all of which would normally cost you $59 / year. Gotta be worth an extra look, for that, I reckon!

VCard in RDF

Via a post

Moderated Comments? Closed Comments? No Thanks!

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:14:17 -0500

Copyright? There’s A Need For A DebateOn Friday I read a blog post on about alleged copyright infringement on Blogger. The post on the JISC Digital Media blogdescribed how “In a draconian move, Google has recently removed several music blogs from its Blogger and Blogspot services“. The story, which was also featured in a Guardian [...]

Scientific publications as social objects ...

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:42:04 -0500

The Comprendia Blog has an entry about social networks in the sciences: Are Any Social Networks for Life Scientists Gaining Traction?

It is a report of a 'quick and dirty' analysis of visitors to a range of sites. Not everything you might expect is included; Mendelay for example does not feature because of its local component.

As I mentioned, this is a quick analysis, and I invite others to copy the data and add to it (here's the Google Spreadsheet), but a clear trend emerged from this short study. The top site, biomedexperts.com, which has an estimated 128,000 visitors per month, utilizes scientific publications to connect and segment scientists based on interests or regions. The second most popular site, citeulike.org, is a social bookmarking site with about 100,000 visitors per month who use it to search for, store, and browse related peer-reviewed publications. What's interesting is that these sites are based on completely different formats, but they both rely on scientific publications.

Is it surprising that scientific publications are the 'glue' that is connecting and attracting scientists? Not really-when I think back to my days in the 90's as a bench scientist, PubMed and my many folders of papers were what helped me to connect with other scientists and learn who the thought leaders of my field were. In a sense, PubMed was scientists' first 'social network.' [Comprendia]

An important strand in discussion of networks suggests that people connect and share themselves through 'social objects', pictures, books, or other shared interests, and that successful social networks are those which form around such social objects. Think of LibraryThing or GoodReads and books, or Flickr and photographs. What I thought was interesting in the post was the focus on the incentives required to create network effects and a suggestion that these related to making connections around 'social objects', in this case scientific publications. It is also interesting to see the suggestion that the literature itself has always had this social element.

There is also a link to an interesting post by Cameron Neylon 'What should social software for science look like' which discusses various scientific research outputs as social object.

Related entries:

A Challenge To Linked Data Developers

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:32:21 -0500

Back in November, following theinterest in Linked Data which had been discussedat a CETIS 2009 Conference I wondered whether it was Time To Experiment WithDBpedia?The following month I attended the Online Information 2009 conference. As I described in a poston the Highlights of Online Information 2009: Semantic Web and SocialWebit was clear to me that [...]

Cover notes

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:39:13 -0500

And speaking of The Second Sex reminds me that the Penguin Modern Classic edition is one of those books with an iconic cover which enters deep into the book memory. (Although i could not find this book or its cover on various Penguin sites earlier, which seemed a shame.)

The weekend issue of the Financial Times carries a nice column devoted to interesting book covers. Unfortunately, only a few recent ones are listed on their web pages as far as I can see. I occasionally look at the interesting Book covers anonymous. I was struck by the very effective use of cover art on different pages in the Faber blog the other day when I came across it.

Thinking about covers in this way prompts me to present here again the text of an entry on book covers I wrote in November 2008:

I spent a couple of hours in Heffer's in Cambridge a while ago. Turning a corner I was pleasantly surprised by a set of handsome books in fine covers especially set out for inspection. It turned out they were a special issue to mark the 30 year anniversary of the Virago Modern Classics.

2008 is the 30th anniversary of the Virago Modern Classics. To celebrate this occasion, we've produced a stunning set of eight hardbacks, featuring cover artwork by twentieth-century women textile designers, including Lucienne Day, Cath Kidston, Orla Kiely, Celia Birtwell, and founder of Biba, Barbara Hulanicki. This stylish collection, celebrating literature and art by women in the twentieth century even featured in the Sunday Times style barometer (going up, of course). [Virago Modern Classics - Little, Brown Book group]

I do not know the background here, or the history of Virago in recent years. And certainly, that last sentence seems out of synch with its founding ethos. The iconic green covers loom large in my book memory.

I consulted my colleagues, my fixation reaching such a degree that poor Harriet tells of me pinning our designer to the wall, demanding five colour covers, exquisite paper, washed tops, strings, and every production frill for my beloved new idea. Penguin used a serious male thinker - Isaac Newton? - to advertise their classics. The Virago Modern Classics list was meant to be more ebullient, a library of women's fiction with Boadicea rather than Newton waving the flag. I chose green because it was neither blue for a boy nor pink for a girl. I saw in my mind rows of green paperbacks with luscious covers on all the bookshelves of the world. [Carmen Callil on Virago Modern Classics | Books | The Guardian]

I immediately bought the Barbara Pym from the anniversary set. Barbara Pym is being read in our house at the moment and Orla Kiely, a focus of our daughter's unfulfilled consumer interest for a while, designed the cover. It is a nice object to own.

Near these books was a selection from the publisher Persephone Books, and seeing them close by like that I wondered if the Persephone approach had influenced the Virago anniversary editions.

We have given much thought not only to the choice of titles we will publish but also to 'what women want'. Our books look beautiful because we believe that, whether they are on an office desk, by the Aga, or hanging in a bag over the handles of a buggy, it is important to get pleasure from how they look and feel....

...Fabrics are as much a part of our daily lives as furnishing and dress materials, yet we rarely see them used in any other context. However, fabric design should be celebrated for its own sake; and because it is a field in which women designers have been particularly prominent we would like to use their work whenever possible. [Persephone Books, rediscovered twentieth century novels, neglected women writers, twentieth century female authors, out of print books, inter-war novels]

Also on display in Heffer's was a table full of David Pearson's Books as History which I mentioned in these pages a while ago. His theme, I suggested, was that artifactual properties of books have historic, aesthetic or other interest independent of the texts they convey. Appropriately enough, then, you could buy a signed copy of the book.

In recent months, since reading David's book, I have been more conscious of the physical properties of the books I come across. And wandering around Heffer's, I did wonder if there was an increased focus on interesting covers or formats for some publishers, of which the Virago and Persephone books were striking examples.

In fact, I nearly bought Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it looked very nice, and had to hurry out of the shop before I got carried away.

Related entries:

The publisher and the translation

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:58:35 -0500

I got my copy of The London Review of Books in the mail (aka post) today. I had seen John Naughton discuss the review of a new translation of The Second Sex by Toril Moi (WC Identity) and I turned to read it.

The focus of the review is a critique of the translation, a not very good one Moi argues. One thing that struck me while reading it was the role of the publisher. This is especially in the light of current discussions about the publishing value chain as patterns of distribution change in a network environment.

Moi describes dissatisfaction with the earlier translation by H.M.Parshley, partly because it cut out about 15% of the text and partly for aspects of the translation. She cites an article by Margaret Simons drawing attention to the cuts, and notes:

After reading Simons's essay, Beauvoir replied: 'I was dismayed to learn the extent to which Mr Parshley misrepresented me. I wish with all my heart that you will be able to publish a new translation of it.'

Simons's discovery had no impact on Random House, which owns the English-language rights to the book through its imprints Knopf (for the hardback) and Vintage (for the paperback). By the time of the 50th anniversary of The Second Sex in 1999, there were still no plans for a new translation: that year, Elizabeth Fallaize and I decided to draw attention to the situation again. Fallaize, whose premature death at the end of last year Beauvoir scholars mourn, analysed the effects of the vast cuts Parshley made in the chapter on 'The Married Woman'. I wrote about Parshley's philosophical confusions, drew attention to a number of elementary French mistakes, and showed the way his mistranslations had affected recent feminist theory. I also wrote about the publication history, and stressed that Parshley should not be seen as the villain of the piece. A professor of zoology at Smith College, he was genuinely enthusiastic about Beauvoir's book. It was the publisher, not Parshley, who insisted on cutting the text; in the end he cut 145 of the original 972 pages, or almost 15 per cent of the original.

The strength of Parshley's 57-year-old translation is that it is lively and readable. Parshley was, on all evidence, an excellent writer of English. When he understood the French, he usually found the right phrase and managed to convey nuances of irony and poetry. The most serious weaknesses are the unannounced cuts; but his complete lack of familiarity with Beauvoir's philosophical vocabulary and the deficiencies in his knowledge of French also undermine his version of the book.

Demand for a new translation gathered force, but the publishers resisted. In 1988, Ashbel Green, then Knopf's vice president and senior editor, summarised their view: 'Our feeling is that the impact of de Beauvoir's thesis is in no way diluted by the abridgment.' After all, the book was making money: 'It's a very successful book that we want to continue publishing.'

In August 2004, Sarah Glazer published an article about the situation in the New York Times. Whether her article was the deciding factor is hard to say. In any case, at the end of 2005 Ellah Allfrey, then an editor at Cape, the British publisher of The Second Sex, persuaded Knopf to split the cost of a new translation. According to Le Monde the final cost was 35,000 (30,000 or $50,000), one third of which was paid by grants from the French state. [The adulteress wife. LRB 11 February 2010]

New translators were found.

In a 2007 interview with Sarah Glazer, published in Bookforum, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier dismissed doubts about their competence. They explained that they first heard about the problems with the English translation at the 50th anniversary conference on The Second Sex in Paris. After the conference, they contacted a former student, Anne-Solange Noble, the director of foreign rights at Gallimard, to propose themselves for the job, and in due course Noble told Allfrey that she 'already knew the perfect translators'.

Based on their earlier work, Toril Moi wonders about the translators' credentials. She then proceeds to deliver a very strong criticism of the new translation.

Now, it will be interesting to see how the publishers respond to this review, if they do at all, and whether they refute the charge that they have not been good stewards of a major work's English expression.

Repositories and the Cloud - tell us your views

It's now a little over a week to go until the Repositories and the Cloud

Google and usability

I made a somewhat negative (andadmittedlycompletely OTT) comment

Higher Education Leadership Summit 2010

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:43:04 -0500

I am attending the Higher Education Leadership Summit in London tomorrow (11 February 2010) which should be an interesting experience in many ways. Not least because I have been asked to provide some “live blogging” along with 3 other people working across the different strands of the conference. Cloudworks is being used to provide a [...]

European activity opense and oer in sweden

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:31:43 -0500

I attended a couple of different events in the last few days. I was at a meeting of the OpenSE project in Oxford. Blogged on olnet.org at http://olnet.org/node/252And I attended an OER in Sweden conference. Blogged on olnet.org at http://olnet.org/node/253One further comment – I stayed overnight when I went to Oxford (40 miles away) and [...]

OMG! Is That Me On The Screen?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:00:41 -0500

Yesterday a tweet from @josiefraser alerted me to the fact that “There’s a giant @briankelly on the screen!“. Josie went on to inform me (and her other followers) that my image was being used by “Kirsty McGill on remote audiences #transliteracy“. A few minutes later Josie tweeted “@briankelly now with added @briankelly http://u.nu/9dy25 #transliteracy“. There [...]

Bruges Public Library catalogue

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:11:02 -0500

Prompted by a recent entry, I got a note from Koen Calis, Librarian Bruges Public Library, about their catalogue, Cabrio. Here is quite a full presentation which covers a range of interesting feature:

Cabriology The Bruges Aquabrowser Experience

View more presentations from Koen Calis.

I was interested in their adaptation of my colleague Robin Murray's synthesise/specialise/mobilise framework to frame the discussion. In his note, Koen remarked that "Bruges Public library considers the horizontal discovery of local resources (heritage collections, community information, courses and events, local advisory data...) to be a very important starting point for redeveloping our library into a local knowledge hub and to enhance participation of the local community".

Virtual World Watch survey call for information

John Kirriemuir has issued a request for updated information for his his eighth Virtual World Watch "snapshot" survey of the use of virtual worlds in UK Higher and Further Education.

Previous survey reports can be found on the VWW site.

For further information about the sort of information John is after, see his post. He would like responses by the end of February 2010.

Our period of funding for this work is approaching its end, so this will be the last survey funded under the Eduserv Research Programme. John is planning to continue some Virtual World Watch activity, at least through 2010, as he indicates in this presentation which he gave to the recent "Where next for Virtual Worlds?" (wn4vw) meeting in London:

What Next For Virtual Worlds

View more presentations from Virtual World Watch.

The slides from the other presentations from the wn4vw meeting (including a video of the opening presentation by Ralph Schroeder) are also available here, and you can find an archive of tagged Twitter posts from the day here.

I enjoyed the meeting (even if I'm not sure we really arrived at many concrete answers to the question of "where next?"), but it also felt quite sad. It marked the end of the projects Eduserv funded in 2007 on the use of virtual worlds in education. That grants call was the first one I was involved with after joining Eduserv in 2006, and although it was an area that was completely new to me, the response we got, both in terms of the number of proposals and their quality, seemed very exciting. And I still look back on the 2007 Symposium as one of the most successful (if rather nerve-wracking at the time!) events I've been involved in. As things worked out, I wasn't able to follow the progress of the projects as closely as I'd have liked, but the recent meeting reminded me again of the strong sense of community that seems to have built up amongst researchers, learning technologists and educators working in this area, which seems to have outlived particular projects and programmes. Of course we only funded a handful of projects, and other funding agencies helped develop that community too (I'm thinking particularly of JISC with its Open Habitat project, and the EU MUVEnation project), but it's something I'm pleased we were able to contribute to in a small way.

Investigation into Challenges, Application and Benefits of Social Media in UK HEIs

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:00:17 -0500

A New ReportA new report on “An Investigation into the Challenges, Application and Benefits of Social Media in Higher Education Institutes” has just been published. This 28 page document was published by Jadu, a provider of Content Management Systems for public sector organisation.The ProcessSince I am aware there may be concerns in the sector related [...]

Let the bad times roll: Job losses bite into HE

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:39:00 -0500

One word for this story...

"Ouch"

Read more below:

Thousands to lose jobs as universities prepare to cope with cuts | Education | The Guardian: "Universities across the country are preparing to axe thousands of teaching jobs, close campuses and ditch courses to cope with government funding cuts, the Guardian has learned.

Other plans include using post-graduates rather than professors for teaching and the delay of major building projects. The proposals have already provoked ballots for industrial action at a number of universities in the past week raising fears of strike action which could severely disrupt lectures and examinations.

The Guardian spoke to vice-chancellors and other senior staff at 25 universities, some of whom condemned the funding squeeze as 'painful' and 'insidious'. They warned that UK universities were being pushed towards becoming US-style, quasi-privatised institutions.

The cuts are being put in place to cope with the announcement last week by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) that 449m equivalent to more than a 5% reduction nationally would be stripped out of university budgets.

The University and College Union (UCU) believes that more than 15,000 posts the majority academic could disappear in the next few years. Precise funding figures for each university will be released on 18 March."

Difficult times ahead. Could wax lyrical about this being an opportunity for efficiency savings, OER being mainstreamed into education, working smarter not harder, innovating our way out of a restrictive financial climate, opportunities for change etc. But... doesn't the above just suck? Bankers and governments get us into a financial nightmare... and Higher Education gets to pay a significant price as a result.

Ouch.

Patterns of publication and library collections as measure of technology shifts?

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:57:25 -0500

We were pleased to welcome Dr Michelle Alexopoulos from the University of Toronto to OCLC last week. Michelle is an economist whose recent research has focused on creating and analyzing new measures of technical change for developed economies.

The abstract of her talk gives a flavor of some of this work, and why it was of interest to us:

Can the patterns of library collections be used to measure economic growth and technological shifts? In this talk, Dr. Alexopoulos will unveil new indicators of technical change that, she argues, resolve many of the problems associated with traditional ones (e.g., research and development (R&D) intensity and patents). Dr. Alexopoulos' measures are primarily derived from previous unutilized information contained in MARC21 records (available from the Library of Congress and OCLC's WorldCat database) on new book titles in various fields of technology over the last century. Further, Dr. Alexopoulos will discuss how the indices are related to inputs into knowledge production (such as scientific advances and R&D), and demonstrate that the measures are closely correlated with the commercialization date of new technologies. Finally, she will highlight a number of questions that the new indicators can help answer. [Presentation splashpage]

We are very interested to see Worldcat data used in this way, alongside other sources of data about book publication and use (books in print data and sales data). It was interesting hearing Michelle describe some of the reasons why books - and library catalog data - was a good candidate as an indicator:

Book publication is linked to changes in knowledge (consider the appearance of manuals, how-to books, ...)
The timing is right: there is a good correspondence between the date of commercialization of a technology or process and the date of books published about it. This is supported by commercial interests of publishers in catching interest at the right time.
Library catalogs group books into subject classifications which can be useful for analysis purposes.

We will make the slides and audio of the presentation available soon. Some further details of the approach can be found in these publications:

Michelle Alexopoulos, "Read All About it!! What Happens Following a Technology Shock?" American Economic Review, forthcoming. Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 391 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/391.
Michelle Alexopoulos and Jon Cohen, "Volumes of Evidence--Examining Technical Change Last Century Through a New Lens." Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 392 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/392.
Michelle Alexopoulos and Jon Cohen, "Measuring Our Ignorance, One Book at a Time: New Indicators of Technical Change, 1909-1949" Journal of Monetary Economics 56 (4) (2009), 450-470. Available online as University of Toronto Department of Economics Working Paper 349 at: http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/349.

Incidentally, it was also quite interesting for OCLC colleagues to see an economist talk knowledgeably about the MARC format ;-)

H.264 Format Free To End Users Until (At Least) 2016

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:22:48 -0500

Shortly after I published my post on “iPad, Flash, HTML 5 andStandards” it seems that the an announcement was made regarding the licence conditions for Web use use of the H.264 video format. Philip Roy alerted me to a press release (PDF format) which announced that the licence deal for H.264 has just been extended [...]

Google Apps for Education

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:39:25 -0500

Many people have already mentioned that the Open University has adopted Google Apps for Education (including the OU official announcement, Will Woods, Niall Sclater, Tony Hirst, John Naughton). My department – the Institute of Educational Technology – hosted a workshop exploring the possibilities on 3 February. These are some notes I made in the discussion.BackgroundOn [...]

iPad, Flash, HTML 5 and Standards

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:11:43 -0500

Lack of Flash Support by the iPad – Bad News or Good?A post I wrote in November 2008 entitled “Why Did SMIL and SVGFail?” has been referenced by the Stevie 5 is Alive blog. The post on the lack of Flash support for the iPad device says “Apple: Thank You for Leaving FlashOut“.As the author, [...]

More famous than Simon Cowell

I wrote a blog post on my other, Blipfoto

Second Life, scalability and data centres

Interesting article about the scalability issues around Second Life, What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps

Data.gov.uk, Creative Commons and the public domain

In a blog post at Creative Commons, UK moves towards opening government data, Jane Park notes that the UK Government have taken a significant step towards the use of Creative Commons licences by making the terms and conditions for the data.gov.uk website compatible with CC-BY 3.0:

In a step towards openness, the UK has opened up its data to be interoperable with the Attribution Only license (CC BY). The National Archives, a department responsible for setting standards and supporting innovation in information and records management across the UK, has realigned the terms and conditions of data.gov.uk to accommodate this shift. Data.gov.uk is an online point of access for government-held non-personal data. All content on the site is now available for reuse under CC BY. This step expresses the UKs commitment to opening its data, as they work towards a Creative Commons model that is more open than their former Click-Use Licenses.

This feels like a very significant move - and one that I hadn't fully appreciated in the recent buzz around data.gov.uk.

Jane Park ends her piece by suggesting that "the UK as well as other governments move in the future towards even fuller openness and the preferred standard for open data via CC Zero". Indeed, I'm left wondering about the current move towards CC-BY in relation to the work undertaken a while back by Talis to develop the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

As Ian Davis of Talis says, Linked Data and the Public Domain:

In general factual data does not convey any copyrights, but it may be subject to other rights such as trade mark or, in many jurisdictions, database right. Because factual data is not usually subject to copyright, the standard Creative Commons licenses are not applicable: you cant grant the exclusive right to copy the facts if that right isnt yours to give. It also means you cannot add conditions such as share-alike.

He suggests instead that waivers (of which CC Zero and the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) are examples) are a better approach:

Waivers, on the other hand, are a voluntary relinquishment of a right. If you waive your exclusive copyright over a work then you are explictly allowing other people to copy it and you will have no claim over their use of it in that way. It gives users of your work huge freedom and confidence that they will not be persued for license fees in the future.

Ian Davis' post gives detailed technical information about how such waivers can be used.

Decommissioning / Mothballing Mailing Lists

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:00:37 -0500

The ContextIn response to my recent post about usage of JISCMail lists Nicole Harris pointed out some evidence of its popularity. It is clear that although in some sectors there may have been a migration to a diversity of communication and collaboration tools, other sectors are still well-served by email lists. This is particularly true [...]

All the news ...

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:01:18 -0500

My former OCLC colleague Eric Hellman has become one of the more interesting bloggers in our space. A little while ago he wrote about the acquisition of Liblime by PTFS. He made a general opening comment ...:

The library industry has likewise been troubled by misalignment of interests between the owners of the companies and their customers. That's why it's important for libraries to pay close attention to the frequent mergers and acquisitions of the companies that serve them. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League]

And goes on to talk about the rationale for open source (primarily to avoid vendor lock-in, Eric argues) and PTFS and Liblime positions in the market.

Here, for example, he talks about aspects of the library/vendor transaction from the vendor perspective ...

From the vendor's point of view, the sales process is very expensive. Promises to customize the system to address customer peculiarities are common, and these add to the cost of system maintenance. Once the system has been sold, a proprietary system vendor has a guarantee of continuing profits from support contracts. Only the vendor has the system knowledge (and sometimes even the system access) to make even the most trivial changes. It's in the support phase that the vendor and customer interests can become misaligned. The vendor has every incentive to do the least work at the highest price possible. The customer is locked into whatever system they have chosen. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League]

.... and here he talks about open source ..

The recent popularity of open source library management systems is in large part a search for business models that better align the interests of vendor and customer during the support phase. If the support vendor doesn't perform to the library's expectations, the library can hire a new support vendor without ditching their automation system. If a library wants to add a new feature to their system, or integrate it with a system from another vendor, they can hire a developer based on qualifications rather than access to source. The important thing to the library is not so much the access to source or the cost of the license, it's the absence of vendor lock-in. [PTFS to Acquire LibLime and Move to Library Systems Premier League]

The entry was informative and interesting. I may disagree with detail or emphasis (other factors are clearly in play in the current interest in open source for example) but - importantly - my thinking has been influenced by it.

When I finished reading it I was also struck by how unusual it is to read something like this in the sources where you might expect it, in the library 'journalism'. In general we are not well-served by library journalism (I am thinking of what is published in our 'trade magazines': American Libraries, Library Journal, CILIP Update, ...) when it comes to this type of 'business' analysis. Our discussions are poorer for it.

Openness? No Thanks, Ill Have An iPad

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:31:25 -0500

After month’s of speculation the iPad was announced yesterday And after a day in which many Twitterers were responding to Steve Jobs’ announcement today we say the headlines in the press. The main photograph on the front page of The Daily Telegraph feeatured Steve Jobs with Apple’s latest creation and in an unusual display of [...]

Links for 2010-01-26 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500

Why Linked Data for data.gov.uk? | Jeni's Musings
Well argued - and accessible - case for why it makes sense to use Linked Data for government data.
A survey of the use of Web 2.0 tools and services in the UK HE sector [pdf]
A Shared Infrastructure Services Landscape Study on the current use of web stuff in higher ed. Everyone who uses this stuff knows this stuff. So why do these reports kep getting written? To document what's been happening so we can remind ourselves of the backstory in years to come? A little bit of me thinks I should read these reports as some sort of personal sanity check. But there are so many of them, and very often they appear not to say anything new at all?
Six Simple Techniques for Presenting Data: Hans Rosling (TED, 2006)
Tips on how to make a data rich presentation engaging rather than confusing or deathly dull...

Use of Web 2.0 in Australian Universities

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:24:43 -0500

The JISC-funded Shared Infrastructure Services (SIS) Landscape Study has published two reports which describe how Web 2.0 is being used in higher educational institutions in the UK and Australia. The two surveys allow comparisons to be made across these two countries. This work was coordinated by my UKOLN colleagues Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell, who [...]

STRIDE E-Learning Handbook

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:00:16 -0500

Last year I received an invitation to contribute to an e-learning handbook which was being produced by the Indira Gandhi National Open University. My contribution focussed on best practices for making use of Web-based slide hosting services such as Slideshare. I’m pleased to say that the handbook, theSTRIDE Handbook 8 on E-Learning, is now available [...]

My Significant Drop in Use of JISCMail Lists

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:00:35 -0500

Back in October 2005 I gave a talk entitled “Email Must Die!” at the Internet Librarian International 2005 (ILI) Conference. The following summary of the talk was published in Elucidate (Vol. 3 Issue 1, January/February 2006 ISSN: 1742-5921 – PDF format):“One particularly provocative paper was from Brian Kelly, Email Must Die!, in which he suggests [...]

eLearning Pedagogy Speak Generator

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:07:00 -0500

For those moments when you need to find that latest bit of eLearning pedagogical terminology in an important meeting for high-level funding, I thought you might like my eLearning Pedagogy generator.

Feel free to use at will. :o)

Save 1million and Move to the Cloud?

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:00:04 -0500

University of Westminster Deploys Google AppsBefore Christmas a message on the UCISA-Announce JISCMail list provided details of aUniversity of Westminster goes Google Case Study. The email described how:“When the University of Westminster asked students what campus email system they wanted, 90% requested Google Apps, which lets colleges and universities provide customized versions of Gmail, Google [...]

Twitter: Part of the Plumbing

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:48:19 -0500

Part of the PlumbingA tweet from @scilib alerted me to a New Year’s day post entitled “Why Twitter Will Endure” published in the New York Times.David Carr described how his first reaction on encountering Twitter, less than a year ago, was a feeling that “the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion [...]

Links for 2010-01-18 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:00:00 -0500

TeachMeet Takeover | edte.ch
A brilliant idea. Folk take over presentation stands at trade shows for an hour. Brings people onto the stand (not necessarily to hear about your product, but at least it brings them there).I fancy a twist on this idea - flashmobs around a stand where a practitioner goes to a stand selling a product they use, and doing a presentation about the product and its real world use from their perspective to any folk who are interested ;-) Could be done as part of a show and tell style walking tour!

Call for Speakers at IWMW 2010: The Web in Turbulent Times

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:00:49 -0500

Call For Submissions to IWMW 2010We have recently announced the call for speakers and workshop facilitators at UKOLN’s annual Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW). This year’s event, IWMW 2010, which is the fourteenth in the series of events aimed at members of institutional Web management teams across UK higher educational institutions and related organisations, will [...]

Whats The Score? And Whose Score Is It, Anyway?

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 06:46:11 -0500

What’s the Score?What was the score in yesterday’s Chelsea versus Sunderland game? The final score was 7-2 – and according to the BBC Web site the score at one stage was simultaneously 5-0, 5-1 and 6-1!I managed to capture a screen image showing this inconsistency. This was slightly cumbersome to do as for my first [...]

Time For A Blog Revival?

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:07:38 -0500

Blogging Is Dead?In June last year Brian Clarke described on the Copyblogger bloghow “Blogging is Dead (Again)“. The apparent demise of blogs was also discussed in a blog post (!) published on the Technovia blog in December: “2009 was the year tech blogging died“.The truth is somewhat different than those headlines suggest; indeed the [...]

Google docs and sharing stored files

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:50:00 -0500

Just noticed a nice new little feature in Google Docs - the ability to upload any type of file without having it converted to a Google Docs. Now, I know this seems like a pretty minor feature but it's actually going to be a useful little bunny to know about if you don't want Google stripping out the formatting for a document you just want to store and share with others. Okay, so there are better services for file sharing which allow you more than the 1GB / 25oMB per file limit imposed by Google (the superb Dropbox is one which immediately pops into my head), but you have to love the convenience... again... of Google allowing you to just get stuff done via a simple tweak to a service.

Stuff which Google has tweaked in Docs lately which has made a difference:

1. File storage without converting your file

2. Sharable folders

3. Bulk uploads

4. Translation of words, phrases or entire pages into any of 40+ languages.

What's not to like?

Sarah 'I sold my soul to Google but I liked what I got in return' Horrigan :o)

Google is out of the (consumer) hardware market

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:38:18 -0500

There’s plenty of comment around on the implications of Google’s announcement about China. Some of these are pretty big geopolitical issues. (For a route in, you can’t do better than John Naughton’s recent posts on what it reveals about business ethics, censorship, and the Chinese Government.)There’s also the impact on technology specifically. Much has been [...]

Reflections on CETISs Future of Interoperability Standards Meeting

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:30:31 -0500

On Tuesday I attended a “Future of Interoperability Standards” meeting which was organised by JISC CETIS. The interest in the subject area can be gauged by the popularity of the meeting with about 40 people managing to arrive at Bolton despite the problems with the snow, with attendees travelling from as far as Belgium, Norway, [...]

How I Use Creative Commons For My Presentations

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:39:32 -0500

“Provide Case Studies”Following my recent post in which I highlighted Glyn Moody’s concerns regarding “Threats to Openness” I received a tweet from @Brunella in which she suggested that she would prefer specific details based on case studies as opposed, I imagine, to a generic call to embrace openness.The Spirit Is Willing; The Content is Complex!Coincidentally [...]

Cuts will bring us to our knees

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:38:18 -0500

May 1997 was an exciting time for many – the Labour party back in power after many years in opposition – and one of the key mantras back then was “Education, education, education”. And despite the many failings of the New Labour experiment we did see significant investments in education with even the Daily [...]

And to sum up...

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:12:00 -0500

Well - after a frantic couple of months (parents ill, I moved house, waiting for exam results - passed my MEd - woo hoo!, job changes at work, piles of marking, swine flu, sick children etc etc etc)... I just thought I'd pop onto my blog to say 'hello' and to reflect, briefly, on this year's bits and bobs.

2009 Highlights
So... my highlights from this year:

1. Social networking makes your brain turn to mush
2. But it's okay... because just about everything else gives you cancer anyway
3. The VLE was dead
4. Then it wasn't
5. Twitter took over the world
6. While Google Wave-d
7. Microsoft Bing-ed... then got sued for binging and their Word was no longer law
8. And Facebook kept managing to annoy people for messing with layouts and privacy settings
9. But it still won the battle of the social networks
10. And Apps were 'it'

Reading stuff
Oh, and when time got tight and I was under pressure, I still found time to catch up with Steve Wheeler's excellent Learning with 'e's, John Connell and Martin Weller's ed tech goodness, Jane Knight's tool recommendations, Mashable's stream of social media goodness, educational goings on with The Guardian and ReadWriteWeb for their tech trend interpretations.

Tech stuff
I also still love Google Reader, Delicious , YouTube, Blogger, Google Docs, SlideShare and Twitter

... while Slideboom, WordPress, Plurk, ScreenToaster and Diigo have also emerged as useful tools during the past 12 months.

However, SecondLife I still don't get but nor do others, Google Notebook was quietly left to die,
Etherpad sparkled with usefulness then disappeared and Google Wave is very, very alpha and I'm waiting for the lightbulb moment with it.

And next year?
But... next year will be another year of ed tech loveliness, I'm sure. Funding crisis in HE or no, there's always interesting stuff happening and with luck... we'll find ways of making learning more interesting, relevant and (dare I say it?) engaging for everyone concerned.

Seeing how people really use online technology with the Tobii eye-tracker

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:14:22 -0500

Liveblog notes from an IET Technology Coffee Morning, 16 December 2009.Presenters: Patrick McAndrew, Graham Healing, with input from Elpida Makriyannis and Anne AdamsWe have a Tobii eye-tracker in the labs, which isn’t used as heavily as it could be. Aim for today is to show how easy it is to use, and explore some of [...]

Scaffolding and online synchronous communications

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:09:00 -0500

Steve Wheeler has just posted something interesting about the ZPD and scaffolding in his 'always worth a read' (Sarah's Made-Up-Taxonomy of blog types, 2009) blog. Anyway, he posted it and it reminded me that I'd been interested in just this thing a few months ago when I was doing my research project to finish off my MEd. I was interested in the impact of a tutor when students were learning in an online synchronous (chat) environment. I wanted to know what happened to any conversation and associated learning... and whether or not the tutor's presence enriched the experience.

Anyway, I ran my research project and got some interesting results. Although the activity itself was fairly carefully constructed so as to provide a light scaffolding for the main body of discussion and the environment was controlled so that I was able to compare both sessions - how each discussion evolved was up to the participants. Different types of reflection were evident in the session with the tutor present and that which took place when just the students were around. The flow of the conversation altered. The type of questions and responses changed. Students seemed to be more passive in the tutor-led session and although there was plenty of conversation, the expectation seemed to be that the tutor was in the driving seat and the ownership of that communication shifted noticably.

If, having read the above blurb, you'd like to read the full report of the research I carried out, then feel free!

Enabling Greater Accessibility

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:32:14 -0500

Live notes from IET Technical Coffee Morning – Robin Stenham on accessibility.Accessibility is one of the things I particularly care about so it’s good to have this session.Robin is Manager – Curriculum Access in Disabled Student Services. Two main areas of responsibility: single enquiry point for students (or their intermediaries) about the interface between their [...]

Twitter lists as online identity

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:28:00 -0500

In the last few weeks, Twitter lists have appeared on the scene. I've seen a few useful bits and bobs about the lists and how they might be used (Mashable has some good ideas) but the thing that surprised me most of all was that Twitter lists are an interesting tool to discover a little more about your own online identity. All you need to do is to see what lists you're on by clicking on the 'listed' link on your profile. Simple, huh?

It's interesting to see other people's perceptions of you. Me, I seem to feature on a fair few elearning / ed tech lists (as well as my favourites so far 'fab education folk' and 'geek girls'!) as well as a few Open University ones. It's interesting to see where you're being placed and how much control (or not!) you have over your online identity. It reveals, also, your main purpose for using Twitter. I tend to use it to communicate with others in ed tech. There are other places where I might talk about other bits of my life / personality... but I've always been fairly purposeful where Twitter's concerned. Other people may find that they feature on a wider variety of lists... but either way... have a look... it's really interesting to see where you fit in to Twitter's strange patchwork of communication!

PS Until someone puts you in a comedy list and you think 'Eh? How did that happen???!' :o)

Literacy in the Digital University

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:02:57 -0500

Liveblog notes from a presentation by Robin Goodfellow. Part of an ESRC Seminar Series on Literacy in the Digital University, which has its own blog. Of course. Also has an ordinary dull website.(Robin’s notes and PowerPoint are available – to OU people – on the Knowledge Network)Update: Andreia Santos also liveblogged the session.LiteracyThere’s an idea [...]

101 Reasons why Google are taking over the world...

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:47:00 -0400

Get Your Files Out of Google Docs With New Export Options:

"... today, Google announced the Convert, Zip and Download feature in Google Docs to tackle this challenge. The new features make it a simple two step process to pull down any and all the Google (Google) documents of your choosing (up to 500 MB), convert them to your preferred file types, and zip them up in a concrete package you can download and save to your desktop."

Gotta love 'em... Google sure are chomping away at the online / offline connected world.

More and more I find I'm using Google docs for collaborative editing rather than entering into track changes hell with Microsoft Word. More and more I'm using Google sites as a wiki rather than faffing about with using other wiki tools (WetPaint withdrawing its ad-free education version forced me to see what Google were up to). More and more I'm using Google forms for surveys / quick an' easy booking systems. And now, I get to not just create stuff online with them, but I can quickly pull all that Googly goodness off the system. More and more I'm using Google to find ways around the red tape / processes which infest institutional systems and make it so painfully difficult to innovate.

Actually, you don't need 101 reasons why they're taking over.

There's really only one: Google get it.

Library learning

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:22:00 -0400

An observation.

The Educational Development Unit where I work is based in the main University library. Last week we had a few powercuts in the library building. As on any normal weekday, there were loads of students in the building. Hardly any spare desks available. Then, the power went off. Though there was no power, but it was still perfectly light enough to work - the only thing missing was the computing facilities and the artificial light. Still lots of books. Lots of desks. Lots of places to read. Lots of places to write.

What happened?

The library emptied.

With no computing resources available, the students left. Virtually all of them. Gone.

Just an observation.

Reserving judgement

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:16:00 -0400

Okay, so... like lots of people I got a Google Wave invite... which was jolly nice, especially if you're a bit of an 'ooooooh, what's that shiny thing over there' kinda girl, which I am. However, I've been struggling to contain my high levels of underwhelm at the moment. I've got a few contacts now, but no real purpose for using it... and the only uses I've seen so far are for what are essentially fancy, collaborative lists. Which is nice. But... not inspiring.

However... two and a half years ago, I remember seeing the following on a blog...

"I have to say if someone I knew thought they should be sending me texts, e-mails, IMs etc about the fact that they were just off to the loo and wouldn't be around for five minutes, I'd be seriously considering turning off my computer forever, bricking up the windows and becoming a hermit. Has the world honestly gone bonkers? My 'persistent presence' is that I'm here. I know I'm here. I don't really care if you are aware of that fact 24/7 and you know what? I'm betting you don't either. Where's the separation between public and private? Doesn't part of that separation exist because we simply don't have time to care about the meaningless minutiae of each other's lives. Isn't it okay not to care????

So... You had tuna in your sandwich... but you thought you might have cheese... it took you three bites and a sip of tea to consume it, lasted precisely 2 minutes of your day and another half a minute in which you wondered if there was a little too much mayo and not quite enough salad. I DON'T CARE! Please, if you're struggling to say something to me today, don't bother. Just take time out for yourself. I don't sweat the small stuff in my own life, and I sure don't want to sweat it in yours either!!

Blogging - okay... now get it.
Microblogging - NO! NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!

PS. NO!!!
PPS. There. That feels better
PPPS. I'm about to have porridge for breakfast. With raisins. A dash of milk. A cup of tea. I may or may not yawn half way through doing so...
PPPPS See - you don't care either. :o)"

... and could tell that that person really didn't think much of Twitter at all. They were seriously dismissive of it as a technology and weren't going to give it a fair go. Microblogging - no, no and a bit more no!

Thing is. That person was me.

And once I got off my negative high horse and found a purpose for it other than the use suggested by the service, just fill in the answer to: 'what are you doing'... and instead built a network... and made connections... then. Then, it had real value.

So. Rather than being the person who makes dreadful dismissive statements about Wave, I'm going to let the dust settle. Keep an eye out. Keep on having a go... and find my own way in. Or at least, give it a proper chance to be what it will be.

OLnet regular meetings

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:34:54 -0400

As well as iSpot, one of my big current projects is OLnet, which aims to research Open Educational Resources (OER) and the OER community, and to support the OER community in developing its research capabilities.We want to model being open in what we’re doing, so we’ve decided to liveblog our regular team meetings – you [...]

iSpot helps six-year-old spot new-to-Britain moth

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:35:59 -0400

Katie Robbins, a six-year-old living near Newbury, spotted an interesting moth on a windowsill. She and her Dad couldn’t identify what it was, so her Dad put a picture of it on iSpot, the nature identification website produced by the OU as part of the OPAL project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund. (I’m leading [...]

Poor neglected blog

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:38:17 -0400

Nearly coming up on an anniversary of my last post to this blog has made me reflect on why I seem to have drifted away from the process of getting ideas out through my own blog. Certainly part of it is sheer lack of time (and possibly ideas!) but it also reflects the choice of [...]

On boring VLEs

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:39:00 -0400

Federal Upset
Originally uploaded by Shermeee
I did a staff development session today on some new tools in the University's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and on the way in to the session (no-one knew it was me delivering the session which put me in a great position for eavesdropping pre-match conversation!) I heard several people chatting about 'another dull VLE session', 'the VLE is so boring' etc and although I get where they're coming from, I do wonder why people get so hung up on the tool itself. I know I probably veer towards the more personalized learning environment camp, but even then, they're all just tools and it's what you do with them that's interesting.

Anyway, I got into the session and made a start and asked them who thought that the VLE was dull... best to tackle this stuff head on, I reckon! So, a few hands went up. 'How many of you... honestly?' - a few more hands went up. Y'know. I agree. It's just a 'thing' after all, isn't it? A shell with some bits and bobs you may or may not use.

So, I moved on. I asked, 'How many of you put your lecture PowerPoints in the VLE?'. Lots of hands. 'How many of you provide anything more than your lecture notes? Anyone put any additional activities in there?'... no hands. I asked them what that might feel like for their students. Was that an interesting or helpful place to be once you'd downloaded those PowerPoints? Were those PowerPoints really that helpful without anything else? Were they engaging? Have to say, there wasn't a great deal of nodding at this point!

I then got them to imagine a really great learning experience that they'd had while they were at school or university and what made it great. I then asked the group 'did anyone's great experience involve a great teacher?' Hands. 'A really great subject area?' A few more. 'A really great activity or experience?'. Lots of hands and nodding. 'Did anyone's great experience involve how brilliant the room was where the learning happened? How great the chair was they were sitting on? How great the desk was they were using? The pen? Anyone particularly excited by the pen they were using?'. No-one.

Y'know. I think I actually heard the penny drop as they realised that it's what you do with something that makes it good and not the places or tools which make it extra special. It's funny how quick we are to blame an environment and forget that inspiring teaching and learning is about the people and the players. As adults we look at an empty cardboard box and see it as a storage device. Somewhere to put 'stuff'. As children we looked at that same cardboard box and saw a plane. A car. A train. An adventure waiting to happen. What happened to our own creativity? It seems like we get confronted by a 'virtual learning environment' and think that's enough. The learning will happen regardless of the effort we put into it. Wrong! So, so wrong! When eLearning works, it's an amazing, interesting, vibrant, evolving, engaging, rich space. When it's just a shell. A place to download PowerPoints... boy oh boy is it a sad bag.

I admit it. VLEs are dull. But what goes on inside them doesn't need to be dull. Here's to opening up the box and seeing what you can really do with it and putting an end to using VLEs as document dumping grounds. Days where you get to see people imagining bucketloads of learning potential and want to hold onto it themselves. Coming up with ideas as you're talking and scribbling them down as quick as they can. Now, those are the really great eLearning days. :o))

Windows 7 for 30

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:14:00 -0400

Just to alert students that you'll be able to get Windows for £30 for a limited time from 30th September if you sign up for the offer using your University email address. There are more details here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/studentoffer/default.aspx. I used Windows 7 for a few months, and I have to say that it was a lot easier on the eye than Windows Vista (there's a thorough technical evaluation for you!), and, apart from a couple of specific driver problems, very stable, so if you've a fairly modern PC this will be well worth it.

The 10 PowerPoint Commandments

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:25:00 -0400

For the past week or two I've been involved in various staff development / conference bits an' bobs and my head is jam-full of PowerPoint loathing. It is such an uninspiring tool... or rather, it is used in such an uninspiring way, so much of the time.

So, wanting not to fall into that trap myself (though I'm sure I've done some of these - I have vague memories of thinking the typewriter entrance effect was cool at one point!), I'm going to set myself 10 PowerPoint Commandments:

1. Thou shalt have other tricks up your sleeve as well as PowerPoint
2. Thou shalt not use rubbish quality images or diagrams
3. Thou shalt not use stupid effects
4. Thou shalt restrict bullet points
5. Honour thy audience's eyesight
6. Thou shalt not bore
7. Thou shalt not use the slides as speaker notes
8. Thou shalt master the slide controls before the presentation
9. Thou shalt be concise
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's Prezi... learn to present well without any props first

If I don't have to use PowerPoint, I'm not going to. When I do, it should be in a purposeful manner. If I ever catch myself simply reading the slide contents out to the audience, I'm going to take myself straight home and read to my kids instead. They like me reading to them... I'm sure the rest of the world doesn't. :o)

So there!

Incoming SMS number

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:38:00 -0400

We've just added an incoming SMS number to our text messaging service. We're going to build a few proof of concept applications showing various ways it could be used, for example as an voting system, and as a way of gathering feedback either in real time or not.

If you've got any ideas or example of similar use then get in touch.

ALT-C '09

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:07:00 -0400

For the past three days I've been tootling to and fro going up to Manchester for ALT-C 2009 and although I'm a bit shattered (understatement of the year) it was a really useful experience. While it is still fresh in my head, and before I crash out, here are my five highlights from ALT-C:

1. The VLE is Dead debate. Okay, not so much debating as a good ol' e-learning ding dong with no winner declared... but the best thing about that? Hearing people getting really engaged and passionate about e-learning! So often we get stuck in the mire of everyday institutional / academic battles and forget that e-learning has the capacity to really grip you and get you thinking. About its complexity. Its potential. Its issues. Its benefits. Drawback. The whole good, bad and ugly shebang.

2. Jonathan Drori's talk on making successful pilots and 'being mighty'. A super talk and he came up with 10 great pieces of advice about projects, so, in reverse order, here's his top 10:

10. Understand the barriers - cost, relevance, ease of use, experience, talent, resources, coherence. Be honest about the talent! This one is hard to do!

9. Think about who are you trying to impress!

8. Sort out project management from editorial leadership

There is a confusion between what is project management and what is editorial leadership and you need to know the difference between the two. In other words, you need someone to say 'that's a bit crap' and take that role in the project - it can make or break a project!

7. Ensure everyone understands the pilot! Seems obvious but so often we skip straight into what the project is now doing rather than giving it a background and contextual description

6. Understand where your pilot fits in

Whereabouts on this chain...

stimulate interest > engage > guide > communicate > create or 'do' something

... does your project sit?

Try to create virtuous circles

5. Choose good measures of success - make the measures make sense!

4. Partnerships - on this... when encountering new partnerships ask this question...

- what does each partner say they want?

then work out this one...

- what do they actually want?

No matter what they say, they may well also want a mix of the following: political influence / power / limelight / money / credit

Universities want some combination of the above - but contextualized
Personal agrandizement is also important!

3. Know everything you can about your audiences - don't just look at the known

2. A word on new formats and services - sketch it out using a storyboard. It's cheap, efficient and can open dialogues with people who should then be able to understand what your project is about

1. Is something missing? Ask yourself this question! Are you testing the wrong thing?

A useful and interesting talk and grounded in lots and lots of experience of projects, which was excellent. I loved his closing thought:

"Meet your audiences. Fiddle. Be curious!"

It should be every e-learning bod's mantra.

3. Excellent opportunity for putting faces to names - even though I did get the carbon footprint conference guilts from Terry Anderson's keynote you can't beat a bit of face to face stuff and I wish that the packed timetable and stupid amount of commuting I was doing had allowed for more chatting. :o)

4. Some great keynotes from Terry Anderson, Michael Wesch and Martin Bean and following the #altc2009 hash tag throughout their presentations gave a good sense of what was relevant to the audience too. Nice way to capture the 'relevance flavour of the month'.

5. The CrowdVine site - worked well and was a useful way to network pre-conference. Liked it and good to see that it was used by most people attending ALT-C.

Okay, so those are my five main highlights. What made the not so good list?

1. The catering!!! Absolute rubbish! Well, unless you like a queue, cheap biscuits, limited drinks and soggy pasta o'course.

2. The lack of quiet spaces to chill out. A seriously noisy venue and for little ol' me who has a bit of a struggle with tinnitus at the best of times, it made networking tricky.

3. PowerPoint overload. I came across presentations with too many slides. Too many notes per slide. Too quick transitions. Presenters simply reading out the contents of their slides. And a generally uninspiring PowerPoint-fest. There has to be a better way than PowerPointing everything. And I can feel a PowerPoint boycott coming on while I work out what that might be.

4. Hashtag spam on the Twitter feed for the conference. Must try to find ways of filtering spam when using hashtag aggregation for events... it's not good on any level.

Okay, am slinking off to collapse. Hopefully will get my 'thinking about it all' head back on soon once I've got a tad of energy back! I'll leave you with my twice-daily view of the Peak District which I had the pleasure of seeing on my gargantuan commute!

Lock Down Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:28:00 -0400

I have a question which goes round and round in my head and it concerns trust. In fact, it concerns trust of adult students / employees and the conflict with a web 2.0 / user-generated world. Why don't we trust people? In fact, I can tie it down a little further.... why do we only trust people when we feel that it doesn't really matter?

Here's an example. An institution has a stance whereby constructivist learning is promoted. Students should 'own' their learning. They should construct their own knowledge. Be critical. Thinking. Reflecting students. We want them to engage and be interested in what they study. But... we put those flowing, interesting, fluid notions of ownership and contextualisation and shove them into a VLE. We encourage people in with the idea that these tools have potential and the capacity to offer them a useful learning environment... then, it seems, we slam the door shut behind them and tie down all the tools until our systemic desire for control is satisfied - "what if someone's offended?", "what if they sue us?", "what about quality control?", "what about... what about... what about...?". "Oh, just turn it off, that'll be easier".

Nominally, we want them to learn it 'their' way, but the reality is that we don't feel comfortable if we're not learning 'our' way. Why don't we trust people? As soon as something becomes institutionally hosted then issues of liability, reputation and administrative control rear their heads and lock down ensues.

Is it any wonder why systems get only a token use? Is it any wonder why students are out there every day using their own tools and systems - making choices, being supported by their peers, when we're too scared to let go just a little. Unless, of course, it's behind closed doors and it doesn't really matter anyway. Are VLEs symptomatic of 'lock down learning'? Where's the trust? What would the educational landscape really be like if we put some real control in the hands of users?

I've just read 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky (yeah, late to the party, I know!) - and it occurs to me that what if our VLEs aren't a case of 'here comes everybody', but instead result in 'there goes everybody' as the PLE offers the flexibility and personalisation which makes learning really meaningful?

PS Thanks to AJ Cann and Steve Wheeler for feeding my inner rant. :o)

Web2practice from NetSkills

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:51:00 -0400

Guides to emergent technologies and innovative practiceAre you thinking about using web2tools for research, administration or teaching? If so, make a quick start with the web2practice user guides.The web2practice guides explain how emergent web technologies like RSS, microblogging, podcasting and social media can enhance your working practice. Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts (such as microblogging in the example below), supported by a more in-depth guide covering potential uses, risks and how to get started.

Netskills: Web2practice

Useful guides from JISC - giving a bit of heavyweight legitimacy to things regularly dismissed as superfluous / superficial / damaging. Good to see and handy to bookmark!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Three cool tools

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:56:00 -0400

I'm always trying out new tools. Some of them make me go 'hmmm'. Some of them make me go 'nice idea'. Some of them make me go 'ooooooh, that could work in x scenario'. Others... I really get using and they become part of my online toolkit.

So, here are three which have taken pride of place on my virtual mantelpiece in the last few months:

Doodle.com - unbelievably simple to use tool to schedule meetings. You just create a free account, give your event a name... put in some suggested days / times... and send out the URL to others who simply enter their names and select their preferred times. The beauty of it is that you get to see at a glance what times work... what time the majority can make and it doesn't matter what diary system / calendar people use, this is just a click, click, click and you're done kinda thing:

Another great tool is Dropbox - if you work on more than one computer and want to move files from machine to machine, keeping them all in sync is a pain. With dropbox, you set up a free account (which gives you up to 2GB of free space) and your files are synced via the secure online Dropbox. Doesn't matter what operating system you're using - it just works. I have a PC at work, PC, MacBook Pro and Linux netbook at home... if I want to work on a file and I know I'm going to need access on a number of different machines, I just put it into my dropbox. On Windows it installs as a folder in your My Documents area / as an icon in the status bar. On a Mac it appears in the Finder and the top menu. No more copying stuff onto a USB stick / e-mailing it to yourself - if you have an internet connection, you file will be updated. But... if you want to roll it back to a previous version, then you've got 30 days to sort that out. Oh, and you can also share your Dropbox folders with others. Love it!

My final new tool is Mindomo - it's a terrific, free online mind-mapping tool and it's even won me away from MindMeister which I liked for years. The advantages of this? Well, once you ignore the Google ads down the right hand side, is that it's seriously feature rich, collaborative and really flexible to use. Work on your maps online, import from Freemind or export as a pdf / rtf / xml file / an image file. It's a bit Microsoft Office 2007 / 2008-ish in appearance and it doesn't feel like 'free'. :o)

So... there ya go. Three free, simple, online tools which have 'stuck' in the past three months: Doodle, Dropbox and Mindomo.

Anyone else got any recent favourites?

10 Pleasing MacBook Pro keyboard shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:30:00 -0400

Being a total Mac newbie (well, I last had a Mac five or six years ago, so it's pretty much all new), I'm finding out some handy things which I thought might be useful for other people too. So... here goes my 10 handy keyboard shortcuts:

1. There's no hashtag key on my MacBook Pro keyboard - to enter a hashtag you need to press alt and 3 together

2. You can get a whole load more symbols by pressing the alt key and another key... here are some useful ones:

alt + 2 =
alt + 0 =
alt + 8 =
alt + r =
alt + w =
alt + p =
alt + s =
alt + g =
alt + ; =
alt + x =
alt + c =
alt + / =

3. There's no delete key, only backspace. To forward delete just press fn and backspace

4. If you want to delete one word at a time, press alt and backspace

5. Pressing F12 brings up the Dashboard gadgets. Press it again and the Dashboard disappears again

6. Pressing F11 moves everything so you can see the desktop. Pressing it again brings everything back.

7. When you're in your web browser, press F6 and you select everything in the address bar

8. Press F9 and you can toggle through all open windows

9. To select words one word at a time, hold down alt, shift and press the left cursor key

10. To quit any application, press cmd and q

That'll do for now! My closet nerdness loves finding keyboard shortcuts! :o)

The joy of the Fail Whale

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:51:00 -0400

Nice little piece in the New Scientist about Twitter and its delicate disposition...

Innovation: Why don't users mind when Twitter breaks? - tech - 10 August 2009 - New Scientist:

"The strong roller-coaster-riding community of Twitter, by contrast, have tied their personas to the service. They simply embraced the fail, enjoyed taking a break from maintaining their 140-character selves, and prepared to celebrate when the service came back."

Yup, people hate Facebook, Google, Amazon etc going down... but there's a certain humour in the fail whale-ness of Twitter going down the loo yet again. A sign of an immature service or one that's got its users on-side from the start in terms of allowing itself to have a wry sense of humour?

Maybe it's just because it's not seen as corporate as the others on the failure hit-list? Maybe it's not seen as essential as the failure hit-list? Maybe it's a bit more opt in... which means temporary 'opt-out' isn't as painful?

Who knows? Fail Whaling (spotting and celebrating the appearance of a Twitter Fail Whale) seems to have an opposite reaction to most systems failures. Bet you any money IS departments all over would kill for that kind of sympathetic, forgiving band of users! :o)

Changing online demographics...

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:38:00 -0400

It's SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites | Media | The Guardian:

"From uncles wearing skinny jeans to mothers investing in ra-ra skirts and fathers nodding awkwardly along to the latest grime record, the older generation has long known that the surest way to kill a youth trend is to adopt it as its own. The cyberworld, it seems, is no exception.

The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom.

The sites, once the virtual streetcorners, pubs and clubs for millions of 15- to 24-year-olds, have now been over-run by 25- to 34-year-olds whose presence is driving their younger peers away."

Where are they going then?

Interesting!

Social Swine flu fever

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:39:00 -0400

This week I have mostly been ignoring swine flu...

Universities prepare for swine flu worst as nurseries take away soft toys | Education | guardian.co.uk:

"The guide for childminders tells them: 'Try to avoid children sharing soft toys as these are hard to clean adequately; you may find it easier to avoid using soft toys altogether. Clean hard toys after use as the virus can survive on hard surfaces.'

The guidance for schools and nurseries says: 'Discourage the sharing of pencils, crayons and pens during a pandemic. Encourage the wiping and cleaning of hands and objects when passing round objects like musical instruments or toys. Do not allow children to share musical instruments.'

A spokesman from the DCSF said: 'We are not suggesting taking all toys out of play settings, just to take care with the use of shared toys, which can be a way of spreading infection. This is about striking a sensible balance between continuing life as normal but also taking simple, common sense steps to protect children.'"

... and watching the world going mad. "Kids. Don't share your teddies. No! Don't!!! Those soft toys are evil. Burn them! Burn them all!!!!" *sigh*

Okay, so my 3 and 6 yr olds have had it... but it was JUST FLU... okay. Honestly. They didn't turn into piglets (they may eat like them, but appearances can be deceptive)... they didn't turn violet... they didn't... well... they didn't do much really. They had flu.

Paranoia about Swine Flu and the Gartner Hype cycle... I bet there's a relationship which is pretty much identical. I also wonder if our increasingly virtually connected world is heightening that sense of paranoia. Before we may or may not have known someone who was poorly. Now, through status updates and Tweets etc... everyone is now a 'friend' and it seems closer and more dangerous than it is.

PS I've also got a bit of a chest infection. A bit of a chest infection. And. It's. Not. Swine. Flu. Honestly!

Return of the Mac...

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:00:00 -0400

I just bought myself a MacBook Pro and while I'm waiting for it to arrive, I thought I'd just share the various links others have kindly shared with a PC-based ignoramus like me for making the switch to (or back to, in my case!) a Mac:

General Mac basics
For free and useful, take a look at Apple's site. Their support pages are good.

Also, Mac 101 and Switch 101 (which is great if you're moving from PC to Mac)

These might answer many of the questions that crop up in the first few days/ weeks.

Also, Mac Help, Finder> Help> Search usually works well.

Open University-related:
For Open University-related questions, try the Mac General website (although this is jam-packed with stuff anyone using a Mac in education would find helpful)

The best news is that Virtual PC is no longer needed. If you need to use a PC, you can install Windows OS onto your Mac- see Mac General for details.

Other recommended sites:
Mac Rumors and Mac OS X Hints - both sites have forums too; you can pick up tips and tricks in those sometimes as well.

Books and Magazines:
Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual, David Pogue
MacUser magazine and website.

Oh, and if you're a student or work in Education... take a look at the deals available via the Apple Education Store. Well worth the saving!

Learning Outcomes... again...

noreply@blogger.com (Sarah Horrigan) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:03:00 -0400

Would love to know what people think about the following... yes... no... anything else?

Do learning outcomes really improve student learning?

Am having a mull about this and would like to know what other people think!

So what do you do in the Summer?

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:38:00 -0400

"So what do you do in the Summer?" - a question I've been asked quite a few times over the years, as friends assume we just relax while the students are away. This summer is going to be particularly busy, with quite a few major projects. Here's a quick rundown on a few of them.

Storage and Server Replacement.

This is probably the biggest one - we've just completed the procurement of our new Dell/EMC Storage Area Network (SAN), server and backup infrastructure. The first parts have just started arriving. This means we'll have much more storage (so bigger mailboxes, more shared storage), and a new virtual server infrastructure to help us cope with the ever increasing demand for new applications. For the techie amongst you we are going to be using Microsoft's Hyper-V for the virtualisaion rather than the more usual VMWare. More on this another time.

Timetabling Phase 2

Last year we installed a new Timetabling system (Syllabus Plus). This year the timetabling processes has been re-engineered, allowing us to really take advantage of the software. Work over the the summer will include better ensuring better web timetables and integrating data with other systems, for example the student record system.

Network Connection Relocation

As part of the process for the move to our new City Centre Campus we'll be moving our primary network connection to the Caerleon Campus, as the current connection goes to Allt-yr-yn - due for closure 2011.

ID Cards

We'll be reviewing our ID card process (and replacing/upgrading the software), with the aim of integrating our new(ish) Salto lock system in the process, as well as various other systems, such as the new Gladstone system in the sport centre, new printing software, and potentially, cashless payments.

Exchange 2007

We'll start the process to upgrade to Exchange 2007 (from Exchange 2003). The immediate user benefits aren't that great, although Outlook Web Access in Firefox/Mac is a bit better. The real benefits will be better integration with voice mail etc when we move to a new Voice over IP (VOIP) phone system

MyLearning Essentials/Moodle

We've integrated Moodle into our Learning Environment (myLearning Essentials), so we'll undertaking staff development, and working on elements such as the processes behind online course work submission.

That's probably enough for now - other projects include completing our Office 2007 roll-out, supporting our new online enrolment process, reviewing and upgrading our Goldmine CRM software, replacing a lot of computers as part of our rolling replacement programme, and refining the plan for the IT services in our new city centre campus.

Let me know if you want more information on any of these projects.

New Macs and Price Rises

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:45:00 -0500

Apple announced a range of new Macs yesterday - usually a cause for excitement among Apple fans (and sadly I'd have to include myself in that group). I was particularly pleased to see a new Mac Mini - it looked like these may been abandoned.

But...

Wow! Look at the prices! 649 for a decent Mac Mini - no keyboard, monitor etc! 949 for an entry level iMac! They are really high, a big increase over previous models. OK, the specs are increased, but still, we've all grown used to better specs for more money. I believe Apple are blaming the (lack of) value of the pound, and, to be fair, this is probably correct - we are seeing big price increases on other manufactures products as well.

Still, this does make me question the viability of the iMac as a basic desktop computer for those that just need access to email/Internet/office. Before these price rises there was only a small premium for our Macs over our standard PCs, but not now.

It's also worth reminding all staff and students who are thinking of making a purchase that you can get a good educational discount that make the prices a little more palatable:

http://promo.euro.apple.com/edu/hed/routing/uk/index.php

Let's hope this is only a temporary problem!

Snow...

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:37:00 -0500

The snow didn't last long in Caerleon in the end in, so here's a short video clip in case you've forgotten what it looked like already!

[YouTube:5OYC1BLrCR8]

A Tale of Three Word Processors (or how I came to use MS Office instead of Google Docs)

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:01:00 -0500

I'm currently taking an MBA at the University, so I'm in the interesting position of being both a staff member and a student. Obviously the course itself is great, but it's also really useful to see things from a student perspective. I'll post some other observations at some point, but here's the story of software for my first assignment. I though this worth sharing because things didn't end of as I'd expected.

Our first assessed assignment is a 3,500 report on leadership styles. This followed on from a group presentation where we'd used Google Docs to create the presentation. This worked really well, as we could collaborate seamlessly. Everyone got to grips with the software, it did everything we needed, and it coped with all four of us editing the presentations at the same time the night before it was due! My first plan, therefore, was to use Google Docs to write the assignment . It's free, and I could work on my it from whatever Mac or PC I was using. Plus it would be backed up.

It all started well, but then I needed to draw a diagram, and I just couldn't get it right in Google Docs. I'm sure it would have been possible, I just didn't have the time, so I saved it in Word format, and decided to try and finish it in OpenOffice. For general home use Open Office is great - it's my home Office application of choice, largely because it's free, but it also does everything I need, and has a drawing package. I created the diagram with no problem, and carried on with my essay, backing it up to memory stick.

I'm sure I could have completed it in OpenOffice, but I really started to miss Microsoft Office's layout features, for example its handling of styles and auto-table layouts. So I gave in and moved to Microsoft Office. Given that I'd ended up with a Microsoft solution I decided to go the whole hog (after all, USB memory sticks are evil!) and used Microsoft Skydrive to backup it up, and give me access to the document from any PC in the same way I had with Google Docs.

So what's the point of this? I was reflecting on this because I think we need to be able to guide our students through the sea of technical options available to them. I'm, sure, for example, most students aren't aware of Skydrive (25Gb of storage for free!) . And without actually trying it, I would, I think be selling Google Docs as a great solution. I think it still has a place, particularly for collaborative works, but I really surprised myself ending up using a wholly Microsoft based solution.

Twitter vs Blogs or Where have all the posts gone

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:44:00 -0500

I've just realised that I haven't posted anything since September. This is by far the longest gaps between blog postings, and I blame (or you can thank!) Twitter. In that time I've made made about 70 Twitter updates, which may seem a lot, but I'm hardly a prolific Twitterer compared to some of the people I follow.

This seems to be part of a trend - here are a few other people who've made the same observation:

http://www.thewavingcat.com/2007/11/08/twitter-vs-blogs-revisited/

http://www.wadehodges.com/2008/12/01/catching-up-and-twitter-vs-blogs/

http://blog.andrewparker.net/2007/09/05/twitters-ruining-my-blogging/

http://graemethickins.typepad.com/graeme_blogs_here/2008/04/blogging-less-t.html

and many, many more...

So what's happening? Is this a good thing? I'm not sure, but I've a sneaky feeling that this post would make sense more as tweet "Twittering more - blogging less. Is this part of trend?".

Future of homework with Xtranormal

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:02:01 -0500

My colleague Martin Weller put a little movie that he made over lunch with Xtranormal on his blog. Martin always picks up on the latest tools and applies them to his work in really interesting an insightful ways. Whereas I delegate! So last night when my daughter for her Year 4 homework had to write [...]

Newspace update

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 08:33:00 -0400

I was asked by a few people outside the University to give an update about Newspace. Newspace is the University's social networking site for new students, based on Ning. I'll give a short update on how it's been used, what next and go over a couple of interesting issues. The bit at the end may give the 'Web 2.0 for free' naysayers some ammunition!

So first, a quick summary on how its been used. Sorry if this is a bit dry and quantitative! At some point we hope do a bit more of a detailed statistical analysis, but here's a summary. We've had 961 students join Newspace, which is a sizeable portion of our intake. We advertised in three ways - an email to students before they joined, a postcard flyer in their joining packs, and a link from the front page of the website. There have been about 280 conversation topics in the main forum - favourite topics have been finding people in the same accommodation and course, and nearly all topics have a good number of responses (probably a few thousand messages in total). On top of this there were 44 groups created, all with their own forums, and a huge amount of use of 'person to person' comments - I can't find an easy way of getting stats on this at the moment. Finally, one of the strengths of Ning is that users can customise their own profile page, and a lot have done this.

Ok, so it's had a lot of use. What next then? In some ways we have a bit of dilemma.

We created Newspace for new students, and my expectation was that use would slowly decline as students came onto campus - after all, they can now meet face-to-face, and now they know one another can easily become Facebook/MySpace friends.We'd then create a new NewSpace for next year. The fun about trying something new is you don't quite know whats going to happen - and at the moment it's still being used, perhaps not quite as much as the flurry of activity when, say, rooms were allocated in halls, but it's still quite steady (and more nocturnal)

We were tempted to open it up to all students and see what happened, but on the other hand, we think maybe it only worked as a 'NewSpace' because all the students were new and in the same sort of position.

So we've decided to stick with our orginal plan for the time being, and keep Newspace as a place for new students. There's nothing to stop other students from joining, but once you are a member of the University you've got full access to MyLearning Essentials (our VLE) myCommunity (although it's fair to say we've seen more activity on NewSpace than MyCommunity and Newport Facebook groups combined...)

If NewSpace does carry on being used and looks like turning into a more permanent fixture we'll obviously rethink.

Finally, what other issues did we face?

We had two main problems to deal with - Google Ads, and a disagreement between Ning and a third party Widget provider. I'm being quite open about these in the hope that it's helpful to other people looking at doing a similar thing.

Let's start with Google Ads. The Ning service is free, if you take Google Ads. Not a problem to start with, they were all for education type things like accomodation services...until I logged in an one day, and got confronted with ads for a couple of other Universities.... NOT GOOD!. The problem with Google Ads is they are personal (I think), so I don't think other people got these, but I can't be sure. So, we decided we needed to remove them ASAP. It only cost 11 a month to get rid of them - but it wasn't that straight forward to arrange payment, just because our Finance people weren't really geared up to paying for this sort of web service (credit card only, monthly debit, in dollars). Still they were very helpful, and we got it sorted quickly.

The next issue is perhaps the most important, as it shows the sort of risks you take when using a free service like this. We used a third party plug in from Widget Laboratory to provide an instant messaging service on Newspace, and this was really popular with some students. Then there was a dispute between Widget Labs and Ning, and the widget was terminated with no notice due to Widget Labs allegedly breaking T&C. There's more about this here:

http://developer.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1185512%3ATopic%3A63551

The Widget was reinstated after while, but then withdrawn by Widget Labs, who, we believe are now developing for Social Go. I've no idea of the rights and wrongs of the case, but it shows (as with the Twitter text messaging) how you can't rely on these sort of services for critical applications. In this instance it was just a minor inconvenience, but it was an interesting experience. It hasn't put us off, but we'll be hedging our bets, and registering with Social Go as well to keep our options open for next year.

Vista and Office 2007 plans

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:10:00 -0400

I presented our plans for Microsoft Vista and Office 2007/8 at our Information Strategy Panel today. A quick summary of the plan is as follows:

Vista

We are going to switch to Vista for new PC deployments later this year (unless the user/area has a reason to stick with XP), and we'll switch the student labs to Vista next summer. We aren't going to roll it out to any other PCs apart from to academic staff who need it for teaching/research reasons.

Microsoft Office 2007/08

We'll start rolling out Office 2007/08 out later this year, to academic schools first and then corporate departments. Lots of training and support will be available, as the interface is completely different.

Why do it this way?

Vista is a tricky one. Obviously it's had a huge amount of bad press, and it doesn't have any 'must have features' that make it worth deploying to existing staff PCs. However, it does have some useful features, particular for us on the IT side (easier imaging, better security model) and it seems quite clear that the next version of Windows is going to be Vista part 2, so there isn't much point waiting to see if something different comes along next time. So just using it for new deployment seems to make sense, and XP will be gradually phased out.

Office 2007/08 is more straightforward. Most people seem to prefer it, its starting to be the version that most people (especially students with new PCs) will be using at home, so know is the time to start upgrading so we're in line with user's expectations.

Now the proposal has been approved we'll start putting together a more detailed project plan.

Google Chrome

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:05:00 -0400

I guess most people with even a passing interest in technology will have picked up on the news that Google have just released its own web browser, Google Chrome. Three questions really - 'why?', 'is it any good?' and 'will anyone use it?'

Lets start with a picture first though...

What you see there is the default home page, with thumbnail links to your most commonly accessed pages, the ability to search your history, and your recent bookmarks and tabs. All very nice - I like it. The thumbnail links seem to be 'inspired' by Opera, but sadly hardly anyone uses that, so that will be new for most people.

So why have Google done this? Well, they've put their version of the answer as a comic strip!

http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

The long and the short of it is that they are saying that current browsers are intrinsically flaky and dated.

OK, but what does this really mean? I'm speculating here, but all the innovation in the browser market recently has been around FireFox. I know of virtually nobody who knows enough about IT to be able to choose a browser who uses IE. Obviously Google has invested heavily in application development, so does it no longer trust the open source FireFox community to deliver a good enough browser to deliver the cloud computing experience is obviously believes is the future?

There's been a lot of talk about a Google OS, but I wonder whether actually this browser is kind of a future OS? Without wanting to get too technical, Chrome has OS-like features, in particular separate processes for each tab (or application) and a task manager to manager the processes. Are they trying to render the host OS irrelevant?

So is it any good?

From a user interface point of view, so far, (and I've only used it for a couple of hours) I love it. I rarely bother with bookmarks (other than del.icio.us) so the default front page (as described above) is great, and the interface is fast and clean.

Google clearly know who they've got to impress first - there's a menu link called 'Stats for nerds' that's clearly hit the mark - have a look at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=stats+for+nerds

And it has some really odd features. You can resize text boxes - a nightmare for web developers.

So the big question. Will anyone use it?

The fact is, most people just want to browse the web, and just use whatever browser they are given. If they haven't got any need to change they won't. FireFox probably has around a 20% market share at the moment (web stats are notoriously unreliable), but it's difficult to see how they could push their market share any further. Google, though, have an advantage. They also control sites that people actually want to use - search. YouTube, Gmail etc. If they can make using those with Chrome significantly better than with IE then maybe, just maybe, they might succeed.

Twitter

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:35:00 -0400

We've just set up a couple of Twitter accounts for the University, one for news, and the other for internal announcements from myLearning Essentials and the intranet:

University News - http://twitter.com/newportuni

Internal News and Announcements - http://twitter.com/newport_mlenews

Both these take news from existing sources, the first from the front page of the University web site, and the other from the Intranet news, so it's not a new place you need to look, just a convenient way of getting noticed when news is updated if you happen to be a Twitter user.

No idea what Twitter is? It's a service that lets people communicate via short messages (or Tweets). It's sometimes known as Microblogging. The great thing about it is that there a whole range of ways to make and receive Tweets, including from the web, mobile phone, SMS, and desktop application (my preference). The way it works it that Twitter users 'follow' people or accounts (sounds a bit dodgy!), which means they receive that person or accounts Tweets.

This article from the Guardian is worth reading if you want to find out more: Making the most of Twitter .

I'm not expecting this to be a particular mainstream service, but it took very little effort to set up, and will hopefully be useful to a few people.

Here are some more University Twitter sites:

http://twitter.com/ManMetUni

http://twitter.com/KeeleUniversity

http://twitter.com/AstonUniversity

http://twitter.com/OpenUniversity

http://twitter.com/CoventryUni

http://twitter.com/CardiffUni

So I finally bought an iPhone...

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:17:00 -0400

Not sure why it took me so long, but I've finally bought an iPhone!

In a previous post I noted how difficult I was finding it have work and fun mixed on one device (that was an iPod touch). I was very grateful for a comment from Kevin from Glamorgan who told me had the same issue, and had bought an iPhone for home and Blackberry for work. Suitably reassured I've gone down the same route, iPhone for non-work things, and I'll stick with my Windows Mobile HTC for work.

So initial thoughts? There are two aspects of the iPhone that I think are absolutely fantastic - the App Store, and the GPS/App/Flickr integration.

The App Store works like this. Anyone can buy the SDK for about 100 and start writing apps for it. The author submits it to Apple, who check it, and then add it to the store. Apple keep some of the money, and the author/developers get some. Applications are typically sold for small amounts of money (eg 59p for 'Shopping List', 5.99 for Super Monkey Ball). The great thing is, small developers can now compete on a completely level playing field with big companies, and actually have some chance of a revenue stream. It almost reminds me of the first days of computing, with the ZX Spectrum cottage industry. The big criticism is that Apple are acting as gatekeepers, but it really doesn't bother me. As a consumer I'm more than happy to have some quality control, and as a potential developer I've no issue with some sort of third party verification. I'm sure it won't be long before I buy the SDK.

Second thing, GPS/App/Flickr etc. This is just fun really, but it feels like something completely new. The iPhone has GPS, so it knows where you are. So, for example, you can then search Flickr (via a third party apps, some free, some 1.59!) and find pictures taken near you. Great for exploring new areas (you could then use Google Maps to find them). And obviously in true Web 2.0 style, you can take photos with the phone, Geotag them (ie add their location, again via GPS) and upload them to Flickr for other people to find. I know other phones have GPS as well, but it's all so elegant on the iPhone. I'm sure we are going to get more an more Apps that make use of GPS and user generated content.

More about Newspace

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:34:00 -0400

News of our Newspace, our Ning sites for news students, has been picked up on a number of blogs around the community, so I thought it worth summarising the reaction, and giving a quick update.

First one is from Tony Hirst from the OUsefulInfo on OUwith a posting 'Institutional Social Networks' , which starts saying

"Reading the feed from Michael Webb's Blog yesterday, I was.... stunned is probably the best word, to read his post "Newspace - a social networking site for new students"

I'm not sure if that's good thing or not! Read Tony's post and decide for yourself.

Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus from UKOLN, picks it up on "Institutional Use of Ning", and says

"I welcome this development - and I am particularly pleased that Michael is being so open in describing the reasons for this decision, the possible risks and how the institution has responded to the risks."

Thanks for the positive feedback!

I also found posting about it on Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog and the tfpl blog , so I'm glad we are doing something of wider interested.

So a quick update.

Firstly, a quick thanks to a couple of my colleagues that did the hard work in getting it going - Allan Theophanides did all the hard work getting the site content together, including the Google maps and events, and, more importantly, getting the staff and mentors on board, and then organising the invitations to the students. If you want a site like this, it's crucial that someone takes this role, after all, a technically great site with no content and members is not much use! Secondly, to Jon Ingram, who sorted out the look of the site (it's based on an existing template, but Jon sorted out the logo, picture and CSS).

So how's it going? So far, really, really well - in a lot of ways it's turning out to be one of the most exciting projects I've been involved in. Feedback on the site is terrific, so far we've over 300 members (we're only a small institution, and have only invited two schools so far), and the quality and quantity of the communication is amazing! It's really working - students are using the site to make friends, share their excitement, create their own home pages, reassure one another and ask questions.

Obviously we won't know it's true value until the start of term, and maybe it's just initial enthusiasm, but, wow!

I'm also really glad we decided to make it a closed community. I'm sorry, that means that a lot of you won't see it, but I really don't think it would work if it was a more public space.

iPod Touch/iPhone and Work/Life Balance

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:45:00 -0400

This post is really triggered by my iPod Touch, but really applies to most handhelds/smartphones etc I guess, especially the iPhone..

As I said in a previous post, I've put the new 2.0 software on, which does a couple of things. Firstly, you can get 'Push Email' from Microsoft Exchange, which means as soon as you receive an email it's pushed to your iPod which beeps, and secondly you can install lots of other applications. Most of these aren't really work type things (eg Last.FM), but some blur the boundary (Facebook is mix of work colleagues and friend-friends, Twitter is mostly works stuff).

Before I go on, it's worth saying I'm a bit of a music obsessive. I've heard a lot of people say they never go anywhere without their phone. I never go anywhere without my iPod (I've got a 30Gb Classic as well). Maybe if you don't listen to music as much as I do none of this matters.

I've ended up with a really odd mixture - as an iPod, something I'd listen to to relax, and now, perhaps with the Touch, get in touch with a few friends, but there, in the corner is an icon telling me I've 27 unread emails, nagging away. And then it beeps to tell me I've got another message. Now, I like my job, but sometimes I need a break from it, I need to recharge. And am I the only one that sometimes reads a work-related email over the weekend and then wishes I hadn't because you can't do anything about it until Monday, but it still gnaws away at you over the weekend. With web mail its fine, as I actively need to go and check it, but with the iPod, it's there, sat in the corner of the screen, hard to ignore.

How do Blackberry users cope? Is it less of an issue, because the Blackberry is really just for messaging? I've got an HTC Windows Mobile Smartphone, but I never switch Push email on - I just fetch it if I need to when I'm off site.

I ended up switching Push email off for the weekend.

I'll probably finish up using two iPods, my 'classic' for music, and the Touch as a work email device.

iPod Touch 2.0

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:44:00 -0400

You can't have missed the new iPod launch, but the upgrade to the iPod Touch has received a lot less publicity. Basically, for 5.99 you can update your iPod so you get the full Microsoft Exchange email client, and the ability run iPhone applications. This turns your iPod into a fully fledged PDA - far more elegant than any of the Windows Mobile equivalents.

The upgrade is painless, and to set up Exchange mail you just need to tell it you mail server address (my.newport.ac.uk for Newport users), your user name and password and you are away - you get Push email, and contacts and calendar synch over WiFI as well (this wasn't possible over WiFi on the old iPod Touch).

So far I've installed Twitterific (Twitter Client), Last.FM, NetNewsWire, Facebook and AIM. LastFM is my favourite, it creates personalised radio stations based on music you listen to, and you can then listen to other people's stations to discover new new music - a perfect application for the iPod. Sound quality is bit rough though... (it's streamed)

Trying out alternatives

Sat, 10 May 2008 09:41:30 -0400

This started as a comment on Martin’s post about problems with Vista but grew a bit too long so I have put it here.I have too many machines (can you have too many ) the one I use most is the MacBook (especially now I have discovered it is Unix really), then the little [...]

Drupal on a Mac not quite as easy as I hoped

Fri, 02 May 2008 19:22:47 -0400

For a couple of reasons I decided to install Drupal on my Macbook: it seems to have become the prototyping tool of choice in the OU; I am thinking about using the ejournal module for the journal I edit JIME; and, I had too much real work to do so a distraction was in order. [...]

Conference blogging

Thu, 01 May 2008 19:49:55 -0400

I have spent a couple of days in the OU internal conference Making Connections blogging the sessions that I am in over on my OCHRE blog. My colleague Doug Clow also blogged the same conference and there were several of us also twittering away during the conference. Liam Green-Hughes created an OU aggregator twitter to [...]

Watch the birdie!

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:32:18 -0400

This year we again have a pair of blue tits in a nest box by our house. The nest box has a camera in it hooked up to our TV via a DVD recorder. Blue Tit TV is definitely the best channel we have and the female has just settled down to brood her 10 [...]

Watch with RescueTime

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:12:03 -0400

Follow TonyH’s advice received through the wonders of twitter I installed RescueTime as part of my move towards managing time. The result over the first couple of days is shown below.I think the plot is interesting but I am not sure how useful. Over these two days my main work tasks were involved in meetings [...]

Restructuring 2.0

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:21:18 -0400

Martin Weller across on his blog has written about how we have just been reviewed where we work at IET. The review has plenty of reasonable anlaysis but ends with a suggestion that IET splits in two and bifurcates – which if it is not handled carefully might lead to chaos, or at least some [...]