What you get when Research and Community come together
I just submitted three abstracts for the OER15 Conference 14 – 15th April 2015 . It started as one but I realized that there are really three distinct pieces of work that could be of benefit. I don't expect all three to be accepted but here are the abstracts for anyone who's interested. Open licensing…
Read more →Last week, I attended an ELESIG workshop at the OU run by Martin Weller and Tony Hirst . Here are some summaries of what was discussed. However, it struck me that many people would not know how to start. Sure, there are lots of free blogging platforms, but if you want to use some of…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignright" width="200"] Advertisement for Hermods (distance learning school) in Sweden (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Recently, one of my favorite titles of a blog post has been " Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads " - I like when righteous indignation is given a full-throated expression. And that is despite the fact that, at least up…
Read more →Educational theorist and provocateur Stephen Downes made really persuasive video on the difference between a Virtual Learning Environment and a Personal Learning Environment . This got me thinking about how this difference is relevant to the area of federated, open research. And I think the analogy is pretty much on the money. Researchers, of course…
Read more →What it is I've written a lot on this site about the idea of using crowdsourced funding to support research efforts. Here's the first example of that sort of thing that I've come across. What Works in Development: 10 Meta-Analyses of Aid Programs is a funding call for $10,000 to support research dissemination. Namely printing…
Read more →I didn’t even have to watch the whole video about Hypothes.is to know I want to give them some money on Kickstarter. It hits all the right buttons: distributed, open, platform independent, ... But I’m not sure about the direction of its foundational metaphor: peer review for the internet. It suggests that the future reputation…
Read more →I wonder if it's the increased popularity of Vampires and their undead natures that has contributed to the spread of the un- prefix in education. If so, then it's yet another feather in the cap of the cultural genius that is Joss Whedon. What do the different versions of un- mean? Traditionally the 'uneducated' were…
Read more →It looks like just at about the same time I started this blog , Haiyan Zhang, who blogs at the awesomely named and beautifully designed site: http://blog.failedrobot.com , was putting together OPENIDEO, an online community-based development platform. It is similar to Quora in principle but rather than solving lots of little questions, it is focused…
Read more →The Royal Society just released a second report on Neuroscience in the Brain Waves policy series this one focusing on its relationship with education: Neuroscience: Implications for Education and Lifelong Learning . While it is a very good overview (I particularly welcome the cautious and sober approach to the results warning against "neuro-myths" - something…
Read more →This is a post about knowledge, community, online repositories, OERs, and the ethnography of the teacher staffroom inspired by a recent experience with JORUM . What was the last time you learned something interesting or helpful ? I'm willing to bet that it was one of these: 1. Somebody you know or trust told you…
Read more →The Get The Data service seems to be getting some traction. There are interesting questions and answers being posted but even more interesting is the quantitative approach to reputation building and community building in general. (Quite distinct from, for instance, Wikipedia or the Drupal community and even more removed from human reputation than Digg). It…
Read more →It is no secret that there is a huge gap between research and practice in education (and many other areas of social practice). Here's a suggestion of a model that might remedy some of this. Parts of it are based on a draft of a proposal for development project. Why community-based research? There are many…
Read more →Anthologize is that great new tool designed during the One Week, One Tool project. It seems to have taken the world by storm partly thanks to the #oneweek Twitter frenzy and as the #anthologize stream indicates, its off to a stellar start. It may seem too early to look for lessons learned for the future…
Read more →Finally, JISC is turning some of the innovation and creativity it has poured into technology into the process of funding itself. The idea of JISC Elevator (see http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/07/28/project-pitching-jisc-elevator-concept/ ) is modeled on the Mozilla Drumbeat ( http://www.drumbeat.org ) - a Kickstarter-like project but with more varied sources of funding. With Kickstarter people have to back…
Read more →Recently, Harvard University’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science released OpenScholar built on Drupal using popular modules such as Organic Groups and getting help from the Spaces and Features. The Biblio module provides the great bibliographic feature. I haven't spent enough time with it yet to completely suss out how it's put together in the Drupal…
Read more →This is a great example of the interface between the machine readable and human readable. It took me a while to figure it out, but I got there eventually.
Read more →A report just came out from RIN.ac.uk that is relevant to the aims of this website (more details on the project website ). I will tweet out some of the more interesting factoids on @techczech but I think the results can be summarised roughly in three points: Very few researchers use Web 2.0 services. Case…
Read more →I started this whole thought experiment as someone who knows quite a lot about research and quite a lot about technology and the social web. But not all that much about how they go together. Sure I've trained others in researching the web, using social networking and bibliographic management with Zotero. And I've advised academics…
Read more →One of the thoughts that kept coming up in my head as I was hearing about all these great digital humanities projects at THATCamp London was: this is amazing but it's yet another silo. As someone who has tried (and mostly failed) building several very niche communities with non-tech inclined audiences, I've come to the…
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Read more →A summary of Twitter discussions during the session.
Read more →Came across this presentation that has some interesting metaphors and examples of practice:
Read more →I have been thinking about this for a while but the below happened as a proposal for THATCamp London . If somebody already had this idea, great. If somebody had a similar idea, lets think about this together. If somebody likes these ideas and wants to do something about it, you're welcome to them! What…
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