For the purposes of this exercise I’ve included networks where I have some sort of profile and connect with other profiles. So I haven’t included some possible networks (such as wordpress, or ebay) where I have a profile but don’t connect with others.

• Facebook : Primary network for friends. Starting to get a bit bored, think it brings out the worst in me (egoist, nosey parker!). massive time drain!
• Twitter profile : Primary network for work related stuff. Friends have started getting on board and a few students follow me, although I don’t think they’re particularly interested in my geeky posts!
• Academia.edu profile : Work related. Don’t use often, but like the notifications of when I’m googled!
• Linkedin profile : Work related, but don’t use at all often. Not really sure why I have a presence there, seems very focussed on business jobs/ networks
• Google plus : Early days, seems neat but I haven’t really decided what to use it for yet. Looks promising as a collaboration space?
• YouTube channel: Use for sharing my video playlists for class, and uploading the odd work related video. Have a few followers and follow a few people, not really using the full social networking potential yet
• Slideshare profile : Use for sharing my conference related stuff, just starting to think about uploading my lecture slides which might radically change my use of this as a network.

So carrying out this quick audit shows me that I am a member of 7 social networks to a greater or lesser extent. It shows me that I might quit LinkedIn (maybe I will have by next year) and that I anticipate using YouTube and Slideshare in new ways in 2012. It also shows that I don’t really have a space for interacting with students, especially as they finish my year. Maybe my increased use of YouTube and Slideshare will provide an opportunity to stay in touch with and engage students as they go on to their undergraduate studies, should they want to of course!

Firstly I think the talk went well and there was a really good discussion afterwards focussing on a variety of issues. In particularly somebody asked about the benefits my students will get from my open-ish practice and I have to be honest and say that I haven’t really thought about that. I hope that my students benefit, and i guess i had some general ideas about how this might happen (e.g. increasing interaction with materials). I do think there are a few benefits, I think that over time my slides might start to look a little prettier at least! I will have to think some more on this.

Another person asked about licensing, and another question was about ownership. These are kind of related. How would students feel about my lecture slides being publicly available? and who owns them once they uploaded? (thanks to @sharonlflynn for tweeting that slideshare state that slides are ”owned or licensed” by them, which I hadn’t realised!).

The last point I would like to make is that initial feedback has focussed on my title slide. Apparently I’m in the running for scariest slide of the conference… [hope people are discussing the content too!]

My talk will be based on a couple of case studies. The first of these is about the reading pack I’ve put together for my anthropology course. I’ve already blogged about the practicalities of putting this together but here I will explore what is possible within the confines of the Copyright Licensing Agreement. Essentially within certain limits (mainly regarding the amount of content and the extent to which it is made available) there is quite a lot that can be done. This has enabled me to re-use and repurpose copyright content in a way which has been popular with students. New technologies allow for some interesting possibilities, even within this constricted environment. One student this year was accessing the pack as a pdf (accessed via the VLE) on his iPad, and there is the possibility of collaborative notetaking etc. to explore.

The other case study came about after my institution’s upgrade to BB9, with its new ‘mashup’ feature. Cringeworthy nomenclature aside this feature makes it easier, amongst other things, to embed slideshare presentations within the VLE. This got me thinking about making my lecture slides available through my slideshare account, which I currently only use for conference slides. This has potential implications concerning copyright and quality. Whereas I might not be too concerned about the appearance of slides which are only of limited availability I am a bit more concerned about slides which are publicly available, and as I’ve said elsewhere I’m no graphic designer!).

It’s actually quite a big step to make all my slides publicly available, and I’m considering this for my sociology class next term. For now I’ve made my revision lecture available and it will be interesting to see whether or not students comment and engage with this material via slideshare (something I’d imagine they are unfamiliar with).

These case studies, and my talk in January, will reflect on how the debate about open/ closed copyright can be quite polarised. Those advocating open practice can be quick to dismiss closed content as if it precludes any sort of open practice. Naturally copyright does place limitations on content and practice, but in some cases (such as the reading pack above) there is still quite a lot of interesting stuff that can be done.

Open and closed can be quite distracting and harmful labels, which stifle debate. I’m definitely a big fan of open content, and for me the nearest ’quick wins’ are to be found in scholarly publishing and open data, but let’s not forget that in the meantime copyright material can be used in ways which encourage open-ish practice.  

I think I’ll be musing some more on what exactly open-ish practice is in January, but I think it will recognise that there is a wide range of practices possible beyond the purely open (based wholly on open content) and closed. Things like my reading pack and lecture materials could be shared in ways which recognise the limitations of copyright, but are still of value to the wider community.

Open-ish Educational Resources anyone?

The ESRC put out a press release last week about the event and there has been quite a lot of interest since. I’ve been interviewed by a colombian magazine, a press agency and the dicovery channel (well the blog). The press release has been cannibalised in various forms throughout the blogosphere and my zombie self has spread across the web with my 5 minutes of fame

Weirdly my namesake, who happens to be the director of the IPPR has also been in the press talking about zombies, saying much the same thing as me (unsuprisingly) for the BBC.

One slightly troubling part of the whole thing happened when I featured in the Register blog where it attracted a lot of comments. Many of the comments were pretty positive although there were a few trollish type comments which weren’t very nice to read! Never read the comments to an article about yourself! 

Zombies have feelings too :-z

Last week I presented my score fellowship project to a workshop at oxford which was being organized by (one of) the anthropology department(s) and the education department. It was called Learning Unlearning and one of the ideas of the event was to open a dialogue between the two departments, how might an anthropological approach inform educational research?

I rose to the challenge and submitted an idea about using the concept of bricolage to inform some of the stuff I’ve been thinking about social media. Much fun was had in the pub afterwards with my neoligism, clickolage [it *will* catch on!].

I was pretty nervous talking about anthropological concepts with a room full of serious anthropologists but they couldn’t have been friendlier (an occupational quirk, surely?).

One thing that did strike me about the day though was how low-fi these anthropogists are. There was about 10 speakers, and I was the first to have any slides and I think only 3 did, one speaker even used an OHP! The second thing to strike me was that you really don’t need to use a projector and powerpoint for an engaging talk, as many of the presenters let their ideas do the talking, and were no worse for it.

Part of the workshop was to launch the RAI sponsored new (peer reviewed and open access) journal, Teaching Anthropology to which I will be submitting something once I get a chance.

There was quite a lot of discussion in the pub afterwards about what it actually takes to be acknowledged as an anthropogist. There is a bit of a east coast/west coast hip hop thing going on between the RAI and ASA, and there is even a sense in which to be truly acknowledged as an anthro you have to have done your fieldwork somewhere remote/exotic, or as one person said you need to catch malaria to call yourself an anthropologist.

Maybe if I keep attending these events and start publishing in their journals I will be accepted into the tribe without the need to catch a tropical disease?

While I was doing my PhD (in sociology) I was never asked or expected to create a poster, but it seems like they are either gaining ground or as my disciplinary focus has changed I’ve begun to encounter them more often. Whereas presenting and producing conference papers clearly relates to the rest of an academic’s job, i’m not so sure that posters do. Is it reasonable to expect academics to be decent graphic designers?

I was recently asked to put together a poster for my SCORE fellowship and this was the first time that I’ve been asked, even though I was recently a judge at Durham University’s poster competition for phd students. The poster will be used by SCORE (and me i guess) to help promote my project, and this is no bad thing.

I think that producing good posters require quite a specific skill set, one that I don’t really possess, and I’m not even sure one that is particularly relevant to an academic career. I’m no graphic designer and that’s pretty obvious with my finished poster, which still took the best part of a day to knock together.

My poster

 As you can see it’s pretty basic looking. My first thought was actually to use old fashioned cut and paste (a collage, which is vaguely relevant to the topic) but this quickly became a fuss, so i tried to use MS Paint and that was too difficult so ended up using PPT, which i’m sure shows. I’ve kept the hand drawn arrows in as a nod to the homemade original idea.

I wonder what software other people use to create their posters? i’ve seen some great posters (and plenty of not so great ones), so I’d be interested to see what other people are using. Although the bigger question is should an academic really need to have graphic design skills to get ahead? I doubt this poster will find its way onto my CV, so why exactly have I opened up myself to ridicule!?

There was plenty of interest in my talk and a good discussion which mentioned a variety of things from the kinds of incentives (or lack) for producing useful video content, the range of content available, IPR issues and digital literacies.

There is a really diverse crowd here, with people from all over europe and teachers, learning technologists and even policy makers, so there has been some good discussions so far.

I thought i’d share my slides here as another way of making connections via twitter/blog/slideshare etc.

Also producing something like this gives me a chance to introduce each reading, include a few questions and so on. By producing the document myself (repro say I can send them the digital file for printing) I have the option to produce a large print version, for example, if needed.

I thought I’d put this blog post together to see how new (and newish) technology (scanners, OCR, editing software etc. ) can help me carry out this task compared with the tippex, sellotape and letroset of old!

Before starting the laborious process of scanning the documents I wanted to see which file format to use. Our scanner defaults to pdf but my gut feeling is that this isn’t best, certainly for editing! A quick look around and .tiff looks pretty good and gives me the option of OCR within MS Office, which is very handy.

I’ll be updating this post as i go along, as I expect to be working on this for a few weeks and I don’t really want lots of posts on the topic.

*** update ***

after a couple of hours of fiddling about I’ve got it sussed and I’m very happy with the product so far. I’m not sure if i’m doing things in the most efficient way, but there’s always a tension between doing things in a way that works and spending the time to find a better way!

so at the moment i’m scanning in the documents as tiffs (will go to compressed tiffs from now as the file sizes are getting huge) and opening them with MS Office Document Imaging (from office tools) and running the OCR to auto rotate and straighten. Then I save and upload into OneNote which then enables me to cut and paste into Word. Once in word I can crop each image (which is great as it gets rid of the huge black lines and bits of other pages and my hand that otherwise show up).

I can now edit the word document to produce my reading pack, voila! File size looks like it might be an issue though as I’m at 100MB for 50 odd pages, but compressing the .tiffs should help with that.

Doing all this has made me reflect on OER though. Old fashioned copyright gets a hard time, but it’s within a perfectly legal framework (the CLA) that I’m essentially repurposing copyright material into a new format. I’m actively encouraging students to seek out the originals, so don’t weep for the publishers just yet, but it does raise some questions:

• What is the copyright status of the reading pack itself? Obviously I’m charging students for the cost of producing it (about 7 quid by the looks of things), but what if i wanted to make a profit? (i don’t, just hypothetical!)
• What happens if i make the reading pack available as a pdf in my VLE? To the public?
• Is scanning and cropping the images materially different to photocopying? If I start to add commentary or correct american spellings how will that affect the copyright status?

Whereas the C-SAP project initially was focussed on the teachers use of YouTube resources in class, and trying to encourage students’ use of it, one of the big findings that suprised me was the students were already using YouTube and other sources to look for online educational resources, with little guidance.

So my proposal to SCORE was to support this within the design of my introductory anthropology course. I will introduce the concept of OER in the first week, and focus on ways of evaluating the quality of online materials more generally (media/ OER literacy?). At the moment I’m focussing on little OER as much as big, so YouTube etc. still very much counts. Then I will encourage students to source the content for the following weeks sessions.

Obviously there are a bunch of issues here. The course is already designed, so if the students don’t bother finding anything I still have plenty of content! But another idea which struck me as potentially interesting is a google jockey. This is where I would encourage a student to look for resources in class. This could be a really interesting way to encourage best practice in searching for and evaluating OER resources. This could be one use of the android tablets which we recently purchased (and haven’t used so much so far!) There are still a bunch of issues to think through, but I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to do so as part of the SCORE project at the OU, where I met some great people when I was working on the Digital Scholarship project with Martin Weller and others.

I’ve also found out that I’ve been succesful in getting a place at the CONCEDE conference in Portugal in september which should be an early opportunity to discuss these ideas. This conference is a really interesting concept in itself, it’s about the use of user generated content and the conference has tried to organize itself along user generated lines, with participants voting for the talks they most want to hear, and the most popular getting their expenses paid! I was lucky enough to be one of those talks

Given the loose focus (education and learning technology can cover a lot of things!) and the suspicion that quality control was sacrificed for conference fees my overall experience was patchy. The keynote from Professor Sugata Mitra was interesting, but he’s from a university 20 miles away!

The twitter activity (mainly #edulearn11 ) was patchy which again was a bit troubling, given the audience and the fact that using twitter as a conference back channel is one of the clear ‘wins’ of twitter, but at least this helped me hook up with a few interesting people.

Due to the sheer numbers each talk was limited to 15 mins, which was really tough (on presenter and listener). Too many presenters wasted their time with preamble and background and I guess we were a little guilty of that with our talk, sorry! here are the slides from my workshop, which were basically the same as the talk given at the conference (although don’t fully acknowledge @ElaineRTan who co-presented at the conference and was a big help with the project).

So my first day back in the office will mainly be spent sorting expenses and following up on some of the interesting contacts I’ve made, and thinking about how it might be possible to rate conferences in future! Maybe there could be a site for conference reviews? Would organizers welcome the feedback?