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I)
The other day social media journalist documentally was invited by Reuters to attend Gordon Brown's press conference. Being a streaming video kinda guy (to put it mildly), he streamed live via Qik:
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Posted at 11:36 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
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When I did my talk on Twitter a few weeks back I said it was a love song to Twitter. Last weekend I had some spare time to myself, so what did I do: did I sort out the back garden? Did I finish reading The Alexandria Quartet? Did I go to the gym? No, of course not, I wondered what a Twitter love song would be like, so I spent the time messing about with Camtasia to produce one. And here it is:
Also available in not so good quality on YouTube
Posted at 01:41 PM in twitter | Permalink
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I've done a guest post for Ken Udas over at Penn State. It's called Exploring new ways of being open, and sets out some of the evolution of the term 'open' in education, from the Open University's perspective.
But more importantly, it contains a Billy Bragg quote, so go take a look.
Posted at 09:19 AM in higher ed, openness | Permalink
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I)
Posted at 10:09 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
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Tony?
Posted at 09:21 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
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Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the
other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all
this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship
recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation.
In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged
to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research
grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your
contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity,
and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the
system – how to get publications out, how to network so you got invited for
keynotes, etc., but on the whole it worked reasonably well if you played along.
But the very nature of the digital world is about the
removal of the filter. Anyone can blog, produce a video, podcast, and generally
express themselves. So, reputation becomes much harder to verify. This is a
problem if we want to start rewarding digital scholarship. Put simply, 100 peer
reviewed journal articles probably means you are a decent scholar – 100 (or
10,000) blog posts doesn’t mean anything. So we need to find new ways of
establishing someone’s online reputation.
Let’s take Tony Hirst as an example. I think we’d all agree
Tony would qualify as a digital scholar. So how would we go about demonstrating
this? There would be traditional contributions too, such as developing courses,
giving talks, involvement in university projects, etc but let’s focus on the
online element. Here are some thoughts:
I think any one of these is easy to cheat or game, e.g. by
getting into blog wars you can get your technorati rating up, or by publishing
very small posts you can increase your quantity, but when taken overall they provide
an indication of reputation.
Which brings me on to George W. Bush. Reputation, online or
otherwise, is something that it takes a long time to establish, but only a
second to destroy. Bush’s failure to twice get the Paulson agreement through
congress seems to me less of a failure of the Bill itself (I have no idea if it’s
the right approach, and let’s face it, no-one does), but rather a failure of
reputation. Put bluntly, the Iraq
chickens have come home to roost. Dave Winer first pointed this out, saying:.
So Bush is suffering from having sacrificed his reputation
in order to legitimise the war in Iraq. And if you are going to
sacrifice your reputation you had better be sure that a) it’s worth it and b)
you aren’t going to need it again.
An awful lot of what us online folks do is not very
easily quantifiable. Exactly how does
sending a joke message on Twitter contribute to our bottom line? In the long
run what we are doing is establishing our own, and by association, our
institution’s online reputation. Given Bush’s reputation collapse the next time
someone asks you how much is reputation worth you can answer ‘ooh, about $700
billion’.
Posted at 09:47 AM in digital scholarship, higher ed, twitter, Weblogs | Permalink
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Martin Weller: The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Changing Academic Practice
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