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Waking up on a Brexit morning
In order to get people to think through complex issues, one technique is to get them to envisage waking up the day after it has happened and imagining their feelings. Bizarrely, inexplicably,...
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Yours, in despair
The unthinkable has happened and Britain has voted to leave the EU. The nation stared into the abyss last week and I had hoped that would be enough to make it pull back, but no, it seems that 52% of...
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Brexit silver linings
Ok, this is my attempt to get out of the pit with this one, and find some positives. I don’t suggest all of these things will happen, but they might, as a result of the Brexit decision. They largely...
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How edtech should react to the next Big Thing
This week has all been about Pokemon Go. Inevitably there are pieces about Pokemon Go for education. This happens with every technology that makes a popular breakthrough. I’m not going to comment on...
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The Open Flip
I wrote a piece for the Journal of Learning for Development recently, which expanded on an idea in a blog post, called the Open Flip. The basic idea is quite simple really (I’m a simple kinda guy) –...
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Revisiting my own (blog) past
Here’s a fun thing to try if you’ve been blogging for a while (Warning: may not actually be fun). Get a random date from when you started blogging until present (eg using this random date generator),...
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Dear reader, I blogged it
A couple of posts coming up about every blogger’s two favourite subjects: themselves and blogs. Since moving to Reclaim Hosting (slogan: We put the host in hosting) I’ve started creating blogs willy...
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What if OER was blogging?
I work a lot in OER, and I do a lot of blogging, and I often blog about OER. But I don’t blog as OER. In this post I’m going to compare two things that are completely different – OER repositories and...
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People are sticky
Do I win the “eeeuuuwww” blog post award? There’s a concept in web design about stickiness, ie content that has people returning or spending longer. So in web design this might be having up to date...
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Emerging OER research discipline
The Primordial soup of OER… One of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is how the OER discipline emerges. Having lived through it, you get to see the field evolve. I’m not sure it counts...
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DashLearn – the Amazon Dash for Learning
[Following on from my piece on Pokemon Go, this week’s thing is Amazon Dash, so getting in with a “for learning” piece before anyone else. And in case it isn’t sledgehammer obvious, it’s parody] “This...
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The open licence gift to the future
One of those phrases that passes around on twitter is that “metadata is a love note to the future” (apparently coined by Jason Scott). A few recent news stories have made me reflect that an open...
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Keynotes & communities at ALT-C
I was at the ALT-C conference last week (I become Chair of ALT for this year, will try not to break it). I’ve noticed over the years that there are two communities at ALT (there are many more of...
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I may not have mentioned it, but I wrote a book called The Digital Scholar a few years back. It was published under a CC licence by Bloomsbury Academic. Last year a colleague of mine, Fernando Rosell,...
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Open education and the Unenlightenment
Generally I don’t go in for a romantic view of the past, and a sense of displeasure with the present. We forget just how grim the past was for most people, for most of history. But lately, I’ve become...
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Ed Tech as discipline
(There’s probably a really good metaphor I could make about this image, but I’ve included it just for the Vasari ref below and because Cellini was something of a ‘character’). There was an article...
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The lesson of Mabon’s Day
This is one of those “thoughts I had while walking the dog that I might as well blog before I forget them” posts. It concerns a little known holiday in Wales, and the relevance this has for...
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OER as educational heritage
There has been a pruning of A-level subjects in the UK recently, with Art history, Archeology, and Classical studies all for the chop. It’s like the Beeching Report for education. It is puzzling in...
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Let’s think inside the box
I’m interested in the way language influences our behaviour (without getting into linguistic determinism), and one aspect I think we’re witnessing is the seepage of Silicon Valley language and values...
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OpenEd16 & my manel shame
I’ve been at OpenEd in Richmond this week, and I feel bad about this post, because it’s been an amazing conference. For example, I’ve just come from post conference drinks with Audrey Watters, Ken...
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