Four Tet on the power of Twitter

I was listening to Four Tet in conversation with Benji B recently, and was interested to hear him talk about connecting and collaborating with other musicians through Twitter. I grabbed an extract as I thought it could be useful to play to next year’s students:

For further musings, it’s worth listening to the whole thing – especially from around 15:40 to 18:15, where he talks specifically about collaborations and the web. Here’s the full chat:

Running a module as an ARG a.k.a. The Rufi Franzen Mystery

So the secret’s out. We’ve had the Big Reveal.

#psvtam (otherwise know as the BSc Professional Sound and Video Technology, Advanced Multimedia module) was a game – an alternate reality game.

A game that took so many unanticipated twists and turns that I’m still trying to process everything. For the past 48 hours I’ve been replaying the past 3 months in my mind, thinking about every clue, red-herring, reaction… wow.

The Joy of Teaching: Learning Journeys and Transformations

One of my undergraduate students posted his weekly course reflections earlier this evening, and I was really moved by this post – extract:

“I cannot shake the growing feeling of “loss” which comes from moving to another semester and the introduction of new lecturers and their module content whilst in the same breath saying goodbye to the friends I have made.”

The Paradox of Openness: Attribution (network ‘whispers’)

In a series of posts around our ALT-C symposium (The Paradox of Openness: The High Costs of Giving Online), Frances Bell, Josie Fraser, Richard Hall and myself pose a range of issues for debate, provoking participants to reconsider the costs of participation online, openness, and the sharing of resources. Following on from my earlier post, which highlighted issues around the tyranny of authenticity, I’m now going to briefly explore ‘network whispers’. Ideas and content are shared easily through open platforms, and yet attributions can be masked in the flow of dissemination: does credit always go where it is due?

The Paradox of Openness: The High Costs of Giving Online

At this year’s ALT-C conference, I’ll be contributing to a symposium session along with Frances Bell, Josie Fraser and Richard Hall. In our session, The Paradox of Openness: The High Costs of Giving Online, we will pose a range of issues for debate, provoking participants to reconsider the costs of participation online, openness, and the sharing of resources. I’ll be focusing practice-based scenarios based on the publishing and sharing of digital artefacts that highlight areas of uncertainty, risk and the personal cost of openness. In this post, i’m exploring ideas around:

The Tyranny of Authenticity (identity)

Bringing the Social into the Sciences

Bringing the Social into the Sciences

View more presentations from Helen Keegan

Here are my Pecha Kucha slides from the Education in a Changing Environment Conference 2011. It’s a whistle-stop tour of the ways we are using social technologies in a traditional science faculty to develop a culture of learning through conversation and co-creation.

The Great Twitter Icon Experiment

So this is it, I’m having a ‘blog-off’ with @clintlalonde! Not as strange as it may sound – we basically started tweeting the other night about something which we both felt warranted more than 140 character exchanges, so we arranged to post our thoughts at the same time (PST/GMT). Here goes…

A few days ago Clint changed his Twitter icon. No big deal – except that it actually was. All of a sudden this guy whose tweets I follow, whose blog I’ve read… he seemed so ‘real’, it was as though this person was jumping out of the screen. So why the impact…?

Media and Learning

I’ve spent the past few days at the superb Media and Learning Conference in Brussels, now at the airport feeling completely fired up after hearing about all sorts of exciting projects across Europe. Stand-out projects include Paul Bottleberghs Ambrosia’s Table and Jonathan Sanderson’s Planet SciCast (yay for short form!)… impressed by Jim Devine who’s really got a handle on the whole digital literacy/media literacy/competency/whatever debate, and also Nathalie Labourdette from the European Broadcasting Union who presented a pan European perspective on major broadcaster’s strategies in terms of audience participation through social media (and used a John Maeda quote, which made me very happy).

Social Media, Education, Industry – and Motivation

(NOTE: There’s a fair bit of context in this post, so the main points are in bold)

When the time came to deliver my new MSc module in Social Media (February 2010) I was feeling a touch apprehensive: firstly, the terminology – since writing the module spec for programme approval a few years ago, attitudes towards the term ’social media’ had changed. The term itself was being seen as increasingly meaningless, the seemingly inevitable downside of buzz-terminology. However, more importantly I was worried about the content, much of which would draw on sociocultural theory, digital literacy and the ’soft’ side of media production (meanwhile the students are working towards technical MScs…). As their other modules were pretty techie I did wonder if they’d object to something that was so epistemologically different and diverse.