So, this is not a new subject. Or a new phenomena. And what sparked me off this morning was a tweet from Eric Stoller. There are so many things going on in this tweet I actually struggled on where to start. But then I, like Eric, decided to challenge the headline; because I think it…
Read moreCategory: Communication
Time to put a stop to the Sound-byte Generation
Touch-Screen Generation, iPad Generation, Generation Z, Touchscreen Teens These kinds of terms are a useful way for identifying if a talk will be any good or whether it will be full of sound-bytes. But the language is more than that, using it in this way disenfranchises billions of people in the world with no access…
Read moreHow the dinosaur got his nose!
I hadn’t gotten excited about 3D printing. It’s great, love the idea, understand how artists can use it, or engineers can build prototypes etc, but I hadn’t got that excited. That changed for me when I met a project in which Jisc is a partner from the British Geological Society at the Jisc Digifest in…
Read moreNaming a problem?
Is the way we use language in technology having a negative or positive effect? It’s a debate that’s been going on a while, but a discussion over the weekend with a new student prompted me to put something down about the authority that jargon seems to carry. It’s been interesting discussing some of the issues…
Read moreOverwhelmed
“the Internet, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts…” with apologies to Douglas Adams.
Read moreSix ways to ensure sustainability for technology based interventions
Over the last two years I’ve been very lucky in working with some excellent projects in three JISC programmes; Users and Innovation, Institutional Innovation and Building Capacity. This community of projects hold a vast core of information and knowledge about the use of technology in institutions and how to get the most of it. In…
Read moreRethinking Dissemination in Educational Technology Projects
What is the purpose of dissemination? For most of the projects that I have been involved with dissemination is about telling people about the project. But this idea of dissemination can be traced back to when the web was a unidirectional medium; most conferences in this field have been around, at least, since the birth…
Read moreQR Codes in education: watch this space
A QR (quick response) code is a two dimensional bar code that can be read on a mobile device, such as a camera phone. Once the device decodes the information then it will enable an action to be undertaken. For instance, this might be accessing a web page, displaying text information or subscribing to an…
Read moreReflecting on JIF08
This is a bit of an indulgence posting on my part, a few short reflections on the JISC Innovation Forum 2008. The sessions that I attended were excellent, and the diversity on show really made me think hard about what we do as the larger JISC Innovation Group. The really nice thing for me as…
Read moreGuardian Article
There’s a great article in today’s Guardian “Tracking technology in the corridors of learning”, it reports on the use of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) antennas and tags at the University of Washington’s computer science department. Rather than the Orwellian overtones you might expect, where the ‘evil overseers’ monitor our every move, the system is open…
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