Category: Open Education

  • New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

    New Visions for the Book III: Liquid Books

    Part 3 – Fluidity deconstructed As Hall has shown, the use of wikis to experiment with new ways of writing and collaborating offers a lot of potential for collaborative and distributive research and publishing practices. However, I feel they are only one possible step towards liquid publications and cannot as yet be perceived as real…

  • Open Media Research Seminar Series

    Open Media Research Seminar Series

    In two weeks the second series will commence of the Research Seminars I have been organizing at Coventry University in this term and the previous on ‘Open Media’. The seminar series is accompanied by a blog that provides more information about the speakers, the theme and the seminars. You can find it here. On his…

  • Why Humanities?

    This has been lying around for a while, and only now did I have the time to properly go through my notes for this excellent conference, which was held at the 5th of November at Birkbeck. The Why Humanities? conference gathered together some of the key figures in the UK Humanities to discuss ‘the value…

  • Open Media Research Seminar Series

    I have been organizing a Research Seminar Series, taking place at Coventry University in this term and the next, on ‘Open Media’. Last Tuesday the first lecture was given by Federica Frabetti from Oxford Brooks University entitled ‘DIGITAL AGAIN? The Humanities Between the Computational Turn and Originary Technicity’. You can find more information about the…

  • The Public Domain and Digital Natives

    Two weeks ago I visited the wonderful city of Turin to attend the International Conference University and Cyberspace. Reshaping Knowledge Institutions for the Networked Age, the closing conference of The COMMUNIA Thematic Network. As they state on their website, COMMUNIA aims at becoming a European point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion…

  • Governance in Times of Change

    Last week I attended the International Conference – Digital publishing and its governance: between knowledge and power, which was held from April 28th-30th in Paris. The conference was organized by Sens Public with support from INHA-Invisu, tge-ADONIS, CNRS and DARIAH. The conference focused on how digitally induced practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences are…

  • Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

    “But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be…

  • Post Literacy

    The concept or theory of post literacy (which I learned about via James Bridle from booktwo.org) is described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’. However, literacy encompasses much more than just the ability to read (and…

  • The Universal Library Revisited

    For those of us who are incessantly scanning the Internet in search of quality material concerning scholarly research and cultural analysis, I am glad to ease your frenzy by drawing your attention to some new online resources that have been launched recently.   First of all, YouTube started an educational channel: YouTube EDU. The campus…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 1

      Last week, on the 19th and 20th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in…

  • Open Your Mind and Participate! Or Not…

    The online environment offers limitless possibilities for learning and other ways of thought expansion. Like the before mentioned video lectures on the net, the institutions of higher education are increasingly seeing the benefit (for themselves and society at large) to free education from its brick and mortar constraints. But not only YouTube seems to be…

  • Open Your Mind

    In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our…