Set in Stone

Two weeks ago I presented the story of our Women in Science and Scottish History editathon at the Wikipedia Science conference in London at the Wellcome Trust*. This week Surgeon’s Hall unveiled a plaque to commemorate the Edinburgh Seven and the Surgeon’s Hall riot. I am very pleased to be able to draw a direct …

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Can open stop the future?

Last week Catherine Cronin brought Alice Marwick’s review of Nathaniel Tkacz’s Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, to my attention and it’s left me with a lot of food for thought.  I haven’t had a chance to read Tkacz’s book yet but there are a couple points that I’d like to pick up on from the review, and one in […]

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Open Education Policy – blocked pipelines and infinite loops

Doesn’t time fly?  It’s almost a fortnight since I joined colleagues at what has now become an annual event in the Scottish education technology calendar; the ALT Scotland one day conference. One of the things I really like about this event is that it consistently brings together colleagues from all sectors of Scottish education to discuss issues relating to open education […]

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Events, dear boy, events

This week I am mostly at EMOOCs conference in Mons. Although I’m supposed to be talking about MOOCs I keep getting slightly sidetracked into history conversations. I’m thinking of The Europeana project 1914-18: untold stories & official histories of WW1. Europeana enables people to explore the digital resources of Europe’s galleries, museums, libraries, archives and …

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sweeping the common

Our staff and students experience our physical estate and our digital estate. In the city of Edinburgh much of the housing stock is flats. Flats in a common stair.  Some of these flats are large, grand and very elegant. Nevertheless  they have equal shares and responsibility in common. The experience of communal living in a …

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technical debt for OER

Three weeks ago,  while preparing  my presentation for e-learningforum@ed conference I was musing on the similarities between ‘technical debt’ and what one might call ‘ copyright debt’. I was thinking about institutional risks of not being open. Institutional risks are sometimes legal, sometimes reputational, sometimes financial.  Mostly, at IT directors’ meetings we talk about the …

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OER16

I spent some of last week in sunny Cardiff at OER15. The conference was very good. Lorna and I have agreed to host it in Edinburgh next year. It’ll be a wonderful chance to  gather like-minded folks together in our own town to discuss open culture and cultures of openness. Edinburgh will be hosting a …

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It’s not ok

Baroness Martha Lane-Fox delivered the 39th annual Dimbleby Lecture from London’s Science Museum on March 30, 2015. I delivered a short welcome speech at Elearing@ed forum at Edinburgh University on April 23.  I took the opportunity to quote her. In her lecture she said “It’s not ok not to understand the Internet anymore.”* I talked …

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