Topic: Communities

Behind the headlines of the new JISC Techdis tools – a personal view

It isn’t often that  when I am delivering a plenary session at a conference that the audience is moved to tears,  but that is exactly what happened at ND2012. Let me explain what happened…. It was the final plenary on … Read more

Where there’s MOOC, there’s brass?

Why bother paying inflated fees to attend university? Why pay to spend three years living on a campus, attending seminars and tutorials, running up debts?  What if you could get it all for free, online? This is the compelling pitch … Read more

JISC and crowdfunding

What links an e-paper watch, a statue of RoboCop and an open alternative to Facebook? The answer is that all of these ideas have been funded via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Crowdfunding is an exciting new approach where individuals can … Read more

The value of local developers

The higher and further education sectors in the UK are fortunate to employ talented and dedicated software developers. Without them, many kinds of technical innovation would be significantly more difficult, more expensive or even impossible. While the patterns of employment … Read more

Developers value to higher education

There is a great William Gibson quote, ‘The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ I believe that working with developers to share experiences, ideas and expertise will help distribute those slices of the future that are … Read more

Co-operation of the fittest: a decade for institutional dialogue and collaboration?

Last month, Tim Marshall’s blog post suggested five ways in which universities and colleges could respond to a changing landscape, the fifth of which was “Seeing over the Horizon”. Whilst confidently predicting the future of UK higher and further education … Read more

Isn’t Google digitising everything anyway?

Since Google embarked on its scanning of major world book libraries, there has been the assumption that there is little more to do in the field of digitisation. Yet this is far from the truth. Opinions vary, but it is … Read more

Turning eyewitnesses into experts

It’s amazing how our collective memory of many events has been shaped by images taken by ordinary people – like mobile phone footage of political protests in oppressive regimes or tragic pictures of national disasters.

The exponential rise of social media has created a new landscape of interaction and collaboration where the boundaries between professional practice, citizen journalism, the subject and the audience are blurring. Read more

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