Thanks to the generosity, fine organisational skills and fabulous mailing list of the team from CLPD at the University of Adelaide I had an excellent and diverse gathering at my little rant about NewMedia today. I will update the audio recording with the official ‘MyMedia’ recording when it comes thru. Scroll down for quicktime movie of slides + audio.

After a quick poll and some definitions we looked at some interesting examples of NewMedia and:

Research

1. Open Access Publishing
2. Open Science
3. Open Notebook Chemistry

Teaching & Learning

1. iTunes and other lecture podcasts
2. The tricky mix of social networking and formal coursework
3. An experimental Open Course

Quicktime movie of Slides + Audio from fang.blip.tv:

The mac version of my slides (complete with black rectangles thanks to evil powerpoint incompatability) is up on slideshare.

Thanks to all who came for the great feedback, I hope to see some of you hanging out at the Science Blogging Conference online tomorrow night.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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• Watching chemists like Jean Claude Bradley publish their experiments as they go, openly, on wiki, failures and all, (with data in machine readable formats) reminds me of that young ‘Torvalds‘ dude before the penguin magic started to kick in.
• Looking at the reaction other science types like ‘the quantum pontiff’ get when they tentatively talk about ideas such as open notebook science (read comments) has a familiar whiff of ignorance. Such as was displayed by many a middle manager in Microsoft who did not get the open movement.
• Listening to podcasts from established publisher Nature, watching things like Plos one emerge and the wild west frontiers like arXiv, remind me of the early public open source plays by companies like IBM and Novell.

Sometimes I think I live in two different worlds – of bits and of atoms. In the online world of digital bits connected via the permisison free zone of the internet, where anything is possible – I am comfortable. The offline world of atoms that make up the air I breathe, the water I need to live and transmit the energy I love to consume does not feel as ‘natural’ to me. A foreign place in which bills must be paid and where those who master the game of serialization of letters and symbols into the written word and who organise themselves into rigid hierarchies fueled by things like rank or impact factor thrive.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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Download .mp3 [right mouse, save as]

• Research on Research – interesting program described by Susan Metros
• Open notebook science – introduction by the creator of usefulchem wiki
• MIT’s Hal Abelson talks about his long history with the intellectual commons
• Johnny Lee urges researchers like him to embrace online video distribution

TreeBlue Originally uploaded by Conor Lawless

Roughly ten minutes of snippets from podcasts I have heard recently that might be relevant to Higher Education. My aim is to stimulate discussion around the impact of the read/write web on research and teaching & learning.

Links/Attribution:

Image – ‘TreeBlue’
Connor Lawless

Metros, Susan E (2008) Challenging IT Leaders to Mashup, Twitter, Tag, and Poke: New IT Strategies for a Digital Society. Via:
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=43977 [Accessed April 07, 2008].

Bradley, Jean-Claude, Open Notebook Science ACS March07 (JCB) on Odeo. Available at:
http://odeo.com/audio/10972353/view [Accessed April 23, 2008].

Abelson, Hal, Hal Abelson on Supporting Our Intellectual Commons. Available at:
http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/faculty-and-researchers/podcasts/ [Accessed April 23, 2008].

Lee, Johnny, TED | Talks | Johnny Lee: Creating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote (video).
Available at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/245 [Accessed April 23, 2008].

Get episodes delivered automatically via iTunes:

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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1. I am not the only crazy dude who thinks Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ is a good open license.
2. Some Aussie researchers have made news thru their open publishing of research into African sleeping sickness.
3. Two usual suspects – Wired magazine and Cory Doctorow are involved

In the first, as Aaron Rowe at Wired News reported and Cory Doctorow blogged, a pair of researchers from Australia developed a blood test for African sleeping sickness — a relatively simple test that Rowe points out can be conducted without the “fancy equipment found in upscale medical labs.” Notably, the researchers published the findings at PLoS One under a Creative Commons Attribution License — making freely available not only the results but the lab protocols for conducting the test itself.

So now I am subscribed to the PLoS (Public Library of Science) RSS feed for neglected tropical diseases and will have to start reading Cory and Wired again.
Fang – Mike Seyfang

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