To state the obvious, I have blogging block — a fairly chronic case of it. The reasons for this, and my abortive attempts to overcome it, are fascinating from one perspective; self-indulgent from another. Therein lies part of the riddle that has undone me. Suffice to say, for now, that I still believe in the […]
Miscellany
What’s holding Open Access publishing back?
As a small business working in knowledge-intensive, research-driven areas, I’ve got first-hand experience of the frustrations caused by mainstream research publishing: you find a research paper that looks useful, but it costs $30 to read the 15 pages if you haven’t got some kind of institutional subscription. These costs keep going up, and even institutions […]
Round-up of recent writing in other places
Agile learning: How ‘making do’ can evolve into ‘making good’ is my latest attempt at developing and honing what I mean by agile learning and why it’s important. Written for the newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology, it’s aimed at the ALT constituency which is mostly people in Higher and Further Education along with […]
Purpos/ed: What’s the purpose of education
This post is my contribution to an ongoing project organised by purpos/ed, “a non-partisan, location-independent organization aiming to kickstart a debate around the question: What’s the purpose of education?” This was initiated by Doug Belshaw and Andy Stewart. When I signed up to make the 38th contribution at the fag end of an already-extended process, […]
My five mind apples
Mindapples is a social movement to promote individual self-management of mental wellbeing. The original “5-a-day” campaign encouraged people to take care of their physical health through simple daily activities, and we want to do the same thing for mental health. We aim to create a stigma-free public debate about mental wellbeing, simply by asking everybody […]
On Slow Blogging
About a month ago, or maybe two, I was on the sofa at London’s Social Media Cafe having a chat to David Wilcox. We had no deals to do, and no pressing initiatives to scheme about, but our interests and contacts overlap at several points, and it was a wide-ranging discussion [Update, 30 November 02008: […]
Some tweaking to this site
I know things have been quiet here for some months, but do not despair: this site is not limping towards terminal decline; it will be back to its normal self eventually. Reculer pour mieux sauter, and all that. Probably you won’t see a major burst of energy here for a couple of months, but please […]
Is Yahoo clamming up: authenticity and transparency under threat?
A year ago I praised Yahoo’s music team for their openness, authentic voice and for recognising the value of conversation. By coincidence, last night, exactly a year later, I listened to Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz on IT Conversations talking about their ethic of ‘opening up’ in various ways. Towards the end of his talk (in the […]
Back in the blogging seat
After a couple of months of inactivity blog-wise, I’m returning to the scene, and hoping I haven’t lost everyone who used to visit here. I’ve actually been back in action since the beginning of the month, but mostly on other sites. Check my Net, Blogs and Rock’n’Roll blog for a couple of entries last week. […]
Hibernation and software upgrade
As regular readers will have noticed, I’ve been posting here much less frequently in the past couple of months. This will continue at least until December, as I am being pretty single-minded about completing the first draft of my book. Normal service will return in due course. The software that this blog runs on was […]