I’m not a hard-nosed computer scientist. I’m more interested in people than algorithms, and that’s why my research has taken me in the direction of hypertext, UX and narrative. That’s also why earlier this month I was so sad to hear about the death of Douglas Engelbart, the American Scientist who thought that computers could […]
Category: Academic
The Email Heresy
Let’s just say it. Email isn’t working. In fact its got to the point where ‘not working’ doesn’t describe the problem anymore. Email has moved beyond not working, it has become anti-work. Technology often benefits from Network Effects, a phenomenon where something becomes more useful the more people adopt it. Telephones are a good example. […]
In Praise of the Ephemeral
There is a creeping view in our society that data is forever. For some reason whilst we are happy for our spoken words to vanish into the ether, our written words and media must be hewn in stone (or at least backed up at an off-site data centre). Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, […]
Hypertext 2012: Fractal Narratives, Ergodic Literature and Submarines
I have just returned from the ACM conference in Milwaukee, excellently run and as interesting as ever, but smaller than it has been in a number of years. I also co-chaired the Hypertext and Narrative workshop with my old student Charlie Hargood (now a postdoc at Southampton). The Narrative workshop had its inception seven years […]
RedFeather: Light and Fluffy OER
We’ve been building teaching and learning repositories at Southampton for a number of years now, ever since we were brought into a couple of projects dealing with Learning Objects and decided that there really must be a better way. I’ve written before about the EdShare software we created and how it was more like a […]
Chasing EdShare: In Pursuit of a Usable Teaching and Learning Repository
The last five years or so has been an incredible time to be involved in e-learning. We’ve seen the rise and demise of the Digital Native, the flight and delight of students and academics to Web 2.0 systems, and the attempted murder of the VLE (we now know that reports of its death have been […]
Rise of the Other Web
Isn’t the Web great? Isn’t it crazy and anarchic, vibrant and wild, unpredictable, awesome and thoroughly marvelous? Well it has been, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way. I’ve been working with and researching Hypertext for nearly fifteen years. The Hypertext systems that I studied for my PhD were alternative contemporaries […]
Choosing our Science: Hypertext and Web Science
This blog post is an abridged version of a guest editorial I co-wrote for the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Special Issue on Web Science. The full editorial can be found in EPrints. Hypertext and the Web What is Hypertext? It is well known in our community that the word Hypertext was coined by […]
Knowledge Ergonomics (That Thing We Do)
For the last few years I’ve been involved in research and development projects where the goal has been to design, build and evaluate useful and useable knowledge and information interfaces. But I’ve always had a problem articulating this as a research challenge. It’s related to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but isn’t so much concerned with […]