How do modern students study, and how good are they at it? That’s the question posed by the emerging topic of digital literacy. Last week I attended the Shock of the Old event in Oxford that addressed this question. The topic of digital literacy is particular interesting to me because for the past year or […]
Category: Web Science
The Last Golden Age of Television
When I was a student one of my neighbors in my University halls of residence popped in with a 3.5inch floppy disk, and told me that on it was a file in a new format called MP3. At the time audio compression was pretty abysmal, and a 3 min song made around a 30MB file. […]
Something Open This Way Comes
At Southampton we have a history of Open Access Research, and a number of my colleagues (in particular Les Carr and Stevan Harnad) are heavily involved with the Open Access movement. At its heart Open Access Research holds the principle that publicly funded research should be available for free. It challenges the existing publishing model, […]
The Art of Visual Complexity
Tom Franklin pointed me towards this really neat website called VisualComplexity run by an interaction designer called Manuel Lima, which is a catalog/index of interesting data visualisation techniques, examples and tools. At the moment there are over 500 items in there, and you can filter by what is being visualised (so for example, Internet or […]
Nativism vs. Literacy
I have read a number of pieces recently attacking the notion of the Digital Native – Prensky’s notion that there is a new generation of students who are in some way soaked in technology to the extent that it has changed their behaviour. Stephen Marshall suggests that the concept of the Digital Native is reaching its […]
Why the Semantic Web hasn’t failed, and how we shouldn’t fix it
(a position statement for the JISC CETIS conference, Aston, UK, held Nov 2007) I’ve been invited to present a position statement at this years JISC CETIS conference on the topic of Semantic Structures for Teaching and Learning. The session aims to explore the potential of Semantic Web technologies in e-learning, and also raises the question […]
The New Web Literacy
I’ve just given a seminar to my research group (The Learning Societies Lab) on the notion of the New Web Literacy, how e-learning systems should change to support it, and what we should be doing as e-learning researchers to enact and understand that change. I have wanted to present something on this topic ever since […]
You will soon be able to download music online!
Yes, folks – hidden away in the depths of the BBC technology pages is the revelation that at last, after years of false starts and obfuscation, you will finally be able to legally download music online. Of course, many people falsely believe that they can already download music. They are sadly mistaken. The current set […]
Sir Tim
Is it just me, or at the mention of Sir Tim does everyone look around nervously for the vicious Chicken of Bristol? Brave, brave, Sir Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the Web – is a Professor at the University of Southampton, and I’ve just returned from his Inaugural Lecture on the past and future […]