PhD handed in!

The minor amendments have been completed, the thesis has been printed and bound and handed in! I’m now starting on drafting papers from the thesis but meanwhile, here’s the final abstract: Distributed online discussion events in social media are increasingly used as sites for open, informal professional development, knowledge sharing and community formation. Synchronous chat … Read more

PhD Abstract: Twitter chat events & the making of a professional domain

Here is the latest draft of a one page abstract of my PhD: Distributed online discussion events in social media are increasingly used as sites for open, informal professional development, knowledge sharing and community formation. Synchronous chat events hosted on Twitter have become particularly prominent in a number of professional domains. Yet theoretical and critical … Read more

IT Futures at Edinburgh

I’m attending the IT Futures conference at Edinburgh today. These notes are not intended to be a comprehensive record of the conference but to highlight points of interest to me and so will be subjective and partial. A full recoding of the conference will be available at the IT Futures website The conference opens with … Read more

The Twitter Experience

For all the structuring effects of the Twitter functional features, the Twitter experience is generally perceived as a private one as only the individual user can see their Twitter feed, as they have structured it, on their particular screen configuration (Gillen and Merchant 2013). This aspect of the individualisation and heterogeneity of public and open … Read more

ReCon, Research in the 21st Century: Data, Analytics and Impact

So here we are at ReCon, Research in the 21st Century: Data, Analytics and Impact at the University of Edinburgh’s Business School. I’ll be taking notes here throughout the day but these will be partial and picking up main points of interest to me. The conference is opening with Jo Young from the Scientific Editing … Read more

What is wrong with ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’

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Last Friday I attended a Digital Cultures & Education research group presentation by Sian Bayne on her recent article What’s the matter with ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’? These are my notes taken during the presentation and then tidied up later – so they may well be limit, partial and mistaken! While Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) is … Read more

Personal learning environments

I’m currently writing up some ideas on open online professional learning that includes considering  personal learning networks. I came across this interesting post from Martin Weller on the apparent decline in interest or discussion of personal learning networks. The reasons suggested include the mainstreaming of the practices associated with PLEs, a consolidation of the tools used … Read more

Open online spaces of professional learning: searching for understanding  the ‘material’ of Twitter discussion events

Here are the slides from my presentation to the Social Informatics cluster group meeting of 13 June 2014. Abstract: Recent years have seen a growth in micro-blogging discussion events intended to support professional learning (McCulloch, et al, 2011; Bingham and Conner, 2010) communities. These events often take place on Twitter and are open to anyone … Read more

Google Alert for the Soul

See on Scoop.it – Network learning Peter Evans‘s insight: An interesting but unconvincing argument presented here. The corrupting influence of consumerism on authenticity appears to be to be based on a ‘straw man’ argument accepting identity as individual. The corruption is due to the colonisation of self-actualisation by consumerism. Yet, arguably, the idea of an … Read more

Digital Scholarship day of ideas: data [2]

This is the second session of the day I wanted to note in detailed (the first is here). The session it Robert Procter on Big Data and the sociological imagination, Professor of social informatics at the University of Warwick. These notes are written live from the live stream. So here we go: The title has changed … Read more