The snowflake effect: the future of mashups and learning

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring web mashups and their potential for educatio

“It might be rubbish, but it’s my rubbish”: How the Makers of Cigar Box Guitars Resist Throwaway Culture

This paper analyses ethnographic research carried out into the activities of a particular group of makers whose DIY activities are centred on the creation, dissemination and performance of home-made musical instruments in the form of cigar box guitars. From a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews, it emerged that these objects are almost exclusively based on notions of recycling, reuse and repurposing, and as such extend the life of component parts that would otherwise be discarded. Also, as hand-crafted labours of love, the resulting instruments are often the focus of strong emotional bonds to their makers, and are used for extended periods, being added to, altered and reconfigured over time as new components become available and the makers’ skills improve. For many makers, partaking in this activity has been their first foray into creative production of any kind, and often, they need to find solutions to problems they encounter in the process of making of their instruments. As a consequence of the usually very solitary nature of the activity, these makers make extensive use of online forums and networks to become part of a community of practice, openly sharing their knowledge and experience to help each other, and to celebrate their achievements of productive labour. It is argued that the ‘magic’ of the instruments produced and the support of a social media network is directly linked to the extension of product lifetimes of the objects made

Democracy, Cultural Agency and Digital Bits: Saving ASAROs Blog

This presentation is a call to action which also introduces a developing project to digitally archive the blog production of a contemporary Mexican artists collective called the Asamblea de Artistas Revolutionarios de Oaxaca/The Assembly of Revolutionary Oaxacan Artists (ASARO).\u2

FAVORing the part-time language teacher: the experience and impact of sharing open educational resources through a community-based repository

The resourcefulness of part-time language teachers is often overlooked,despite the large numbers of such staff teaching in language departments across higher education. Part-time teachers typically juggle life work commitments and experience far fewer opportunities for professional development than their full-time colleagues. They frequently work in relative isolation, yet carry out their teaching duties enthusiastically and conscientiously, striving to provide as rich a learning experience as possible for their students, often spending a considerable amount of time in lesson and resource preparation. The aim of the JISC-funded FAVOR (Find a Voice through Open Resources) Project was to bring more part-time teachers into the open content movement, drawing on their wealth of resourcefulness and offering them something back for all their, often unrecognised, hard work. This case study will describe one participating institution’s experience on the FAVOR Project, including an initial investigation into its impact on the post project practices of part-time teachers. It will draw on a range of qualitative data gathered from individual and group meetings, teacher interviews, and reflective notes made by the institutional coordinator to present a picture of the experience from the part-time teachers’ perspectiv

Pioneers, subcultures and cooperatives: The grassroots augmentation of urban places

About the book: There have been numerous possible scenarios depicted on the impact of the internet on urban spaces. Considering ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile, wireless connectivity and the acceptance of the Internet as a non extraordinary part of our everyday lives mean that physical urban space is augmented, and digital in itself. This poses new problems as well as opportunities to those who have to deal with it. This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies

Audiences, Intertextuality and New Media Literacy

This article explores intertextuality as a technique that can be used to bridge old and new media literacies for teachers and students who hope to move beyond the textbook model of instruction into a world of online resources, flexible pedagogies and innovative designs for learning. These include the uses of online archives, media studies techniques, participatory knowledge creation, and multimedia analysis and production.Radio-Television-Fil

Issues for the sharing and re-use of scientific workflows

In this paper, we outline preliminary findings from an ongoing study we have been conducting over the past 18 months of researchers’ use of myExperiment, a Web 2.0-based repository with a focus on social networking around shared research artefacts such as workflows. We present evidence of myExperiment users’ workflow sharing and re-use practices, motivations, concerns and potential barriers. The paper concludes with. a discussion of the implications of these our findings for community formation, diffusion of innovations, emerging drivers and incentives for research practice, and IT systems design

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records, Part I: A Theoretical Basis

The Information Revolution is making preservation of digital records an urgent issue. Archivists have grappled with the question of how to achieve this for about 15 years. We focus on limitations to preservation, identifying precisely what can be preserved and what cannot. Our answer comes from the philosophical theory of knowledge, especially its discussion about the limits of what can be communicated. Philosophers have taught that answers to critical questions have been obscured by "failure to understand the logic of our language". We can clarify difficulties by paying extremely close attention to the meaning of words such as 'knowledge', 'information', 'the original', and 'dynamic'. What is valuable in transmitted and stored messages, and what should be preserved, is an abstraction, the pattern inherent in each transmitted and stored digital record. This answer has, in fact, been lurking just below the surface of archival literature. To make progress, archivists must collaborate with software engineers. Understanding perspectives across disciplinary boundaries will be needed.