Open educational resources such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare are changing the way universities make impact and engage with the world

With the trend for freely available online resources now growing popular at university level, Patrick Lockley notes that the impact of such material is now of increasing interest to funding bodies. Here he discusses the key issues around the debate and provides details of some great websites which can help academics get started with increasing impact through online repositories

Open is not enough: design considerations for a networked data commons

Recently, researchers within the Networked Learning (NL) community have tried to (re)claim NL’s roots in critical pedagogy and (re)assert its commitment to social justice (Networked Learning Editorial Collective, 2021; 2021a). However, despite these avowed intentions, NL has also been criticised from within for “fail[ing] to take account of emancipatory struggles and political imperatives in society more broadly” (Networked Learning Editorial Collective, 2021a, p. 328). The suggestion is made to put NL “to work … to allow the concept of NL itself to become ‘networked’: to make connections, to interrelate, to transform, mutate, and hybridise in response to the pressing issues of our time” (Networked Learning Editorial Collective, 2021a, p. 359). In this paper, we take concepts from NL and put them “to work” in relation to the design of an informal digital learning environment – that is, a digital environment that lies outside of formal education provision, but that is intended to be a place where knowledge can be shared and circulated and where people encounter knowledge in ways that enable them to think, understand or act differently. The work was carried out in the context of a project aiming to develop design principles for an internet-based platform through people would be able to openly access, learn about and share publicly available data, using Scotland’s waste and re-use data as a case study. In this context, we plug NL into a theoretical and methodological design assemblage that connects concepts of openness, data literacy, (de)coloniality, and participatory design into new formations that we hope will allow these concepts to mutate and hybridise into something closer to the social justice ideals that NL claims

Continual publishing across journals, blogs and social media maximises impact by increasing the size of the ‘academic footprint'

If we start to see publishing as both multi-stage and dialogical, impact becomes more a matter of engagement than broadcasting. In their concluding ‘Site or Cite’ post, Pat Lockley and Mark Carrigan write that the tools used in continual publishing provide accessible quanititve metrics which could be easily legitimised

The search for the academic arctic monkey: why we must maximise the exposure of research through a blend of traditional and new methods of publication

In the second in their series, ‘Cite or Site?’, Pat Lockley and Mark Carrigan analyse the dominance of academic journals in publishing despite a drastic change in cultural context, arguing that moving social science research online should be second nature

Cite or Site? The current view of what constitutes ‘academic publishing’ is too limited. Our published work must become truly public.

Producing papers for a growing number of journals with an ever shrinking audience risks diminishing the potential of the impact of academic work. Pat Lockley and Mark Carrigan consider the incentives of the current system of academic publishing and call for a new definition

17. PressEd — Where the Conference Is the Hashtag

#Advanced #Twitter #pressedconf18 ‘I’ve been to conferences that used a hashtag, but this is my first conference that is a hashtag #pressedconf18’ (Groom, 2018). You may ask what a Twitter conference is. There have been five hashtags: #IconTC, #UPMTC, #PressTC, #PATC, and #PressEDconf18 (Lafferty, 2018) that have been billed as Twitter conferences, and of those #PATC has run multiple times. In such fledgling times it would seem dangerous to be prescriptive about what is and what is not a Twit..

Arras 95 Tweets Map

This resource consists of geotagged tweets to tell the Arras 95 story. There is also a KML layer for the geotagged tweets

The Medals of Arras

There is no easy way to compare medals across different armed forces - they remain distinct entities without comparison. Harry Cator won a VC and a Croix du Guerre for his actions at Arras, but the majority of medals awarded are for Commonwealth forces - the awards for German forces are primarily for generals - the Iron Cross is awarded more often, and is perhaps, more akin to the military medal

Arras95 Map

This map shows geo-tagged tweets from the @Arras95 project

The King of Albania

Aubrey Herbert was almost blind but served in France, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia in World War One. He was the basis for characters in the work of John Buchan and Louis de Berni