Category Archives: Uncategorized

Blogging about Blogging

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I’ve been rather neglecting this blog recently, ironically because I’ve been busy blogging about blogging on other blogs :}  The University of Edinburgh launched a new Academic Blogging Service, including a centrally supported WordPress platform, blogs.ed.ac.uk, last year and the service has really taken off.  

In addition to our workshop Blogging to Build your Professional Profile, as part of the roll out of the service, Karen Howie (Digital Learning Applications & Media) and I have been curating a Mini-Series on Academic Blogging over on the Teaching Matters blog. The series features reflections on different uses of academic blogs from staff and students across the university.  Together with Susan Greig (Digital Skills) and Daphne Loads (Institute of Academic Development), I wrote a post on blogging for professional accreditation Blogging: What is it good for? The post reflects on my experience of using my blog to create and evidence my CMALT portfolio, while Susan and Daphne discuss how blogging can be used to support CMALT and HEA accreditation. 

We’ve also recorded two podcasts as part of the series; one on How Blogging can be used as an effective form of assessment, and another on Blogging to enhance professional practice, which is a conversation between Karen Howie, Eli Appleby-Donald (Edinburgh College of Art), James Lamb (Centre for Research in Digital Education) and I.  Though I’ve recorded lots of webinars, this is the first time I’ve recorded a conversational podcast and it was a really fun experience!  Karen made a great “interviewer” and, perhaps surprisingly, Eli, James and I managed not to talk over each other all the time.  Although all of us have quite a difference experience of and approach to blogging we were all very much in agreement that blogging can be a great way to enhance professional and academic practice. 

The week before last I had double blogging; on Wednesday afternoon I gave a talk as part of a panel on “Using Social Media to Engage Research End Users” for colleagues in the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Then later in the evening I joined Girl Geek Scotland to give a talk on professional blogging (slides) as part of and event on “Your Online Self:  How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?” Girl Geek Scotland are a network and community for those working and studying in creativity, computing, enterprise, and related sectors in Scotland. As most of the participants are working and building careers in the commercial sector it was quite a different audience to the kind I usually experience and it was really interesting for me to reflect on the affordances and tensions between using blogging and social media to develop your personal profile and to market a personal brand.  Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the whole event so I missed the discussion sessions later in the evening but Anne-Marie said that there was considerable interest in using blogs for personal development, so I’ll take that as a win.  Now all I need to do, is get my own blog back in order!

She is done with doing

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I was deeply saddened today to hear of the death of Ursula K Le Guin.  Despite being an avid reader as a kid, for some strange reason I never came across any of Le Guin’s books.  I have no idea why but it’s something I still regret.  It was actually my current partner who introduced me to LeGuin in my mid thirties. During a very wet holiday in Sleat on the Isle of Skye he read The Wizard of Earth Sea to me.  I was entranced, and read all six books of the series back to back.  Having grown up in the Western Isles, the archipelago of Earthsea, and the rocky island of Gont in particular, was instantly familiar. The Outer Hebrides with dragons!  What’s not to like?

It’s hard to pick a favourite from the series, but if I had to, it would be Tehanu, because it is so rare to find a work of transformative fiction told from the perspective of a middle aged woman.  And it’s not just the perspective of one single woman, women’s experience of the world, of child hood, adulthood, birth and death is absolutely central to the whole mythos of Earthsea.

It was only after reading the Earthsea series two or three times that I moved on to Le Guin’s science fiction.  I never got much further than The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, because they raised so many questions and gave me so much to think about and to process.

When I read the news of Le Guin’s death on twitter this morning, it was The Dispossessed I picked up to read in remembrance, but it’s this quote from the end of The Farthest Shore that’s been with me all day.

The Doorkeeper, smiling, said, “He is done with doing. He goes home.”

Maritime Masculinities Conference Registration

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Registration is open for the Maritime Masculinities conference which takes place at St Anne’s College Oxford on the 19th and 20th December.

Register for Maritime Masculinities

Maritime Masculinities covers the period from 1815 – 1940, which saw the demise of the sail ship, the rise of steam and oil-powered ships, the erosion of British naval and maritime supremacy during two world wars, the advent of the Pax Britannica, and the emergence of popular navalism through the press, popular literature, photography and film.  Panels will cover a wide range of topics and themes including: material culture and technology, bravery and honour, memory and nostalgia, race and empire, visual culture, life stages, homosociability, and sexualities.  A full conference programme will be published shortly.

The conference features a wide range of international speakers from the UK, USA, Canada, Italy, Germany and Sweden, along with keynotes from leading international scholars Professor Joanne Begiato, Oxford Brookes University, Dr Mary Conley, College of the Holy Cross, and Dr Isaac Land, Indiana State University.

Professor Joanne Begiato has worked on the role that representations of military and maritime masculinity played in the formation of masculine identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in the part played by material culture and emotions in disseminating and fixing ideas about manliness.

Dr Mary Conley’s research areas include the intersection between empire, navy, and manhood in British society; imperialism and post-colonialism; maritime history; and the history of gender, family and childhood. She is particularly interested in issues relating to boys’ culture and sodomy.

Dr Isaac Land has written about masculinity and the Royal Navy in a variety of contexts, including patriotism, popular politics, spectacle, empire, nostalgia, autobiography, domestic violence, and religion. He will present a keynote on “Dibdin’s Ghost in the Age of Ironclads”.

Further information about Maritime Masculinities is available from the conference website https://maritimemasculinities.wordpress.com/ and on twitter @MMasculinities.  Emails can be directed to maritimemasculinities@gmail.com

Maritime Masculinities is supported by Oxford Brookes University, Portsmouth University and the Society for Nautical Research.  The conference is being organised by Prof Joanne Begiato, Dr Steven Gray, Dr Isaac Land and Ms Lorna M. Campbell.

Sailors at capstan

Sailors and an accordion player on board Magdalene Vinnen (no known copyright restrictions)

New Blog! lornamcampbell.org

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After months, if not years, of procrastinating, I’ve finally decided it was about time to start practicing what I preach and I’ve moved my blog over to Reclaim Hosting.  Huge thanks to the guys at Reclaim for setting everything up for me so promptly! So, my shiny new domain is

http://lornamcampbell.org/

I’ll no longer be maintaining my blog at lornamcampbell.wordpress.com but will set up a redirect shortly.  Onwards and upwards!

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Ada Lovelace Day at the University of Edinburgh

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Yesterday I was lucky enough to participate in the first Ada Lovelace Day event at the University of Edinburgh.  The event, which was attended by a wide range of staff and students from across the University, featured an eclectic mix of talks and creative activities.

Melissa Highton introduced Ada herself and highlighted the importance of her relationship with her mentor, the Scottish science writer Mary Somerville; Jo Spiller spoke about the Edinburgh Seven, the first women to matriculate as undergraduates at a university in the UK, who were the subject of a Wikimedia editathon at the University and who have been commemorated with a plaque that was recently unveiled at the Anatomical Museum; Katya Krasnopeeva from the Pilizota Lab gave an amazing demonstration of how Lego is being used in the lab; and Stewart Cromar introduced us to his, frankly wonderful, Lego Lovelace & Babbage.  Stewart has submitted Lovelace & Babbage to the Lego Ideas challenge, where they are steadily gathering votes.  If you haven’t already done so, please go to http://bit.ly/vote-ada and add your vote to make Lego Lovelace a reality.  You can also follow Lego Lovelace on twitter and facebook.

Among the activities, participants had the opportunity to try their hand at building Lego Raspberry Pi enclosures, to compose music with algorithms, and compete in metadata games, which turned out to be horribly addictive and ridiculously competitive :}

In the afternoon Sara Thomas, Wikimedian in Residence at Museums and Galleries Scotland gave us a crash course on Wikipedia editing and led an editathon on the University of Edinburgh’s women in Computer Science.  (I created my very first Wikipedia page, which made me immensely proud 🙂

As if that wasn’t enough there was Lego Lovelace gingerbread made by my lovely colleague Nicola Osbourne and a beautiful colour-in Ada by Jackie Aim.

Best of all, all the deliverables and handbooks created for the day have been released as OERs which you can download here http://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/ada-lovelace-day/oers/

Anne-Marie Scott and Eugenia Twomey, two of the organisers of #ALD15EdUni

Anne-Marie Scott and Eugenia Twomey, two of the organisers of #ALD15EdUni

Me and two inspiring women!

Me and two inspiring women!

Lego Ada takes a walk in George Square Gardens

Lego Ada takes a walk in George Square Gardens

Jackie Aim's beautiful colour-in Ada, picture by Marshall Dozier

Jackie Aim’s beautiful colour-in Ada, picture by Marshall Dozier

ALTC twitter take over!

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alt-logo_0_0Tomorrow I’ll be heading off to Manchester where I’ll be attending the ALT Conference for the first time in several years.  Or rather what I should say is that this is the first time for a while that I’ll be attending the conference in person, as for the last couple of years I’ve participated in ALTC remotely.  This year however I’ll be on the other side of the ALTC twitter feed.  Along with Richard Goodman (@Bulgenen) of Loughborough University, I’ll be taking over the @A_L_T twitter account to live tweet the conference keynotes and invited talks, which will also be live streamed on ALT’s Youtube channel.  Last year I found that following the keynotes via the livestream and the twitter feed to be a very rewarding experience (see Marvellous Monsters – thoughts on the #altc 2014 keynotes) so I’m looking forward to helping to make sure that this year’s remote participants are able to enjoy the conference as much as I did last year!

I’ll also be providing updates about OER16 at various stages throughout the conference, so if you’d like to find out more about OER16 and how to participate look out for me and feel free to come and have a chat any time.

OER16: Open Culture

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Less than a month after the fabulous OER15 conference in Cardiff and we’re already thinking ahead to next year’s OER16 event which will be taking place in Scotland for the first time in the conference’s history.  The event will be held at the University of Edinburgh, an institution with along tradition of education innovation and  openness.  I’m delighted to have the opportunity to co-chair the conference along with Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the university.

We’re still in the process of working with ALT to finalise the date for the conference so please keep an eye on the conference holding page and hashtag #OER16 for announcements.

We’re also looking for open practitioners and like minded sorts from all sectors of education to join the conference committee and to help us shape the event. If you’d like to get involved you can sign up here: Join the OER16 Conference Committee.

The theme of OER16 is Open Culture in all its forms and the vision for the conference is to focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. Themes will include:

  • the strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness;
  • the converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access;,
  • hacking, making and sharing;
  • the reputational challenges of openwashing;
  • openness and public engagement
  • and innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

I’m also particularly keen to encourage colleagues from libraries, archives, museums, and the cultural heritage sector more widely, to get involved so we can learn from each others’ experiences of openness and start to break down barriers across these sectors.

I’ll be posting updates about OER16 here as planning progresses, so watch this space and please do sign up and get involved.

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Hearing Voices

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Earlier this evening I cast my vote in the Scottish referendum.  To be honest, I’m not sure I ever thought this day would come. I felt slightly woozy when I stepped out of the front door to walk up to our polling station.  The first step on a new journey perhaps?

I was ten years old at the time of the last referendum, two years older than my daughter is now.   My memories of growing up in the Outer Hebrides and later in Glasgow in the 1970’s and 1980’s are a jumble of images and events; The Cheviot The Stag and the Black Black Oil, the oil boom years when Stornoway was filled with Norwegians gambling impossible sums at private poker parties, Scotland’s mortifying 1978 World Cup campaign, the bitter disappointment of the 1979 referendum, the Cold War and military build up in the Western Isles, the despair and disenfranchisement of the Thatcher years and the injustice of the poll tax.

But the thing I also remember is the glimmer of hope that never quite died, and the voices that still spoke out.  I remember trespassing the NATO base, Monseigneur Bruce Kent speaking passionately for nuclear disarmament at a packed public meeting in Stornoway, I remember Peter Watkins filming our local CND meeting for his magnum opus Resan, and going to watch his banned film The War Game in a packed darkened room in the QMU at Glasgow University, I remember Dick Gaughan playing Songs for Scottish Miners at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, I remember the poll tax riots, and the Glasgow Phoenix choir singing The Red Flag at The Big Day in Glasgow in 1990 and later, I remember the day that Thatcher finally went.  I’m sure one of my colleagues in the Archaeology Department had a bottle of champagne at work that day.  I also remember the day that Donald Dewar announced “There shall be a Scottish Parliament.  I like that.”

Nelson Mandela’s quote “May your choices reflect your hopes not your fears” has been widely used by the Yes campaign, while the No campaign has been overwhelming in its negativity.  For me that’s what it’s all about, having the courage to choose hope over fear.  What has inspired me most about the referendum, is the passionate political engagement of the Scottish people and the myriad voices that have spoken up for their beliefs on both sides of the campaign. I hope that whatever result we wake up to tomorrow morning that engagement will continue and those voices will still be heard.

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George Square, Glasgow, 17/09/2014

Marvellous Monsters – thoughts on the #altc 2014 keynotes

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I wasn’t able to attend the ALT Conference this year, but what with the faultless online coverage and following the back channel on twitter, I think I caught more of the conference than I often do when I’m actually there in person. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard all three keynotes, and I’m very glad I did, as they were all excellent.  Congratulations to the ALTC committee for putting together such a thought provoking programme.

Jeff Haywood’s opening keynote, Designing University Education for 2025 began by focusing on the positivity of open education, while adding the caveat that

“Without vision at policy level, at government and senior management level, the system will not transform.”

He acknowledged that changing higher education takes time and needs both persistence and patience, and he concluded by calling for more modest, purposeful pilots and experiments with learning technology that are designed to scale. That final point seemed to resonate with many listeners and was tweeted many times on the conference hashtag. I could help thinking that this is exactly the kind of experimentation that the Jisc development programmes used to facilitate so successfully; we need such purposeful and experimental innovation now more than ever.

Catherine Cronin’s keynote Navigating the Marvellous explored the potential of openness to bridge educational divides. Catherine framed education as a political and ethical act, urging us as educators to use our voice, and exhorting us to “Always speak, always vote.”  A timely reminder, if ever there was one.

Quoting the inimitable Jim Groom, Catherine reminded us that “openness is an ethos not a license”. Open means sharing and building community, however the restrictive nature of both space and technology can inhibit open practice; lecture theatres privilege the lecturers voice, and the privileged position of lecturers in VLEs works against building communities and mutuality.

Taking her inspiration from Seamus Heaney’s Lightenings viii, Catherine explored the different formal and informal educational and social spaces we inhabit as learners and educators, asking

“Have you ever found yourself in a learning environment so strange you are unable to breathe? Many students have.”

Open practices and the use of social media can enable us to cross educational boundaries, to overcome “othering” and to “minimise the differential in power between educators and students”.

This latter point raised an important question for me and when I asked on twitter

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a lengthy discussion followed, with Helen Beetham arguing that while open practices may democratise participation they can not extend equal participation if learning and digital capital is unequal. Furthermore, while online spaces can disguise or level some kinds of difference and otherness, surely they amplify others? David Kernohan also suggested that social media just holds a mirror up to existing power structures.  To my mind, this is one of the most important points Catherine raised in her thoughtful and astute keynote; there are a lot of issues that need further exploration here and I very much hope we can continue this debate.

It’s hard to know what to say about Audrey Watters keynote that could begin to do it justice. We were very lucky to have Audrey present a keynote at the Cetis conference earlier this year and, if I’m honest, I did wonder how she could top such an inspirational talk. It’s fair to say that with Ed-Tech, Frankenstein’s Monster and Teacher Machines Audrey exceeded even her own high standards. Her talk was personal, inspirational and insightful and covered everything from her own grandfather, an alumni of Bletchley Park, Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, Frankenstein’s monster, the Luddites, Skinner and Rand, by way of fairytales, poetry, storytelling and pigeon-guided missiles. I’m not even going to attempt to summarise the points Audrey raised, if you haven’t heard it already, go and listen to her keynote yourself, it’s worth an hour of anyone’s time. After all, as Audrey reminded us, quoting Hannah Arendt

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.”

Links

ALTC 2014
Designing University Education for 2025: balancing competing priorities (video) – Jeff Haywood
Navigating the Marvellous: Openness in Education (video) – Catherine Cronin
Navigating the Marvellous (Storify)
Ed-Tech, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Teacher Machines (video) – Audrey Watters
Ed-Tech’s Monsters #ALTC (transcript)
Ed-Tech’s Monsters (Storify)

Jisc DigiFest and “What I Know Is”

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It’s been a little quiet on this blog recently, I haven’t been sitting around twiddling my thumbs though, far from it! I’ve been busy on the Open Scotland front and with another exciting project that Phil Barker and I will be announcing very shortly.

I also seem to have got myself roped into an awful lot of conferences and events over the next three or four months. I’ve got ten presentations coming up between now and the end of June, on topics ranging from open education policy and Open Scotland, to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, to the crew of an 18th century naval frigate (yes really!)  If you want to find out where to catch me, I’ve updated my list of Presentations & Events.

The first couple of events I”m looking forward to are the Jisc DigiFest in Birmingham on the 12th of March and “What I Know Is” – a research symposium on online collaborative knowledge building in Stirling on the 19th of March.

Jisc DigiFest

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©Jisc and Matt Lincoln
www.mattlincolnphoto.co.uk
CC BY-SA

David Kernohan has invited me to Jisc DigiFest to participate in the panel session he’s running called Whatever happened to the MOOC?  The session will be:

“A discussion between UK and international speakers concerning current activity around open education and open courses. Find out how cutting edge academics and institutions are taking control of their own open education offerings, and adding value to traditional courses and outreach activities.

The “MOOC” (Massive Open Online Course) dominated discussions about online education in 2013. But as the bubble of media interest begins to fade, we will look at some of the interesting open education experiments and practices that could define the next wave of open education.

David has ambitious plans to run the panel as a single seamless narrative with seven speakers.  We’ve each been given a starting point and an end point in the narrative and have five minutes to cover our topic in between.  There will be no breaks between presenters and David has threatened to be ruthless if we deviate from our allotted five minutes. It’s going to be an interesting challenge!  The panel will also feature video contributions from the incomparable triumvirate of Jim Groom, David Wiley and Audrey Watters.  David has promised us it will be

“Insane? Possibly. Risky? Certainly. Fun? Totally.”

Wish me luck!

“What I Know Is”

260px-Wikimedia_UK_logo“What I Know Is” is a research symposium hosted by the Division of Communications, Media and Culture at the University of Stirling, which focuses on Wikipedia and other wikis and “inquires as to its status as a platform for collaborative online knowledge-building.”  The symposium aims to

“…bring together speakers from a range of disciplines, with a range of interests, from within the School of Arts and Humanities, and from across the UK, to share their work addressing different dimensions of  knowledge-building activities. It is hoped that in engaging with and sharing the various philosophical and interdisciplinary strands of research included in the symposium’s speaker-respondent structure, we will gain some insights into the true value of these online collaborations.”

I’m really pleased to have been invited to contribute to this event as I’ve been hugely impressed with Wikimedia UK’s recent efforts to diversify and engage with the education community throughout the UK over the last year.  I’m particularly looking forward to this event as, due to other commitments, I haven’t had a chance to participate in any of the fascinating events run by Wikimedia UK.  (I was particularly gutted to miss the recent Anybody but Burns editathon hosted by the Scottish Poetry Library.)  I’ll be speaking about Open Scotland and the Open Knowledge Foundation in a session on “Networked Communities, Commons and Open Learning.”

For a comprehensive overview of Wikimedia UK activities in SCotland see this great post by Graeme Arnott on the Open Scotland blog: Wikimedia in Scotland 2014.