Digital Fingerprint

As Steven Schwartz retires, he looks ahead As everyone knows, technology has exploded in the past decade. In 2002, there were no Moocs, no Facebook, no iPhones or iPads. As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed, 10 years ago Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking space, [...]

Listened to this talk live – interesting to see it in the THE: Students have so many devices: sector must be smart and tap them, says expert. Chris Parr writes Harnessing the power of the technology that students already have in their pockets could revolutionise the way universities teach – but more research into how [...]

This book looks interesting, reviewed in Times Higher Education this week: You’ve probably been there: the plenary speaker arrives straight from the airport, rocks up to the podium and whips out a Mac laptop that the techie supporting the event assumed would be a PC. There is much muttering and scrabbling for a video adaptor – [...]

Is technology at the base of all innovations? Someone told me recently that there is a correlation between economic recession and the frequency of the use of the word “innovation”. The correlation is a positive one. I have no idea if it is true, or even how you could find out, but I suspect there [...]

I’m booked onto the following lunch: BBC Future Media Lunch with Ralph Rivera (Thurs, 13:15 – 14:00) Following on Ralph Rivera’s Thursday morning Thinking Digital talk, the BBC are hosting a lunch with Ralph, Ian Forrester and Samantha Chadwick. This will be a great opportunity to get to know some key people at the BBC’s Future Media Division as [...]

Friday 3rd February 2012 1-2pm Online via Blackboard Collaborate Presenters: Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster) The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive [...]

A fascinating video (which makes sense even if you don’t speak French) – how fast technology changes: Another video, for the American market: by

A really inspiring video which echoes much of what I end up saying (wonder if I could sneak this into my Soc Med for Scared courses… makes a chance from ‘Guess the date of the quote’ – which usually sounds like something people say about social media, but was about e.g. the printing press or [...]

Inspiring stuff from Duke University, where they issued all first-year students with iPods, with no particular idea of what they were going to do with them pedagogically: Well, not so fast. I believe strongly in the importance of education addressing the urgencies of the moment, but I also oppose “techno-determinism”: the tendency to think that [...]

Encouraged by this story demonstrating that academics are taking hold of technology potential to influence the world’s news: When news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US special forces, who was best placed to assess the global political impact: a rushed general reporter in a short-staffed newsroom, or an academic expert on [...]