OUseless.info
OUseful.Info, the blog…
Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education
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- psychemedia: oh good .. wight train leaves just as folk get off boat...
- psychemedia: any uni libraries/repos out there depositing to internet archive? #ukdiscovery #jibsuk #ukoer
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Recent Posts
- Protection of Freedoms Bill – Release and publication of datasets held by public authorities
- Visualising Twitter User Timeline Activity in R
- Generating Twitter Wordclouds in R (Prompted by an Open Learning Blogpost)
- More Thoughts on Potential Audience Metrics for Hashtag Communities
- When A Comment Spammer’s Script Goes Wrong 3
Top Posts
- Using Google Spreadsheets Like a Database - The QUERY Formula
- Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database with the Google Visualisation API Query Language
- Why Private Browsing Isn't...
- Maintaining a Google Calendar from a Google Spreadsheet, Reprise
- Updating Google Calendars from a Google Spreadsheet
- Data Scraping Wikipedia with Google Spreadsheets
- Displaying Events from Multiple Google Calendars in a Single Embedded Calendar View
- Visualising Twitter User Timeline Activity in R
Recent OU/BBC programmes
- open2: The Bottom Line is on BBC News at 21:30 http://tinyurl.com/cmxn8b
- open2: Coast is on BBC TWO (Scotland only) at 18:15 http://tinyurl.com/5jkwux
- open2: The Naked Scientists is on BBC Local Radio in the East at 18:00 http://tinyurl.com/53txlf
- open2: Coast is on BBC TWO (not Scotland) at 17:45 http://tinyurl.com/5jkwux
- open2: The Bottom Line is on BBC News at 02:30 http://tinyurl.com/cmxn8b
OUseful Video favourites
- How Subtitles Are Made - See Hear - BBC Two
- G-Male
- Dan Saffer (Adaptive Path) -- How to Lie with Design Research
- Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world
- First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy
I don’t know the people behind this decision, Tony, but they are cretins.
Please don’t let this decision stop you doing your stuff here on the blog, or providing inspiration to all your readers and followers.
You’ll always be providing useful info – and I demand you revert the name of this blog forthwith.
Dave Briggs
October 11, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Seconded. Cretins all. Perhaps a knighthood might help? I’ll start the petition…
Paul Bradshaw
October 11, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Yes: cretins. Comiserations to you. Time to leave and become a highly paid consultant, thus depriving HE of an academic who contributes a great deal to HE *and* to society at large? Isn’t there a word for that? Oh yes, “IMPACT”. You have it in spades. They don’t.
We still love you, even if they don’t.
Andy Cotgreave
October 12, 2010 at 8:38 am
Never mind. There will be other chances.
Danyal
October 12, 2010 at 11:22 am
Speechless.
Brian
October 12, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Promotion is always a strange thing in a university. And it is dumb that something that should be about recognizing excellent work can be so demotivating.
You will get promoted if you choose to stay. I would bet that their “procedures” just cant keep up with the pace of what you are doing.
But dont throw their feedback away – it should be clear where they felt you were short. So you can solve it.
Of course ’till then you have the one thing they can’t touch: A reputation.
Keep working on it I say.
M
Mark B
October 14, 2010 at 6:25 am
[...] [UPDATE: the attempt at promotion turned out to be ouseless] [...]
In For a Penny, In For a Pound… My Promotion “Case for Support” « OUseful.Info, the blog…
October 15, 2010 at 8:49 am
Just seen this — many commiserations.
Disappointing if the OU can’t acknowledge (and reward) digital scholarship of the kind you’ve been pioneering.
Jonathan Hewett
October 15, 2010 at 5:05 pm
I’m very sorry to hear that, and disappointed that the committee made what is to my mind exactly the wrong decision.
Stephen Downes
October 15, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Thanks, all, for the comments… I’ve haven’t see the feedback yet, but will post it (gulp!;-) when I do…
A paper on scholarship recently went to OU Senate, so as soon as that becomes a public doc I’ll post it in a commentable form and add my own commentary to it.
Martin has also written some more thoughts on the recognition of new forms of scholarship at http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2010/10/tenure-publishing-and-tony.html
Tony Hirst
October 16, 2010 at 9:26 am
Crap news – really sorry to hear this.
I (personally) had really high hopes for you here. If someone like yourself can’t seem to make progress using alternative research ‘vectors’ then what hope is there for any other new paradigm?
Maybe need to wait for the post-mortem.
Now, here’s the horrible thing – Edinburgh University are advertising a Lectureship in Design Informatics. Good job, good university, but you need the research background and what would really be different? Would it just me more of the same (but in a much nicer city ;) )? It’s not just the OU, it’s endemic.
Did you listen to the whole of Ken Robinson’s RSA talk? He’s not suggesting a reform but a complete re-design (mad, wonderful daydreamer that he is).
(PS – How is it possible to have an up to date published research portfolio in a subject that requires 24/7 knowledge anyway? Is this ironic, or does it really demand a new attitude and approach?)
(PPS – At least when you type ‘Tony Hir’, google prediction pulls up a really bad picture of you under Images. not many people at the OU can do that…)
Derek Jones
October 17, 2010 at 10:20 pm
@derek Thanks for the support – I suspect that my CV wouldn’t do me many favours if I tried to apply for a job in ac.uk – the formal marking scheme for applications would, I suspect, land my application on the reject pile…
As for “tony hir” in Google, I did actually include a screen shot of that in my case for support. I like to think, though I have no evidence of it, that that action by itself had some impact in the form of the members of the promotion panel trying similar ego searches on their own names and the names of other colleagues they maybe thought of as influential… and when they got nowhere (maybe…;-), cast it off as “pah, well, it’s *only* Google…”… ;-) Heh heh…
Tony Hirst
October 17, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Late to this, and really sorry to hear it.
Keep on munging. They’ll get it in the end.
Mike
Mike Ellis
October 23, 2010 at 2:02 pm