About
OUseful.info is a blog in part about… things that I think may be useful in an higher education context, one day…
For more info on how I manage my online presence, see How OUseful.info operates.
OUseful.inof started pointing here in July 2008. Posts from the OUseful.info blog prior to that (that used to be hosted at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59) are all archived at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive; all links to the old blog should redirect there…
Bio
Tony Hirst is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University, Visiting Senior Fellow in Networked Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln, and regular blogger at OUseful.info. With a background in electronics and artificial intelligence, he has authored on OU courses ranging from robotics to information skills, and most recently a course on computer game design and appreciation. He is passionate about open and lifelong education, and is actively involved in developing course models to support informal as well as formal education. As a self-proclaimed mashup artist, he gives regular workshop and conference presentations on how to create novel information services from freely available web tools and applications such as Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo Pipes, as well as creating compelling network visualisations using tools such as a Gephi. An Arcadia Fellow at the University Library, Cambridge in 2009, he has spent many years berating academic libraries about the changing world of information around them. Since posting a widely circulated map based visualisation of MPs’ travel expenses in Spring 2009, he has become increasingly interested in the practice of data journalism and the use of visualisation techniques as a way of making sense of complex data sets, as well as co-founder of getTheData.org, an open public data question and answer site. This approach is complemented by his work on the public document consultation platform WriteToReply which helped government departments and policy makers think differently about the nature of commentable documents.
enjoy your new home!
guy
July 31, 2008 at 6:11 am
Hi Tony,
I noticed you mentioning Freebase and the BBC’s topics page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/topics/) on twitter a while ago, via twitter’s search. Are you still interested in Freebase? I’ll be visiting London shortly (Aug 16-24) and I’m interested in meeting up with people who are working with Freebase or interested in working with it. Drop me a line at kirrily@metaweb.com if you’d like to catch up.
K.
Kirrily Robert
August 6, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Hey, I like your blog, but I have to say – for those of us who didn’t regularly read your blog at it’s old home, this is a pretty unsatisfying “About” section!!
I wanted to know more about you & the blog, not your previous address!
thea
March 4, 2009 at 2:53 am
[...] I’m aware of some experiments being done by Tony Hirst. In particular, experiments with Twitter sub-titled YouTube [...]
You only get this type of education in class – mythic attributes of the lecture « The Weblog of (a) David Jones
June 9, 2009 at 4:51 am
[...] to the comments on Hirst’s blog, OUseful.info, (where he writes about “things that I think may be useful in an higher education context, [...]
DeliTV Personal Video Channel on PC | Create TV RSS Feeds for Boxee Using Delicious & Yahoo Pipes
September 21, 2009 at 7:37 pm
[...] Fringe in Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly openness was one of the key themes of this year’s event and Tony Hirst kicked off with a typically inspiring keynote on content liberation. Tony suggested that although [...]
Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog » Time travelling to the RepoFringe10
September 10, 2010 at 3:12 pm
[...] following post is by Tony Hirst, who has been working with Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge to create http://GetTheData.org/, a [...]
Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing GetTheData.org: Ask and Answer Data Related Questions
January 20, 2011 at 9:57 am
[...] A recent Open Knowledge Foundation blog post. Written by Tony Hirst, this post describes the new site GetTheData.org. From the site : GetTheData is a Q&A site [...]
D-Lib Data Issue and GetTheData.org « Research Communications Strategy
January 21, 2011 at 3:16 pm
[...] Tony Hirst et Rufus Pollock de l’OKFN ont créé la plateforme http://GetTheData.org/ où vous trouverez toutes les questions et réponses que l’on peut se poser en matière d’opendata. [...]
L’opendata dans tous ses états – Fev I «
January 31, 2011 at 2:49 am
[...] to Paul Bradshaw I recently came across a post by Tony Hirst who has very helpfully provided an extraordinary lesson in the joys (and I do mean joys) of [...]
Data scraping using Google Docs spreadsheets « Be Vocal
June 22, 2012 at 11:44 am
[...] like to extend a really warm welcome to Tony Hirst, who’s joining the School of Data as a Data [...]
Tony Hirst joins the School of Data | Design Interaction
March 11, 2013 at 1:29 pm