TCC 2013 Conference Review

Last week, I attended the 18th TCC online conference – thanks to the organizers for the free pass! My conference report is published at ETC Journal.

 

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Call for comments: SPARC the debate about openness

SPARC – The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition – is asking for public comment on a document defining different degrees of openness. The call for comments ends October 8.

http://www.arl.org/sparc/media/HowOpenIsIt.shtml

 

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Special Issue “Socially Mediated Publicness”, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM),

From the introduction:

Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media (Taylor and Francis)

“Social media complicate the very nature of public life. In this article, we consider how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs ‘audiences’ and publics, and alters what it means to engage in public life. The nature of publicness online is shaped by the architecture and affordances of social media, but also by people’s social contexts, identities, and practices. Navigating socially mediated publicness requires new mechanisms of control and new skills. Understanding socially-mediated publicness is an ever-shifting process throughout which people juggle blurred boundaries, multi-layered audiences, individual attributes, the specifics of the systems they use, and the contexts of their use.”

The articles are open access. The introduction offers an overview of the individual articles ans well as a sound conceptualization of “socially mediated publicness”

I found Eden Litt’s article on “the imagined audience” particularly interesting. When I wrote my PhD thesis on the design of educational resources, I interviewed developers of educational Web portals and was intrigued by the different ways they conceptualized their target groups and how information on the actual audience informed the “imagined audience”.
 Litt, E. (2012): Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56:3, 330-345
  • “The imagined audience is the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating, our audience.” (331)
  • “mere imagined audience can be just as influential as the actual audience in determining behavior” (331)
  • “During face-to-face settings, and even some one-to-one mediated communication, people typically interact with small and explicit audiences relying more on who they can
  • see or hear in the actual audience, rather than their imagination. However, characteristics of social media platforms have altered the size, composition, boundaries,
  • accessibility, and cue availability of our communication partners during everyday interactions making it nearly impossible to determine the actual audience.” (332)
  • “Without being able to know the actual audience, social media users create and attend to an imagined audience for their everyday interactions.” (333)
  • In the conclusion, Litt draws attention to techniques for conceptualizing the audience that could be leveraged for social media profiles:
  • “Some industries have spent lots of time and money attempting to understand who is on the other side of the screen. While not all of these strategies may be economically feasible nor time efficient for everyday social media users, such as focus groups, there are many other industry-learned strategies that people may be underutilizing. For example, Berkenkotter (1981) identified that successful publishing scholars were much more likely to ‘‘internalize’’ the audience than a layman or student writer (p. 395). These scholars were constantly asking themselves what the reader might think or ask. Likewise, some in the Web design industry create ‘‘personas’’ or fictionalized individuals based on empirical research to help them think realistically about their users beyond ‘‘users’’ (Massanari, 2010). One potential strategy then is to focus on making users more cognizant of their imagined audience and teaching them techniques to help them gain more insight on the make-up of their potential audience. This might include, for example, teaching users to take advantage of a site’s analytics functionality or educating users on understanding and reviewing their privacy settings before posting.” (342)
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International Journal of Inclusive Education

Today I received an invitation to serve as a reviewer for the International Journal of Inclusive Education. Published by Taylor and Francis, the journal “provides a strategic forum for international and multi-disciplinary dialogue on inclusive education for all educators and educational policy-makers concerned with the form and nature of schools, universities and technical colleges” (Journal Homepage).

I look forward to my first review.

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Conference Review: Elon 2012

The annual Teaching and Learning Conference at Elon is a regional event that attracts professors, instructional designers, postdocs and other academic personnel from North Carolina colleges and universities  The 9th edition of this free, one-day conference took place on August 16.  I attended this conference together with my instructional design colleagues here at UNC Chapel Hill, Rob Moore and Greg Whisenhunt.

Read the conference review at Educational Technology and Change Journal.

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Kindle Plugin for CS 6 (beta)

A beta plugin that allows to publish directly from Adobe Indesign to Kindle has been released in July 2012.

“Kindle Plugin for Adobe InDesign® converts the InDesign source content to a single file which supports both KF8 and Mobi formats enabling publishers to create great-looking books that work on all Kindle devices and apps. “

Sounds great!

Download plugin

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Special Issue on OER and Social Inclusion, Distance Education 33(2)

Distance Education is a peer-reviewed journal of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc. It publishes research and scholarly material in the fields of open, distance and flexible education. The current special issue comprises 12 articles by leading OER and e-learning specialists. True to the topic, the issue is open access.

  1. Gráinne Conole

  2. Andy Lane

  3. Carina Bossu, David Bull, Mark Brown

  4. Samuel Nikoi, Alejandro Armellini

  5. Julie Willems, Carina Bossu

  6. Thomas Richter, Maggie McPherson

  7. Eileen Scanlon

  8. Christine Hockings, Paul Brett, Mat Terentjevs

  9. Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Michael Paskevicius

  10. Terry Harding

  11. Liam Phelan

  12. Don Olcott

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Creative Commons Licence 4.0 – 2nd draft

The 2nd draft of the new creative commons license (version 4.0) was released on August 1st and is open for public comment.

From the creative commons Web site:

“Since CC’s launch in 2002, it has versioned its core license suite three times, the last (3.0) in early 2007. CC licenses constitute a globally-recognized framework, developed in consultation with legal experts and CC affiliate institutions in over 70 jurisdictions. Over 500 million CC-licensed works have been published so far.”

Blogpost:  http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33632

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Digital Scholarship: OER Collection

This Web site is a nice example on how to mold different open educational resources into one coherent collection that presents the learner with a concise, coherent and well structured curriculum.

Many OER repositories and collections aim for a comprehensive overview of “all the great stuff that is out there”. This leads usually to an overwhelming amount of content the individual user is expected to sift through. “Digital Scholarship” follows a different approach. The site only lists very few resources, that are carefully selected for a a specific topic and target group.

Screenshot of "Digital Scholarship"

 

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LGNC 2012

http://prezi.com/_qilbntsvqmy/local-government-in-north-carolina-2012/

 

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