Research Essentials

Alan Cann just posted up a fascinating ALT article about a study of twitter use among undergraduates aged 18 – 19 during their first semester at uni. Well worth a read. by Gill

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I enjoy using twitter. I enjoy reading other peoples tweets. However I had a moment’s confusion recently with Olnet. The Olnet project is now in full swing with many interesting researchers working on it in various capacities. I recently gained a follower called @olnet so I followed back. I now see discussions between people I [...]

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When Cory Doctorow talked at the Open University today, the audience in the room was supplemented by a more widespread group who were watching the live webcast. Throughout his talk, the extended audience was discussing, reacting to, reporting and referencing what was said. By the end of the session, Cory was responding to a question [...]

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Maybe it was my mistake. I expected a workshop but instead listened to five presentations between 10am and lunch, and a further four in the afternoon. All were good stuff, but it felt like a heavy load when what I was anticipating was a session in which the participants would exchange and brainstorm about how [...]

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Last Wednesday I went to the Cellar Bar. This is a lovely old bar in, you guessed it, the cellars below the oldest part of the Open University campus. Quite small but very friendly and cosy. A few others were already there, and Tony Hirst joined us. He remembered my research interest in Geocaching and [...]

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 I’m hoping my twitter contacts don’t take offence at this, but I was just glancing through my twitter stream and I spotted this succession of posts. What caught my eye was the way the different images seemed to be looking at one another, or out directly at the reader. We could change our images so [...]

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My Facebook usage has diminished as my Twitter usage has grown. However just recently one of my other circles of friends has “discovered” facebook and this has got me back into it again. I’m now nearing the end (I hope!) of writing up my PhD thesis. Eileen (one of my supervisors) said early on that [...]

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At HHL2007, I joined twitter. This was good fun and definitely a little ahead of the game. I’m now signed up for HHL2008 in October and this year they’re sending all delegates who register before 31st July a free Nintendo DS. Apparently it will come with one game and some conference material. I wonder what else? [...]

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I’m almost reluctant to wade in with yet another post about twitter. It seems to quite polarise views. Will triggered qute an interesting dialogue when he highlighted some disadvantages of twitter in his blog and suggested that it might be possible to become addicted to twittering. Martin responded with some interesting points about how twittering [...]

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…if augmentation is the correct term. In March 2007 I attended the ALT-C conference in Nottingham. After registering, I was invited to give my blog address to the organisers so they could add it to their Yahoo pipe. All the blogs in this pipe were aggregated into a single chronogical feed. At the conference, many [...]

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