As part of the digital scholarship which I'm heading up at the OU, we have a small pilot project called 'podstars'. We've asked for volunteers across the university, who might be interested in exploring new methods of output. We've got thirteen of these, and yesterday we had our kick-off meeting. We gave each of them a Flip camera, showed them how it worked and discussed some ideas.
I gave a brief project overview, and there was an activity, which is in the slidecast below if anyone is interested.
It's a pilot project so what we want to find out is:
- Do people go off and create new stuff or does nothing much happen?
- Are there issues that operate as specific barriers?
- What type of output do academics create? (are there disciplinary differences for example?)
- What are the support issues?
- What is their experience and how does it relate to their 'normal' output?
It was interesting that people had a variety of reasons for participating: some had a specific project in mind; others were keen to make their blogs more engaging; others wanted to use it in teaching.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is running a similar project, and I'll post up any interesting contributions we get.
That picture of a dog remains disturbing Martin. However, a good presentation! Are you going to share some more insights into the motivations for participation? Perhaps that will come later, as the project matures...
Posted by: Samkinsley | 03/02/2010 at 05:47 PM