Researchity – Idea for a Research Community

I didn’t even have to watch the whole video about Hypothes.is to know I want to give them some money on Kickstarter. It hits all the right buttons: distributed, open, platform independent, … But I’m not sure about the direction of its foundational metaphor: peer review for the internet. It suggests that the future reputation [...]

I wonder if it’s the increased popularity of Vampires and their undead natures that has contributed to the spread of the un- prefix in education. If so, then it’s yet another feather in the cap of the cultural genius that is Joss Whedon. What do the different versions of un- mean? Traditionally the ‘uneducated‘ were [...]

It looks like just at about the same time I started this blog, Haiyan Zhang, who blogs at the awesomely named and beautifully designed site: http://blog.failedrobot.com, was putting together OPENIDEO, an online community-based development platform. It is similar to Quora in principle but rather than solving lots of little questions, it is focused on individual [...]

The Royal Society just released a second report on Neuroscience in the Brain Waves policy series this one focusing on its relationship with education: Neuroscience: Implications for Education and Lifelong Learning. While it is a very good overview (I particularly welcome the cautious and sober approach to the results warning against “neuro-myths” – something I’m planning [...]

This is a post about knowledge, community, online repositories, OERs, and the ethnography of the teacher staffroom inspired by a recent experience with JORUM. What was the last time you learned something interesting or helpful? I’m willing to bet that it was one of these: 1. Somebody you know or trust told you, OR 2. [...]

The Get The Data service seems to be getting some traction. There are interesting questions and answers being posted but even more interesting is the quantitative approach to reputation building and community building in general. (Quite distinct from, for instance, Wikipedia or the Drupal community and even more removed from human reputation than Digg). It [...]

It is no secret that there is a huge gap between research and practice in education (and many other areas of social practice). Here’s a suggestion of a model that might remedy some of this. Parts of it are based on a draft of a proposal for development project. Why community-based research? There are many [...]

Image by d6y via Flickr Anthologize is that great new tool designed during the One Week, One Tool project. It seems to have taken the world by storm partly thanks to the #oneweek Twitter frenzy and as the #anthologize stream indicates, its off to a stellar start. It may seem too early to look for [...]

Finally, JISC is turning some of the innovation and creativity it has poured into technology into the process of funding itself. The idea of JISC Elevator (see http://blog.ouseful.info/2010/07/28/project-pitching-jisc-elevator-concept/) is modeled on the Mozilla Drumbeat (http://www.drumbeat.org) – a Kickstarter-like project but with more varied  sources of funding.  With Kickstarter people have to back their interest with money [...]

Recently, Harvard University’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science released OpenScholar built on Drupal using popular modules such as Organic Groups and getting help from the Spaces and Features. The Biblio module provides the great bibliographic feature. I haven’t spent enough time with it yet to completely suss out how it’s put together in the Drupal way [...]