A crowd funding site for science projects. Doesn’t look particularly active or popular (yet), but it does have some quite neat support for community building, team formation and other parts of the process as well as the funding tools. Definitely focused on traditional science projects, not the arts, social sciences or humanities. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.iamscientist.com/

A crowd funding site for scientific projects. This is very much in the area of traditional sciences – biology, physics, chemistry etc – so not much use for those in more social, arts or humanities areas of research. A slightly simple and traditional feel belies a slick engine behind it. Like all such things that I am aware of and despite the .org domain, this is a for-profit venture that skims some of the money from donations.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.petridish.org/

Crowdfunding Platform for Science Research Grants. A neat way to bypass the system to get funding for scientific research projects. One of several in this area of crowd funding that may be particularly valuable for those whose work falls outside the remit of traditional area-specific funding councils.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.microryza.com/

A simple and popular crowd funding site mainly meant to make it easy to raise funds for non-profit charitable projects and organizations. Only takes a small cut of the proceeds (2.9%) and has a distinct social mission to connect good causes and funders. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.razoo.com/p/overview

A crowdfunding machine. With a slight bias towards socially conscious research, educational and artistic endeavours, RocketHub is a little different in style and purpose than the wildly popular Kickstarter. It includes, in its LaunchPad,  support for the process of working an idea up to a full-blown project through (optional) collaboration with people who know about such things like marketers etc. Or you can just go straight for the FuelPad and pitch your project. Either way, like most such ventures, the site earns money by creaming a little off the top, but it is free to start a project.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.rockethub.com/

I’ve just got back from an interesting week at the SITE 2013 conference in New Orleans, run by the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education. It was the first time I’d been to a SITE conference, though they have been running for 24 years and I have more than a passing interest in teacher education, as that is my ongoing role as honorary faculty fellow at the University of Brighton and one of the reasons for setting up the Landing. It was an impressively organized and lively conference supporting a very rich community of people who sustain relationships between conferences and for whom SIGs are at least as important as the papers and roundtables of the conference itself. I was presenting a paper that I and Terry Anderson wrote about the value of the Landing in supporting a community of teachers. Not one of our best, though I think there is a bit of mileage in the notion of distributed transactional distance among networks and groups of people who are simultaneously learners and teachers.

A lot of the papers were about schooling of kids, which is a little outside my main areas of interest. I sat in on a fair number, however, out of curiosity and an interest in educational systems in general. Depressingly, a great deal of school education seems concerned with conforming to restrictive legislation and standards, meeting quotas, and controlling crowds of kids and their learning. The relatively small number of papers actually concerned with learning seemed to take these horrific premises as givens, though there were some innovative solutions to the problems.

While there was quite a bit on the usual learning technology suspects – mobile, social and blended learning, MOOCs, simulations, virtual worlds, Facebook, wikis, e-portfolios, etc – by far the most dominant theme was around uses of TPACK, Punya Mishra’s framework of technology, pedagogy and content knowledge, and their overlaps and contexts. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am delighted that teachers are enthusiastically acknowledging that it is not just about content and pedagogy, but about other technologies too, and that technological competence is being treated with the respect it deserves. I am less happy that ‘technology’ almost ubiquitously means things with microchips inside them and/or the software that runs on them. This is a naive and simplistic view that suggests technology, pedagogy and content are separate and separable, and underplays many enormously significant technologies like course schedules, curricula, techniques, legislation, rules of behaviour, classrooms, corridors and school hierarchies (though oddly includes technologies related to content like lab equipment). I don’t think this is what Mishra actually means, but it appears to be the dominant interpretation, and it is depressing to see how wholeheartedly the education community has taken to the easily applied framework to assess the ‘different’ areas of knowledge without reflecting on what any of it actually means. The basic message, that everything should be orchestrated as effectively as possible and no part of the system and its context should be ignored, is a very good one. Unfortunately the artificial schisms that are introduced as as result of its application are not always helpful. 

It once again occurred to me, as I listened to relentlessly positive reports of the effectiveness (seldom ineffectiveness) of various interventions, that educational researchers, especially those reporting on their own interventions, are almost always the worst people to do educational research. Their passion and interest almost always trumps any tools, techniques and trickery they use. Our paper for the conference was no exception. Such stories are very good as long as that is all they are portrayed as being and there is no pretence of doing science. I’ve been talking about organizing the journal/conference of failed educational research for some time and really should get around to it soon. Just once in a while, it would be really good to hear someone say that they tried something that didn’t work at all, where everyone learned less, where they screwed up the pedagogy, made a hash of the research methodology, and where the tools they used or created were just pants. We’d all learn a lot more from that than from the countless pieces of meticulously engineered statistically valid nonsense that miss all the important factors and explain nothing. 

This was also my first visit to New Orleans. I didn’t have anything like enough time to explore it as much as I’d have liked, but I saw enough of it to fall in love with it. It is a city of magic, music and ghosts, filled with gentle, generous and utterly weird people. Wonderful.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/formare/article/view/12613

A fantastic article by Richard Nash ostensibly on how books and associated technologies have evolved and may continue to evolve, but really a meditation on the nature of culture, technology and society. The punchline is that the business of literature is blowing shit up, but here are a few quotes to give a flavour of this long and thought-provoking article…

“The book is not counter-technology, it is technology, it is the apotheosis of technology—just like the wheel or the chair.”

“Heuristics are great until they aren’t.” (a reference to the skewed view we all get of literature from what is published)

“What is published is published, and from that pool we choose to celebrate what we celebrate, and we say the system produced these celebrated works because, well, they’re available.”

Pre Gutenberg – “Writers were the machines through which the word of God was reproduced and disseminated.”

“the printing press essentially made science possible by allowing experiments to be replicated through the introduction of falsification, the ability to prove something wrong.”

“A variety of copyright-like regimes sprouted throughout Europe, the first purpose of which was censorship—to thwart the “greate enormities and abuses” of “dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books,” as England’s Star Chamber pronounced. The second purpose was to achieve the commercial equivalent of copyright for a cartel of businesses agreeing not to compete with one another, so as to increase their prices when it came to reproducing writing.”

“Pope’s view of himself was still as a transmitter of culture, not its originator. To originate, we invented genius. “

“the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.”

“Abundance, it turns out, is a much bigger problem to solve than scarcity”

“The economics of the analog reproduction of culture lead inexorably to the exhibitionist….The most profitable print-publishing business of all would be in a society where everyone reads the same book.”

“The non-mainstream was abetted by the growth of the superstore model of bookstores. The traditional independent bookstore stocked 5,000–10,000 titles, and so could only handle the new and backlist output of a limited number of publishers. But a Barnes & Noble or Borders superstore could have 50,000 or 60,000 or even 70,000 titles! Indeed, it needed those non-mainstream offerings to fill its shelves. Ironically, while indie, alternative, and literary presses frequently decried the predations of the superstores, the superstores were critical to their existence. “

“Copyright, though nominally instituted to encourage the creation of a work, has as its only logical purpose the encouragement of the reproduction of the work.”

“[the business of literature is] not about making art; it is about making culture, which is a conversation about what is art, what is true, what is good.”

“… relying on the notion that one deserves to get paid will fail every time. Imagine that as a dating strategy: I deserve to be desired by you.”

“Selling a book, print or digital, turns out to be far from the only way to generate revenue from all the remarkable cultural activity that goes into the creation and dissemination of literature and ideas.”

“Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts.”

“The publisher is an orchestrator in the world of book culture, not a machine for sorting manuscripts and supplying a small number of those manuscripts in improved and bound form to a large number of people via a retailer-based supply chain best suited for the distribution of cornflakes, not ideas. “

“A business born out of the invention of mechanical reproduction transforms and transcends the very circumstances of its inception, and again has the potential to continue to transform and transcend itself—to disrupt industries like education, to drive the movie industry, to empower the gaming industry.”

“The business of literature is blowing shit up. “

Marvellous. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2013/spring/nash-business-literature/

A list of reasons that a social networking system like the Landing can be more effective than email for managing knowledge and communication in an organization.

It’s a brief opinion piece so it’s little simplistic in some places, and it clearly has a very particular toolset in mind (that includes task and project management, apparently), but it covers the basics of why tools like the Landing are a good idea pretty well. As with all technologies, it’s not what you do but the way that you do it that makes the biggest difference, but systems like the Landing have some propensities and strengths that are harder to duplicate with other tools.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/why-social-networks-are-better-than-emails-for-enterprise-collaboration-0437685