Martin Weller's blog on open education, digital scholarship & over-stretched metaphors
A busy month with my daughter having her Cardiff Masters graduation, our purchase of our first electric vehicle, a trip to Newcastle and finalising my second book publication. I also went to see the Odyssey twice, once with Maren and once the way Nolan intended in IMAX. It s been interesting to see the online discussion about it. I must admit, I hadn t appreciated hitherto how many experts in…
My new horror novel The H-index is coming out in September with Morfa Press. Here is the cover designed by Roderick Brydon. I love it! The cover builds off the style of the first book, The Recluse Rules. I m writing a series of novels all set on the Welsh coast. The books in this Cursed Coast series are all stand-alone, but they exist within the same universe , a bit like Stephen King s Derry…
When I left the OU I went through a process of unsubscribing from all the lists and circulars that had my work email listed. These could be research bulletins, newsletters, products, platform updates, etc. It was cathartic. I try to do this periodically on my Gmail account also. But what I hadn t done was a real back catalog clear out. I had around 90,000 emails which Gmail placed in the Updates…
(Featured Image we saw The Cure perform an amazing set on the scorchingly hottest day of the year) A month that almost resembled the old days of working. I gave a keynote (online), had an external examiner meeting (the end of my tenure for the fabulous Warwick IATL courses) and went to a conference. I need a month off now. I may blog this in more detail later, but this month made me reflect that…
As I mentioned in my previous post, I went to OER26 this week, back at the Open University. Huge congrats to Rob and Beck for chairing such a great conference. Like all good conferences it helped crystallise some existing thoughts and prompted fresh ones. So, I ll probably do a couple of related posts from it. The theme of the conference was Looking Back and Looking Forwards . The conference…
I m off to Milton Keynes next week for OER26. It s my first time attending a conference just as Joe Public, I even paid with my own cash! They are celebrating 30 years of JIME and 20 years of OpenLearn. Of course, I know all of this is merely a ruse for the real celebration two years to the day since I left the OU. There is a strong GO-GN presence there as you d expect so I m looking forward to…
I was invited to give an online keynote to the Pedaforum conference in Finland last week. Their theme was sustainability of practice, so I decided to lean into that idea of sustainability and draw on metaphors from ecology. This came with my usual caveat of metaphors being drawn from nature being potentially dangerous. I used three resilience, invasive species and rewilding. The main point I…
I set out the idea for my Daily Prefab Sprout in this post. Here is the process for making it. Step 1: Curating the Lyrics As good a lyricist as McAloon is, you still don t want everything. I needed to curate the lyrics from the ten albums. I used Claude (claude.ai) to analyse each song s lyrics and strip out repetition and filler. I then identified lyrics to keep, either as stand-alone or as…
One of the good things about being retired is that you have the capacity to indulge in completely pointless projects that no-one asked for, or wants (mind you, that may not be that different from being an active researcher). The other day I was on the treadmill listening to an old playlist when a Prefab Sprout track came on. Readers of this blog may know that I am a huge fan of Paddy McAloon s…
I ve been on a bit of a blogging break as I mentioned in my last post. But back now and resuming the monthly round-ups, whether you like it or not. Maren and I visited Canada for a two week trip this month. We completed (very slowly) the Vancouver Half Marathon, and then spent some time on Vancouver Island. I loved the big country feel of Vancouver Island. You will believe a Sasquatch (or at least…