Once Tom's Planner is released out of beta, it is our intention to extend all actively used beta accounts for a minimum of one additional year without any obligations. This will enable all Tom's Planner beta users to continue to work with and use Tom's Planner for free for at least one more year.
My BCU colleague Inger-Lise Bore got me into reading Piled Higher and Deeper - a web comic about being a research student. The humour is pretty geeky and quite niche on a good day, but the last three instalments have ticked all my geek boxes.
The three parter is about a trip to a comic-con, and as such is full of in-jokes about both research and media studies. Enjoy:
Last week I attended the 2010 conference of the International Association of Media & Communication Research where amongst other things I gave a paper, Help Me Investigate: the social practices of investigative journalism.
Taking all of your ideas and presenting them in less than 15 minutes is pretty hard going when you're used to having captive audiences in lecture rooms for up to an hour, so I was delighted that several people wanted to read the full paper and get some more detail from me. So here it is, my full paper.
Some folk I know will be a little put off by these 8,000+ words, so if you're not used to reading academic work, the best plan is to read the abstract, then the conclusion and then work your way through the detail. You can also catch a pithy version of one of the themes over at Interactive Cultures. This is draft work at the moment. Following a pep talk from Paul Long (my BCU colleague - Reader in Cultural Studies at Birmingham School of Media) yesterday, I'll be honing this down for publication over the rest of the summer.
(download)(img cc kelvin255)
*not really. I'm being provocative, but I do have some ideas about another way of using the concept when talking about the Internet.
I wrote a brief piece over at Interactive Cultures last week, which was a neat distillation of a lit review I've written about social capital and a key point from my paper, which I presented to IAMCR 2010. Here's the blog post and here's the inevitable Flickr photo of my IAMCR badge (I collect my name badges)
a research project looking at the history and cultural significance of the medium of video with an emphasis on the sale, rental and collecting of video formats. Developed by Dr Simon Barber and Oliver Carter, researchers from the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University, the project will initially gather oral histories from video shop owners, collectors, industry professionals and the general public. This research will then form the basis of a published academic work and subsequent documentary film about video shop culture in the UK.My two posts:
In the course of my morning I had cause to be looking at some stuff by Jeffrey Zeldman on A List Apart, and then shortly after to be on Amazon which threw up a suggestion that I buy the new edition of his book 'Designing with Web Standards' (I already have the first one, and I've ordered this new edition for BCU's library).



OK so being as Ana and Jen (part 1 & part 2) blogged about posters, I guess that means it's what we do now. So here's my regulation blog post about a poster.
A few summer's ago Dave Kane, Anita Reardon and I were given a small grant for a pilot project in the uses of technology in teacher training. This paper presents our findings, grounded in education and cultural studies theory, to help understand some of the determinants that affect the uptake of technology in classrooms.
This was my first academic poster, and I enjoyed the process. The premium on space means really cutting the research down to the core, while trying to retain enough to give some sense of the project's narrative. That's pretty tough - even the forced brevity of using Twitter doesn't prepare you for it fully.
We presented the poster at RESCON '10 (BCU's internal research conference) as a dry run ahead of our attendance at next month's Research Informed Teaching Conference in Staffordshire. The poster went down pretty well (we came second in the judging for the poster tour - I'll take that) so we won't need to make many changes before we head to Staff's in July. Looking around the posters, I have to say (discarding all sense of modesty for a second) that ours looked the best. Many of the posters were wordy, and hard to read, and as many members of staff had made them on PowerPoint they suffered from some of the afflictions that can only come with an off the shelf Microsoft template (ill conceived drop shadows, poor contrast, garish colours) as well as from pixelation caused through blowing A4 slides up to A1 and even A0.
Brevity works, for sure, and it's worth speaking to someone who knows a little bit about print production when you undertake this sort of task. In that regard I wonder if there's a place for academics to team up with design students when they produce their posters? Valuable experience for the student, and some practical training in effective communication for the academic. That's got to be worth some thought if you're based in a University that has a design school.
One thing before I sign off - it seems to pay to do something different. RESCON gave a special award to a poster that had its own frame made of astro-turf, and I added a little something extra to my poster that got a few nice comments. I won't tell you what it is, you have to find it. Seven people did at RESCON yesterday, and they hadn't been given a clue so you have a head start.
(download)When hearing what I did for a living, my bank manager confessed to breaking down earlier this year. Reminded him he is one of 1 in 4...