Other Events
Another great #digitalsurrey event
September 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris
It was good to catch up with mobile supremo Jane Vincent from the University of Surrey at Digital Surrey last night. The topic was recent developments in mobile, presented by Jon Bishop, Head of Social Media at PayPal UK (@jonin60seconds). Jonâs slides are available on Slideshare and a detailed review of his talk was very quickly posted by Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit)
The purpose of this post is to flag up some points arising from listening to Jon, that could be pursued in a research project by Jane and myself as a sequel to our investigation from a few years back of the role of mobile communication in e-government. We suggested in this paper that mobile phones may offer the most viable electronic channel through which to encourage large-scale take-up of online public services, but âm-governmentâ would take a significant amount of time to become a reality unless there was a substantial change in social practices.
It was clear from Jonâs fascinating discussion of mobile payments in Africa that the developed world has a lot to learn from successful services developed in Kenya.
In the UK, mobiles have become even more central to peopleâs lives and business is clearly waking up to the marketing potential of location based services. But effective interaction with government services via mobile looks no closer than it did back in 2007.
The Digital Surrey community are by definition enthusiastic adopters of new developments in technology, but Iâm not sure that the general population is quite ready for NFC and QR codesâŠand as Jon noted, 76% of websites are still not optimised for mobile devices.
Infrastructure issues still remainâŠjust try staying connected while travelling by train.
And are smartphones really that smart? My BlackBerry (a recent model) takes forever to simply load a website, and if password access is required, forget it. I certainly wonât be using it to buy anything with. Perhaps a âhype v realityâ project might be a useful exerciseâŠ
Many thanks to Jon, Abigail and the rest of the Digital Surrey team for laying on great weather and free beer, as well as an informative and entertaining evening! For information about upcoming events, check out the website
Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com
Reflections on the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference #PLE_SOU
July 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris
Last week Hugh Davis, Su White and I hosted the 2nd International PLE Conference in the brand new Life Sciences Building at the University of Southampton.
The event provided a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experiences around the development and implementation of PLEs, including the design of such environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. There were around 90 visitors from all over Europe and as far away as New Zealand and Pakistan.
The event included a number of innovative features:
Un-Keynote sessions in âFishbowlâ formats: a small group of participants move in and out of chairs in the centre of the room when they wish to contribute directly to the debate. This enables the whole audience to experience a lively and intense discussion that is facilitated by the presenter.
Bring Your Own Laptop: for practical real time participation in a specific topic.
Speakers Corner: a time and place is announced for informal discussions on a particular theme.
Pecha Kucha: a simple presentation format where you show 20 images each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically so the presenter has to be concise and stay on track ï
During the event, a number of additional useful tools also emerged. Standouts for me were:
Scoop.it (via @pgsimoes) which is a curation service that allows you to find things that interest you and gather them all into one place or showcase on your blog
Packrati.us (via @torresk) = Twitter + Delicious. It automatically saves tweets or retweets with a url to your Delicious account
Debategraph (via @thanassis_t) enables communities to visualise, synthesise and evaluate contributions from its members and facilitate constructive dialogue around the issues raised.
We had an active backchannel including Tony (@aeratcliffe) who stayed up all night in Canada two nights running to watch the livestream and contribute via Twitter. There were some interesting combinations of online and offline communication. During the first unkeynote, two backchannel participants from different countries were introduced to each other via Twitter by a delegate in the room. On another occasion, delegates moved from the café area into the conference room part way through a session, intrigued by the content of tweets coming from inside the room.
A big THANK YOU is due to all the tech support guys from iSolutions who enabled high speed *reliable* wifi connections (how rare is that?!), live streaming and video capture of sessions (including contributions via Second Life and Skype).
You can watch opinions and insights from presenters and participants , read presentation slides on Slideshare (thanks to David Delgado), see photos on Flickr and read full papers.
Twitter provided some great feedback (and speculation about the location of PLE2012!) ï
Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com
Web Science Conference in Koblenz
June 22, 2011
by Lisa Harris
Just back from a great Web Science event in Koblenz. Social network analysis was by far the most dominant theme, and the full selection of papers can be accessed here.
Where were the business peeps though? A commercial perspective on some of these great ideas would have been very useful. For example, Karolin Kaplerâs excellent presentation titled âsocial media as a new social fetishâ has significant relevance to marketers tempted to evaluate the impact of Facebook communities on the basis of âlikesâ. Karolin discussed the trend of âinterpassivityâ where users substitute an online action for a ârealâ one â for example, setting up an impressive selection of RSS feeds does not mean that any of them are actually read, or âlikingâ a particular cause may not necessarily lead to a charitable donation. Businesses who are currently paying out cash or other benefits for âlikesâ on their page ought to bear this phenomenon in mindâŠ
For a tweet-sized flavour of the conference, check out the Alchemist analysis
And the Rhine boat trip was fabulous J
Originally published on www.lisaharrismarketing.com
Digital Economy All Hands Meeting – Digital Futures (Nottingham) 11.12.2010
Following the success of the UK eScience All Hands Meetings, we are pleased to announce the inaugural All Hands Meeting devoted to the Digital Economy. The Digital Economy involves the novel design or use of information and communication technologies to help transform the lives of individuals, society or business. This is a fundamentally multi-disciplinary challenge, requiring input from areas including, but not limited to, the arts and humanities, economic and social scientists, medical sciences, in addition to computing, engineering and physical sciences, with the potential to have radical impact on many sectors (for example, transport, healthcare and the creative industries) and societal concerns (for example, quality of life, social and digital inclusion and sustainability). The UK, through RCUK, has invested significantly in this area over the last year with the creation of a number of Digital Economy Research Hubs, Doctoral Training Centres, community projects and other research grants, with a total investment of around ÂŁ120m.
A key goal of the programme is to create a community in the UK that is capable of world class, leading research in the Digital Economy and one that produces trained researchers with the necessary cross-disciplinary skills to have real impact in this area. This Digital Futures conference is a key event designed to encourage the development of this community. The emphasis of this event will be on community building and discussion, with the overall theme of digital futures.
The âClimategateâ emails: controversy and consequences 01.09.2010
DE USRG members will be interested in a Tyndall Centre public discussion of the issues raised by the âClimategateâ emails for the science and climate change community. The event will be chaired by Professor John Shepherd FRS CBE (University of Southampton) http://jgshepherd.com/ with a panel of leading contributors:
- Professor Alan Thorpe (Chief Executive, Natural Environment Research Council)
- Professor Mike Hulme (University of East Anglia and author of ‘Why We Disagree About Climate Change’)
- Fred Pearce (Writer and author of the ‘Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming’)
- Dr Lorraine Whitmarsh (Lecturer in Environmental Psychology, University of Cardiff)
Women in Industrial Research and Development – School of Management Evening Seminar
by Graeme Earl
It is almost universally recognised that scientific innovation and discoveries are the main driving forces behind a technological advanced economy and a highly skilled labour market. This area has received even greater attention in recent years due to factors such as the increasing competition from emerging economies such as India and China, the opportunities and challenges brought about by globalisation of markets, collaboration in a new form of open innovation, and the service sector’s increasingly technology-intensive activities Innovation is considered to be the key to some of the biggest challenges currently facing the world in terms of global warming and climate change. As a result, there is intense international, inter-regional and inter-firm rivalry to capture the high ground in terms of invention and innovation and their rapid deployment for commercial or social gain (Edquist, 1997; Wynarczyk, 2006; DIUS, 2008).
The importance of infrastructure –hard and soft elements– to support innovation activity at the national, regional or firm level is acknowledged but creativity remains a human activity, whether as an individual working alone or in a team, whether in the public or private sectors. As stated in the UK government’s Innovation Nation White Paper (2008), ‘government can foster innovation but it is people who can create an Innovation Nation (p1)’. While the lone inventor remains an important player in the technological process, in today’s world it increasingly means the highly qualified and trained professional employee, working in R&D/lab teams within private corporations or public sector establishments (Freeman 1982). On the surface there does not appear to be any fundamental reasons why women should not be equal with men in the inventive, innovative processes and R&D activities that result essentially from ‘brain work’. However, limited data that exists clearly demonstrates that Europe, in general, has not been successful in attracting women into industrial research. In 2003, women constituted less than 15% of industrial researchers in the EU (EC, 2003).
Based on a survey of 84 innovative SMEs, carried out as part of the ESRC (Science in Society Programme and Impact Grant), aims to address the ‘gender gap’ in industrial R&D within the context of the ‘open innovation’ in the UK.
Speaker Bio: Professor Pooran Wynarczyk
Professor Pooran Wynarczyk is the Director of the Small Enterprise Research Unit (SERU) at Newcastle University Business School. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (FRSA) and a judge of the F1 in Schools Challenge, North East Regional and National Finals. She is the Founder and Director of the North East of England Role Model Platform for Innovative Women, the Chair of the Diversity Consultative Group at Newcastle University and a Board Director of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE). Her Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) sponsored research, publications and engagement activities include entrepreneurship, SMEs, innovation, R&D, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pipeline (policy, initiatives, education and employment) with a special focus on gender and young people.