The site was built by Paul's company the Internationale which specialises in Open Source Content and cloud learning.
This site is for students of: These 'cloud spaces' run alongside the face-to-face teaching to provide materials but more importantly peer-to-peer opportunities for learning.
And in that spirit, just because you are on one of the courses, feel free to read and contribute to pages from the other course.
You can keep up-to-date with changes to the site (and so any course announcements) on the News page.
Note: You will have to set up a Google Account to be able to make full use of the site.
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Philosophy :: Cloud learning
This site and its partner feeds and virtual notebooks reflect Paul Caplan's thinking about learning and the media: it is and should be open source. This forms the basis for the introductory sessions on the course but in brief:
- Paul is the tutor. He's read stuff. He knows stuff. He hasn't read everything. He doesn't know everything.
- Students on the course have read stuff. They know stuff.
- The area we're looking at is fast-moving.
- No one person can keep up with everything.
- If we pool our analysis, ideas and research we have more chance of keeping up and understanding.
- Everyone has their own way of working, their filing systems and notebooks.
- If we link them together we can enable those information and analysis systems to work together.
- The network is more powerful than any one node on that network.
Practice :: Cloud learning
The course has face-to-face sessions every Tuesday (Press in Britain) or Wednesday (On theAir). The course also has virtual spaces:This site
This site is a Wiki. Anyone can edit any page, add new pages or simply leave comments. Simply click the Edit button. Paul has set up a framework for each course with each having their own Home page and Syllabus page which in turn will link off to a page for each session. This page will include a brief outline of what the session is about, a link to the MP3 of the 'lecture' and... well anything anyone decides to add. You could add:
- References or links to readings
- Comments or questions
- Thoughts.
- A individual home page where you can include... well anything you like.
- Create a new page about an author or concept or theory
- Link to an existing page on this site or to an external site.
The notebooks
The media, broadcasting and content industries are moving so fast that most of the best analysis and research is published online - the book and even journal production schedule is just too slow. Most of your reading and thinking will therefore be online. What you need is a way of keepoing up ad making use of the streams of news, information, analysis and commentary. Paul uses three Cloud services as notebooks: RSS, Evernote and del.icio.us.RSS
As Paul reads his RSS feeds he can hit 'Share' if something looks interesting. This then appears on his shared page and also here. If you have a Google account and have told Paul, then his shared items appear in your reader and vice versus. He can also add a note to that shared item for his own or the world's benefit. Those notes can only be seen on the Google Reader page. You need to set up an RSS reader and ideally a shared page. Google makes it easy (of course) but you can use other services if you prefer.Evernote
Paul keeps a notebook on his computer. If he finds an interesting webpage or receives an interesting document or mail or anything, he 'clips' it into his Evernote notebook. This scrapbook exists on his computer but also in the Cloud so he access it from anywhere. He has various notebooks for various things. One is a 'shared' notebook for his courses. This can be seen here. Because Paul is a bit of a geek he can add to his notebook from his mobile phone too. These notes tend to be longer articles or resources. They can also be annotated or otherwise played with. Again you need to set up an Evernote notebook or multiple ones if you prefer and share it with the rest of us.del.icio.us
You know how you bookmark favourite web pages in your browser? Well you can do the same in the Cloud. del.icio.us lets you save your bookmarks to a central server that can be accessed from any computer. What is more you can add keywords or tags to your bookmarks so they are easy to find. What is even better is you can share them and also see what other people have bookmarked. Paul's bookmarks are at http://delicious.com/theinternationale and also on his page, here. Anything he finds useful for the course in particular, he will save to del.icio.us and add the tag "birkbeckmedia". You can see just those bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/theinternationale/birkbeckmedia. You should create a del.icio.us page and put its address on your Notebook page on this site. As everyone creates their page and adds the address to their Notebooks page entry, we can then all add each other to our del.icio.us network.Tagging
There will be a lot more on this during the courses but just as a start, the Live Web and the Cloud work by Tags, keywords assigned to pieces of information or content that can glue them all together. I have decided to create a tag "birkbeckmedia" that I assign to anything I find that might be relevant. When you search for this tag on Live Web search engines like www.technorati.com it should all start to appear...again, don't worry for now. Just make sure that when you blookmark something in del.icio.us or share something from Google reader or Evernote, add the tag "birkbeckmedia".Bringing the notebooks together
If you use Google as your reader and make Paul a 'friend' then his items appear in your 'Friends' shared items' feed and yours appear in his. If you make others students your Google 'friends' then all the good stuff is shared.Furthermore, once everyone has set up their shared RSS page and their shared Evernote page, Paul will use his geeky wizardry to pull all the pages together into a single metafeed for each course so that:
- he can learn from all of you
- you can learn from each of you