UK Govt report: Not using social media “could appear unusual or even suspicious” in 10 years

My eye was just drawn to a couple of pieces about the UK government report that was published today. The document, entitled Future Identities, Changing Identities in the UK: The next 10 Years is covered in an article in The Telegraph here whose headline, Rise of social networks in Britain ‘risks fuelling social unrest’ will certainly help fuel its readers suspicion of social. Is this just media paranoia? Certainly there has been plenty of that over recent years, remember the furore over the riots here in the UK?

Reading the article more closely though, and looking at the report itself there are some interesting, and yes, some quite unnerving things to consider. The report speaks of a changing situation where people have several overlapping identities rather than a single one. We knew that. Our students learn about the importance of digital identity and how to separate their personal from their public identities. My kids and their friends are not so switched on about it unfortunately but hopefully they will learn. They’ll have to be very good at it.

The report talks of social media remapping the social relationships of the UK, of

Comment: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it?

Just read @melissaterras great article here on her experiences using social media to promote her research papers.

Unsurprisingly the papers she blogged about and tweeted were downloaded more, the only surprise was how much more. I am curious how much of this is because they were available for free download rather than being behind a paywall though. Would similar results have happened had she linked to the usual “you do not subscribe to this journal” message?

It’s another insight into academic publishing which doesn’t make pretty reading for publishing academics.

The paywall adopted by the vast majority of academic journals might as well be designed to prevent people accessing knowledge. But this access problem has no impact on publisher profits. Academics have to publish in these journals because of national research assessment exercises, institutions have to pay for access so that academics can cite the articles in the papers they submit, often to the same journals. Sound like a scam? Feels like it too.

Facebook: your pact with the devil

In bed with Facebook, image from Mashable http://on.mash.to/FPT7XZ

I’m as frustrated as everyone else at constantly shifting Facebook privacy settings, and have struggled to keep my posts, and my kids posts private like many others. It’s a difficult place to be at times when you’d like to keep a personal life separate from a professional identity. It’s particularly worrying when dealing with kids’ Facebook accounts, even though these are the ‘digital natives’ we hear so much about there’s very little awareness of future consequences of everything being available for all to see. I even keep an extra account open so I can check on the privacy setting of their accounts – how much do I really want a stranger to see about my kids? How much is

Image via Nik Hewitt (http://nikhewitt.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/facebook-and-you.html)

safe? The apparent default setting of “open to all” every time the feature set changes does not help matters and means that a war of attrition is constantly in progress against creeping privacy invasion. So much for ‘friendly Facebook’ eh?

It gets worse though. It seems that some organisations, including colleges and government agencies in the USA are demanding usernames and passwords for prospective student and employees facebook accounts

Audio Flipboard anyone?

Listen: Sign on BBC Building at MediaCityUK

“ I think 2012 will be the year that audio in social really explodes.“

When I first got my hands on an iPad Flipboard was a revelation – previously I dug into Twitter and Facebook chronologically and Flipboard’s magazine layout and easy-to-browse nature made it a much more random and fun process. I’d spot things I hadn’t before but more interestingly, I was reading social media streams like I’d read a newspaper and not at my desk with a computer.

While reading Katie Moffat’s predictions for 2012 I was struck by, “ I think 2012 will be the year that audio in social really explodes.“

I commented on the post that, “ it really needs a platform that will manage audio well. If we had something that would do to podcasts and AudioBoo what FlipBoard does for text you’d have yourself a custom radio magazine show, it’d be awesome! I’d listen every morning on the daily commute. “

The post made me think, there must be a way of aggregating audio content, esp social content in a similar vein to FlipBoard. I’d be interested in knowing if anyone has done this effectively yet BECAUSE I WANT IT! And if it’s not being done, looking further into developing ideas around it. Would make an interesting project for some of our bright students perhaps. Shuffler.fm are doing it for music but I haven’t yet found an equivalent for spoken word….

Games People Play: a post from the ETC

The Last Message - A Kinect platform-game that tells a story of the journey of a waveform. The player controls the the amplitude and frequency of the waveform using both arms, and must guide it to the broadcasting tower — with Brian Lee, Ruijie Liu, Shibli Mansuri and Scott Chen. From the Fall 2011 BVW Show

As promised, this post comes from Pittsburgh where I’m working for a week as a guest of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC).

The inimitable Don Marinelli, Executive Producer of the ETC

The ETC was created by the inimitable Don Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch combining skills in drama and computer science to produce game designers and “entertainment technologists”. It is a unique place that I have written about before. Students here study on a largely project based masters programme that aims to produce graduates that thrive on cross disciplinary team based project work. 

I’ve been invited here to do some workshops on 3D audio and to inspire students to incorporate some of the work we do at the Acoustics Research Centre at Salford into their projects and

Social Media and learning: why?

Twitter: Come to the dark side (pic Dot D)

I’ve just been reading through some of our BSc Professional Sound and Video Technology student blogs and having read @JustPressPlay_‘s post A few thoughts.. « JDTWerk I started commenting on it and the comment got long enough for a new post on here. So here it is, gets me back on track anyway as I’ve been getting busy again and the blogging is the first thing to drop off the to do list.

Firstly it’s a nice post and resonates with me as I didn’t ‘get’ Twitter for a long time. Until it starts being useful to you it’s just so much noise and there’s plenty of mainstream media belittling the platform as pointless. I have a lot of sympathy for the students who just don’t want to engage with it. It doesn’t necessarily seem core to what they feel they should be learning. It’s worth persisting though.

In the end I was forced onto the platform by my students who were

#12hrfashion: Salford & Melbourne Online Fashion Collaboration

Logo from the Salford & RMIT Fashion Facebook page

As I type this around 60 students at University of Salford and about the same number at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia are coming to the end of a 12 hour fashion design-and-make collaboration and putting the finishing touches to their garments. The collaboration came out of discussion at Salford’s Media, Digital Technology & the Creative Economy  Steering Group and was the brainchild of Bashir Aswat (Fashion, Art & Design School) and Marianne Patera (Computing, Science & Engineering) who drove the whole project from the start.

The fashion groups in Salford and Melbourne both sent sealed bags of materials to each other in advance of

Bashir at #12hrfashion

the event, students at the receiving end had no idea what they were being sent ahead of the start of the 12 hour marathon. All student groups were linked to matching groups at the other side of the world by social networks and mobile devices. Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Bambuser, Ustream have all been used so that students could communicate right through the process. At each end a big screen displayed a live video overview of activity at the other side of the world.

I was there for the first couple of hours at Salford and have been following online since then – the event has been amazing! The buzz in the room as preparations were made for the 9pm start was really infectious, excited students and staff distributing mystery parcels sent from Melbourne – many with friendly messages on from their counterparts in Australia.

@samrecordsmusic is carrying out an MSc project on user generated content and motivation, he’s covering this as a case study and was helping out with some of the tech on the night.

I was

University at MediaCityUK teaching week 2

Foyer of University of Salford at MediaCityUK (pic by Heloukee)

I’ve been here 4 weeks now but we’re on week 2 for our students. Before we opened around 1600 students attended inductions for our building from courses covering areas such as TV, radio, journalism, media, audio, video, animation and multimedia. I’ve had a great week or so seeing the rooms I’ve spent the last three and a half years helping plan full of activity. There’s still snagging going on of course – it’s a new build and we lost a little testing time before opening but both staff and students are on a learning curve here so something of a shared adventure taking place.

Most of the facilities are up and running; TV and radio studios are full with

All your eggs in the Google basket?

Several conversations I’ve had with online friends and colleagues recently have centred round the fact that most of their activity that was previously spread across a multitude of different locations has drifted inexorably into the Google cloud. Recent comments include several versions along the lines of “Google runs my life now”.

And why not?

Google+ First Thoughts

Having been fortunate enough to be invited onto the beta of Google+ (thanks @heloukee!) I’ve been playing with it to see if it is going to be useful to resolve or manage my split digital identities.

As described in a previous post I currently have a professional/personal split to my social media using Facebook for family and friends and Twitter (and this blog) for work related stuff. Both platforms have different content and although the more personal end of my Twitter posts also finds its way onto Facebook it’s not a regular enough occurrence to justify using something like Posterous to post to both platforms.  Talk of Google Circles  set me wondering whether I’d be able to rationalise some of my activity to a single platform. Circles is Google’s way of categorising online contacts so by default you have ‘friends’, ‘work’, ‘family’, ‘aquaintances’ etc. Posts/pictures/videos and so on can be shared with all  or only specific circles and this has the potential to greatly simplify a work/personal split. Conversely you can choose to post to all of your circles and also to ‘extended circles’ – the circles of everyone in your circles.

image from rustybrick

After a few days of dabbling it looks like