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Zoe Cairns and her social media message

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 19 Mar 2014, 06:14

Three years ago I attended a day long course on social media advertising in higher education run by Zoe Cairns. She is a former PR/marketing person from Warwick Business School - I was representing the OU Business School. Those attending included LSE,  Bath, Imperial College ... LBS? And several others (blog post someone in here I should think). Zoe has just launched an self-managed e-learning version of the same. Having gone from 120 delegates or so a month she may now globally reach 1,200 a month? All this for the cost of investing in a web design and platform and approach that looks reassuringly familiar. I did a bit of something like this with Manchester Metropolitian a couple of years ago. 

Three things strike me:

1) Her plausible transition from facilitator to online brand hoping to reap the rewards of having more participants. This is the hardback book of the past. The 'how to ...' of e-learning in an inviting an saleable package.

2) The prospect, as I see it, of the subject champion, not the institution becoming the educator we seek out in a 'who's who' of learning. You feel, whether it is the case or not, that a big name of the subject is 'teaching you' - Niall Ferguson on history, Martin Weller on e-learning, Richard Dawkins on ... what is his thing? Atheasism? Biology? Zoology?

3) The value of repeating, refreshing or repeating a topic until you feel like you are starting to master it - practice for want of a word: continual professional development for the technical term. I take the view that a qualification is no more, nor better than a motorway sign - do you pull over at the first service station on passing it, or press on? And imagine this motorway on a hill: if you stop you can only roll backwards.

P.S. Over the last 24 hours this blog has received over 2,000 views. I have no way at all of knowing why, or who is reading this stuff! Do say 'hi!'

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Design Museum

When is a blog not a blog?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Tuesday, 20 Mar 2012, 03:48

Try deciding where the North Atlantic becomes the South Atlantic.

The boundaries are somewhat fluid.

I go back through my OU blog from day one early Feb 2009 and amend, rewrite, 'doube-up' or muck-up this content, reviewing and ameliorating my recollection.

Is this a blog, or re-blog?

It's the same memory. All I'm doing is what we do all the time to make a memory stick; I'm reflecting on it. Taking a difference stance. And depending in good part on my mood thinking either postive constructive things about it or negative destructive things.

Does an amended 2FEB2010 become an entry for 2FEB2011, if for simplicity's sake this is how and when I do this?

You see, I know what happens. As a teenager I kept one of those Five Year Diaries ... I could see year after year what I was doing this time last year, or five years, or far more years than that ago.

Businesses compare quarters, and year on year. All false constructs. All chosen periods of a time.

My mind don't care.

It's simply stuff.

And often you have no control over what you recall in any case.

I smell Swarfega and I am a six year old washing oil from my bike-chain off my hands with my Grandfather. And I see the work bench, the shed and the bike. I can smell his tweed jacket and see his flat cap.

It will be extremely interesting to see how a professional take on looking at OU Blog entries Feb 2010 to Jan 2011 works out.

 

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