Online conferences Time management and Continuous Partial Attention The simultaneous focus on multiple technologies and social contexts in conferences settings creates opportunities as well as problems for researchers.
Online conferences Are virtual conferences good enough? Socially constructed obstacles to virtual conference adoption are large, but fragile. Change will be driven by improvements in technology, increased networked literacy and pressure to restrain costs – both financial and ecological.
Online conferences What do conferences do—and can econferences replace them? Why do we have academic conferences at all, and what are the affordances and constraints of online conferences in meeting these needs?
Online conferences Econferences: why and how? A blog series We are all having to learn how to do more remotely, now and for the foreseeable future. This series of blog posts, drawn from 'Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene', deals with the why, the what and the how of online conferences.
Linguistics Featured 'The Tiberian pronunciation tradition of Biblical Hebrew' The term ‘Biblical Hebrew’ is generally used to refer to the form of the language that appears in the printed editions of the Hebrew Bible and it is this form that it is presented to students in grammatical textbooks and reference grammars. The form of Biblical Hebrew that is presented
Author Posts The Shifting Politics of Representations of the Himalaya: From Colonial Authority to Open Access On an uncharacteristically sunny afternoon in late September, 50 students, staff and faculty gathered at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies [https://pwias.ubc.ca/event/book-launch-the-politics-language-contact-in-the-himalaya] in Vancouver to celebrate the launch of The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya [https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/980]. Since
English Literature Allusion/Echo and Plagiarism: Walking the Fine Line In the three-volume second edition (1987) of Tennyson’s complete poems, editor Christopher Ricks cites more than twelve hundred instances where phrases and short passages are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands. These similarities are sometimes as minimal as two or three words, but
Human and Machine Consciousness Human and Machine Consciousness - a systematic approach Consciousness is extremely important to us. What would life be worth without the smells, colours and sounds that fill our waking conscious experience? Coma patients who are unlikely to regain consciousness are allowed to die. Fictional unconscious zombies are shot with impunity. Within the Christian tradition the conscious soul is
open education Enabling lifelong learning through open education Broadly speaking, open education (OE) is the widening of access to high quality educational resources in order to promote lifelong learning and greater participation in higher learning and training. One of the driving principles of OE is that lifelong learning is a human right [http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?
1600-1850 The Role of the Well-Timed Question My chapter in Information and Empire [https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/636] is something that I never really expected to write. It came about because of a simple question from Katia Bowers about what I might have to contribute to the conference where the volume began. Did I have anything
1600-1850 Expect the Unexpected Underlying my contributions to Information and Empire is academic work extending back several decades over much of my academic career (with many breaks for other projects). I have had the satisfaction of seeing conclusions based on imperfect evidence confirmed by the work of colleagues (notably Ingrid Maier and Stepan Shamin)
1600-1850 Of Roots and Scrolls Or, How the Bible, Witchcraft, and Botany Were Brought Together By Bureaucracy In A Completely Everyday Fashion That Was Totally Normal At The Time, No, Really, Stay With Me On This One You Guys. Because I can explain. This is the story of an institution both entirely unique and completely
1600-1850 How do people know things? “How do people know things?” – the title of this blog post – seems like a simple question, but as our new publication, Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 demonstrates, the answer is complex. The volume focuses on how people knew things in pre-modern Russia, from the official information
Author Posts Why Open Access? OBP Author's Perspectives ‘I am committed to egalitarian education and breaking down any barriers that would get in the way to learning. In short I champion access to material for all.’ -Andrew Fisher ‘I really wanted The Idea of Europe to be widely available, to as many people as possible. I wanted to
Author Posts Open Textbook Network: The Power of Community Open education means providing greater access to knowledge and learning. It also means significant institutional change, something that takes time and concerted effort to be successful. The Open Textbook Network (OTN) is a community of higher education leaders dedicated to advancing open education best practices on their college campuses. Together,
Author Posts Tolerance: Student Perspectives “We produced translations for Tolerance in a small group, made up of the 2nd year students in my college. We were given the French copies of two texts, produced our own translations, and then all met with our tutor to share our translations and come up with a final version.
Author Posts Open Access Week 2017: Tolerance It has been exciting to see how much interest our Tolerance volume has provoked since its publication. We initially took up the project in order to show support for our colleagues in France and to help the anthology of searing Enlightenment texts they’d put together on tolerance, equality, and
Author Posts Warlike and Peaceful Societies: The Interaction of Genes and Culture Why has Afghanistan changed in a few decades from being a relatively relaxed and tolerant society to one of the most authoritarian and fanatical societies in the world? And why were women allowed to wear miniskirts in Afghanistan in the 1960s while they were forced to wear burqas under the
Author Posts From George Romero to The Walking Dead: The Meaning of the Zombie A few weeks ago, filmmaker George Romero passed away in Toronto. Across the city and elsewhere, remembrance vigils were held for him. It was the kind of treatment usually reserved for great musicians, artists who bared some cardinal human aspect in their work that was hitherto unexplored. In the case
Author Posts L'idée de l’Europe au Siècle des Lumières This blog post was originally posted as an article on theAdventures on the Bookshelfblog – you can read it here [http://bookshelf.mml.ox.ac.uk/2017/05/17/europe/]. In 1813, Germaine de Staël published a seminal work called De l’Allemagne, which offered a wide-ranging introduction to German romantic
Austerity ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’ Read and downloadJust Managing?for free here [http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/591/just-managing--what-it-means-for-the-families-of-austerity-britain] . “If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly.” (Theresa May; 13 July 2016) Words are tricky things, and we can all agree that ‘talk is cheap’
Author Posts Ownership and Cultural Heritage This free to read book [http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/590/searching-for-sharing--heritage-and-multimedia-in-africa] grew out of discussions about how multimedia technologies afforded scholars new ways of sharing documentation and scientific knowledge with the cultural owners of these collected oral genres. Funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the project
Author Posts Strengthening Democracy Through Open Education This blog post was originally published by Patrick Blessinger as an article on University World News – you can access it here [http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20170502124125567]. Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education can be read and downloaded for free here [http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/531/
Author Posts Security in a small nation? Events, dear boy, events… I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal or not, but Harold Macmillan supposedly once claimed that what politicians in government fear most is “events, dear boy, events”. For the academic, the publication of a long-gestated project can hold similar trepidation. The ‘thing’ that you set out to study can,
Author Posts Behaviour, Development and Evolution - an Introductory Blog (1/3) The Appearance of Design My book touches on many aspects of human nature. However, I regard the nature/nurture dichotomy as false. Nature refers to the end products of development and nurture to how they got there. The innate/learned, robust/plastic, hard-wired/soft-wired, and genetic/environmental dichotomies all incorrectly
