Lisa Harris Marketing

Next week I’ll be in Sunny Spain at the PLE Conference (@PLE_BCN)

What is a PLE you might well ask?

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) include the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. It represents a shift away from the traditional model of consuming information through independent channels such as the library or textbook, and towards a more active approach where connections are made and relationships are developed both online and offline. A PLE also puts learners in charge of their own learning processes, challenging them to reflect on the tools and resources that help them to learn best.

In a refreshing contrast to many academic conferences, this event looks likely to “practice what it preaches”:

• The keynote speakers ( including @courosa and @grahamattwell) have already posted up video and slides previewing their sessions and requesting comments and questions from the delegates.
• The conference hashtag (@PLE_BCN) has been active on Twitter for many weeks.
• We have been asked to design our own ID badges, with the instruction to “be creative”
• There is an active conference social network on Crowdvine 
• And a YouTube channel

Amongst all this innovation and creativity, are my boring powerpoint slides:

I will blog some feedback about the event next week

Mike Lister (Principal Business Fellow at the School of Management) will be presenting this Seminar at the University of Southampton. Mike was one of the experts consulted by the Office of Fair Trading as they looked into the future of where digital tracking is taking society.

Venue: Room 1019, Building 58a (School of Management Executive Education Centre), University of Southampton, Highfield Campus.

Internet use is so pervasive across society now that using it is considered normal behaviour.  But consumers are surprisingly unaware of how much information about them is collected – either online or offline and how this gets combined.

Currently the main application of this knowledge is to entice you to buy products and services that you otherwise might not have bought.  You use Google but do you realise how much they know about you?  German authorities are so concerned they have just told Google to stop tracking website visitors without their consent.

In the UK we seem less anxious.  But privacy and the data about you that companies capture and sell on to others will become a hot topic.  Not least because of the business opportunity this represents for the legal profession.

Date: Thursday 28th January 2010. 6pm Registration, 6.30pm Presentation, 8pm finish.

To book your FREE place please email busdev@soton.ac.uk with your contact details and numbers of seats you wish to reserve.

Lorraine Warren and I are running a Careers session for Southampton Students on Thursday – the slides are here:

We also hope to have some virtual guests in the form of representatives of last year’s graduates and maybe also some Twitter followers…I will update this post with feedback after the event.

Now that I’m back in the UK after Opened09 in Vancouver, here are some of the things that have stuck in my mind, in fairly random order…

• “it’s not about content” Providing open educational content is just the starting point…people are what make the difference
• “Cute kitten syndrome” – or “if it’s open it must be good”…this attitude can lead to a lack of critical evaluation of what really works and what doesn’t
• The enthusiasm of back channel (morning sessions were even followed by some attendees from their hotel rooms, but no names will be mentioned…) There were more than 3000 tweets using the OpenEd hashtag over the duration of the event
• The efforts of tech team were awesome – running 3 live streams concurrently, between 10am and 4pm every day, with 95% uptime. If you check out the daily conference programme on http://openedconference.org/ and select any session title, you can link to a synopsis of the talk, the presentation slides, trackbacks to blogposts that have mentioned the session, comments on the session and the full video of the presentation…wow!
• I heard the word ‘awesome’ a lot…J
• Great breakfasts, with enormous cakes and pastries, comfy chairs, wifi and access to powerpoints J
• Relaxed presenters with a lot of humorous interaction with the audience
• There were lots of mentions of Clayton Christensen, applying his principles of ‘disruptive innovation’ to education. This theory centres on the notion that established industries are not best placed to adapt to change, and may not even notice the need for change. They will eventually lose out to newcomers who start off outside the system with a basic product aimed at a different audience that can acquire critical mass under the nose of the incumbent (think of the first PCs on the desk providing simple consumption of computing vs the complexity of usage of a minicomputer….)
• Even this audience of enthusiasts seemed to baulk at the model where content is created by the students themselves, but such a system is already up and running in the USA (see the learning model adopted by Brigham Young University, Idaho)
• Gardner Campbell of Baylor University warned against “digital facelifts” (a term coined by Clay Shirky). This means ”we will do what we did before but we will put it on the web” …you can check out his entertaining presentation here
• A number of participants who are far more efficient than me have already blogged about their OpenEd experiences, see for example the reflections of Cole Camplese and Dave Cormier

Many questions emerged from the discussions, for example:

Sustainability – how to grow and manage online communities beyond the initial funded phase?

Where is the student feedback, as users what do they think of open education resources?

For open education to become mainstream, do we need a new education system or is it possible to amend the old one?

Are new elites of the “hyper-connected” emerging? (for example we heard a story of Wikipedia editors forming an exclusive club)

As early adopters are well and truly on board, how can open education now appeal to the next wave of more mainstream tutors? Is a new language required?

How many of these OpenEd initiatives reflect their broader institutional culture, and how many merely operate as isolated pockets of openness within a sceptical traditional system?

In summary…the best event I have attended, well done to all the organisers and volunteers. I’m looking forward to Barcelona next summer J

The other day I presented some ideas about online assessment and recording micro-lectures to the University of Southampton Learning and Teaching Unit’s Online Learning Workshop. There was a lot of interest and it was good to discover that many projects are already underway across the University. A Ning site is under development for ongoing discussions which I will link to when it is ready. Meanwhile, you can find the slides below.

last week I presented a paper at the Network Ethics Conference in Lisbon(co-authored by Lorraine Warren of the University of Southampton and Kelly Smith of the University of Huddersfield)

The event was small but friendly and the City of Lisbon is lovely

This paper is now being developed into a book chapter for publication next year…watch this space!

The slides can be viewed here:

Alan and I presented an overview of the results of our online networking project at last week’s Marketing and Entrepreneurship Conference in Antalya, Turkey. You can see the slides here:

Last Thursday Tom Chapman and Natalie Kitcher from Headstream came to talk about their experiences of Social Media Marketing to Southampton University undergraduates studying Digital Marketing. They covered examples of their work for a diverse range of businesses including the Young Victoria film and Red Funnel Ferries.

As an experiment, I tweeted the event using the #headstream tag. If you do a Twitter search for #headstream you will see the entire conversation, but here are a few edited highlights from my notes as the speakers talked, and the backchannel comments and Q&As.

First a few comments from me…

lisaharris: #headstream Innocent Drinks crowdsourced ideas for a new drink from Facebook – via a poll to select favourites

lisaharris: #headstream see @YoungVictoria which has been very successful in engaging people with ‘key facts’ about the Victorian era

lisaharris: importance of analytics in measuring success and demonstrating value to the client #headstream

Lorraine invites a virtual guest to join us…

lwarren17: @jonhickman, we’re doing a live tweet-up in a marketing seminar here on #headstream

The virtual guests start interacting…

Jas: @jonhickman Some companies measure loyalty and trust through surveys and polls. #headstream

jonhickman: @Jas how do you feel about the effectiveness of that sort of research? Is the data good enough to demonstrate ROI to suit types? #headstream

Jas: @johnhickman Also watch out for brands as they start to position their social media efforts onto their front pages. #headstream

I bring in the virtual participants for questions and feedback…

lisaharris: #headstream any questions you would like me to pose to Tom and Natalie?

lwarren17: #headstream, we all went quiet when you gave us a space – just like a lecture! :>)). was interested to see Young Victoria link

Jas: @lisaharris What are Tom and Natalie’s thoughts on the recent social media experiment by #skittles? #headstream

lisaharris: thanks for questions – I have asked some of them and will feedback shortly, just wrapping up now #headstream

lisaharris: @Jas in response to your qtn about what happens after the campaign, that depends on for how long the client is prepared to pay #headstream

lwarren17: #headstream, raises interesting questions of managing on and off line interactions together in real time – super stuff

What is missing of course is the contribution from the student audience in the room…. we’ll try that next time! But if you were there and would like to add your comments to this blogpost, please feel free J

Many thanks to Tom and Natalie for their efforts!

This event is FREE to School of Management Staff and Students

20^th November 2008 from 6pm – 8pm in Building 2, University of Southampton.

Punch Above Your Weight CASE STUDY SPECIAL on Web 2.0 marketing techniques

Marketing is about creating a good story that connects you with your customers, and telling it in the right places – especially on the Web. Now we present the case studies – an opportunity to discover the secrets of three successful online businesses.

Alan and Lisa will explain how they talked to several early adopter small companies during their current research programme who have become quite sophisticated in how they use online and Web 2.0 techniques to help them ‘punch above their weight’ and look more substantial to prospective clients and collaborators. Three ‘best practice’ early adopter companies will be discussed from the many that participated in the research programme.

Dr Alan Rae is Managing Partner of Ai Consultants, which researches how small companies use IT and the Internet. He develops training programmes for small companies or those who need to work with or sell to them. He is a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Marketing and sits on its Membership Group.

Dr Lisa Harris is Senior Lecturer in Marketing, a Chartered Marketer and Director of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. She is currently working with Alan on a number of follow-ups to the Punch Above Your Weight online marketing research programme.

You will need to register though as places are limited. Please contact Christopher Hopper by email: c.hopper@soton.ac.uk and include your full name and University e-mail address.

Technorati Tags: Punch Above Your Weight,Alan Rae,Lisa Harris,CIM Seminar