About

Mission: “To render the sensible incomprehensible. To hobble innovation wherever it lives.”

I am the Emerging Technologies Discoordinator with UBC’s Office of Learning Technology.

I can be reached by email at brian|DOT|lamb|AT|ubc|DOT|ca

This page is always out of date… some day I will channel the sufficient bursts of narcissistic energy required to update it.

Selected Articles

• [Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix], EDUCAUSE Review. Open content, freeflowing bits and bytes, data literacy. With a complementary 15 minute audio mashup. [Download MP3]

• [Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not], EDUCAUSE Review. A longish feature on wikis and their implications, with special emphasis on their effect on higher education. [PDF 502 KB].

• • (Une traduction française est en cours de relecture sur [CraoWiki EspacesGrandOuverts] – relecteurs bienvenus)

• [Taking a Walk on the Wiki Side], Syllabus Magazine. A basic overview of wikis, and a brief case study of UBC’s use of them.
  • [Five Winning Ways People Are Using Wikis Across UBC] – A slightly more detailed version of the case study, for UBC’s eStrategy Newsletter.

• [The Instructional Use of Learning Objects] – a review and epistolic exchange with author/editor [David Wiley], for the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology’s [special issue on learning objects].

• ["Course Management Systems: Trapped Content Silos or Sharing Platforms?" (.pdf)] – from [Learning Objects: Contexts and Connections] (Co-written by [Michelle Lamberson])

• [Bookmark This: How To Store, Use and Share Your ‘Favourites' Online] – Social bookmarking tools and Flickr, for UBC’s eStrategy newsletter.

• [Sharing Educational Resources: Creating Copyright Policy That Works for Creators and Users] – focusing on [Creative Commons] and [BC Commons].

• [Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids] – For UBC’s eStrategy Newsletter.

• [Learning Objects Part 1: "Why You Shouldn't Use Learning Objects, and Why You Should"] – For UBC’s eStrategy Newsletter.

• [Learning Objects Part 2: Pitfalls and Progress] – For UBC’s eStrategy Newsletter.

• [RSS: A Love Story] – For UBC’s eStrategy Newsletter.

• [Beyond the Hype - What's in a Weblog?] – For UBC’s eStrategy Newsletter.

Selected Presentations

  "[It's a] presentation from Brian Lamb, so you know it combines wikis,

  RSS, blogs, learning and chaos." -- [Stephen Downes]

• [Fast, Cheap, and out of Control] – Social Software in the Academy. A presentation with (at least) three split personalities.

• [What blogs, wikis, and Soylent Green have in common...] – This talk was delivered at the Vancouver Public Library for it’s “Changing World of Information Series. I made a [call for help], and received a lot of great input from diverse sources, which makes of the bulk of the presentation content.

• [Beyond The Blog] – This was [my first screencast (QuickTime 43MB)], and based on audience reaction my best. It’s all been downhill from here.

• [Wired for Wikiphonics] – Online presentation using Macromedia Breeze for the NMC Conference on Social Computing. A special broadcast of radio station WIKI, with special call-in guests. Warning: this is a profoundly silly piece of work.
  • A WikiRadioWikiCast version using all-free software for production and delivery is also available.

• [WikiRadio2 Electric Boogaloo] – I really enjoyed making [this screencast (QuickTime 42MB)], but I don’t know anyone else who liked it.

• [Been digital so long it feels like print to me...] – “Is the University profoundly (perhaps tragically) a print-based institution? What are the new literacies? And what does it mean to educators when text becomes more raw material for the remix?” [Audio] (24 MB MP3)

• [Podcasting at UBC] – short overview of how podcasting is being used at my university, with some great clips from local innovators.

• SmallPiecesLooselyJoined: “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” – A wiki-blog-chat fest presented at the [New Media Consortium Summer Conference 2004] but tapping into participants around the ‘net. (With [Alan Levine] and [D'Arcy Norman])

• InsurgenceEmergenceConvergence – a presentation delivered at the [NLII 2004 Annual Meeting in San Diego]. The presentation is divided into three sections: a) [insurgence], which highlights the disruptions that digital media is making to our practices; [emergence], which focuses on the development of social networks enabled by personal tools and protocols like RSS; and [convergence] is meant to point to examples of how existing institutions and industries are evolving to take advantage of the properties of online culture.

• [Syndicating Learning Objects with RSS and Trackback] – (With [Alan Levine] and [D'Arcy Norman]) for MERLOT 2003 – “Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack”
  • [Connecting Learning Objects with RSS, Trackback, and Weblogs] – for the [NMC Online Conference on Learning Objects] – With audio narration via the miracle of Macromedia Breeze.

• [Oh no! Not another learning objects presentation.] – “In which our hero walks through the valley of the shadow of doubt, and comes out smiling.”

Selected Teaching & Workshops

• [ETEC 540 - Text Technologies] – The changing spaces of reading and writing. (Co-instructed this graduate seminar since 2004.)

• [Adventures on the edge of new media] – a two day introductory workshop on social software, delivered to CARNet in Zagreb, Croatia]

• [Podcast Frenzy - One Hour of Digital Audio Mayhem] – a one hour workshop on podcasting, with emphasis on the basics of Audacity.

• ObjectsEducause04 – Rip. Mix. Feed. (Official title: “Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies”) Pre-conference workshop for EDUCAUSE2004, covering learning resources, RSS, weblogs, social bookmarking, Flickr, [crass stereotypes] and [goofy costumes]. (With [Alan Levine])

• [Finding and Reusing Digital Learning Resources]

… as well as in cavernous, sparsely-attended conference halls!

• • Thanks to [D'Arcy Norman] for some of these images.