About

Detalles ZEMOS98_Martes de Festival_16 shared CC by Julio Albarrán, on Flickr

• Never Mind the Edupunks; or, The Great Web 2.0 Swindle, EDUCAUSE Review, July/August 2010. With Jim Groom. This was our take on “open ed tech” for the openness-themed special issue of ER.

• La ineducación del tecnólogo, RUSC. Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento, Vol. 6, n.º 1 (2009) Con Jim Groom

• English version of the above article, “The Un-Education of the Technologist” written with Jim Groom, is at http://unartist.wpmued.org/

• 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

• Taking a Walk on the Wiki Side, Syllabus Magazine (now Campus Technology). A basic overview of wikis, and a brief case study of UBC’s use of them.

• 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)

Selected Presentations

“[It’s a] presentation from Brian Lamb, so you know it combines wikis, RSS, blogs, learning and chaos.” — Stephen Downes

• Open Contempt – Closing keynote at the JISC Open Educational Resources International Symposium, July 2010 in London, England. Audio Here

• Never mind the edupunks… Featured speaker at the 2010 Expanded Education symposium held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Downloadable .FLV video (with Spanish translation overdubbed) here.

• The Urgency of Open Education: Cheap Thrills, Participatory Culture and Working Social Media (Silverlight player) – Closing keynote for WCET 2009 Annual Conference, Denver. Links here.

• A Visit from the Future: Uncanny Learning – With Tom Woodward and Jim Groom, Second Life presentation for the New Media Consortium’s Symposium on the Future Audio here (MP3 33 MB)

• Are the wheels coming off the open education juggernaut? – Featured presentation for JISC Innovating e-Learning online conference 09, featuring interviews with Catherine Ngugi, Jim Groom, and David Wiley

• Where is the open education movement going? – EDUCAUSE Live! session in Adobe Connect. With Chris Lott, and interviews with Lott, Scott Leslie, and David Wiley

• The Urgency of Open Education (Ustream archive) – Opening keynote for 2009 TTIX Conference.

• Radical Reuse: A Survivalist Handbook to the End of Edtech, with Jim Groom and Tom Woodward. Web resources and funny videos made for 2008 Open Education Conference, Logan, Utah.

• Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist – Presentation in Second Life for New Media Consortium’s Symposium on Mashups. Mashed-up audio file here (57 MB MP3) Review by Alan Levine.

• Adventures in Wikipedia – Tagging along with Jon Beasley-Murray and Wyeth Wasserman.

• Web 2.0 Online Learning Film Festival – With Gardner Campbell, Jim Groom, D’Arcy Norman. For NMC Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video.

• The UnKeyNote – Both a wild adventure, and a complete disaster. With Stephen Downes and D’Arcy Norman Warning: this is an extraordinarily chaotic work. MP3 here.

• 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 – “Flickrtation” with Alan Levine for 2006 EDUCAUSE ELI Conference. Audio here (14 MB MP3)

• Wired for Wikiphonics – Online presentation 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. MP3 here.

• WikiRadio2 Electric Boogaloo – I really enjoyed making this screencast, 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)

• 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.

• 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.

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 With Jeff Miller – a two day introductory workshop on social software, delivered to CARNet in Zagreb, Croatia

• ObjectsEducause04 – Rip. Mix. Feed. (Official title: “Decentralization of Learning Resources: Syndicating Learning Objects Using RSS, Trackback, and Related Technologies”) Pre-conference workshop for EDUCAUSE 2004, covering learning resources, RSS, weblogs, social bookmarking, Flickr, crass stereotypes and goofy costumes. (With Alan Levine)

Miscellaneous

I’ve been writing this particular blog since 2002, though due to archiving mishaps the posts here start in 2003 when I did a cut-and-paste, one-post-at-a-time migration. Those were the days. “Object Learning” started out on Blogger FTP-ed to a UBC webspace, as well as Radio Userland (thanks Cyprien), then on to Movable Type on the reusability.org server (thanks David!), then a rogue UBC server (thanks D’Arcy!). Thanks to Ken for performing a miracle recovering a data crash on the rogue server. Then we got a proper supported UBC server (thanks Michelle and Michelle). This blog service was built with friendly and gifted co-workers like Frank, Tyler and Andre… and of course the absolutely incredible current OLT tech team (I have to single out Novak, Scott, Alison, Joe, Enej, Michael and Marianne for their ongoing service, innovation, inventiveness and fun). I could not be prouder and more satisfied with my current home than I am with UBC Blogs.

I won’t go into the same detail telling the story of the UBC wikis I’ve been involved with (previous incarnations here and here), many of the same names are involved. I’m quite pleased with the current installation at http://wiki.ubc.ca/

In 2007-8, I was a Research Fellow working with David Wiley at Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL)

In late 2008, I worked with Julià Minguillon of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) as a visiting researcher.

I possess a BA Honours Degree in English from the University of Saskatchewan, and an MA in English from McGill University. I am also a certified Chainsaw Carpenter.

I got my start in online learning in 1997 as a Profesor de Ingles with Campus Sonora Norte (Hermosillo) of Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey.

I have also been fortunate enough to serve as a co-organizer for every Northern Voice conference (Canada’s first weblog conference when held in 2005), as well as co-organizer for the 2009 Open Education Conference here in Vancouver. I’m on the program committee for the 2010 Open Education Conference in Barcelona.

Some of my favorite things: my partner Keira and my son Harry. Going to the horseraces. Shopping for, fiddling with, and generally fetishising vinyl LPs. Jamming, making a racket, doing anything musical at all with friends and/or family. Making sandwiches and Mexican food.