Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life such as air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.

All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad. The book that I worked on, along with Janneke Adema, explored the way that concepts and ideas around the theme of Symbiosis can be applied to a number of areas within the (digital/networked) humanities.

Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions: Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org).  The Editors of the series are Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London). Other members of the project team include Sigi Jőttkandt (Open Humanities Press), David Ottina (Open Humanities Press) and myself (Coventry University).

In January 2012 we’ll be launching our Free and Open Undergraduate class exploring Creative Activism

This class will explore the potentials of creative media activism through encouraging ‘live’ creative interventions and participation in cultural, political and social debates.

Throughout the 10 week class we will be exploring how media activists and campaigners have used their media knowledge, connections and skills to ask difficult questions, provoke debate and raise awareness of important issues and problems in their local, national and international communities.

Choosing an issue that is important to them, participants in the class will work on a number of real and situated tasks that will aim to provide them with a number of new knowledges and skills.

By being run as an open community it will enable participants to constructively critique, learn from, build on and collaborate with each other to produce a body of work that will, hopefully, make a practical and positive mark on the world.

If you’d like to get involved, or just stay up to date with the work of this class, please join us here.

Over the past few months I have been working with Jonathan Worth and the Photography Team at Coventry University to develop an iPhone App for a free and open undergraduate course called ‘Picturing the Body’.

The ‘trendsetting’ app has been mentioned by the British Journal of Photography, PDN Pulse, Times Higher Education and Professional Photographer Magazine. It has been described by one of our collaborators as ‘an innovation in photography education’ and by Wired’s Rawfile team as ‘Blowing minds & shifting paradigms in photo education’.

The beta App allows people to engage with the community of practitioners and students who are taking part in the course. Pulling in photographs from Flickr, content from the blog, comments from Twitter as well as a range of photography podcasts from our iTunes U Project.

The intention is to see whether mobile applications can enhance the experience of being involved in the course and to help us to think about future developments in this area as part of our mantra for Open Media at Coventry University. Since the launch of this app, we have been involved in developing a number of innovations for mobile based learning, including the launch of the MediaPRO – Media Production Course App

To download the visit the PICBOD App in the iTunes Store and to find out more about the course please visit the PICBOD website.

(The image at the top and on my homepage – Crash Courtesy of Jonathan Shaw)

The Picbod App was developed as a part of my Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education. You can find the poster presentation of the PICBOD App here. Thanks to all the colleagues, students and other people who were involved in its development.

Back in early 2008, and at a time when I was only just getting to grips with the whole digital ‘thing’ myself, I came up with the idea of viral education and made this video to ask some key questions about the nature of education in relation to emerging participatory technologies:

Originally made as part of a presentation for my own institution, the video has been used by a number of educational organisations to open up conversations about the way that education is using new viral possibilities enabled by the open web to change the way we think about what education can be. It’s been cited on hundreds of blogs and in a number of reports. Many of the comments have helped to shape my own ideas about education in relation to technology. Here’s just a few of the places it has been used over the last 4 years:

http://sydneyinstituteonline.net/blog/2010/05/25/viral-education-2-0/

http://www.joewilsons.net/2010/10/viral-education-20.html

http://civitaquana.blogspot.com/2009/02/viral-education-20.html

http://www.archive.org/details/ViralEducation_123

http://edteck-lms.org/viral-education-2-0/

http://aewallace.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/viral-education-2-0/

http://epicmarketingvideos.com/2011/07/viral-education-2-0/

http://blogs.netedu.info/2009/11/06/viral-education-2-0/

http://www.washingtondcupdate.com/uncategorized/viral-education-20

http://lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/viral-education-20022409/

http://www.mikemccready.ca/blog/2009/03/weekly-video-viral-education-20/

http://www.veted.net/video/112-viral-education-20–coventryacuk

“If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked.” ― Gilles Deleuze

Many of our institutions in education, technology and the media are remarkably exclusive in terms of the culture, people and ideologies they produce. On one level its quite disturbing how so few voices can permeate our culture and ideas in such a holistic and totalising way. Yet we accept these ideas as if they were common sense. As if they were our own.

The arts and humanities, within the academy, has a remarkable way of dealing with this contradiction. It speaks as if it can imagine a world where inequality should not be so. It speaks against neoliberalism and contemporary servitude. It speaks against hierarchy and the formidable consequences of global capital and the political economy.

Yet its actions, and I’m talking about how the Arts and Humanities has positioned itself in contemporary Universities, often creates the opposite. While addressing, critiquing and analysing the practices of others, it forgets to look inwards and question its own practices, its own hierarchy and function in maintaining power structures.

Rather than becoming an alternative space for asking important questions and bringing about progressive change it actually ends up doing the opposite: keeping things the same. Its an illusion. Its a veil that conceals a rather empty and false reality. Its vein and individualistic. Its a world that I dont want to live in.

For me, because of this contradiction, academic critique, in many of the forms that it has taken for hundreds of years, just isn’t capable of working effectively anymore. The shelves of journals just gather dust as we wallow in the quagmire of an ‘ideal of theory’ from a bygone age.

I believe that in order to ask important questions around cultural and social justice that we need to be active in reproducing structures, forms and possibilities that can speak for themselves. We should not separate theory from practice, the linguistic from the embodied. We should not need to textualise and territorialise everything into our domain.

That is why I refuse to create work in ways that stop others from accessing it. I refuse to exclusively tie my work into the expensive journals that have bastardised our important work into insignificance, I refuse to exclusively tie myself into the media institutions that do not share my open ethics.

I will do all I can to be open with my work and practice and I will help others to do the same.

I will not be trapped in the dream of the other. I will not be fucked.

Although I will probably be fired.