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).

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.

I initiated and project manag the Coventry University partnership with Apple’s iTunes U, enabling us to significantly raise our international profile through open sharing of teaching and research resources.

At the time of launch in June 2009 we were the 6th UK institution to launch our content through this platform and since its inception it has grown to include over 600 open multimedia resources ranging from lectures to online tutorials.

The site now attracts thousands of visitors every week and now has over 7 million hits (including the other sites where we send the content to) and includes a diverse portfolio of free content from across the University. It also enabled the University to be Highly Commended for ‘Innovation and Creative Thinking Campaign’ at the 2010 HEIST Awards. As well as paving the way for a number of funded projects in the area of Open Access for the University and the development of further applications and projects.

Prominent collections in this include the Coventry Conversations series, the Photographic Mediations series and the Open Media series

Find out more information about the CU on iTunes U project

I initiated and develop much of the content for this project, whose aim was to set up an online channel for Coventry University. To date the CUTV channel has had over one million views. It includes a range of videos including lectures, research projects and student work from around Coventry University. It is helped with the support of a number of people around Coventry University including students and staff from the Media Production and Media and Communication Degrees at the University.

The CUTV project is also part of the Youtube Edu global education platform, which includes thousands of free academic videos from YouTube’s educational partners around the world.