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The amazing Beth Hewitt at Salford University produced this fantastic afternoon event within the BBC Digital Cities week, which I opened with a talk on how Virtual Reality is changing what sports involve. Here's a summary of the event from the BBC's journalist Charles Miller, who came up from London to capture some of the afternoon.
As part of the BBC Digital Cities week, I was delighted to take part and open the VR/AR Show and Tell event at Manchester Metropolitan University's Digital Innovation hub last week. It brought together some really amazing pioneers in VR, demonstrating how it can be an interface for research, industry, art, and entertainment. It was a fantastic affirmation of England's vibrant North West VR/AR network!
Among the people there was WizDish, which is a fantastic low friction platform to allow a player of a VR game to physically walk on the plate, thus moving a character within the digital game. Here's what it looks like.
Today, I am in Switzerland, giving a talk about how to utilize social media to build a reputation as a researcher. My take on this is to think about how best to utilize the range of creative media around us, as academics, and to explore the overlap between journalism and academia in that pursuit.
This configuration allows us to develop a holistic approach to nurturing reputation, with community building, and awareness raising, while ensuring that we don't treat the media as a static entity.
We need to ensure that our use of media - social or otherwise - is not just about instrumental values, but about co-creating and innovating as researchers.
Today at Media City, we have our first eSport conference, with some really amazing speakers, who are thought leaders and doers in the industry. It's such a privilege to have to have such excellent folk to our place to plan the future!
The University of Salford Centre for Sports Business, in collaboration with The Digital Cluster (part of CARe), and World Gaming Executives is hosting a one-day symposium on the 2nd November 2016 at the University of Salford at MediaCityUK on eSports and the Future of Sport.
This event will include talks by leading academics in the field, and those working in the management and provision of eSports. This will explore the rapidly developing business of eSports, and consider its relationship and synergies with the changing nature of more traditional sports.
The event is free and open to anyone interested eSports, the business of digital gaming, digital media, or the changing nature of professional sports.
Garry Crawford (University of Salford)
Andy Miah (University of Salford)
Trevor Keane (Celtic eSports League)
Chester King (CEO International eGames Group)
Christopher Paget (Sheridans, Media Law)
Dr Mark Johnson (York Digital Hub) & Dr Jamie Woodcock (LSE)
Dominic Sacco (British eSports Association), Carleigh Morgan (King’s College London), Malph Minns (Strive Sponsorship), Josh Williams (NUEL)
Last week, I was in Paris giving a talk for the News Media Coalition about how to future proof in a rapidly changing media industry. I covered everything from social media to virtual reality. There's so much work here to be done, but journalism has something we need to protect. Here's my talk:
Accompanying my A-Z of Social Media for Academia re-launch, in partnership with the Times Higher Education, I published a 2 page article on the value of social media. I will also have monthly updates on social media for the magazine, so keep an eye out for that!
Today, I re-launch the A-Z of Social Media in partnership with Times Higher Education. We have produced a double page feature in the print magazine, and I'm going to be working on a monthly column for inclusion, which will have updates.
The online version within their website will still have the list in full, with any updates, and we are working on a dynamic function within it, to make it more engaging and useful. This is a great way for the list to reach out even further and I'm really excited to be working on something more regularly for THE!
The resource can be found here
For citation purposes, please use
Miah, A. (2016) The A-Z of Social Media for Academia, Times Higher Education, Available: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/a-z-social-media [Available Online]
Yesterday, I went to Warwick University to give a talk about using social media for research and impact. It was an event organized by Luke Robert Mason, focused on young scholars mostly. The question that I am often asked at such meetings is how much time I spend doing social media. The answer is usually that it is hard to quantify, but that it's not just time spent communicating.
My time spent using social media is time spent doing the kinds of things that we need to do as academics, to stay ahead of the curve. A lot of it is about discovery - finding out about new projects, initiatives, headlines, research, networks - which feeds into wider processes of research that I undertake. Usin social media means I also use email much less than I used to. Instant messaging through WhatsApp or Facebook are now critical ways for me to contact students and colleagues.
However, the main reasons I use social media a lot have to do with the underlying principles of its ethos - it is user centred, so you can decide what you want to say, rather than rely on the media to interpret it for you, it is the place where people are discovering learning opportunities - and it allows us to grow our communities more effectively.
All of these things are crucial to doing research and so using social media is a no brainer for me.
here are the slides
This week, I am in Lausanne for the Sport Future Rendezvous 2016 conference, organized by good friend Professor Jean-Loup Chappelet at the University of Lausanne. I took the chance to talk about the biodigital interface, the growth of e-sport, biotechnological change, ingestible sensors, and virtual realities. But the big controversy, as always, was my views around doping, which did hijack the futures debate a little. In any case, here's my presentation.
Thanks to Michel Filliau for the photograph.
This week, I was over in Dublin for a Virtual Reality conference organized by Professor Timothy Jung in collaboration with the Dublin Institute of Technology. I covered all things virtual and sport, here's what I said....
My talk at the Sport Accord in Lausanne this year focused on e-sports, an area of focus for my forthcoming book for The MIT Press, out later this year. My talk was followed by a panel debate with Patrick Nally (President, International Federation of Poker), Alex Lim (Sec Gen, International e-Sport Federation), and Chris Osborne (BBC Sport).
Here's the livestream recording
Here's the prezi...
Last week in my penultimate seminar for our ELS Study Skills course, we covered revision tips, but instead of just running through ideas, we thought we'd try to come up with a top 10 list, based on the range of top tips others provide. Here's what revision looks like for the student who lives in a world of social media and mobile apps. Hope it's useful for you!
Contributors include: Flossie Washborne, Lydia Watts, Steven Wheelhouse, Rhona Wood,
Last week, I interviewed for BBC's Chris Osborne on the use of virtual reality in sport. A great article followed.
This week, i gave a talk with colleagues at Salford University, focusing on how we want to build collaboration with industry partners and work towards more co-creation of research. Here's the presentation.
Tonight, I appeared on BBC 5 Live, a feature 90min show about the development of digital gaming in football. It was hosted at the National Football Museum and brought together a great cast of expertise in the room, including the England's Captain of the Women's team, Steph Houghton. Here's the show.
This week, we had a 2 day event for PhD students, to give advice and guidance on how to use social media to build profile, develop research collaborations, and to discover new ideas. My contribution focused around key platforms and how best to use them, covering, Twitter, ResearchGate, Whatsapp, YouTube, Slideshare, Prezi, and we covered ResearcherID and ORCID too.... that said, the main thing was about how social media is a crucial way for academics to get behind the digital revolution, which is transforming what universities do, how they do it, how they relate to the media, publishers, government, and everything. I wanted to show this classic, but I didn't have time...
Last week, I was at the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, for one of our regular meetings of the Ministerial Advisory Group for Digital Participation. It was a really uplifting meeting, focused on the Scottish strategy to get the remaining number of the population online, who presently are not. The strategy is being driven by Fiona Hyslop MSP and is drawing on libraries as a focal point of investment.
There was a sense of needing to revisit the role of libraries for a digital age, make them core to society and communities in ways that many are not. It's a wonderful approach and a privilege to be a part of it.
This week, I took part in a panel discussion about the future of hospitals, following this brief:
The Government is committed to a vision for hospital services structured around the needs of patients, both now and in the future. Delegates will explore the need for changes to how we organise and deliver hospital care and treatment that is safe, effective and meets the needs of patients, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As the constraints on NHS spending continue, coupled with patient’s expectations of safer and higher-quality health care, the need to provide health services differently has never been more crucial.
Under intensifying pressure to change, hospitals are adapting their organisation and services to cope with cuts to financial resources. Simon Stevens, NHS England Chief Executive, has made facing financial challenges a priority. He has also emphasised how frontline staff will be vital to create change and generate innovation to deliver services differently.
A core part of the vision laid out by Simon Stevens in the NHS five year forward view involves hospitals becoming more closely integrated with other forms of care. If the health and social care system is to respond to the changing needs of the population, and also address the financial challenges it faces, all hospitals will need to play a fundamentally different role within local health economies.
Hospitals across the UK and around the world face significant challenges as a result of demographic change, rising demand and a staffing challenges. The changing needs of the population make it increasingly important that hospitals are able to provide high-quality care for people with multiple chronic conditions and complex needs, including but not limited to the growing numbers of frail older people. To respond effectively to these changing needs, health and social care services must be capable of providing ongoing support over time, anticipating and preventing deterioration and exacerbations of existing conditions, and supporting a person’s multiple needs in a well-co-ordinated way.
With all this in mind, hospitals will need to develop new ways of working that span traditional service and organisational boundaries – including working more closely with other hospitals (for example, through alliances and partnerships), and strengthening connections with community-based services such as primary care, social care, community services and mental health. This points towards hospitals playing a more outward-facing role in their local health system, in which they shift
from an organisational focus to a system leadership role, and play a more active part in preventing illness and promoting health in local communities.
What the future hospital will look like and what its central role will be will emerge out of the remnants of a system currently not fit for purpose. The Future of Hospitals Conference will address all the key issues and ask the main question, namely, what will the future hospital look like and how will it operate on a day to day basis
Salford University's Creative Entrepreneur event has become a huge success, with over 400 delegates registered over 1 day. I took part in a panel this year focused on Sport Business 2.0, at which I spoke about the game development community around sports and the growing mobile health market.
Opening at the National Football Museum this week is a new exhibition I was involved with producing, through my relationship with the museum's artistic director, John O'Shea.
I have worked with John for many years now and he has done amazing work in bioart and new media art. He has brought together an extraordinary exhibition of the last 40 years of football computer games to show how much gaming has evolved and how close art and life now come together.
The exhibition is on until June, so plenty of time to see it. It's worth spending a whole day at least, just to experience the different kinds of game interfaces and appreciate how they have changed over the years.
