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.
A really early start today on BBC Radio 5 Live with Nicky Campbell and Rachel Burden talking to them about the recent signing of eSport player Dave ByTheWay to Wolfsburg football team. Here's a story about what happened.
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, I ran a FameLab taster session at the Museum of Science and Industry with Dee-Ann Johnson from Manchester University and Sam Illingworth from Manchester Metropolitan University. It's a wonderful thing that the universities are collaborating on making Manchester a mecca for science communication and the whole event was loads of fun.
I focused my contribution on what I describe as the 10 Commandments of FameLab - a number of principles taken from recent winning performances.
It's a work in progress, but you get the idea. Blatantly reliant on other films, but hopefully done enough to them to make it a worthwhile contribution and a distinct thing, a homage even.
I also spent my time getting the participants to go through a mock FameLab test, filming each other with mobile phones and shooting with a bigger camera, just to get over that first hurdle! We had some great candidates and I think it will be a strong regional heat!
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.