Last year I was invited by Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger to go up to Leicester to give a lecture about the impact of blogging on writing at their Narrative Laboratory for the Creative Industries seminar, Blogs, Communities and Social Software. This year, I have a return invitation, not to lecture in person again but to be one of several guest lecturers contributing to De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media via a variety of online venues. I thought for a while about giving my lecture in Second Life, but decided that that might be a case of the medium obscuring the message with technical difficulties – if your computer’s not powerful enough to run Second Life well, it can a very frustrating experience. Instead, I’m going to be recording a short video which I will publish here on Strange Attractor and we’ll have a discussion with the students in the comments.
My topic this year is ‘open publishing’ and everything related, and in the spirit of openness, transparency and discussion, and with the realisation that there are a lot of people out there who know a lot more than I do about this, I have decided to publish all my research here, as I go along. So you’ll get to see all my sources, my half-formed thoughts, my wrong turns and my wild goose chases – and you’ll be able to join in now, if you feel like it.
My video is due to be published on Monday 26th February, and I’m currently feeling like I really should have started putting this together before now, but them’s the breaks. Hopefully, if the wider community feels like joining in, we can pull together a set of links, notes and finally a video that will both engage the students and prompt a discussion about what all this social software and open licensing really means for the publishing industry.
A note of caution, though. I can’t say that I really have a clear cut idea right now about the shape of the video, so don’t expect this to be all that well structured! I’m also planning a lot of small posts, rather than a few big ones, so it might get a bit ‘stream of consciousness’-y.