Windmills on the mind

The dust has settled over the Bazaar 'Show that You Share' conference held this week at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, and it's all been a bit of a whirl, so now I have some time to reflect, here are some of my thoughts on the proceedings:

On the theme of social software, managing digital identities is a concern, with personal content on the web being both an asset and a liability. Copyright is an issue, and not many people understand the notion of creative commons. The question was posed: do students know the possible consequences of posting for example, images of themselves in compromising contexts on FaceBook? (for this read 'drunk and disorderly'). Anything can now be in the 'public domain' in seconds with pervasive mobile technologies around to capture the moment. How much do we own our digital self?

The second theme was 'Hey dude, where's my data?' Someone remarked that there are complex and comprehensive privacy and copyright rules in the user agreements in most social networking systems, but no-one ever reads them. We simply tick the box to say we have and then ignore them. Decentralised storage of data in open content systems makes it sometimes difficult to locate the data at a later stage. The delegates decided that current legislation in most countries is not adequate to deal with the new uses of digital technology that are emerging.

Theme three was Open Education Resources. It was agreed that new skills are required on the part of teachers and students to be able to use them to their full potential. However, institutional structures (or even strictures?) hinder rather than advance learning and a culture of sharing, due mainly to direct competition between universities competing for the same market.

Other conclusions included the comment that metatagging when used outside of a community of practice or interest may make no sense to anyone else. New methods of metatagging are needed to ensure cross-operability of platforms, and portability of digital objects between sites. Great conference - pity it's the swansong for the Bazaar project, as the funding has now ended.