Plagiarism and music

Dr Daniel Müllensiefen (Musicologist at Goldsmiths’ Computing Department, and academic consultant on plagiarism) on the BBC World Service’s The Forum, demonstrating software which detects similarities between pieces of music which may indicate plagiarism. Daniel introduces some historical incidents and, with the guests, discusses stylistic constraints on originality, whether there is a limit in the number of original popular music tunes which can be written, and how to gauge whether these are incidental. And the inevitable discussion about intellectual property, litigation and profit.

Brian Kelly: 5,000 tweets on

Brian Kelly (Community and Outreach Team Leader at UKOLN, the University of Bath) has a post on his blog reviewing his use of Twitter. In it he summarises how Twitter has contributed to funding bids, participation at a distance, promoting and amplifying his own and others’ work, peer-reviewing draft work and, perhaps most importantly, his professional grapevine.

As you can gather from the tag cloud illustration in his post, Brian Kelly is a professional online networker. As such, he is drawn to Twitter as Twitter, examines its potential purposefully, tweets and blogs about being online, and has a community of practice with similar interests. Of all the academic disciplines, you would expect people in disciplines like Brian’s to be the pioneers – and I’ve learnt a great deal from Brian so I’m glad he is. What his experience illustrates, though, is that Twitter becomes an attractive proposition for academics who have people they want to hear from, or communicate with, there. For many disciplines, Twitter is still a bit empty.

I think what that suggests in turn is that, in academic disciplines without an academic interest in online networking Twitter will have to broaden through multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary channels, or through an individual’s non-professional tweeting identity fusing with their professional identity (as can easily happen on social networks – although various studies of online networking for learning e.g. Great Expectations indicate that learning in social environments tends to be haphazard). This broadening will probably go unnoticed until it is picked up by established organs like journals or disciplinary conferences, after which I think it will probably take flight.

So (for the very small proportion of my working time I have to dedicate to such things) I continue to wonder, what would pique interest for an academic who is intrepid with technologies but whose community of practice isn’t on Twitter?

Engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning – the report

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Higher Education Academy funded me to carry out a synthesis of literature on engaging academics in professional development for technology-enhanced learning.

This was a beneficial experience in terms of my personal and professional development. It improved my understanding of what is required in my role and the findings prompted me to change the way I go about my work.

I’m pleased to say that the report is now available on EvidenceNet (home of many other relevant pieces of work – do browse).