Author Archives: Thomas Lancaster

About Thomas Lancaster

Principal Lecturer and Associate Head of School (Computing, Electronics and Mathematics) at Coventry University and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Putting The Professional Online Presences Site Live

The first version of the main site is now live, containing information about Professional Online Presences in general, as well as links to the podcasts.

As usual, this wasn’t totally plain sailing. I wanted to link to the individual podcasts in iTunes, but the only links I could find went to a summary page (and, for some reason the first podcast is missing, although it shows once you are “subscribed” to it). As a workaround, I’ve linked to the original audio files.

This is very much a first draft, so there’s some information and links to resources along with the podcasts.

One thing I’d like to add is make the teaching resources previously developed for the HEA more visible. They’re not available in a convenient format as of yet.

I’d also like to update the resources and add some other useful resources. Feel free to send me any that you think could be included. Likewise, some of my own older talks and resources aren’t up on my SlideShare account, but could be included.

There’s scope for some examples of Professional Online Presences as well (any students who I’ve taught want to volunteer for that)?

The whole site could be much more visual. This is just one of the WordPress themes out of the box. The theme has an annoying feature of adding hyphenation in some browsers (e.g. Firefox, but not Google Chrome) which I have to track down as well.

Finally, there’s potential for a blog with commentary on the latest developments of Professional Online Presences.

I don’t want to overcommit myself with this one, as I also have my main site and blog to maintain, my contract cheating site, and my contributions to the Birmingham City University blog. So, I’m more than happy with everything that is on here, as it’s in a useable state, but of course, this could always be futher developed.

Next step is some more publicity, including a post on my main blog, and looking at any other sites that are available.

Still a few finishing touches to do to finish off this project properly. This includes the paperwork for the HEA and a consideration of digital literacy. I also want to put together a few general findings from the work. I also want to look into the potential for a poster, paper or some other forms of presentations as well.

Other Podcast Directories

I’ve just had a frustrating time trying to submit the podcast to directories other than iTunes.

Out of the ones suggested by podPress, only one was accepting links and that came up with a registration error.

There are lots of podcast directories out there, but I’m really not convinced that any of them are widely used. And certainly not worth a long trawl through to collect a few listeners each.

For this particular podcast series, I’m convinced that iTunes is the right directory, and that other people will find it through recommendations from the HEA and their lecturers. I’ll better spend the time working on publicising the availability of the podcasts here and in iTunes myself.