New Paradigms in Pedagogical Thinking for the Academy of the Very Near Future, or how the Wasp Became the Orchid

This presentation was given on Wednesday, 21st of December 2011, 8 pm GMT, by Dr Mark Ingham, @ScopingPhD2010. Mark is visual artist who has been making work about and researching into ideas of autobiographical memory and its relationships with photographic images. This work is made up of a number of installations that use SLR cameras and LED light sources to create photographic projectors. They use photographic slides as their image source and are attempts to create a sense of memories being fuzzy narratives that can constantly change and be changed. These projected photographic images are an exploration into experiences of remembering and forgetting. They are attempts to evoke a form of ‘paramnesia’, whereby fantasy and reality collapse to create a sense of déjà vu.

The Swedish Twitter University (@SvTwuni) is a place where interesting speakers — scientists, academics, etc. — tweet about exciting ideas from their respective fields in a certain well-defined format.

The presentation must comply with certain constraints, meant to stimulate creativity and challenge the tweeters to formulate their ideas as effectively and interestingly as possible:

A presentation will be a maximum of 25 tweets long. Each tweet has a 140 character limit.
Each tweet must be broken naturally—no ugly enjambement! That is, a sentence, clause or phrase may not overflow arbitrarily into several tweets. That’s not to say each and every tweet has to end with a full stop — follow the spirit and not the letter of the rule and be creative!
The tweeter should pay attention to questions from the audience for a total of at least one hour from the start of the presentation. Answer tweets do not count against the total 25. Both questions and answers should contain the hashtag assigned to the event by @SvTwuni. Each presentation will be archived together with the questions and answers from this hashtag.

It’s fine to blurt out all your 25 tweets at once and then take questions, but it might be more interesting if you exploit the fact that Twitter is a conversational medium: adding pauses and answering questions as you go breathes life into your lecture, and since answers don’t count towards your total 25 tweets, answering questions from the audience can give you a few extra tweets to develop your idea in further detail.

Events will be announced on @SvTwuni and this blog with the following information:

the title of the presentation,
the tweeter’s name and Twitter handle,
the associated hashtag,
the time and date when the presentation starts, and
on the blog only: hyperlinks for further reading (hyperlinks are allowed in the presentation tweets, but they might make the lecture harder to follow).
When the time has arrived the tweeter will get access to the @SvTwuni account and should begin with introducing him- or herself in a few tweets before doing the 25, answering questions and engaging in discussions in the associated hashtag.

• Organisation