imran*

I was invited to a workshop on Teaching New Media at my old university, Leeds Met, yesterday morning. Ben asked me to present a fifteen-minute talk on Carbon and what we’re doing to help regional startup culture; my presentation is below…

I’d come prepared to talk about how industry and academia could collaborate on startup culture in the region, but the group, more interestingly, focussed on the changing nature of knowledge and teaching in a connected world and how participatory culture, open source and Web 2.0 were impacting higher education.

We didn’t reach any conclusions, but for me, the most striking observation was the externalisation of the trends in question…that Web 2.0 and open source were taking place elsewhere and causing academia to adapt. I found this a little disappointing and hope Leeds Met (and others in attendance) will consider how they can define and lead the
patterns and trends that come to define an era. I would love for Leeds Met to become the Stanford, MIT or Berkeley of the region. Ben’s a graduate of MIT Media Lab and bringing a lot of that school’s innovaive culture to Leeds Met…I’m hoping Carbon can contribute to that and we’re hoping to collaborate on a few things very soon.

The group did consist of a few interesting individuals working on projects
as elaborate as Augmented Reality and visualising eye-tracking data from
movies…I should make some introductions to Charles and Stamen 🙂

Coincidentally, Mark told me Sleevenotez had made Techscape’s 25 UK Web 2.0 startups to watch in 2007…ths list includes our friends at YuuGuu, another Northern startup 🙂