He was editor-in-chief at The Observer from 1996 to 2000 (where he continues to write a column), when he joined The Work Foundation. His review ‘Fair Pay in the Public Sector’ has just been published, and he has conducted independent reviews into Britain’s education and training compared to EU countries, the BBC’s charter renewal, and the creative industries. He is currently chairing the Ownership Commission, an independent commission has been established to monitor the impact of increased university fees and the Big Innovation Centre.

Mr Hutton spoke to the OxTALENT audience and winners about transformative technology and openness of innovation. He presented the ecosystem of innovation, individual light bulb moments, networks and peers the drivers, funders and sponsors who provide spaces for innovation to grow, and the University as the crucible of innovation.
- Lets celebrate OxTALENT as a different story about what Oxford is. (Will Hutton)

Colleagues from across the University make use of web technologies to reach new audiences, communicate in new ways to students and to disseminate their research. OxTALENT prizes are given to individuals who have taken a risk, gone a little bit further and used technologies in a range of exciting ways.

This years winners are:  Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach (Faculty of  Music and St Hughs College) for her blogging and tweeting; Dr Margaret Yee (Faculty of Theology and St Cross College) for her  ‘Ultimate Origin’  event featuring the Archbishop of Canterbury, Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir Anthony Kenny streamed live from the Sheldonian; and Dr  Cedric Tan (Green Templeton College) winner of the international ‘Dance your Ph.D’ competition.

Elizabeth Eva Leach is a music theorist and musicologist, with wide-ranging interests in everything from the minutiae of musical structures and manuscripts to the broadest cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts for music. She is also one of Oxford’s best  known bloggers and tweeters.

She blogs to support not only her current students but also students who might wish to apply to study Music at Oxford and students all over the world via her open online course of tutorials. her use of twitter enables students to  follow her and send direct messages . She considers questions that can be answered in 140 characters to be much better than getting open-ended time-consuming emails.

The advice posted on her blog to support student coming to interview at St Hughs and Exeter was considered to be unique by the LTG researchers compiling  the recent ‘Student Digital Experience ‘ report.

Dr Margaret Yee  a senior research fellow at St. Cross College organised a groundbreaking debate between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Professor Richard Dawkins chaired by the philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, entitled “The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of their Ultimate Origin”. Tickets sold quickly and in order to cope with demand not only was the debate filmed, but it was screened in the Physics department via a live video link and streamed live over the web to three parallel websites.  It gained coverage in all the national newspapers and media and during the debate the #dawkinsarchbishop hashtag was trending worldwide.  On the days after the event the recording of the debate was downloaded from Oxford on iTunes U thousands of times.

First prize went to Mihran Vardanyan (Department of Physics and Christ Church) for his development of the iCosmos cosmology calculator. This innovative web-application allows researchers, educators and learners to compute different cosmological quantities and visualise a graphical representation of these quantities with a selection of cosmological parameters. iCosmos is being actively used in Cosmology research all over the globe, and is referenced in many Masters and PhD thesis’ to crosscheck results and compute theoretical values. Using a combination of advanced web technologies, the web app provides an efficient and speedy user experience, an invaluable tool for those in the field of Astrophysics and Cosmology.

Two runners up have also been awarded in this category. LHSee, developed by Chris Boddy (Department of Physics and Brasenose College), is a Smart Phone App that visualises collisions from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest scientific experiment. Users of the app can find out about more about the Large Hadron Collider, learn how the ATLAS experiment works, view live 3D displays of collisions direct from CERN, and play the ‘Hunt the Higgs’ game. Making an astonishing and complex process accessible to everyone the App is a novel way of attracting people into the world of Partical Physics.

Joshua  Chauvin (Department of Experimental Psychology and New College) showed originality in his use of applied artificial neural networks to aid in the classification of children affected with Autism Spectrum disorders. ‘Neural Network Classification of Syndromic Facial Dysmorphology: Autism Spectrum Disorders’ collected image data from participants using a 3D photogammetric device to compile a facial image database of children unaffected with ASD. This was then compared with a facial image database of children diagnosed with ASD. The ANN exhibited strong predictive capabilities, suggestive of differences in facial morphologies. The success of this study provides evidence to support the hypothesis that there are differences in facial morphologies between children affected with ASD and children unaffected, and that ANNs are capable of recognizing these differences. Ongoing research is being carried out to further examine the potential clinical application of such computational models that has the potential to span philosophical, psychological, neurological, medical and social disciplines.

In this category we celebrate colleagues who have made innovative use of technologies during face to face teaching or who teach in technology-enhanced classrooms. previous winners have made use of voting ‘clickers’, mobile phone polls and google maps for teaching.

This year’s winner is Dr Robert Belshaw from Biological Sciences (Brasenose College) for his use of agent-based models in a  2-hour practical session for his Infectious Disease Control course.  Students build and analyse an ABM where they can measure the effect of different vaccination strategies on the spread of a virus through human populations with different social network structures. To run this session Robert used the Behaviour Composer (a web-based tool for constructing NetLogo models), developed within Oxford’s Learning Technologies Group and available as a new WebLearn tool. You can read more about this innovative classroom session on the LTG Case Studies Blog.

Also awarded is a team of academic bloggers from the Department of Politics and International Relations  who, along with student editors and colleagues from Cambridge University, write a shared blog  ‘Politics in Spires’ which comments on current events.

As part of their 23 things course, librarians engage with a series of social media tools, share ideas, reflect on practice and write blog posts to contribute to a community resource for others.  The design of the course itself is a re-used learning design. The original 23 things concept was developed by librarians in the USA and has been adopted by university and public libraries across the UK, with each group adding their own local spin on the tasks. All of the courses are available to all, and all materials generated are openly licenced. The 23 Things team at OULS are Laura Wilkinson, Penny Schenk, Jane Rawson, Emma Cragg & Angela Carritt. Read a SCONUL article about 23Things Oxford 138 members of OULS library staff registered to take part in the programme and set up blogs to record their progress. Of these, 82 participants successfullycompleted the programme.

‘Politics In Spires’ is a similarly influential community resource. Researchers and students are regularly blogging into a shared resource, with their writings publicly available and licened for re-use. Kate Candy has worked hard along with her team of students and colleagues to make the project a success. Scot Peterson of the Oxford Politics in Spires Oversight Committee says, ‘The blog is really interesting, original and thought-provoking It is well argued and incorporates material from students’ field work for their degrees.  This is exactly what we are looking for!’ You can find out more about the ‘Politics in Spires’ project on the LTG YouTube Channel.

2nd prize went to Lindsay Percival  for her eye catching image of the Ordovician trilobite Trinucleus abruptus from the University’s Museum of Natural History. The image was taken for the JISC-funded project GB/3D Fossil Types Online. The aim of the project is to produce a unified web database of all British type specimens held in British collections, with high quality photographs and 3D digital models. Most images will supplement those in existing publications, but in some cases specimens will be photographed for the first time. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History is currently undertaking work to document the 2000 type specimens held in our palaeontology collection.

Traditionally fossils photographed for publication may have included a stereopair (two offset images) to create the perception of 3D depth when optically fused by means of a stereoscope. This project is diverging from tradition and using stereo anaglyphs instead, a more accessible option. The anaglyph images are produced by photographing the specimen in two slightly different attitudes on a tilt board, at an angle of rotation of 8°. The photographs are then processed in Adobe Photoshop; the left eye image is filtered to remove blue and green, and the right eye image is filtered to remove red and green. The resultant photographs are then merged together creating a 3D image when viewed with red-blue glasses.

The 3rd prize in this category went to Ian Cartwright (School of Archaeology) for a technically excellent image with great detail and colour, captured for Professor Helena Hamerow’s research The Origins of Wessex.  The image was part of a traveling poster and artifact display touring around Oxfordshire Museums. The Ashmolean will host the display later in 2012.

Wikipedia is one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of crowdsourced knowledge. Dr Mark Graham (Oxford Internet Institute) has developed a map that uncovers the distinct geographies of that information.

Most Wikipedia articles about places, events or any other locatable articles are geotagged with a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates. We downloaded the list of approximately 1.5 million articles from a 2010 database of Wikipedia (in all languages) and joined them to a file containing the boundaries of every country in order to determine the total number of geotagged articles in every country.

What the map reveals at a glance is fascinating. There is a highly uneven geography of information in Wikipedia. Europe and North America are home to 84% of all articles. Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged articles (four), and indeed most small countries have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterized by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles (7,800) written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America. Even China, which is home to the world’s biggest population of Internet users and is the fourth largest country on Earth contains fewer than 1% of all geotagged articles. Because of the high visibility of Wikipedia in online information ecosystems, countless decisions are made and countless opinions are formed based on information available in the encyclopedia. It is thus important to point out the digital terra incognita that covers much of the world and reproduces existing representational asymmetries. The map is also in the publication: Graham, M., Hale, S. A. and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World’s Knowledge.

2nd prize is for this visually stunning and communicative infograph by Scott Hale (DPhil student and Research Assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute). This poster and extended abstract were accepted and presented in Austin, TX, at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012) from 7-10 May. The analysis for this work collects, manages, and analyses more than 130GB of data encompassing tweets from Twitter and edits to Wikipedia about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The poster examines the sharing of off-site hyperlinks between speakers of different languages on Twitter and between different language editions of Wikipedia. The extended abstract is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2212776.2212456

In 3rd place is an infograph that asks the visitor to compare themselves with the data. Ryan Harrison’s (Department of Physics and Wolfson College) ‘Face of Life Sciences’ asks what does an American life scientist really look like? Using nifty facial averaging software, combined with available government statistics the image answers the question.

This year the 1st prize is awarded to Bhavana Kohli (Department of Experimental Psychology and The Queen’s College) for her poster presenting the findings of a study designed to ascertain the effect of exposure to misinformation or wrong information on 3-to 6-year old’s memory performance. The study also sought to investigate whether susceptibility to misinformation was related to representational abilities, or to subjects’ general memory abilities. The findings contribute towards a better understanding of the effects of post-event information on the reliability of children’s recall. The poster’s bold design, well organised content, with good use of colour saw it take the lead in the competition.

2nd prize goes to Iain Mathieson (Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and Lincoln College) for his clever use of the structure of the lattice model (which is used heavily in the work described) to present his poster’s content. The poster communicates Iain’s research on modelling and making inference about natural selection in populations which are distributed spatially. This has many applications in ecology and evolution, with Iain’s interest in applying this work to cancer, and the evolution and development of tumours. The colours used reflect the varying patterns of selection which the research is investigating.

3rd prize in this category is presented to Katrin Dulitz (Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory and Merton College) for her poster on ‘Zeeman deceleration’, an experimental technique in which inhomogeneous, pulsed magnetic fields are used to control the velocity of a supersonic beam. The poster presents the design of a 12-stage Zeeman decelerator for hydrogen atoms that can readily be integrated into an existing ion-trap setup using a bent magnetic hexapole guide. This combined Zeeman decelerator – ion trap experiment will allow for experiments on cold ion-radical reactions. The work will contribute towards the understanding of chemical reactivity in the low-temperature regime and it will provide fundamental tests for chemical reaction theories. The well-structured poster superimposed over a dynamic image makes it an eye-catching and attractive piece.

At Oxford we are fortunate to have  many student editors and podcast producers who work to produce podcasts, write blogs, tweet conferences and make videos so it is always difficult to choose winners in this category.

This year’s Student Podcasting Award goes to a group of undergraduate students at St Peter’s College who have created a YouTube channel to give applicants a clearer depiction of university life, from the students themselves. The entirely student-run channel aims to dispel some of the myths about studying at Oxford, and to give a sense of the vibrancy of student life at St Peter’s. Videos include interviews, college tours, and footage of college events. The videos were put together by a team of students led by Simon Clark, 3rd year physics undergraduate at St Peter’s.

The runners up are  the teams of Great Writers Inspire student ambassadors. Seven post-graduate students from the English Faculty with varying subject specialisations who find existing  open content for the project, write contextual material (essays), blog and promote the project via  a social media campaign.

Oxford is one of the largest producers of academic podcasts in the UK. 2nd only to the Open University in the number of  recordings we publish into ItunesU. This success is entirely due to academic colleague being willing and enthusiastic about this way of communicating their work.

The winners in this category are selected from the large community of academic podcasters at Oxford. This year there are three winners, who have all delivered high quality educational content to a global audience. The winners are Dr Catherine Brown (Faculty of English and St Catherines College ), for her lecture series looking at key concepts in studying ‘Literature and Form’; Dr Alison Foster for initiating a series of high quality podcasts from the Oxford Botanic Garden; and Professor Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre for the immensely popular The New Psychology of Depression series.

Catherine Brown’s podcasts are part of the ‘Great Writers Inspire’ collection. This is Open Educational Resources project designed to attract new learners and support teachers in schools. The collection  saw 40,000 downloads of short lectures and talks on iTunes U in its first fortnight.

Alison Foster has led in the creation of two virtual audio tours for the Botanic Gardens.
Visitors can walk round the gardens with a device that will play back the short talks at various points along the route.Various speakers have gotten involved with tour including accomplished, award winning writer, Phillip Pullman. Following the success of the first series, a new series, talking about the chemistry of plants, is currently in production, with various academics and students from the Chemistry department getting involved.  A third series is planned.