Podcasting News from the University of Oxford

with our podcasts on The New Psychology of Depression and on iTunesU https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/new-psychology-depression/id474787597.

We live in a world filled with material wealth, live longer and healthier lives, and yet anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and depression have never been more common. What are the driving forces behind these interlinked global epidemics? In this series, Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman discuss the recent scientific advances that have radically altered our understanding of depression and related disorders. They discuss the latest treatments and therapies that are offering hope to those suffering from depression including Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).

The theme for Mental Health Awareness Week, which runs from 13-19 May, is physical activity and exercise, highlighting the impact they have on mental health and wellbeing.

Short talks on Love

Romantic ideals, sexual attraction, platonic love, marriage – all talks from Oxford researchers relevant for Valentine’s day?

In this series of short talks, Oxford academics tackle the great questions on ‘Love – and other things’.

• How do we find love online? – Dr. Bernie Hogan
• If marriage is a trade, then what price romance?’ – Dr. Sos Eltis
• Who did Plato (not) love?’ – Dr. Cressida Ryan
• How did Jonathan Swift use an elaborate combination of language and code to tease his reader? – Dr. Abigail Williams

Enjoy the Love and other things trailer!

http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/devoff/oxford_abridged/Love_ad-web_11022011.mp4

and why not subscribe in advance to the free podcast feed and listen to more from the series Oxford Abridged, including:

• What role do pheromones play in sexual attraction? – Dr. Tristram Wyatt
• Darwin and Friends – how many friends can you really have? – Prof. Robin Dunbar

Subscribe to the series in advance on Oxford on iTunesU:

http://bit.ly/itunesu-love or via the web site

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/oxford-abridged-short-talks

And don’t forget you can always search for Love on our Podcasts site here:

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/search?terms=love

By Joanna Wild

Last term Academic IT Services and the Bodleian libraries ran a series of events under the name Engage: Social Media Michaelmas (here on Facebook). The 9-week programme included workshops, courses and talks by invited speakers from both Oxford and other UK Universities.

The speakers shared their social media strategies and told their own stories of how they had used digital technologies to communicate their subjects to a wider public (Marcus du Sautoy and Peter Gill), increase the outreach and citation of research outputs (Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Leach), attract project funding (Dave White), and help career development (Lucy Hawkins).

The series of talks has been published on our Podcasts website. In this blog post we have pulled together our speakers’ top ten tips for using social media in academic practice.

1. Define what you want to achieve in using social media and decide whom you want to reach. This will help you manage your online presence and think about your writing style. Writing for a specialist academic audience will be different from writing for a non-academic audience (Peter Gill).  When setting up your Twitter account, think of three key messages you want to get across in your profile (Lucy Hawkins).

2. Both blog and tweet. Blog to promote work around your publications. Describe what your article is about and link to an Open Access version of your paper.

Then tweet to publicize your blog posts (Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Leach).

3. To attract readers to a new blog post, tweet between 10 and 5 on Mondays to Fridays: this is when people are most active on Twitter.

4. Consider blogging about your work in progress or rejected papers that you would like to publish.  This will enable you to attract comments from the scholarly community. “You can have a much more interactive process where publication is not an end point but a starting point for generation of new research and information” (Elizabeth Leach).

5. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas even if they are not yet fully formed. “It all comes back to the idea of being part of a flow of discourse rather than making sure you’re right before you show anybody your stuff. That’s a bit of a different approach culturally than what we’re used to perhaps.” (Dave White)

6. Struggling to find the time? Schedule blogging into your working week. It’s enough to blog once or twice per month. Finding time for tweeting is easy, especially if you have a smart phone: you can tweet “when you wait for things to happen, like queuing in Sainsbury’s” (Elizabeth Leach).

7. Check your blog and tweets regularly to see if people have responded. “With social media and institutional Open Access repositories you do have to do, I call it, gardening – looking after the things that you’ve planted” (Melissa Terras).

8. Remember that communication is a two-way process. Social media are a great tool for promoting your work but they work best when you engage with other people: conversation is key. Blog, but read and comment on other blogs too (Lucy Hawkins). Tweet about your work but also follow other people, reply to their tweets and pass on (retweet) interesting tweets to your own followers. “If you only go online to tell people about you, you, you then very soon people are going to turn off: it’s about engaging, chatting with people, helping out” (Melissa Terras).

9. Blogging and tweeting are an easy way to network, but finding your own way in using them takes time. “It’s experiential. You can’t really get sense of what social media is and how it works unless you actually get stuck in and start using it” (Dave White). Before jumping in, do some ‘social listening’: see what others are saying and how they use social media. You can lurk as long as you want to before you decide to write your first tweet.

10. Consider writing for blogs run by others (e.g. the impact of Social Sciences blog run by LSE), it will help you attract new readers to your own blog (Nando Sigona).

The ‘Engage: Social Media’ recordings are now available via iTunes or the podcasting website :

Via  Oxford on iTunes

• 9 audio talks: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/engage-social-media-talks/id571879134
• 2 video talks: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/engage-social-media-talks/id571878102

Via the Podcast web site
        Engage Series:  http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/engage-social-media-talks

or Via a web RSS reader

• 9 audio talks: http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oucs/engage-audio/itunesu.xml

·         2 video talks: http://rss.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oucs/engage-video/itunesu.xml

In this post we recommend three lecture series, which can be perfect listening for long evenings over the upcoming Christmas break. Each lecture series is complete in itself and consists of a set of short ‘episodes’, ideal for listening in short bursts.

General Philosophy with Peter Millican

In his General Philosophy lecture series Peter Millican takes a chronological view of the history of philosophy. Each lecture is split into 3 or 4 sections, which outline a particular philosophical problem and how different philosophers have attempted to resolve the issue. If you are interested in the ‘big’ questions about life, such as: how we perceive the world, who we are in the world and whether we are free to act, you will find this series informative, comprehensive and accessible.

Physics and Philosophy: Arguments, Experiments and a Few Things in Between is a set of short interviews that explore some of the links between the two of the most fundamental ways with which we try to answer our questions about the world around us. The topics include among the others: the nature of space and time, the unpredictable results of quantum mechanics, and the nature of the mind and how far science can go towards explaining and understanding it.

This thought provoking but accessible lecture series on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason looks at German Philosopher Immanuel Kant’s seminal philosophical work and discusses Kantian ideas surrounding metaphysics. Each lecture looks at particular questions raised in the work, such as how do we know what we know and how do we find out about the world, dissects these questions with reference to Kant’s work and discusses the broader philosophical implications.

Enjoy our podcast Tolkien and the Art of The Hobbit  and explore our series of lectures and interviews called “Tolkien at Oxford” – http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/tolkien-oxford

Tolkien at Oxford Podcast Series

In the podcast interview from 2010 entitled “The Hobbit at the Bodleian” – Judith Priestman, a Bodelian library curator explains the background to their unique collection of Tolkien’s own drawings -

“On World Book Day 2010, we decided to put on a small display of some of Tolkien’s artwork and we have a large collection of drawings and paintings, watercolours, doodles, illustrations by Tolkien. So we were really rather spoilt for choice as to know what to pick.But in the end we decided to show three of his famous watercolours that were published in ‘The Hobbit’, and the dust jacket which he designed himself, and the first edition of ‘The Hobbit’, which he also designed himself – the covers of it, and the black and white illustrations inside it.

And then we also found this wonderful sheet of doodles .. a real find to discover it. It was rather difficult to decide which paintings we wanted to show. But, in the end, we picked the ones that had been the most popular. We picked in particular, one drawing called ‘Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves’, which was Tolkien’s very favourite of all the drawings and paintings he produced in the course of his life.

And of course, you have to remember that he was painting and drawing from when he was a toddler, really. So we’ve got evidence of his art work from a very early age, from the age of about five or six right through till he died. He was a very, very talented designer indeed.He couldn’t draw people. That was the only thing he couldn’t do. One of the drawings we showed was the wonderful one of Smaug the dragon on his golden horde. It’s a very vibrant painting.And it’s got a picture of Bilbo bowing in the bottom corner. And he’s wearing boots, which is very extraordinary. In all the pictures – in all the watercolours in the Hobbit, Bilbo’s wearing boots. Bilbo with his marvellous curly hair on his feet and leathery soles that don’t require footwear.But he is wearing boots. And he’s not very well drawn. But, for the rest of it, he really did put down in image form this extraordinary imagination that he had.
The thing about paintings as opposed to the illustrations is that these paintings, which were shown on World Book Day, didn’t actually appear in the first edition of ‘The Hobbit’. Tolkien always called it an illustrated manuscript, it was a manuscript that was in circulation long before it was published. He showed it to all his friends at Oxford, the Inklings group, and C.S. Lewis read it a long while before it was ever published. And Tolkien had illustrated it with black and white drawings, pen and ink drawings. And they really are marvellous.”

Hear the full podcast – “The Hobbit at the Bodleian”

The Tolkien at Oxford Series includes lectures introducing J R R Tolkien’s career, showing how medieval literature influenced his fiction, and considers the wider scheme Tolkien worked on linking his mythology to historical and  mythical events.
http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/tolkien-oxford

The Christmas break provides a perfect opportunity to read, listen to, watch, and do things that we struggle to find the time for during the year. So Oxford podcasts invites you to embark on a journey into the world of literature, theatre, arts, and the big questions of our age.

Each lecture series we present below is complete in itself. The talks are usually accompanied by PowerPoint slides or notes to support understanding by a global audience.

Approaching Shakespeare is a lecture series by Emma Smith. Each lecture focuses on a single play by Shakespeare, and employs a range of different approaches in order to illuminate a central critical question about it.

Shakespeare was not, of course, the only dramatist of his day. In another lecture series: Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular Theatre, Emma Smith introduces six plays which were once widely performed but are now almost forgotten. She shows how these plays can tell us a lot about what the audiences of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre enjoyed, aspired to and worried about.

If you’d like to get more hands-on with the arts over Christmas, you might enjoy Stephen Farthing’s lecture series Elements of Drawing. Stephen presents eight practical classes using John Ruskin’s teaching collections (housed in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum) to explain the basic principles of drawing.

Finally, if you are concerned about the future for the planet, how civilisation will adapt to emerging problems and issues such as climate change, urbanisation and the development of vaccines to fight against future pandemics, the series Big Questions for the Future is the right listening for you. Academics from the Oxford Martin School explain their various research topics in an accessible and thoughtful way and try to find practical solutions to these issues.

From Jo Wild

In this talk – http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/war-levesons-ear-audio, John Mair, senior lecturer at Coventry University and author of ‘The Phone Hacking Scandal; Journalism on Trial’ gives a talk for the Reuters Institute seminar series on the background surrounding the Leveson Enquiry. In his opinion this is the biggest crisis facing British journalism ever.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is Oxford University’s international research centre in the comparative study of news media.

Listen to nearly 60 talks from the institute on journalism and politics here -

Oxford University Podcasts web site:

http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/reuters-institute-study-journalism

Oxford on iTunesU:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/itunes-u/reuters-institute-for-study/id3817031533

October 2012 marked the fourth anniversary of the launch of Oxford’s iTunesU site, featuring audio and video podcasts from across the University. It has been a great success – 19 million downloads so far, and currently reaching a worldwide audience of 185 countries. Oxford on iTunesU has grown from a very small corpus to more than 4,000 hours of material online – ranging from quantum states to welfare states, from Philosophy for Beginners to Quantum Mechanics. This free site managed by Academic IT Services has achieved the altruistic aim of bringing Oxford thinking to a broad global audience, whilst giving our current students, staff and alumni any-time access to a wider range of lectures than they might physically be able to attend.

If you have iTunes on your computer already click here to visit Oxford’s site

Key facts since launch of Oxford on iTunesU on October 8th 2008

• 19 million downloads from iTunesU
• 4,200 podcast items processed
• 3,480 academic speakers and contributors
• A worldwide audience of 185 countries (including 31% from the USA, 17% from the UK and 7% from China)

Recent highlights in Autumn 2012 include:

• From Bench to Bedside : 50 talks on Translational Medicine
• ??Oxford Alumni Conference 2012 – over 100 talks from the best of Oxford
• ??Alan Turing : A Centenary Conference on the famous mathematician
• ?Engage – Social Media for Dissemination and Public Engagement with Marcus Du Sautoy and colleagues??
• The Chemistry of the Botanic Garden
• First World War: New Perspectives
• Children’s Language and Literacy and Impairments
• Great Writers Inspire – Over 30 short talks on famous writers

The support team within Academic IT Services has continued to improve and expand the help, support and resources offered – including regular briefing sessions run fortnightly on the technical and legal issues of audio and video recording.  Oxford staff can benefit from our podcasting overview session and more advanced media training -  See http://www.it.ox.ac.uk/courses

Many more departments are now using the service to disseminate their public lectures and to engage with the public and to make sure all users can access the material, we have our updated parallel website, http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk which meets the needs of those learners restricted to web only access or those that wish to find the material through Google searches.  This web portal, with the same content as Oxford on iTunes U, offers a web friendly view of Oxford’s lectures and has the following features:

• Material can be searched by department / college / keyword
• Creative Commons licenced material for educational reuse is available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open
• Material is ranked highly in Google Searches