Changes

Tony Hirst is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and regular blogger at [http://blog.ouseful.info/ OUseful.info]. With a background in electronics and artificial intelligence, he has authored on OU courses ranging from robotics to information skills, and most recently a course on computer game design and appreciation. He is passionate about open and lifelong education, and is actively involved in developing course models to support informal as well as formal education. As a self-proclaimed mashup artist, he gives regular workshop and conference presentations on how to create novel information services from freely available web tools and applications such as Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo Pipes, as well as creating compelling network visualisations using tools such as a Gephi. An Arcadia Fellow at the University Library, Cambridge in 2009, he has spent many years berating academic libraries about the changing world of information around them. Since posting a widely circulated map based visualisation of MPs’ travel expenses in Spring 2009, he has become increasingly interested in the practice of data journalism and the use of visualisation techniques as a way of making sense of complex data sets, as well as co-founder of [http://getthedata.org/ getTheData.org], an open public data question and answer site. This approach is complemented by his work on the public document consultation platform [http://writetoreply.org/ WriteToReply] which is helping government departments and policy makers think differently about the nature of commentable documents. (source: [http://blog.ouseful.info/about/ | OUseful.Info, the blog…])