The Future of Sharing Ideas Nigel Portwood Chief Executive, Oxford - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Exeter Speaks: the Next 700 Years The Future of Sharing Ideas

Nigel Portwood Chief Executive, Oxford University Press Fellow, Exeter College

The Future of Sharing Ideas Four themes

• Big events disrupt the patterns and behaviour associated

with knowledge sharing

• Language and the dominance of certain languages play a

critical role

• The medium of communication is as important as the idea

itself.

• Idea generation and sharing depend on models that lead to

sustainability

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Gutenberg Press

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OUP Delegates

The Definition of “Scorpion”

• Johnson’s 18th century dictionary:
• “A reptile much resembling a small

lobster, with a very venomous sting”

• Murray/OED first edition:
• “An arachnid of any genera (Scorpio,

Buthus, Androctonus, etc.) forming the group Scorpionodae, having a pair of large nippers and a general resemblance to a miniature lobster; they inhabit tropical and warm temperate countries in both

• hemispheres. The intense pain

caused by the sting of the scorpion (situated at the point of the tail) is proverbial.”

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Digitized Archives

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How Many People Speak English Today?

• Official language in over 75 countries,

with population of 2 billion

• First language of 375 million people
• Spoken as a foreign language by further

750 million people

• Spoken to some level of competence by
• ne in four of the world’s population

Source: David Crystal/British Council

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Astrophysicists’ Conversational Clusters

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A Barrage of Digital Information

• 63,000 words of new information every day
• 40 websites a day
• Programmes switches 36 times an hour
• We change tasks more than once every two minutes

Source: Website ‘Informed’

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“Ideas Worth Spreading”?

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The Future of Sharing Ideas The four themes and the future

• Events:

– What new technologies will emerge? – Cultural – eg. China, the ‘bottom billion’?

• Language:

– Real time translation?

• Medium:

– e.g. Impact of 140 characters?

• Sustainability:

– Impact of ‘open’?

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Thank you and questions

Nigel Portwood

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