About KMi

Find Us


The Knowledge Media Institute occupies the top floor of the Berrill Building on the Open University's Walton Hall campus. Follow the signs to Visitor Reception - we're just a short distance away by stairs or lift.

To help you find your way to KMi, here are some maps for you to download and print.



Travel Guides

Air travel directions and transport options.

Milton Keynes local hotel list

Download a PDF with all maps and travel information
 
The Open University Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.