A great blog on the Guardian [again] Bad Science site about determined bloggers breaking news stories ahead of the mainstream press:, demonstrating "timeliness, accuracy, relevance, effort, ethics, and stupid names". The power of user participation in supporting the vulnerable and in taking meaningful action in the world. For me this keys into the progressive pedagogies demonstrated by Paolo Friere, John Dewey, Ronald Barnett et al., where our ability to seize technologies for purposive action in a connected, social world underpin productive change.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Monday, 2 June 2008
Monday, 19 May 2008
UPDATE: Highpoint Symposium Workshop 8: How would a weblog blog on a weblog blog if a weblog could blog blogs?
Thank you to those of you who attended our session. For the benefit of the delegates (those who attended and those who could not) we have made available the slides online for your perusal. The summary of the workshop can be found on a previous post by clicking here.
My slide show along with an audio narration can be found by clicking the image below or following this link.
Phil Adams has uploaded his presentation on to slideshare and can be viewed below:
If you have any questions regarding the session that we delivered then do not hesitate to contact any of us via our university email.
My slide show along with an audio narration can be found by clicking the image below or following this link.
Phil Adams has uploaded his presentation on to slideshare and can be viewed below:
If you have any questions regarding the session that we delivered then do not hesitate to contact any of us via our university email.
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Highpoint Symposium Workshop 8: How would a weblog blog on a weblog blog if a weblog could blog blogs?
What do you mean that the title doesn’t make sense! Mohamed Yaseen Kassam (Training & Development), and Alan Brine and Phil Adams (Library Services) will give tips on common-sense blogging for readers and writers in order to enhance the student experience. The session will be split in to 2 mini sessions; the first half concentrating on a writers’ aspects, and the second half dedicated to the readers’ aspects.
Although the session is aimed at novices, any budding talents and experts are welcome to join the session to contribute to discussions as the facilitators are still continuously learning new things everyday about this and other similar technologies.
Writing blogs:
In this part we will discuss:
In this part we will discuss:
Although the session is aimed at novices, any budding talents and experts are welcome to join the session to contribute to discussions as the facilitators are still continuously learning new things everyday about this and other similar technologies.
Writing blogs:
In this part we will discuss:
- What weblogs are and how they are affecting us in HE and the world?
- How we can use blogs to further our professional/personal interests?
- What a blogger needs to know to keep the blog going and keeping the audience craving for more?
- Discuss different terms, words, or lingo that crop-up in the blogging arena.
- General tips of do’s and don’ts as writers.
- Guidance on further exploration around the subject.
In this part we will discuss:
- How do readers find blogs?
- Is reading a blog’ as simple as it sounds?
- Can tags help to manage interesting blog posts?
- Can feed readers help you to keep up to date?
- Can browsers be adapted to make reading blogs easier?
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Social networking – build don’t ban! – Donald Clark – Executive Board Member UFI
Donald Clark’s session blew my mind away. His charismatic and amiable demeanour complimented his informative and candid session which was peppered with light-hearted humour.
Donald demonstrated that Social Networking (SN) is redrawing the boundaries of the web and that it’s not just mere chit-chat with friends, but in organisations can be tamed to yield great benefits in training and development too. He further went into issues surrounding rolling-out SNs in organisations by talking through benefits for employees and the company and legal issues.
Donald cleared misconceptions and called on the executives and policy makers to wake up and not ignore SN, as shunning these will only be at the company’s ultimate detriment. He further added not to be scared of legal issues but ‘Police through policies’. Where else will you find a tool that is not restricted by organisation or distance and enables a sense of community, bonding experiences, and instant expert access at your convenience on your computer.
Donald did confess that “there are still lots of people who faff around on the Internet”, however HR departments need not have knee-jerk reactions and ban the Internet because some people procrastinate daily tasks by virtual loitering. But harness the power for great business gains. Donald went on to give some examples of great uses of the Internet, and creative and innovative ways of uses of the Web.
Kids stuff
Donald conveyed his experience at a dinner party where he had a ‘tiff’ with a friend who revealed that he was to ban his child from the Internet. It turned out that the friend’s son was spending most of his time on Instant Messengers chatting to his friends. Donald tried to explain to him that the lingo franca of the new generation is IM, and that they multi-task (play a game, listen to music, chat with there friends, and do their homework concurrently). He went on to further describe that when he is away abroad and calls home all he gets is ‘grunts’ from his children on the telephone, however to his surprise they have a full-blown conversation on MSN Messenger! Donald now uses this way to communicate with his children when away. With this story Donald was send out a message that adopting the various ways of communication you can get to different people; this can only be good for an organisation.
Most of the resources in an organisation are spent on formal learning as empirical results suggest that most learning occurs informally. So why is Facebook and IM banned which is based around you? When the Time person of the year was for 2006 was you, as you own the Information Age.
Donald then went on to show examples of companies that benefited from using innovative methods in their line of work, but first used the example of Professor Walter Lewin from MIT who finds different ways to demonstrate complex parts to physics. However, along the way has emerged as a international Internet guru, and has a cult following at M.I.T. It all started in the pursuit of making his lectures more enjoyable to students. I thought to myself when hearing about the Professor, can we not adopt various ways to keep our staff energised?
Donald demonstrated that Social Networking (SN) is redrawing the boundaries of the web and that it’s not just mere chit-chat with friends, but in organisations can be tamed to yield great benefits in training and development too. He further went into issues surrounding rolling-out SNs in organisations by talking through benefits for employees and the company and legal issues.
Donald cleared misconceptions and called on the executives and policy makers to wake up and not ignore SN, as shunning these will only be at the company’s ultimate detriment. He further added not to be scared of legal issues but ‘Police through policies’. Where else will you find a tool that is not restricted by organisation or distance and enables a sense of community, bonding experiences, and instant expert access at your convenience on your computer.
Donald did confess that “there are still lots of people who faff around on the Internet”, however HR departments need not have knee-jerk reactions and ban the Internet because some people procrastinate daily tasks by virtual loitering. But harness the power for great business gains. Donald went on to give some examples of great uses of the Internet, and creative and innovative ways of uses of the Web.
Kids stuff
Donald conveyed his experience at a dinner party where he had a ‘tiff’ with a friend who revealed that he was to ban his child from the Internet. It turned out that the friend’s son was spending most of his time on Instant Messengers chatting to his friends. Donald tried to explain to him that the lingo franca of the new generation is IM, and that they multi-task (play a game, listen to music, chat with there friends, and do their homework concurrently). He went on to further describe that when he is away abroad and calls home all he gets is ‘grunts’ from his children on the telephone, however to his surprise they have a full-blown conversation on MSN Messenger! Donald now uses this way to communicate with his children when away. With this story Donald was send out a message that adopting the various ways of communication you can get to different people; this can only be good for an organisation.
Most of the resources in an organisation are spent on formal learning as empirical results suggest that most learning occurs informally. So why is Facebook and IM banned which is based around you? When the Time person of the year was for 2006 was you, as you own the Information Age.
Donald then went on to show examples of companies that benefited from using innovative methods in their line of work, but first used the example of Professor Walter Lewin from MIT who finds different ways to demonstrate complex parts to physics. However, along the way has emerged as a international Internet guru, and has a cult following at M.I.T. It all started in the pursuit of making his lectures more enjoyable to students. I thought to myself when hearing about the Professor, can we not adopt various ways to keep our staff energised?
Professor Walter Lewin demonstrates how a pendulum works.
Cadbury Schweppes
Amongst the blue chip companies Cadbury Schweppes was one of the first to adopt blogs and podcasts in recruitment. The amount of national coverage and PR it received was phenomenal; it had a direct effect on raising applications by 40%.
IBM Thinkspace
IBM developed a tool that uses various social networking techniques to provide a virtual space for staff to submit new ideas and improve processes. Using tagging, personal profiles, and collaborative communication the system would see an idea through it’s inception through to its implementation (or rejection). Amongst other things Thinkspace was used for induction purposes where new staff could get a wealth of information from other more established colleagues. After 18 months, it was estimated that the value delivered (cost reduction and quality improvements) by Thinkspace was a whopping $400 million!
Second Life and Gender-related discrimination
Donald gave a great example of how a male could empathise with female discrimination; he said that if someone wants to really learn about Diversity, take gender for instance, try living as a woman in Second Life for 2 days and you’ll really see the issues and discrimination around being a women.
Donald then also finished of his session passing the stage on to another speaker.
Everything Flows – Jay Cross CEO Internet Time Group
The theme of the conference was based around – Driving workforce performance through learning and development – which looked at the what, the how, and the why of learning and development in this day and age using technologies. The conference kicked-off with Jay Cross, an e-learning guru, and is (I learned later in other session) well regarded and revered by other prominent figures in the community. Jay’s name and work was continuously referred to in other lecturers, I got a feeling of Jay being a sort of patron figure in the LT community.
Jay’s address was slow paced, albeit with lots of interesting information and thoughts. Jay started off by explaining his first slide and his afterthought of changing the title from Learning: All change to Everything Flows.
In summary, Jay spoke about the rampant pace at which technology is moving, and the unpredictable nature of it impeding planning ahead. Seventy-Five percent of organisations think that their existing training provisions are inadequate to maintain a knowledgeable and competitive workforce. Coupled with a budding young workforce who have no time for training, the only way organisations will thrive in the future is to perpetually rethink how employees should learn and develop.
Jay went on to say that he thought there are some advantages of the Internet that will tie things back to learning and development, and how we can exploit these to our advantage. He further highlighted “Take Instant Messaging which makes networks in silos internally without restriction of hierarchy”. Some ‘Beta’ Web 2.0 and Open Source services empower users to use software for free however reclaim feedback and development as payment. Jay encouraged the crowd to adapt the free services that are available, “Microsoft wants you to think that Open Source is made by hippies on a beach who’ve had too much to smoke”.
Jay continued by defining 3 characteristics of successful learning to take place: Comprehension, Conversation, and Collaboration. These 3 things can be supported with various ‘free’ web tools for the benefit of an organisation.
Jay then shared some very insightful examples of Blue chip companies and the US Military using these new technologies to disseminate message and display transparent communication:
Tootsie Rolls and the US Military
Jay’s address was slow paced, albeit with lots of interesting information and thoughts. Jay started off by explaining his first slide and his afterthought of changing the title from Learning: All change to Everything Flows.
In summary, Jay spoke about the rampant pace at which technology is moving, and the unpredictable nature of it impeding planning ahead. Seventy-Five percent of organisations think that their existing training provisions are inadequate to maintain a knowledgeable and competitive workforce. Coupled with a budding young workforce who have no time for training, the only way organisations will thrive in the future is to perpetually rethink how employees should learn and develop.
Jay went on to say that he thought there are some advantages of the Internet that will tie things back to learning and development, and how we can exploit these to our advantage. He further highlighted “Take Instant Messaging which makes networks in silos internally without restriction of hierarchy”. Some ‘Beta’ Web 2.0 and Open Source services empower users to use software for free however reclaim feedback and development as payment. Jay encouraged the crowd to adapt the free services that are available, “Microsoft wants you to think that Open Source is made by hippies on a beach who’ve had too much to smoke”.
Jay continued by defining 3 characteristics of successful learning to take place: Comprehension, Conversation, and Collaboration. These 3 things can be supported with various ‘free’ web tools for the benefit of an organisation.
- For instance to set meetings use Doodle
- Share info through podcasts using Audacity, a mic, and a podcatcher
- Set-up Blogs and Wikis (Blogger and Wordpress) for process, procedures, and activities
- Use RSS feeds to alert and send messages
- Facebook for profiles
- Ning to start your own community around an interest
- Del.icio.us for bookmarks.
Jay then shared some very insightful examples of Blue chip companies and the US Military using these new technologies to disseminate message and display transparent communication:
Tootsie Rolls and the US Military
Tootsie Rolls are chocolate flavoured sweets that have become somewhat of an American cultural icon. The US military would occasionally airdrop to servicemen as a treat to increase morale. However, the noise in unwrapping the sweet was detrimental to the servicemen who were constantly being targeted by snipers. Somebody blogged about this and within a little time news spread like wildfire, to the benefit of the military. Jay added “Now you can’t imagine the National Defence Manual mentioning this little tip would you!”
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems
Jonathan Schwartz CEO for Sun Microsystems frequently speaks directly to his workforce directly though his blog. So everybody gets the message at once. Jay added that Jonathan’s style of writing was such that it made him feel that Jonathan was really speaking to him.
I remembered another quote from a speaker in a different session that is related to Jay’s account of Jonathan Schwartz; “How many times in a year does your CEO speak to you?” asked the speaker, “Even if you do get a couple of annual address, they speak to you collectively in a lecture theatre”. A CEO’s blog is a leader’s personal voice to a worker, and many times to associated businesses too.
For example when Sun Microsystems decided on acquiring MYSQL, Jonathan knew that there will be much buzz and a little rumour flying here and there, so what better way to address this and keep confidence of his workforce and to contain the newly acquired company nerves by videoing the executive’s conversation around a picnic table basking in some sun. OK so there’s chances of it being staged but the comment section on the same post bears testimony to the success of this strategy.
Sun Microsystems and mySQL Excecutives have a chat and video it for the workforce
Intel Wiki
Josh Bancroft thought of the idea a repository to store a myriad of acronyms that flow around Intel Corp. in a wiki. There were 13 million hits in one year and they were all internal!
Jay then finished off the session by taking some questions from the audience.Tuesday, 22 January 2008
Research Blogging
Following on from Steve Mac's post about educational not social networking I received this from Philip A in the Library...
"The Research Blogging site is live now; you can find it at http://researchblogging.org/. Research Blogging helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers use the Research Blogging icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected for easy reference.
"The site aggregates blog posts that discuss and cite peer-reviewed research. There are some basic subject headings, so you can find recent psychology related posts, for example. It is interesting to see what research is attracting attention and who is doing the commenting. Since the posts all have correctly formatted links to the research under discussion, the site is a good example of the value of things like citations.
DOIs.
A DOI is ‘a digital identifier for any object of intellectual property’ . It is a unique number for an article in an electronic journal, for example. ‘10.1377/hlthaff.27.2.w84’ is a DOI, but it is often part of a link to the DOI website, such as http://dx.doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.27.2.w84. If you click on a link like this you will be passed on to the publisher’s web site where you may or may not have access to that article.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0706321105
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1143921
The Library has its ’Find it @ DMU’ service which can locate the copies to which we do have access and offers services, like an inter-library loan form, where we do not have access. You can set a cookie on your browser that will bring the resolver into play. Visit http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Resources/EJournals/index.php?page=351 and try the above links again. You should be taken to the ‘Find it @ DMU’ menu for these articles.
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Legal Warning to Abusive Bloggers
The Directors of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club have won a high court ruling against a website to reveal the identity of anonymous bloggers who made serious allegations of greed and dishonesty against the club's chairman, directors and shareholders. Indeed exposing the identity of those who post defamatory comments on a website has become a growth area for lawyers. FE and HE institutions are cautiously reminded of the legal sanctions that may well be imposed in relation to defamatory content posted on their websites.
Read More...
Excerpt taken from JISC Legal newsletter October 2007.
Read More...
Excerpt taken from JISC Legal newsletter October 2007.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Give me a 'learning' network anyday
A few of the following thoughts crossed my mind as a title for this blog. What is the point of this blog? (not in a sarcastic way), what is the purpose of this blog? I ask these questions because i am wondering whether another vehicle i.e a ning social networking site would be a far far better option to better foster debate and discussion on the many interesting blog entries that are posted.
My assumption is that a lot of the blog posts are initiated to stimulate interest, discussion and maybe illicit a response. The comment feature i believe is inadequate to encourage debate and don't think it has really designed for that purpose.
If this blog is just about relaying information then this can be done just as easily on a ning social network environment with all the added benefits of further developing arguments and discussions.
I don't know what the dynamics or the chemistry involved are but these easily created personalized ning social networking sites have an interface that seems to encourage interaction and collaboration amongst its participants.
If as part of the project this blog is a stipulated part of the disseminating of information then my view is that with the advent of social networking the blogging approach has been superseded by a much more flexible, usable and multifunctional option - the personalized 'learning' network.
My assumption is that a lot of the blog posts are initiated to stimulate interest, discussion and maybe illicit a response. The comment feature i believe is inadequate to encourage debate and don't think it has really designed for that purpose.
If this blog is just about relaying information then this can be done just as easily on a ning social network environment with all the added benefits of further developing arguments and discussions.
I don't know what the dynamics or the chemistry involved are but these easily created personalized ning social networking sites have an interface that seems to encourage interaction and collaboration amongst its participants.
If as part of the project this blog is a stipulated part of the disseminating of information then my view is that with the advent of social networking the blogging approach has been superseded by a much more flexible, usable and multifunctional option - the personalized 'learning' network.
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