Tuesday, 5 August 2008
Why I succumbed to Twitter....
I avoided it for a long time – who needs another obsession? – but after the NLab Social Networks Conference, I decided I had to have a part of this, and yes it’s become a regular practice. I follow and am followed by various other people interested in social networks and online communities and I’m already seeing some interesting insights, being pointed to useful resources elsewhere on the Web and being caught up in new discussions both on Twitter and elsewhere (e.g., on blogs and mailing lists.
After comments by Andy Roberts and others on emint, here are some suggested rules for effective use of Twitter:I can see a lot of positive uses for Twitter over and above the simple “What are you doing now application”.
- Only follow people you find interesting.
- Use the Twitter search to find people (not the “invite people” – I find that’s a red herring and not the way to find people!)
- Ask questions or throw out any problems you’re grappling with. Use it like a “garden fence” for the eliterati.
- Use additional services like following a news or sports feed - you can then get that feed to your mobile via Twitter.
- Beware of getting a large feed sent to your mobile – the thing will keep you awake!
- Distributed problem solving
- Finding out a bit more about your contacts and facilitating closer relationships
- Keeping attendees at a conference informed before and after
- A quick way to keep members of a community or network in touch
- Alerts to web content (using short URLs)
- Learning prompts and alerts for learners on a course.
Labels: blogging, internet policy, moblogging, twitter, Web 2.0, web applications
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:44 AM
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Today's interesting links!
Pew internet research:
"Teens and Social Media: The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media."
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/ r/230/report_ display.asp
Designing communities presentation
by Christina Wodtke:
http://www.slideshare.net/cwodtke/ designing- communities10150 7
Free stock photos
http://www.sxc.hu/
Wikis in plain English
http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english
(The other videos by the same people are excellent explanations of Web 2.0 concepts as well)
Talent
http://www.talent.ac.uk/
the online community for adult literacy, numeracy and ESOL teachers and anyone interested in good practice in the teaching and learning of adults and young people with language, literacy and numeracy needs.Articles by Helen Beetham on the topic of models:
- http://www.elt.ac.uk/ELT%20documents/EFFECTS/Vision.pdf
- http://www.eres.ac.uk/source/docs/pub-ou-47.pdf
Labels: internet research, links, models, online communities, photos, Web 2.0, wikis
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:50 AM
Sunday, 20 January 2008
H2O playlists
An H2O Playlist is a shared list of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest. It's a way to group and exchange useful links to information - online and offline.
Developed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, it claims to represent a new way of thinking about education online.
I think it likes to be a more academic version of del.icio.us. It doesn't seem to have changed a lot since 2005 according to the blog posts which reference it, and its page on Wikipedia is a bit of an orphan.
Alexandra Samuel said in July, 2005 "Where H20 comes in handy is if you’re actually trying to turn your playlist into something…prototypically, a syllabus or some sort of guide. For example I could see H20 being a nice way of organizing and annotating my list of RSS resources . Or if I were going to teach my Internet & Politics course again, I might use it to structure the online readings."Labels: e-learning tools, social software, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:50 PM
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Integrating Web 2.0 - some doubts
Here are some issues that have been mentioned to me (by academic staff) about integrating Web 2.0 technologies into institutional VLEs, and how they might be overcome.
- Institutional IT policy can be a barrier - you don't know what's available.
Fear of "what people will say"- How to cope with the student who goes "off the rails"
- Managers fear adverse comments about their services and don't see it as constructive.
- Can cause horrendous" problems in mature learners who aren't familiar with the technology.
- Students (esp. mature students) worry about "breaking" the technology.
Labels: challenges, e-learning, elearning, issues, learning design, learning futures, learning technologies, student expectations, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 1:52 PM
Friday, 14 September 2007
The wiki way
Here's an interesting article on "the wiki way" from the Guardian.
"Don Tapscott, the author of an eye-opening new book called Wikinomics, says that we have barely begun to imagine how the internet will change the way we live and work. He tells Oliver Burkeman how everything from gold mining to motorcycle manufacturing is being transformed - and why huge companies as we know them may simply cease to exist."
Hmm. I suppose if you're selling a book you have to make big claims. But having seen how many wiki projects fail, I am more cynical...Labels: collaborative working, learning futures, media, Web 2.0, wiki, wikis
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:27 AM
Friday, 3 August 2007
Join me on the Creativity in E-Learning network
Labels: creativity, e-learning, education sector, elearning, FE, HE, learning and teaching, learning technologies, social networking, universities, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 4:06 PM
Thursday, 2 August 2007
Levels of Technology/Web/VLE Use in Teaching and Learning
1 Administrative
Syllabi, submission dates, room allocations, last-minute changes, etc.
2 Supplemental
Materials to support the traditional classroom, but not critical to the course (e.g. notes, handouts, slides, reading lists, Internet links).
3 Essential
Students require regular web access to be productive members of the class. Most materials, tasks, assessments available on website. Teachers require ICT literacy and sufficient course development time.
4 Communal
Course website used for communication purposes. Much course content generated through asynchronous discussions, real-time chats, publication of documents, audio and video-conferencing. ‘Design for e-learning’ expertise and e-moderating skills needed.
Blended courses need go no further than this.
5 Immersive
No classroom-based teaching. Courses are taught online.
(with acknowledgment to Dr Ale Armellini)Labels: learning and teaching, learning technologies, levels of transition, VLE, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:51 AM
Saturday, 28 July 2007
Shift Happens
Did You Know 2.0 is a thought-provoking "Shift Happens" video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod. This June 2007 update of an original includes new and updated statistics, thought-provoking questions and a fresh design. It even has its own website. Content by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, design and development by XPLANE.,Labels: Fisch, learning futures, Scott McLeod, Shift Happens, shifthappens, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:58 AM
Thursday, 12 July 2007
Learning resources for free
Learn for free on the Web
http://stingyscholar.blogspot.com/
Tools for sharing
There are tools that already exist for sharing your materials. These include:
*
* Open SLedware an initiative of SL educators to make course content accessible to all
* List of 2.0 Apps
* TeacherTube (think YouTube for teachers)
* Zoho show
* Common Content: a open catalog of Creative Commons licensed content
* Poll DaddyLabels: creative commons, e-learning, free apps, second life, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:34 AM
Sunday, 10 June 2007
Meg Pickard at Women, Business and Blogging
The first speaker at the Women Business & Blogging conference at DMU on Friday (8th June) was Meg Pickard, Head of Communities and User Experience for Guardian Unlimited. She spoke about "Whose Web is it anyway".
Meg introduced us to the levels of a user's interactions with the internet starting with the easiest:
consumption: users now can consume content without even visiting the site it comes from
interaction: basic interaction involves comments & conversation hosted by the creator - when it comes to commenting and interaction it's "not always polite and genteel – can be rowdy but is still your turf, i.e. 'my gaff, my rules'." Then people start responding to your content in their own spaces can't control it - may not eve know about it! Invisible interaction includes - attention data - using a feed reader - user/view count
curation: a new way of people being creative by involvement in creation and aggregation like feed readers. New technologies make it easier to do this - e.g., folksonomy, delicious, recommendations like digg. Squidoo - people creating lenses about things - bring in sites etc. - adding metadata. Other people can be creative with your content! Examples : Mashups - eg Yahoo pipes, remixing feeds and open data sources across the web for new purposes
creation: Content creation - contribution - e.g., photos on BBC website, youtube, flickr - user-generated content: the user has the control.
Meg went on to look at what makes a community.
Communities are good for users because they:
- increase relevancy
- increase emotional connection to the online experience
- increase social connection to each other
- add depth to conversations
Communities are useful to publishers and businesses because they:
- make experiences more relevant and human
- improve the quality of content
- increase usage
- increase revenue
Meg's "Holy Trinity" of community management include:
- Human solutions - moderators, policies, processes, consistency of approach
- Technical solutions - moderation platform, profiles, user management tools, ratings, etc.
- Editorial solutions (the one people forget) - proposition, framing of debate, tone of voice, reward, interaction
Personally I'd put the human and editorial solutions in together as all those things in editorial solutions are, for me, part of moderating, but it's true that many who start communities think of the technical aspects, sometimes think of the human aspects but miss out on the editorial aspects and the resources that need to be put into it.
Meg pointed out that the user engagement cycle of
casual - > connected - > committed - > catalyst
visiting registering engaging identifying/evangelist
could be mapped on the user engagement cycle.
Labels: blogging, interaction, Meg Pickard, nlabwomen, nlabwomen07, online communities, Web 2.0
posted by Helen Whitehead 3:18 PM
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
Web Applications and Web 2.0 links
Personalised homepages
PageFlakes
http://www.pageflakes.com/
Netvibes
http://www.netvibes.com/
iGoogle
http://www.igoogle.com
Office/Organisation
30 boxes web calendar
http://30boxes.com/welcome.php
Amazon S3 (NOTE - not free)
Simple Storage Service
can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
Yahoo pipes
feed aggregator
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Thinkfree
ThinkFree Office is a Microsoft® Office compatible application suite comprised of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics software-all usable online and off.
http://www.thinkfree.com/
Google Apps
Free for domains (premier service for charge)
Groups can check email, schedule meetings, check email, chat in real time, collaborate on documents, and more, via the web.
http://www.google.com/a/
Dabble DB
Web database
http://www.dabbledb.com/
Virus Scanners
AVG
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
Trend micro housecall
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
More from
The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
Web 2.0 links
RSS Info
tools for rss feeds
http://www.rss-info.com/
ELGG
Open source social networking platform developed for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which encompasses weblogging, file storage, RSS aggregation, personal profiles, FOAF functionality and more
http://elgg.org/
There.com
A virtual world that's not Second Life
http://www.there.com/
UK Web Focus - Web 2.0 blog
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
Office 2.0
http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/Labels: calendar, organisation, Web 2.0, web applications, website development
posted by Helen Whitehead 2:27 PM
Monday, 14 May 2007
Jakob Nielsen on Web 2.0
Jakob Nielsen, usability guru, on Web 2.0 - I don't think he's impressed!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stmLabels: usability, Web 2.0, web design
posted by Helen Whitehead 3:11 PM
