Monica Rankin posted a video to YouTube about how she uses Twitter in her classroom at the University of Texas. Somehow this Monday morning the video showed up on the page of the most popular bookmarks for the day on Delicious. It had only been viewed 425 times and neither Rankin nor we could figure out how it got bookmarked so much in that one random day. It's a very good video though, so we wrote a blog post about it that saw an unusually high 12,000 views within 24 hours. We decided to pay very close attention to where those readers came from, just to see what we could learn, and some unexpected trends emerged from the data.
How are blogfolios different from e-Portfolios? They aren't exactly, they're more of a subset of e-Portfolios, or another way of looking at the traditional e-Portfolio.
I gave a talk recently about blogging (twittering, etc) and how we create online identities for ourselves. The slidecast is above. I wanted to explore some ideas, the main ones being: It is about identity, not technology X; Your identity will be constituted from several different tools/services; Your configuration and emphasis of those tools is part of what makes the identity (as well as what you put in them); An online identity is becoming default for academics now; All this is driven by really easy and diverse ways of sharing; There are numerous benefits to you as an academic. I concluded with two propositions, which you might like to disagree with: 1. Soon, your online identity will be your academic identity, 2. There is an online identity of some form out there for everyone.
First a disclaimer: My legal qualifications go as far as an A-Level I did at nightclass. Nonetheless I’ve been reading a few posts recently on English law by other bloggers and they all seem to be making the same mistake. The bloggers are intelligent, fair and reasonable and the make the assumption that English law would be too. So I’m throwing up some points for discussion, most of it applies to bloggers around the world, but there are one or two stings for bloggers based in England and Wales.
A US study (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx) has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication. The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes which extends WordPress MU and brings social networking features to a new or existing installation.
CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.
It’s a rich, rich source of information and interaction. But it’s doing my head in. That’s why Jim Hendler’s blog post last Friday hit home so well. His piece is about finding the time to blog, which itself is an issue for me. But if I add to that the distraction of Twitter, the problem is compounded. I keep thinking back to Richard Hamming’s remarks about sustaining that 10% extra effort in your science so as to reap long-term benefits in progress and productivity. And I wonder if blogging and twittering has soaked up that time from my schedule. I think it might have.
We will be asking each of the student to keep a reflective research blog as they work through the course and will be encouraging them to read and comment on each others blogs. We want them to experience the role of blogs in a research context and for them
CoveritLive's web based software publishes your commentary in real time like an instant message. One-click publishing lets you add polls, videos, pictures and audio clips instantly, and take questions.
The University of Leicester’s Student Support and Development Service are currently running at graduate internship scheme called TULIP. We are encouraging the students to record their experiences by creating an ePortfolio on wordpress. Here is the beginners guide for the the students.
Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
The centre maintains a list of academics interested in the application and development of e-learning in the Biosciences. Our initial purpose for this reference group was to enable community comment on specific matters or issues.