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.