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Arguments for social media engagement
In a comment on a previous post my colleague Chris Jones argued that establishing an online identity wasn't suitable for everyone: What of the bulk of other academics interested in research and publication? They may move to open access routes for publication but will they want to spend their time in developing a public persona? I am not sure they or I will. I haven't yet developed a blog, though I follow others, including yours. I am not sure that digital scholarship covers all or even the main aspects of intellectual endeavour. Sometimes it is a lone academic quarrying away obscurely on a narrow point that makes a difference. Some…
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We’re all studio bands now
Marieke, over at RemoteWorker, asked me to do a guest blog post around this issue of being a remote worker and establishing a profile at your work place, which you can read in full on her blog. I mixed up several issues, the first being the effectiveness of being an online worker, where I made a (tongue-in-cheek) comparison with the power-breakfasters of yore: In the 1980s in the heyday of the Yuppie, there was talk of the ‘power breakfast’ when Masters of the Universe would meet at breakfast to do business to show how tough they were. This is nothing – nowadays I get up and reply to some tweets,…
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Riffability and MPO
Couple of quick terms for you to play with, and no apologies for butchering the English language, it likes it really. Riffability – the potential for a resource or idea to generate quick modifications, for it to be riffed upon by others. Riffability is one (but not the only) factor for how memes, ideas or social objects work. If something has a high riffability rating, then it means others will modify it, suggest alterations, or explore ideas around it. Not everything that spreads is riffable – some ideas/outputs are just perfect as they are and you just want to share. Others promote debate and discussion, but that's not the same…
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Blogging and academic identity
Blogging and academic identity View more OpenOffice presentations from mweller. 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…
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Some more thoughts on metrics
Following on from my last post on the possible use of metrics to measure online digital reputation, here are some more thoughts. Andy Powell took me to task in the comments, arguing eloquently that the metric is so obviously flawed that it is positively harmful. I've been pondering this, and here are some reflections, both for and against. As the methodology is the property of the consultants, I don't know exactly how the algorithm works, so am guessing from the results. I can see at least three possible problems with the methodology: 1) A deadly attractor – given the search term used ('distance learning'), the OU unsurprisingly dominates the space.…
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Connections versus Outputs
<image No Trumpets Please! by Mr Jaded http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaded/1907907/> Warning! This post may contain own trumpet blowing! Laura Dewis sent me a report the lovely OU Online Services people had prepared in collaboration with consultants (MarketSentinel). They were interested in examining the broader influence of various web sites and looking at sentiment mining. The idea from an official communications perspective being you can see how well regarded your institution is in different sectors, and maybe influence that perception. But from my perspective the analysis they performed could be tweaked to provide a measure of an individual's influence or prominence in the online community of their particular topic. As you will know,…
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Robin Mason RIP
(I hope Robin's family and friends don't mind me posting this). I was deeply saddened to hear that my colleague, Robin Mason, passed away today. It was Robin who brought me to the Institute of Educational Technology (from the Technology Faculty). Robin was a pioneer in e-learning, and fabulously well connected in the educational world – everyone knew, and liked, Robin. Like John Naughton, Robin was one of the big influences in my early academic career at the OU – I learnt from her how to tread the right balance between scholarly activity and practical application, and just plain have fun with new ideas. Interestingly I was warned against working…
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Bridging the gap – book chapter
A while ago, I wrote a chapter with James Dalziel on bridging the gap between web 2.0 and higher education. It was published in the Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, edited by Stylianos Hatzipanagos, & Steven Warburton, and published by IGI. There are some good chapters in this book, so it's definitely worth a read (despite the rather uninspiring title). I've had news that they are using it again in another book: E-Collaboration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. I wrote most of the chapter at the end of 2007, so it already feels a bit outdated, but I forgot to put the PDF up here…
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Always-right-ism
A curmudgeon returns Part 2 in my curmudgeon series (don't worry, after this, it's all utopia again). A couple of posts back I mused that "we have seen the demise of any sense of compulsion or quality. There is no more 'should' anymore. Everything is okay." I pondered whether this started with post-modernism and was reinforced by the internet as echo-chamber. Ain't no echo chamber I've been thinking more about it, largely thanks to the excellent comments on that post. On reflection I feel that the echo-chamber effect is probably overplayed. Certainly we tend to talk to like-minded people – this is human nature. Sometimes it is a result of…
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Some big hitting technologies (shiny show special)
Well, it's been an eventful few weeks for technology releases, which have been blogged to death, but here's a quick roundup from my point of view. Google Wonderwheel – the smallest of the releases, but potentially significant. Wonderwheel gives a visual representation of search terms, with the term at the centre and then related ones around it. Naturally, each of these terms is itself searchable, so you can quickly build up an expanded search tree across a domain. Here is a search I did using Tony Hirst's blog name (OUseful Info) as the starting term: You could dismiss this as just some shiny added to search, but hat is interesting…
