Why would I want to tell people what I had for breakfast?

I am thinking of running a workshop for non-academic colleagues on how to blog and Twitter and why it might be something that would be useful for their professional work (to explain that it is not just about telling people what you had for breakfast… but you can if you like…). These are my initial notes.

‘Personal’ professional
http://olnetpm.blogspot.com/ - This is my ‘personal’ blog as project manager for OLnet – I set this up using ‘Blogger’ because it is easy to use and to make something look a bit different and individual and I have used it for other blogs. It is made/hosted by Blogger (https://www.blogger.com/start ), which is a free Google service and you need a Google Account to access it (but not necessarily a gmail email address).

If you don’t already have a Google account, it is worth setting one up for all the other services that Google offers (eg Google Analytics, Reader, docs) and I would recommend setting it up with your OU email address (as the ‘current email’ ‘username’: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount)

I am using this blog to record things that relate to my own experiences and things that I find out that are relevant to OLnet that I might want to look back on and also might want to tell other people about. I don’t imagine that anyone is necessarily going to read it. It is just a way of recording some content in an easy way to sign-post to, so I am sort of using it as an easy content management website. (I can also easily monitor who is looking at it by adding some code and monitoring it with Google Analytics). (There are lot of variations of 'easy' in this paragraph which is because for me it is).

‘Organisation/Team’ professional blog
http://ouarts-funding.blogspot.com/ - I previously set up this blog in my old job, which all team members had ‘author rights' on so could add posts. This again was about recording useful things that could be sign-posted to or looked back on. It was also a way of sharing information between team members and acted as an archive of information about funding sources and successes.
http://dartmoor-nationaltrust.blogspot.com/ - this is a blog a friend of mine set up for their work to promote activities and events. All their team can add stories to it. The stories are archived by category labels (tags) and month.

Linking to Twitter
Most people have a vague idea that Twitter messages are short – limited to 140 characters. Whilst messages are ‘out there’ possibly forever and searchable for, for me it is primarily a temporary, of the ‘now this moment’ kind of thing. I see it like a newspaper seller shouting out the headlines for today’s paper or the headlines on the news. Or other analogy might be the stock market ticker tape string of things coming through. In simple terms, I use it to find things out and to promote ideas/events/information that I want others who share my interests to know about.

In the first instance you need a Twitter account, which you set up at http://twitter.com/. After that there are many applications that you can use to watch the other Twitter accounts that you choose to follow and to send out messages. All of the things I use are free.
I use Tweetdeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/) on my macbook
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com/) for sending out messages to a schedule (eg linked to event dates)
I used to use Tweetlater for this which is now called SocialOomph (http://www.socialoomph.com/)
I also use a Tweetdeck App (http://www.tweetdeck.com/iphone/) on my iPod Touch and have tried out a few other Twitter iPhone apps.
Liam Green-Hughes (http://www.greenhughes.com/) uses JournoTwit (http://journotwit.com/).

I would tend to put a story on my blog and then send out several messages on Twitter with a link to that story. The Twitter messages need to give a strong hint about the content of the blog post. If the story is about an event then the Twitter message might have the title and date and the blog story would have more information like venue, cost, programme, target audience.

I might also build up a following by sending out messages relating to subjects that are of interest to the audience I am trying to attract - usually with useful/interesting links.

‘Personal’ academic
There are many academics now blogging (in the arena of digital scholarship) with a great blurring of boundaries between the professional scholar and the personal. A few examples:
Martin Weller: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/
Doug Clow: http://dougclow.wordpress.com/

OU hosted blogs
The blogs that I have referred to above are all hosted externally to the Open University and are open to the whole world to view (although there are ways you can set up to just use to communicate in a closed group of invited members).

The OU hosts blogs and there is a link at the top of the intranet page to see the list of currently hosted blogs that takes you here: http://intranet.open.ac.uk/oulife-home/blogs.aspx (only visible if you have access to the intranet). The system uses a platform called WordPress, they can be set up for internal or public audience and you have to apply to have an account http://www.open.ac.uk/forms/blog-request/ I did have an account but I found at the time that the set up was not as flexible or easy to use as the Blogger account that I was already familiar with.

Drupal and olnet.org Blog
Olnet.org is a website built using Drupal (which is an Open Source content management system) and one or the modules we have installed allows people who are ‘registered’ to add ‘content’ to the site in the form of blog posts.

Developing tools to record and annotate research presentations and workshops

CREW (Collaborative Research Events on the Web) aims to improve access to research event content by capturing and publishing the scholarly communication that occurs at events like conferences and workshops. The project is developing tools to enable presentations and similar sessions to be recorded and annotated and enable powerful searches across distributed conference and related research data. Searches will yield results within written documents such as abstracts and papers and also in rich audio-visual content, such as clips from presentations, questions asked at a talk or Twitter messages during presentations.

The project is a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester, Bristol and Wales, Bangor and is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) through the second phase of the Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. The project builds upon the success of Iugo and Memetic by developing and integrating these technologies and embedding them in a variety of authentic research settings, including Intute, a national JISC service to provide access to web resources for research to UK universities, the Institute of Health Sciences, which promotes health sciences research in Manchester and scientific visualization research groups.

Project website: http://www.crew-vre.net/
Intro video (5mins - good overview): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFaFA4WUJc

Some write-ups and reflections on the OpenEd09 conference

"How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education" by Anya Kamenetz http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html

"Open Ed 09 – My debutants ball" by Dave Cormier http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/08/15/open-ed-09-–-my-debutants-ball/

"OpenEd 2009 Recap" by Cole Camplese http://www.colecamplese.com/2009/08/opened-2009-recap/

"On the open education experience" by D'Arcy Norman http://www.darcynorman.net/2009/08/20/on-the-open-education-experience/

Not quite sure what to make of Alan Lavine's "Amazing Stories of Openness" - lots of links to other blogs http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/opened09/

"Open Education - crossing the chasm?" by Chris Clarke of Talis http://blogs.talis.com/education/2009/08/14/open-ed-crossing-chasm/

"Reflections on OpenEd09" by Lisa Harris Marketing http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/events/reflections-on-opened09/

"Thoughts from Open Education 2009" by Mary Burgess http://rruoer.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/thoughts-from-open-ed-2009/

"Reflections on OpenEd09" by Kyle Mathews http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2009/08/25/reflections-opened09

Not a write up but a great video (16 mins) from ccLearn http://blip.tv/file/2512680 (even though I'm not on it)

(I'll add to this as I find them)

WikiEducator at OpenEd2009

I made contact with Randy Fisher (aka WikiRandy) at OpenEd2009 and thought I'd add some information here that he sent me, since it is of relevance to networking with the OER community.

Randy works for WikiEducator (http://www.wikieducator.org). Their vision is to create a free and open version of the world's education curriculum by 2015. WikiEducator was a project of the Commonwealth of Learning (http://www.col.org), but has outgrown the home nest - with 10,000 active educators from all over the world and a top 90,000 website in the world. Randy is on the governing council. Now, WikiEducator is co-located with Otago Polytechnic in NZ, and is under the rubric of a nonprofit entity called the OER Foundation. Athabasca University in Canada hosts their servers, the Commonwealth of Learning supports their infrastructure, and they have relationships with tertiary and secondary institutions from around the world.

WikiEducator are exploring different models of openness, including "open philanthropy" (http://www.wikieducator.org/Open_Philanthropy). They are also always interested in pilot projects (http://www.wikieducator.org/Pilot_Projects) to strengthen relationships and see how they can work together and develop internal use cases.

Talis launches angel fund for Open Education Projects

Talis is offering grant funding of between £1,000 and £15,000 for Open Education projects. Aimed at individuals or small groups, the Talis Incubator for Open Education provides angel funding and other forms of assistance for ideas and projects that have the potential to further the cause of Open Education through the use of technology. All they ask in return is that you donate or ‘open source’ the intellectual property generated back to the communities that could benefit most from your work.

The Talis Incubator for Open Education scheme will run for 12 months from September 2009.

The submission deadline for proposals for the first round of awards is the 31st December 2009, with the first awards made towards the middle of March 2010.

The submission deadline for the second round is the 31st June 2010, with the awards made towards the middle of September 2010.

For more info see: http://blogs.talis.com/education/incubator/

Opening lines

I had a quick meeting with Patrick* yesterday in preparation for going to the OpenEd conference next week. He passed on two discs from JISC infoNet so I could have a browse while I am sitting in my hotel or maybe even to pass the time on the flight. I know a little about JISC, but not much, so I thought I'd have a look at their website: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/. It looks like there are loads of great resources there. But straight off I thought I'd follow them on Twitter.

In passing I heard a headline on the radio last night asking people to phone in on the topic 'are you fed up with social networking media?' Some may have tried it out and then become bored, but I feel it is not going to go away. There are certainly fashionable trends on which media to use, though. I guess the clue is in the 'social' part of it - to keep in touch with your friends you need to use the things they use, go to the places they go…

Someone told me that Twitter had been hacked into this week, but as I couldn’t find out any current news stories on it, I'm guessing it was old news from mid July being recycled on the radio because August is always a slack time for news.

*Patrick McAndrew, Director of OLnet