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.
