Jay Cross has some interesting stuff here from a Forester Analyst Click for The ladder of participation in social media
I doubt the validity of the results without more detail. A bit contentious to say that people in China participate more in social media than Europeans without some supporting data. Entirely possible, but some data to back up the figures would be good.
The Sydney Morning Herald has a good article on the dangers of email. Click for ‘Email becomes a dangerous distraction’smh.com.au
The article reports:
Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email
This adds up: we can waste as much as 8 1/2 hours a week if we answer our email as soon as we get it.
I like the reason they offer for why people might feel compelled to check their email every five minutes:
Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, England, and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. “Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’ which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits,”
Well, it made me giggle.
Now I don’t get any pleasure from email at all. In fact, I avoid it as much as possible. But then maybe I’m just a Misanthrope.
This whole ‘dangers of email’ thing got me thinking about Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero idea: 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero
Here’s his video (hour long Google talk about Inbox Zero)
Via Slashdot Slashdot | Why Email Has Become Dangerous
Caroline Tees from the British Council Singapore gave a great account of how she’s been using wikis for the past two years. She shared examples of her success in using wikis for:
The tool she’d used for this was 37 Signals’ Writeboard: which is a simple one-page wiki. It allows multiple authors and editors, version comparison and commenting, all the usual wiki stuff - but on one page: “just like a Word document”, Caroline explained.
Caroline took us step-by-step through the Writeboard set-up and then went on to show how easy it is to use. She added that this wiki tool was simpler to use than other online tools like blogs or more conventional wikis, (I reckon because each Writeboard is only a single page). Writeboard’s simplicity is its strength. Because of this, she explained, any teacher or student can get to grips with it quickly.
She gave some tips on what to watch out for when running a wiki writing activity:
She also gave tips on how to make it work:
Here’s Caroline’s presentation:
Billy Tan and Karen Yap from Innova Junior College showed us the results of some action research they’ve done into how they used the online social bookmarking tool Delicious with teachers and for students.
Billy Tan explained how he’d been testing out Delicious with his General Paper students to help them make connections between issues and motivate them to read more. He showed how students, who had set up their own Delicious accounts, had made connections between different issues within one article by assigning multiple tags to individual articles.
Their exit survey showed that 90% of students liked using it. They found that was an easy and effective way to manage and share online information - all you need is internet access, a browser and to remember your login and password.
Among teachers, their results showed that Delicious allowed colleagues to easily archive and share online resources. Karen Yap showed how tagging makes it easy for teachers to retrieve and organise online information. Their exit survey for these teachers showed that 100% agreed that Delicious is good for sharing, 75% of which strongly agreed.
I asked if they’d had any problems with people tagging this differently or mis-tagging. They said they had. To deal with this they recommended that users agree on how to name tags before setting up a Delicious project to avoid mis-tagging. They added that standardising account names is also a good idea.
Individual or Department Delicious accounts? Both speakers agreed that personal accounts were the best option.
Click to download their presentation from ICTLT.
They also handed out a DVD made by Innova JC called ‘What is New Media?’ which showcases the great stuff they’re doing.
Innova Junior College is the Centre of Excellence for New Media and New Media Arts.
Earlier today I was at a presentation by Nick Potts, from the British Council Singapore, on the lessons he’s learned from two years of using blogs with lower secondary students in Singapore. He gave an account of all the problems, lessons learned and he also shared strategies he’s worked out to overcome these challenges.
His main point was that these students tend to view (and use) blogs as a means to vent their feelings. He showed us how this manifested in free-form rants, which were far from the aims of his lessons. He confirmed this by showing us the results of survey he asked some students to complete last week.
He was quick to admit that his first attempt at using blogs with these students at integrating blogs into his classes resulted in work that (at best) lacked focus, and (at worst) had these teenagers revealing things about themselves that he was concerned might expose them to risk if the blogs had been in a public space on the web. His blogs were all closed to public access - he chose to use 21 Classes to help address these concerns by keeping the blogs closed and viewable only by his class.
His strategy for dealing with the challenge included setting clearly focused writing tasks, not calling the blog a ‘blog’ in class (instead refering to it as a portal) and starting the blog with very positive and simple writing activities.
One teacher in the audience asked if Nick had used this blogging exercise to explore issues of cyber-wellness and safe practices for minors online. Nick pointed out that he only saw them for two hours a week, so he didn’t have time to explore these issues with his class, although if he had time he would have liked to. It seemed to me that he had already helped his students toward managing these risks by getting them to apply better strategies for writing online than those they’d resorted to before.
Here’s Nick’s presentation:
Low-income students are in many ways just as technologically savvy as their counterparts
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. click for article
“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practising the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. Read More…
This is a great collection of ‘Laws’. For example:
Conway’s Law: Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
Hofstadter’s Law: A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. (lol)
The Click for Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development | Blue Flavor
click for Education | Pisa international rankings
Finland’s done well.
More pearls of wisdom from Jakob Nielsen about intranet Info Architecture:
Only three topics attained top-level navigation status on the majority of the intranets:
Here are my notes from Keith Kruger’s excellent and thought provoking workshop.
Keith is the CEO of CoSN, the US’s premier voice in education tech leadership. click for CoSN site
Outline of the workshop:
Three major conclusions:
Recent posts from sites I like, all grouped together in one place - Pageflakes.
