Via the Downes site I discovered this :Blogs for Learning.

Site quote
'an online resource about instructional blogging. The site provides students and instructors with information and resources about the technical and pedagogical aspects of blogging in the classroom.'

Perhaps there are insights here that will help Intouch members make the most of their Intouch facilities?

Not had a chance to look to deeply into it yet, sometime this week I hope.

technorati tags:Learning, blogs, instruction, pedagogy, class, technology

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From Tony Karrer

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2006/11/e-in-elearning.html

RSS is a great technology. Simple to use but powerful in its implication. I can now very quickly review my news feeds, favourite bloggers (and comic strips) and have podcasts delivered to my desktop or PDA - automatically. Very neat.

Intouch provides many RSS tagging oportunities, one of which is the tagging of searches made. For example teh search term 'elearning' might produce a a set of results that are of immediate interest. However I don't want to repeatedly enter the same search term at later dates when I want tos earch again, I want to be alerted when someone blogs, posts a file or references anything with the tag 'eLearning'. With Intouch you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the search term. I've not used this yet but I'm about to. 

Interestingly, Intouch now retreives data from the Emerald Insight Database that matches your search term - If I subscribe to the search term by RSS, will I also be alerted if new Insight article content matches my search? I don't know yet but I hope so.

Anandan, C., and M. Gangatharan, eds. Digital Libraries: From Technology to Culture. New Delhi, Kanishka Publishers, 2006.

Ariadne, no. 49 (2006): Includes "Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository"; "Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?"; "DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning"; "e-Books for the Future: Here but Hiding?"; "From Nought to a Thousand: The HUSCAP Project"; "RDA: A New International Standard"; "Workshop on e-Research, Digital Repositories and Portals"; and other articles.

Armbruster, Chris. "Cyberscience and the Knowledge-based Economy, Open Access and Trade Publishing: From Contradiction to Compatibility with Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing." (2006).

Association of Research Libraries. Proceedings of the 149th Membership Meeting, Washington, DC, October 18-19, 2006. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2006.

———. To Stand the Test of Time: Long-Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2006.

Barbera, Michele, Francesca Di Donato, Christian Morbidoni, and Giovanni Tummarello. "HyperJournal Software, PHP Scripting and Semantic Web Technologies for the Open Access." (2005).

The Electronic Library 24, no. 5 (2006 ): Includes "E-Books Access Models: An Analytical Comparative Study," "Perceptions of Electronic Library Resources in Further Education," and other articles.

Harnad, Stevan. "First Things First: OA Self-Archiving, Then Maybe OA Publishing." Open Access Archivangelism, 3 November 2006.

High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine, no. 13 (2006): Includes "International Workshop on Institutional Repositories and Enhanced and Alternative Metrics of Publication Impact, 20-21 February 2006, Humboldt University Berlin, Report"; "The Joint Accelerator Conferences Website, JACoW: An Open Access Website for the Publication of Conference Proceedings"; "Open Access—What Has Been Going On?"; and "Report of the Task Force on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics."

Information Today 23, no. 10 (2006): Includes "Google Book Search Has Far to Go," "Trials: The New E-Book Readers," and other articles.

Internet Reference Services Quarterly 11, no. 3 (2006): Includes "Slashdotting Digital Library Resources" and other articles.

Journal of Library Administration 44, no. 3/4 (2006): Includes "Business, Science and the Common Good"; "Library/Vendor Relations: An Academic Publisher's Perspective"; "Managing the Unmanageable: Systematic Downloading of Electronic Resources by Library Users"; and other articles.

Journal of the Medical Library Association 94, no. 4 (2006): Includes "Awareness and Attitude of Spanish Medical Authors to Open Access Publishing and the 'Author Pays' Mode for Electronic Content," "Evolutions in Communication Begin with Small Steps," "Retention of Retrospective Print Journals in the Digital Age: Trends and Analysis," and other articles.

Law Library Journal 98, no. 4 (2006): Includes "Redefining Open Access for the Legal Information Market" and other articles.

Library Review 55, no. 9 (2006): Includes "Revising Digital Library Content in Response to User Requests," "Risk Assessment and Copyright in Digital Libraries," and other articles.

The New Zealand Library & Information Management Journal 50, no. 1 (2006): Includes "Examining the Claims of Google Scholar as a Serious Information Source" and other articles.

The Reference Librarian 45, no. 94 (2006): Includes "Preserving Electronic Government Information: Looking Back and Looking Forward," "A Virtual Depository: The Arizona Project," and other articles.

Research Information (October/November 2006): Includes "Building an Information Infrastructure in the UK" and other articles.

RLG DigiNews 10, no. 5 (2006): Includes "Digging Up Bits of the Past: Hands-on with Obsolescence," "Fedora and the Preservation of University Records Project," and other articles.

Searcher 14, no. 10 (2006): Includes "Google and OCLC Open Libraries on the Open Web" and other articles.

The Serials Librarian 51, no. 1 (2006): Includes "Innovative Interfaces' Electronic Resource Management as a Catalyst for Change at Glasgow University Library," "The Keys to Successful Change Management for Serials," "The Need to Archive Blog Content," and other articles.

Steele, Colin, Linda Butler, and Danny Kingsley. "The Publishing Imperative: The Pervasive Influence of Publication Metrics." (2006).

Suber, Peter. SPARC Open Access Newsletter, no. 103 (2006): Includes "The Mandates of October," "No-Fee Open-Access Journals," and other articles.

A short JISC briefing paper entitled e-Portfolios: an overview of JISC activities has been made available by Lisa Gray and Sarah Davies (apparently since the 5th of October, though I only saw it announced yesterday - hence this post).

The paper gives a useful overview of JISC-funded activities in this area (though a few more links to project Web sites would have been nice). In particular, the paper lays out three main functions of e-portfolios as enablers of:

• presentation - providing supporting material for admission to study or job, induction, appraisal or assessment;
• transition - supporting learners as they move between and across institutions and sectors; and
• learning - enabling personal and reflective learning, guiding and developing learning (both formal and informal) over time in education, training and employment.

technorati tags:e-portfolios, Intouch, personalisation, learning, web

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Though this article is a year old it very clearly articulates the need for an Intouch like facility businesses and individuals.

technorati tags:intouch, business, corporate, email

Blogged with Flock

The Flock browser, a browser built upon the Firefox system is quite frankly superb. Light years ahead of the recent IE 7 release and designed for 21st century web 2.0 user.

ScrapBook

technorati tags:Flock, browser, web, 2.0

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A tour and tutorial of the Flock Scrapbook extension

technorati tags:Flock, scrapbook

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This wiki is for the community considering the relationship between tagging and metadata, especially DC metadata.

Over the last week or so I have started to recieve mails regarding this really interesting development in DC metadata developments -

But, dear reader, this posting isn't about that. It's about this:
http://www.dc-anz.org/TagThatURL.m4a

Whenever you're feeling down about all the tagging you have to do and whether or not you can really push through another dinner party conversation about the merits of Dublin Core metadata and/or folksonomies sing this astonishing ditty all to yourself. Wonderful. Kind of...

technorati tags:DC, Tags, folksonomie, metadata

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Very pleased to have been able to present a quick demonstration of the Intouch service to the Emerald board and heads of Departments. Would like to think that this will help decision making when it comes to the Intouch project.

I think it was received well enough. Personally I believe that people will adopt at various rates, and of course Intouch is nothing without people and their projects, learning and activities.

Hopefully the strategy group and the feedback coming in from the users groups will continue to improve product.

We'll see.

technorati tags:Intouch, development, Emerald

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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/work-based-learning/message/6

If you’ve been scratching your head about why a business should blog, skim this study of business blogging success.

After careful review, the research team identified five factors for success.  The majority of the twenty participant bloggers pointed to these factors as important to the success of their blog. The five factors identified by the participants were:

1. Culture
2. Transparency
3. Time
4. Dialogue
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization

First, thanks to Anne Marie Thorslund for these slides.

The attached file, in PDF Format, is a copy of the MetaPress presentation given at the recent Charleston conference. Ordinarily I wouldn't embedd the file, I'd link to it. but I think that this is such an interesting insight into usage behaviours I didn't want anyone to miss it.

For WSD this is probably old news, but I'm sure for others it's quite an enlightening document. It certainly was for me. 

Please read it. Seriously, read it and then post your comments here.

[You do not have permission to access this file]

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Can a wiki-style editing process result in a worthwhile business book? Pearson PLC, the publishing firm, intends to find out — and it has recruited business-school officials at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help with the experiment.

The publisher is putting together We Are Smarter Than Me, a new book that tries to help businessmen make sense of blogs, online communities, and other interactive Web media. Professors at Penn and MIT have already written the volume’s chapter titles and introductory anecdotes. But otherwise the project is, well, an open book: Web surfers are invited to stop by the book’s home page and edit or add to it as they see fit.

technorati tags:Publishing, book, wiki, blog, social, network

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I must admit that when I didn't really 'get' Action Learning when I was enrolled on the Emerald Academy project loking at the Jade Support Centre. I was very focussed on developing a delivering a project and I already knew how to do it. In spite of the the many learning opportunities afforded to me during the project I guess most of it passed me by. Only after the project ended was I able to reflect and consider that, perhaps, getting the project right first time wasn't really the point.

Christopher D. Sessums :: Weblog :: Action Research and Social Software: An Approach for Adopting Technology in Schools

This posting, though aimed at educators, might be useful in reminding Action Learning participants that the methodology is very different to anything they may have experienced before. It takes time, thought and personal reflection.

Doh! If I'd taken the time, thought about the project and reflected on the project, perhaps a better product would have come out if it. I might have even learned something too.

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Stumbled across only recently. An excellent piece from Fred Stutzman's blog - extracted with permission.

"Lately, I've found myself reflecting on the role of this blog in my academic career. Granted, my academic career is somewhat nonexistent, but perhaps one day that will change. To that extent, I must think about how my present-day creation will affect my future possibilities. Remembering the Chronicle piece "Bloggers Need Not Apply", it is hard not to second-guess the value of my blog, or academic blogging in general. I figured that it might be useful to enumerate some of the valuable effects of academic blogging, and imagine how these might one day be integrated into mainstream academia. So, as a list - some of the benefits of academic blogging:

1. Blogs help researchers find one another. Traditionally, researchers "found" each other through academic publications. They would then meet up at a conference, pat each other on the back, talk about collaborating, etc. As a graduate student, I don't have a very strong publication record, nor do I have money to travel to conferences. I am essentially locked out of the traditional academic model. However, Google drives a ton of traffic to my blog; in that traffic are researchers who are conducting background and primary research. I can't tell you how many interesting researchers have contacted me, left comments, or tracked back to my blog; I've made many valuable contacts this way. I've also many many valuable international contacts this way - people I probably wouldn't have met otherwise.

1. Blogs can be a place to share research. Indeed, this is a controversial point, so let me share my back story. When I started researching the Facebook, I didn't know what I was going to do with my findings. Largely, I was conducting the research as background - using it to formulate a more formal research agenda. However, in doing the Facebook research, I came across interesting findings, and there was a public need to understand the Facebook. I shared my research, and it was widely read. Indeed, this was the same research I would have sent to a conference or journal, but it was dressed down a little, and thrown online so people could access the research immediately.

I'll be the first to admit that blogging research findings is somewhat of a gray area. However, if you look at Pew or other think tanks, you'll see they consistently promote summary research findings. They put key findings into the public via a blog post or press release, hoping to generate buzz. In a sense, I've done the same thing, though my intentions were really to get something out there that would be useful to people as they attempted to understand the Facebook.

In the right context, the blog can be a very valuable place to showcase research. The research goes into Google, people can repost it, and there can be a public conversation about the research. I can't tell you how much of a bummer it is to know that the best academic work is tied up in controlled-access journal that are prohibitively expensive; perhaps the personal academic blog can be somewhat of an antidote. To sum, I do believe blogs can be a valuable place to share research - the ethics haven't been completely worked out, but as more and more academics use blogs as venues to promote their research and distribute early findings, the more we'll understand the accepted ways to blog research.

1. Blogs make academics better writers. Writing is difficult. For every beautifully written paper I read, I come across two or three that are almost unreadable. It is an axiom of the writing community (creative, academic, journalism) that the way to be a better writer is to write more often. Every post I write gets sent to a few hundred people - knowing this, I'm forced to write better - in terms of content and grammar. As academics, we are communicators - and blogging/writing consistently only improves our communication skills.

1. Blogs leverage the community's wisdom. A lot of what I put on my blog is stuff I come up with in the shower or the car. Blogs are great venues for these big, crazy ideas, because you've got a community of readers who will check, interact, argue, disprove or validate you. Maybe one day you'll decide to test one of those big ideas, and you'll already have the benefit of a community that has vetted your ideas.

1. Blogs are great places to share accomplishments. Blogs are an excellent way to let your community know about things like papers, talks, conference attendance. Think about it - as your audience is opt-in, they actually care about the stuff you do, and they might actually read your papers! Also, it is becoming quite common to "subscribe to a person", in the sense someone follows your blog to keep up with you. Who knows - maybe someone who is subscribed to your RSS feed will hire you someday - you want to keep them aware of the cool stuff you're up to. At a more basic level, however, we subscribe to each others feeds because we are fans. I want to know what people are up to, their accomplishments, changes in their lives.

1. Thinking aloud is valuable. My blog wanders through my various interests. Social networks, identity, virtual communities, academia - and through this public thinking, I've been able to reflect upon these interests. As I begin to think about my dissertation, I can look back on my blog and know that I've thought through a number of things, refactored and moved on.

In my opinion, all of this is extremely valuable. Connecting with researchers, formulating an agenda, bouncing ideas off a community, thinking aloud. Its extremely difficult to think about myself without a blog. That said, how is it that blogging could have such a bad name in academia - is blogging academia's digital divide? Let's explore this a little.

1. Academic blogging is misunderstood. As evidenced by the Chronicle piece, the underlying assumption is that blogging is only the sharing of public grievances. Unfortunately, blogging has its stereotypes, but I believe they are being broken down methodically. People can blog professionally. People can divorce their political views from their blogs. There's no requirement that a blog be a non-filtered braindump of everything in one's life. That's not how I blog, and I respect bloggers that are topical and try hard to create posts of value.

1. Academic blogging is generational. At SILS (an information science school), a minority of professors maintain blogs. However, as I look around at my cohort in the program, I see lots of students with blogs. As long as these students get value from their blogs, there's no reason to assume that they won't carry blogging forward with them as they advance in their careers. Our generation will begin to break down some of the barriers to blogging in academia.

Considering the value my blog has added to my academic experience, I tend to believe that academic blogs will eventually mainstream. Their acceptance will take some time, but the value provided by blogging - in terms of connecting with others, the public debate, the real dialogue that emerges - will be self-evident. Of course, some things will never change - being a good blogger will always take effort, and not all of us need to blog. However, as we see models develop for academic blogging, it stands that more and more of us will want to take advantage of the benefits."

Unit Structures: Blogging: Academia's Digital Divide?

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First posting from the online educa plenary. The final speaker, Roger Larson [CEO Fronter] is demonstrating, get this, a web 3.0 system and talking about Open source 2.0 - cripes! not even got my head around web 2.0 yet.

The first three speakers were interesting. Kenyan Higher Education minister David Seleis, George Siemens and a very entertaining Jeane-michelle Billuiatt. Quite thoughtful speeches. More detail later.

A good start though from yesterday, after a workshop on building online global communities of learning - improbably, on sculpture and weaving - and a DTI event at the British embassy in the evening. Interestingly, met with a Peter Mackay of Hodder Arnold (hi Peter) who was very warm with his regard for Emerald - If you'd like Emerald to help you demonstrate the value our R&D efforts Peter open your InTouch account now and start blogging with us!

Well, the session has ended. A Management & Leadership development seminar next - from Bridge2Think I believe. I think this is an iniative from the Harvard Business School - must remember to idle past their stand and pretend to be interested. But for now off for a coffee. A word of thanks to the British Embassy staff who worked tirelessly to find the seediest late night Jazz club in East Berlin for the delegates to retire after their reception. Nice...

More later.

The early afternoon session, Management and Leadership development programmes and eLearning has just finished. Exploring the challenges of online learning for management development the panel summarise the greatest challenge as that of time - managers and execs simply don't have it or can't find enough of it for personal learning programmes and development.

The first speaker started with a solid enough analysis of what is required of the learner in order to successfully deploy elearning. Biggest signpost for the future as, again mobiles. Suggestions that in 2009 there will be over 200m mobile devices sold and concludes with a demonstration of a seminar from a Harvard Business School professor on an iPod. Gimmicky.

Speaker concludes with the launche of a new product: 50 Lessons. a collection of 3 minute video files of leading business people talking on a specific topic. Relevance and diversity are the key drivers for content selection for use in this context, and for Corporate users in general. Kind of interesting. I wrote about this as an aside /idea yesterday without being aware of this - it was interesting to see it in action

The seminar moved into an investigation into Lufthansa deployment of a system called getAbstracts. getAbstracts is a collection of 5 page abstacts of the best business management books. The summaries are available in a variety of formats inlcuding PDA friendly resolutions and mp3 for audio.

This has been a very successful project from LHs view. I wonder if Emerald could offer something similar - though I confess I thought Emerald Management Reviews (EMRs) did this already ?? Anyone?

An important point made time and again by the panel was the importance of selecting the right content; usually case based study materials. The appetite for case studies is vast. Anna Torrance reported this to be the case in the US too.

Anyways, time to go. The next session is Social Software and elearning 2.0. and is filling up fast. It's being held in the biggest hall too - clearly social, InTouch like systems are very fashionable right now.