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Citing and Referencing: video lecture now available

Knowing how to cite and reference properly is very important when you are preparing essays and other assignments. It’s also important to know how to cite properly in your dissertation. The Library and Centre for Learning Technology have made available a selection of online resources to help LSE students with this topic. Please visit:http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/insktr/citing_referencing.htm

A video lecture, a referencing best practice guide and further reading are available. This is a new initiative and if you have any feedback about the resources (particularly the video lecture) please do contact me.

June 18th, 2007|Social Media|1 Comment|

Universes & Pagecasts

I’m not sure who dreams up these names

CrimsonConnect was developed by two students at Harvard as an alternative to the institutional student portal: “my.harvard.edu”. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that they were asked to remove the course material they had been included as it wasn’t password protected. It was developed with the relatively new Netvibes Universe.

I’ve had a Netvibes account for a while but I don’t yet have the ability to create a public universe (invitation-only it seems!), so for now Netvibes remains like iGoogle & MyYahoo, a private personalised page.

Pageflakes, have been offering publicly sharable portal-type pages for a while, which they recently seem to have started calling Pagecasts…ugh. Here are a couple of examples:

Wine Feeds
LSE Blogs & my demo page

June 1st, 2007|Social Media|Comments Off on Universes & Pagecasts|

Explaining RSS

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while as it seems to be a topic that workshop participants don’t always get straight away.

A ‘blog trail’ just took me from Open as to… to We Ignore RSS at OUr Peril to OpenLearn_daily to RSS in Plain English
Tony Hirst – we ignore RSS at OUr peril – uses this analogy to explain RSS:

One way of thinking about content delivered by RSS, compared to delivering via a website, is to consider the world of film. Visiting a website to consume content is like going to the cinema. You have to physically visit a multiplex, for example, and locate the screen that is showing the film you want to see. Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a satellite TV channel. Your Skybox, or digibox, which you keep at home, of course, aggregates the channels you have subscribed to, each playing films on a particular theme. Each channel is like an RSS feed. You can choose which you subscribe to, and when. You can channel hop at your leisure. In the same way, users consume the RSS feeds they are subscribed to via a single application – either online (using a service such as Bloglines or Google Reader) or via a desktop client. Sky Movies sells convenience, pushes content to me. RSS is another push medium.

I can’t decide whether it’s over complicating it. Won’t most people get it with news website examples? RSS in Plain English from the Common Craft Show is an excellent low budget video that I’m certainly going to try and incorporate into my upcoming careers social software workshop but it might be something we can use in the e-literacy social software workshops too.

Click To Play

Alternative Version: Windows Media

May 3rd, 2007|Social Media, Tools & Technologies|3 Comments|

Collaborative Software and Web 2.0

The University of Edinburgh Information Systems working group has recently produced a report with the above title.

Quoting from its conclusion

“Collaborative technology such as IM, Wikis and blogs are fast becoming ubiquitous, and it is quite clear that the University, through Information Services and its partners, needs to act to ensure that it makes best use of such tools.

The report is well worth reading. It can be found here

Following on from the report is the University of Edinburgh’s Web 2.0 action plan. It is here

May 1st, 2007|Social Media, Teaching & Learning|1 Comment|

Was Pepys an early blogger?

“Was Pepys an early blogger?” ask LSE’s Tony Barnett in a recent ‘argument’ with the New Statesman’s Ben Davies!

But, most of all, the professor wanted to talk about blogs. “My son writes a blog – his latest entry talks about doing yoga and reading John Fowles’s The Magus. Now who’s going to be interested in that?”

“Mind you,” he answered himself, “my son has a female admirer called ML in Washington – perhaps it’s a new form of dating agency . . . or is it like those round robins you get at Christmas. We get one from a man in which he tells us about his hamster . . .”

“Perhaps,” I interjected, “blogs are a bit like diaries – at one end of the scale you get a daily record of a mundane life: ‘Got up, went to the toilet, made tea, read paper’, and at the other you have Pepys recording the fire of London?”

“Now that’s interesting,” he responded, “Was Pepys an early blogger? Did he write because he witnessed momentous things or were they momentous because he wrote about them?”

The journalist bought the chance to argue with Prof. Barnett for £90 in a charity auction. See Spat’ll be ninety quid in the New Statesman for the full story. The recently revamped NS uses a blog format for most of it’s site now with RSS feeds, commenting and links to other social software (post to del.icio.us etc).

March 23rd, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Was Pepys an early blogger?|

Terry Anderson on PLEs

I attended a CDE event today delivered by Terry Anderson of athabasca univeristy, canada’s equivalent of the OU. The session had been advertised as blogs and social software but the focus was Personal Learning Environments (based on social software). He described a PLE as a “web interface into the owners’ digital environment” and spoke about the institutional VLE being replaced by an institutional PLE (such as elgg) as a transitory step to individuals choosing their own PLEs. This year he has`been teaching a class using Moodle for content, elgg, branded as me2you for blogging and making connections, elluminate for real time stuff and furl for bookmarking and sharing web resources.

Couple of quick things – Athabasca are using moodle, he mentioned some recent data on web2.0 use from the jisc spire project which might be worth a look and a strongly recommended read was Seely Brown new learning environmnts (2006).

March 21st, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Terry Anderson on PLEs|

Some thoughts on Virtual research environments

I have been thinking about virtual research environments.

In this context I’m not so much interested in all singing all dancing high-end research environments but rather the provision of a set of tools that will assist academics in the kind of research collaboration I believe many of them are engaged in.

We have recently been asked to set up a WebCT course so that a group of academics worldwide can edit a book. We set up a wiki link to a web site for a European wide research project. Anthropology want some kind of virtual research environment to work with colleagues in China and elsewhere. We’ve also had several requests for blogs and wiki is linked to groups a PhD students or research groups. I also suspect that a number of academics are exploring the research potential of the Google suite of tools.

March 21st, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|1 Comment|

Eduspaces

The external hosted version of elgg has been relaunched as eduspaces. And I think elgg is defintely worth revisiting… I’ll certainly be having a more detailed look soon. Just need a project / interested academic… Since I last looked at it, with a group of PhDs about a year ago, and decided it wasn’t quite there, the following things have changed:

Look and feel
Much improved navigation – links to your own profile, blog, files, resources (RSS feeds) are always visible
Your profile is more configurable
Community blogs can be viewed as a Forum as well as a blog
Messaging system introduced
Browse users / communities as well as search & tag cloud
WYSIWYG editor for blog posts and messages

All in all, much improved…

Update: In today’s seminar Terry Anderson reminded me of one of key features of elgg which we identified when looking at it previously and that’s the permissions side of things. When posting to an elgg blog, adding a file or completing your profile you have complete control over who can see it – your content can be public, only seen by logged in users, completely private or restricted to an elgg community or a group of elgg contacts that you specify.

March 21st, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Eduspaces|

Embedding YouTube in the Blog

The other day I made a post with a link to a YouTube video. I tried to embed it using the code that YouTube supplies but this resulted in the blog looking like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it… and no video.

Today Charlie Beckett was asking how to do this for his POLIS blog so I’ve been looking into it. If you look at my earlier post you’ll see that it is now working but it’s a bit fiddly. I followed instructions posted by Matthias Zeller Memento which involves turning off the visual rich editor while you make the post. I’ve found that you only need to worry about your personal settings so a revision of the instructions would be:

Login to WordPress admin
Go to Users
Uncheck ‘Use the visual rich editor when writing’
Go to Write >> Write Post
Type your post
Paste the ‘embed’ code for your YouTube video in the write box (copied from YouTube)
Publish

And then repeat 2&3 to turn the visual editor back on!

March 16th, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Embedding YouTube in the Blog|

Ditch that Mouse & Keyboard

This is probably old technology now – recorded Feb 2006, SO last year – but I want one!

Watch the ‘Minority Reports’ Touch screen on YouTube.

I came across this clip on StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site that I haven’t seen before (and am finding a little confusing) but it beat del.icio.us in Dion Hinchcliffe’s 2006 Best of Web 2.0 which itself provides a useful list of web 2.0 sites.

March 9th, 2007|Social Media|2 Comments|