Life’s been busy lately, what with starting a new job and all… but this week I have been lucky enough to attend the ALT-C conference. It’s my favourite type of conference because: I know I have at least one thing in common with everyone :) nearly everyone is friendly and
Back in August 2009 I wrote a post explaining how to shorten a URL in order to share it on Twitter and other social networks. When every character counts, as in the 140 characters permitted per tweet, then a URL can take up far too many characters, and in the
It’s not always easy to engage a large audience interactively in a learning session. Yet we know that active learning and engagement improves understanding, prompts reflection, provides feedback so that the tutor can tune the content of the session, and has many other positive effects on learning. Asking questions however,
It’s amazing how much continuing professional development you can do for free. The web has always been a great place for sharing knowledge and expertise, and there are new ways to do this appearing all the time. It’s almost always the case that someone will have written a blog post
Ning has added two good features for helping your network avoid spammers. Better moderator tools are essential if Ning is to compete in the market for paid-for community platforms. I’m glad to see that they’re beginning to offer good value with their well-priced new services. The first new feature prevents
Back in November 2009 I wrote about the planning necessary for a successful webinar and suggested that one of the most important thing to do before a webinar is to test and test again – the software, your equipment and the speakers’ equipment. If possible all attendees equipment should be
Now that Ning has announced that it is phasing out free services, it’s time to take another look at our Ning communities and to establish what might be a reasonable alternative to Ning. For my longest-running Ning network, ELESIG, we are prepared: a hard-working group from this community of practice
Sometimes I am accused of being a pessimist: I always treat technology, especially wonderful new inventions, services and applications, with a healthy pinch of salt. So I laughed a bit hollowly to read that Ning are phasing out their free social networks (as well as reducing the number of their
I was intrigued to see that in Canada they are reporting that the use of social networking and other web tools such as Twitter and Facebook is damaging the quality of students’ English skills. Apparently academics at Waterloo University, Ontario and Simon Fraser University, British Columbia are finding that many students
Rhonas Sharpe has made a couple of posts about ELESIG (one of the academic networks I manage the online space for) on her blog. She asked members what benefit they found from the experience of being a member of the community, and got some great answers: From Esyin Chew’s “I