Category Archives: blogging

EduBlogs Nominations

Last day to nominate for the Edublog awards, here are my nominations:

1. Best individual blog – Learning with ‘e’, Steve Wheeler – I always enjoy reading Steve’s blog postings and more often then not will inspire me to write a response. Other blogs that were in the running include Josie Fraser’s SocialTech blog and Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus. The key here was which blog did I read on a regular basis and which inspired me the most.

2. Best group blog – Pontydysgu – Lots of interesting stuff.

3. Best new blog – Dave Foord’s Weblog – Dave has a passion for using technology to support and enhance learning, he is always coming up with new ideas. A close second was Joss Winn’s Learning Lab my third choice was City College Norwich’s …from the elab…

4. Best resource sharing blog – Dave Foord’s Weblog – Dave has a passion for using technology to support and enhance learning, he is always coming up with new ideas.

5. Most influential blog post – Monkey Business – has inspired me and others to write responses, we have even recorded a podcast. F-ALT was a close second.

6. Best teacher blog – OllieBray.com – I enjoy reading Ollie Bray’s blog.

7. Best librarian / library blog – Paul Walk’s Weblog – I met Paul Walk through Twitter, met him in person on a train to the JISC Conference. I always enjoy reading his blog entries and they make me reflect on my practice and how we run our Library service.

8. Best educational tech support blog – eFoundations – this was difficult, I was torn between Andy Powell and Pete Johnston’s eFoundations blog and Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus

9. Best elearning / corporate education blog – Andy’s Black Hole – Andy Black of Becta’s blog is always interesting. Geoff Stead’s moblearn: the mobile generation is learning … was a close second.

10. Best educational use of audio – Pontydysgu – Nominated for their use of live internet radio.

11. Best educational use of video / visual – Mark Kramer on Qik

12. Best educational wiki – F-ALT Wetpaint – this was an amazing part of ALT-C this year and has to be commended to bringing the Fringe to an educational conference and inspiring others to do the same at conferences across the world.

13. Best educational use of a social networking service – Jaiku, it’s the whole community – Though Twitter may be popular, the community of practice I have on Jaiku make me nominate Jaiku over Twitter. Flickr came close,  but it lacked the educational use for me.

16. Lifetime Achievement – Josie Fraser – what can be said about Josie, she has inspired others including me to rethink the way we use the web and the services we use.

50,000 Visits

Well the number of visits to the blog has gone past 50,000.

Yay!

50000 Visits

I have to admit I was expecting to pass the 50,000 mark back in September, but after a quiet summer the number of visits dropped off quite fast and it’s only now that I am getting the traffic levels back up.

Since the blog started (again, well I did have a WCC blog) I have started to add a lot more video and audio.

Over the next few months, the podcasting should become a regular feature and after my experiences doing the JISC e-Learning Online Conference I hope to do a lot more video.

So that’s 50,000 visits, here’s to the next 50,0000.

So are we seeing the death throes of blogging?

So is blogging dead, is it no more?

Will Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku mean that people will no longer blog.

A Wired article says

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Following on from the article in Wired on the death of blogging, there has been much discussion on Twitter about the article and the subsequent piece on the Today programme on Radio 4 and Rory Cellan-Jones’ blog entry.

So here I am blogging about the death of blogging?

What do you think?

Personally I think that Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku and other services have in many ways supplanted and replaced the personal blog, you know the kind that talk about family gatherings, taking the dog for a walk, going to the pub, what I did on my holiday kind of thing.

Where I think there is still room for blogging is the more in-depth articles, technical, reflective, opinion pieces.

In the same way that radio did not kill newspapers, and television did not kill radio, and the internet did not kill television. Blogging will not be killed by Twitter, Twitter won’t kill blogging in the same way it won’t kill e-mail or instant messaging.

It’s just another tool that allows you to communicate and learn in ways in which it isn’t possible via blogging and e-mail.

I see e-mail as one to one communication, blogging as one to many, whilst Twitter and Jaiku is much more a many to many form of communication.

I still read newspapers, I still listen to the Today programme on Radio 4, I watch BBC News on the TV, I look at the websites of traditional broadcast media for news, I read and subscribe to blogs, and I also find out about news via Twitter.

Twitter is just an additional tool or medium in which to communicate, share, collaborate and learn. Twitter hasn’t killed blogging it’s just another way of doing things.

What do you think?

Academic uses of Twitter

Nice article on some of the academic uses of Twitter which I found out about after reading a blog entry on Twitter from Lindsay Jordan.

Academic users of Twitter

The article by Dave Parry says:

I thought I would explain how I use it, specifically for academic related uses, and teaching.

Includes a really interesting observation on the way that learners used Twitter for classroom chatter.

The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class. Most of these conversations were not directly related to class material, but many were tangentially related. Because the students had the shared classroom experience when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time it often got twittered. This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the “real world.”

The whole article is well worth reading if you are wondering about the academic benefits of Twitter.

In case you are still wondering what Twitter is…

One thing about Twitter is that you need to “do it” to really understand it.

Many of these ideas would also work for Jaiku (and in some cases with the threaded commenting could work better).

A decade of blogging

Well 17th December 1997 saw the first use of the term, weblog, from which blog, blogging and blogosphere all arise from. The BBC reports on the history of the blog:

The word was created by Jorn Barger to describe what he was doing with his pioneering Robot Wisdom web page.

The word was an abbreviation for the “logging” of interesting “web” sites that Mr Barger featured on his regularly updated journal.

A decade on and blog-watching firm Technorati reports it is tracking more than 70 million web logs.

So this is one of these 70 million and here’s to the next ten years.

A decade of blogging

Google buys out Jaiku

Those of you who follow me online (or just plain bump into me online) or have read this
blog before will know that I am a fan of micro-blogging and specifically Jaiku.

So I read with interest today that Google has bought out Jaiku.

Exciting news: Google has bought Jaiku today. What does that mean? First and foremost, we’re of course continuing to support our existing users. So fear not: your Jaiku phone, the Web site, IM, SMS, and API will continue to work normally.

Interesting that Google went for Jaiku and not Twitter. Twitter has certainly had a lot more press than Jaiku, maybe it was a price thing, maybe it wasn’t.

What is also interesting is that Google already own a similar service, Dodgeball!

I do feel that micro-blogging has real educational potential, if not for learning, certainly for administration or even marketing.

Alas one of the side effects of this purchase is that…

That said, new user sign-ups have been limited for the time being.

But…

Existing users will still be able to invite their friends 

So if you know me and have been thinking about joining Jaiku, fear not, want an invite let me know.