Here Comes Everybody

My summer reading task for work was to get through Clay Shirky’s Here Comes everybody. I have just finished it and have to say I really enjoyed reading it. I want to summarise the good things I picked up from it here before the sunshine and Pimms dulls the memory.

1. I’ve always loved Alexrod’s work but hadn’t thought about applying tit-for-tat to social networks before now.

2. Ridiculously easy group formation is the key to the changes we are seeing online in social networks now. Seb Parquet

3. Failure is the way to learn, lower the barrier to even making the decision to try something and fail faster, learn quicker and cheaper (‘failure for free’).

4. Flash Mobs – cool stuff, especially liked the example of the original flash mob in New York.

5. Much of what Shirky writes about does not rely on fancy technology, email, discussion boards and mobile phones have paved the way.

6. Small worlds: Duncan Watts. Need to look at this more closely for our own projects

7. Bridging and bonding social capital is something we need to think about for our small worlds project to bring our networks together. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

TouchGraph is very pretty

TouchGraph is very pretty. I came across it whilst wandering around online (I find I regularly suffer from obsessive link-clicking until I forget what I came online for). I wondered into the Science 2.0 friend feed room, got distracted by the edubloggers room and saw a link for a list of PLE maps and diagrams (posted by Mike Bogle), and was amused to find Alan’s diagram on there. I saw beautiful one created by D’Arcy Norman and just had to see how it had been made (see how one things leads to another?).

Anyway, a quick play determined that it probably wasn’t the tool I had hoped it would be. Initially I had thought it could be used for students to quickly create a map/ visual representation of their personal learning environment, but it is powered by google search, so not as specific as it would need to be. I tried several different searches (jobadge/ Jo Badge with and without quotes) but none of them really represented what i was using. I tried ‘ajcann’ instead, and got a fairer map – the one shown above, it includes Alan’s slideshare account, twitter, microbiologybytes and technorati ID’s butmost the links coming off these centres are not related – for example, from twitter, the links are not to the people who follow Alan or are his friends.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: PLE

The evolution of my PLE

Alan set me some homework while I am frittering my time away at home this summer. He wanted to know if my PLE at work and at home were different. I have actually concluded that they are not different from each other at all. I am not sure what to think about that. Perhaps it tells me that I need to get some interest outside of work!

However, it did start me thinking about my first ventures into thinking about the tools I used online as a PLE. I started a wikispaces wiki, jople (natty name eh?!) mainly to play with wikispaces, but mostly in response to Alan’s tutorial on PLEs. I came up with something that looked like this:

Jo's PLE in January 2008

I thought I would redraw it. Only 7 months later, I was quite amazed by how it had changed…

Jo's PLE July 2008

When drawing this second PLE, the main thing that struck me (and that I had trouble conveying in the diagram, I am a bulleted list kinda girl), is that there are many more connections between the tools I am using now. Flock has been instrumental in this, helping me to bring lots of different strands together. Start ingof this blog, and others, has also changed the way I use delicious to create RSS feeds on particular topics. Pulling an RSS feed into google reader from my delicious network has been extremely interesting and provided a real wealth of information that I haven’t accessed before.

Of course, the biggest change has been using twitter. Without it, I doubt I would have discovered or used half of the new tools I now use regularly.

p.s using Zemanta Firefox extension for WP on this post. It is tremendously cool. I found it reviewed on Doug’s blog that I started reading because I followed Doug on twitter.

here comes my summer

All of a sudden, the school holidays are upon us. As my twin daughters started school in September, this is my first proper School Summer Holiday. I was lucky enough to switch to a term time only contract when they started school, so from Monday I will be off work until 28 August. Lucky you – I hear you cry! Well, I’m not sure about that yet – we will have to see if 6 weeks of childcare will leave me unhinged.

One serious issue for me is that part of the reason I justified moving to a term time contract was that it was quiet over the summer, and the academics I support didn’t want to know about plagairism and blackboard in July and August. However, I forgot that this was the time that I got all my work ‘housekeeping’ done. So, this week has been a mad rush of updating and report writing and tidying. Some of it will no doubt go home with me in the end!

I hope to keep twittering and blogging over the summer, so apologies in advance if I am moaning about camping in wet Devon or just moaning about being at home.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: summer