Group blog functions as a group memory.
Our top five this year (two tied for fifth place):
Making use of the comment function and the emoticons.
Group blog in action http://conclave.open.ac.uk/iet-students/?p=75
Using the blog as a research journal.
Over 30 different uses.
My top five:
Blogs are searchable by word and date.
They are accessible via any Internet-linked computer or via PDA.
You don’t have to put your rss feeds into a blog.
These RSS feeds are on my netvibes page http://www.netvibes.com/
Lots of connections to people in IET: Gill, Anesa, Juliette, Alan…
Blogs can take the form of an online diary or journal.
Or they can be composed almost entirely of RSS feeds
‘A website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in reverse chronological order’.
You can add pictures, or links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
There’s a seminar coming up that I’m planning to go to on the semiotics of Powerpoint. In the meantime I found this blog (the URL’s too long, so I’ve had to break it up)http://homepage.mac.com/lesposen/
blogwavestudio/LH20040807225237/LHA20060422204527/index.html
piece about how Keynote (see promotional pic) is infinitely better than Powerpoint – it frees you from endless blobby lists and transitions and ‘it doesn’t get in your way’. Yes, that’s just what good software should do – it shouldn’t get in your way.
I read another blog post somewhere about making text-free Powerpoint presentations. Don’t use text – just think how wh
at you say can be represented in graphic form.
But how would this work with the OU brand template?
John Lanchester, Guardian Weekend, 4 Nov 2006 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1940641,00.html
‘Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, “email’s main function is an instrument of torture”. In civilian life, I increasingly ntice that people don’t actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past.’
Lots of interesting things came out of the OU Research Day. I liked the speaker who pointed out that the RAE is an end not a means. Interesting to view it as a tool, not a task.
My reading of the DZX222 Help Conferences suggests a problem built into the online course idea. These days, we expect sotware and gadgets to be intuitive. If they’re not we get frustrated, angry and, more than likely, give up.
Now, DZX222 has a detailed set of printed materials, as you would expect from an OU course. Do students read them? No. Then they go to the Help conference, or somewhere else in FirstClass and start asking questions that are clearly answered in their course materials. Not only that, they don’t read other postings in the Help conference, or the FAQs posted at the top of that confeence, so they ask the same things again and again.
I think this links to the HeatMaps that I blogged a month or so ago. That showed that people who went to the library website tended to go automatically to the Help button, even when the link to what they required was on the Home screen.
I suppose this could be a digital natives v digital immigrants thing, but I don’t think so (not only because I don’t like the whole natives/immigrants analogy). I think people like to have technology / software explained to them by someone who knows, as they work through it. That’s what these students are trying to access. That’s why the Help conference is so useful.
And FirstClass isn’t intuitive. It’s got a bizarre threading system that I still haven’t managed to figure out. You can’t choose to file messages in a way that makes sense to you. You have to trawl through a lot of irrelevant stuff. And because the OU is in the process of migrating to Moodle, they won’t fix it.
No sooner do I vent in my blog about my interrupted epistolary interviews than both interviewees get back to me with answers.
🙂 🙂 🙂
