Blogs can also be used to analyse data by making use of the ‘Categories’ function
Nigel Robson in AACS cloned our group blog for us
We now have 29 blog categories
http://conclave.open.ac.uk/iet-students-analysis/
(categories are shown on the right).
Blog management tools provide an overview of these.
Blogs can be used as data.
Anesa, Gill and I are studying our own blog and our group blog
Gill is collecting data on informal mobile learning http://conclave.open.ac.uk/naturetrailblog/
This can be contrasted with the data collected in a wiki http://schome.open.ac.uk/wikiworks/index.php/The_Open_University_Nature_Trail
woodleywise, originally uploaded by ebbsgrove.
IET bloggers include Alan (above, if you couldn’t guess)
Anesa
Gill
Juliette
Patrick
Steve
Is this a virtual community of practice?
It’s easy to follow up comments in other people’s blogs.
This is a page from the blog of Tony Hirst, who’s a lecturer in the Technology department.
I referred to it on 15 September and again on 9 November
Also discussed it with Steve and various others
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?
