Practical Social Media

The second of the two presentation is an introduction to practical social media through the eyes of one practitioner… me. This is a record of the presentation from ustream.

practical social media

Open Education

The presentation on open education was a tour of different projects that deal with the differing ideas of openness. One can think of openness in the sense of making content available (as in the case of the Open Courseware initiative at MIT) and the other being openness of the learning process itself. These links are from the presentation and give an introduction to the topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_education

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-001Fall-2008/CourseHome/index.htm

And, if you like… a quote via @jonmott of BYU. Copied from http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/quote-of-the-moment/ and written by Foucault.

A view of dave's ticker page

What does it look like?

Well, the main ticker webpage is a stream of different UPEI people talking. You can post a picture of yourself, describe who you are and what you do. In other communities of this sort, people work together to solve their problems and share relevant professional information. That’s what I’m hoping happens here.

Our current test project?

If you go in right now, you’ll see mostly international students talking. They are part of the EAP (English for Academic Preparation) and some of the teachers in that program are experimenting with using it to help their students practice conversational English. Feel free to interact with them (helps them practice) or start your own unrelated conversation.

Uh… why would i do this?

It is a really good way of using a network to support your work. You can rely on the rest of the UPEI community to answer tricky little questions (“how do I get excel to…” or “where on campus do i…”) without bothering one specific person. If you call someone to ask a question, you’ve got the potential of distracting that particular person. If you post it to the ticker, you are more likely to encounter support staff who are committed to answer your questions or someone who happens to be there at that time for another reason who happens to have the answer to your question. They may not answer it right away, but you’ll get an email if they respond to you later with the answer.

And… it builds community.

Wont all this crammed writing wreck proper writing?

Well… research says it doesn’t. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/09/23/tech-internet-chat-speak-teens.html?ref=rss This article from the CBC last week suggests that people who use short forms well are just as likely to use more traditional forms effectively. Knowing how and when to write a certain way has always been necessary, now, maybe, more than ever.

Ok. So how do i do it?

Go to http://upei.ca/ticker. Sign in with your UPEI username and password. Write something in the big white box on the top of the page and hit send. That’s the way to start. After that… you can check out the the http://ic.upei.ca/ticker/doc/faq and click on things. If people want, I can create a more complete tutorial down the road. Just let me know.

What are the rules?

These are simple. Nor personal attacks (or they will be deleted and dealt with depending on severity). Respect people and treat each other professionally.

new menus screencast Click Me!