education building

Following up yesterday on a smaller talk I did a few weeks back on tagging for university web applications, I was fortunate to be able to give a full one hour seminar on tagging for educators in SCoPE. Quite a hot topic these days what with all the Web 2.0 apps flying around out there, this presentation was part of a larger 3 week seminar on Social media in education. How tags can be used in an educational context was the main focus of the session which you should be able to listen to the full recording of here, via the elluminate service we used to record it. There was some great discussion questions and a few new services emerged on the radar that deserve some linkage.

Scholar

Blackboard Scholar is built right into the Blackboard Learning System, for easy integration of relevant, reliable resources and dynamic streams from Scholar, directly into the course.

Peerworks

Peerworks is an open source project that is building content classification tools to help online browsing, collaboration, and social discovery.

Both of these look to be useful applications for educators and both of them incorporate tagging into the user experience. It was also fun to share with educators from around the world, and meet some new people from my own back yard. One of the participants in fact resides a stones throw from my own office, the blog Data Designs from from Therese Weel’s was a welcome addition to my RSS reader. Always good to know there are fellow bloggers right here at SFU. (and yes, one post per month still allows me to call myself a blogger)

saw a poster for this up here today, PUNK - Words, music, politics, influence

http://www.sfu.ca/punkconference/

North America’s first international scholarly conference on punk will be held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, on April 24-26, 2008. The conference will be held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre, located in downtown Vancouver, close to historic Gastown and the original site of Vancouver’s first punk club, the Smiling Buddha. The conference will help promote the establishment of a punk archive at SFU’s Bennett Library

Its amazing that I didn’t come across this sooner, but I was pleased to see the conference organizers (Paul Budra and Stephen Ogden) are using a blog as the main point of contact for web communication.

http://blogs.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/punk

The SFU library has been running a number of blogs for awhile using b2evolution.net , which seem to be working well. This one will definitely be worth keeping an eye on over the coming months as preparation heats up. I may even consider a contribution on the topic of my masters thesis or something, particularly if I can get a few of my old cohorts together for another kick at the speakers. fuckinhellya!

It is so rare that we get to do a podcast in the LIDC that I am pleased to post a link to this exceptional series on Voice and Presentation Skills from our in-house Teaching Enhancement Specialist, Sarah Louise Turner. Produced as a companion to the Voice and Presentation Skills Workshop (which will be running again in the fall,) Sarah covers the essentials of breath work and presentation technique in this easy to listen to, six-part series which you can subscribe to in itunes. What was so nice about setting this up was the ease with which it was done. Of course working with some finely recorded, original audio didnt hurt either, but once those were in place it was simple matter of uploading them to a local server, and then linking to them from the Voicewerx Blog that Sarah has also set up and maintains. Pointing this blogs RSS feed to Feedburner, (now owned by google excuse me?!) a site that processes the feed into its final podcasty form and provides the necessary links, formatting etc. yay!  As far as the production goes, I think it still needs a bumper, with some familiar music that could be used to open every episode, and perhaps a bit more of an informal introduction from the hosts, but listening to these audio clips will inspire you to use your voice in ways you have never thought of before.

Be sure to check it out and come back for more as I expect this site to have some very interesting updates in the months ahead.

over on the the ed tech post things are getting all gussied up, no doubt for the pending Northern Voice jam next month. This is EXACTLY the reason I’m putting some effort in here at the moment. gotta look my best!

But really, who the heck would even know i AM blogging half the time, what with my completely undisciplined habits and tendency to invest effort into posting on side projects or the other various communities in which i participate? I’m blogging here right now in fact while the blog i actually POINT everybody too goes neglected. jeez, and theres also time suckers like this.
Somehow, i do like having all these different places to riff off the odd thought once in awhile, but if i am not going to commit to the “whole blogosphere” thing, perhaps i should reconsider my modus operandi altogether. I’m just saying I need to get my act together, and putting these new “SFU templates” to the test seems like a worthwhile excuse for the effort.
More on NV later, for now I just want to link to another of my co-bloggers in the LIDC who did NOT choose to jump in with me to test this official look, (which I have no real permission to be doing btw). Amyyy is using the same wordpress services as I am, yet she has chosen a completely different look of her own. you wouldn’t even know she works for SFU if you were not reading this. I think its quite smart actually for many obvious reasons, although I have a feeling we’ll be seeing alot more of her in the whole blogosphere this year.

The risks of me blogging like this are great, I hope I’m responsible enough to handle them.

OK, so its true this blog never even really got off the ground to begin with, but I sure am glad its here now to adopt and show off the brand spanking new S.F.U. look and feel for Wordpress. This template was built by yet another in a string of brilliant Co-op students we seem to recruit here at S.F.U. Thanks David! (do you got a myspace or something i can link too?) I’d say each one is better than the last although that would just be rude.

There is no official blogging infrastructure here at our university, although when there is (there will be), I imagine (hope) it will look something like this. The idea here is to demonstrate that a blog can in fact be used as part of a universities ‘official’ public communications in a way that both integrates with the presentation strategy, but also adds fresh and diverse content to the flood of google results that may result with any random query. If I would just use the thing once in awhile it might help.

We are getting ready to launch a new blog for Student Services using this very template, which I hope will be a welcomed addition to the communications tools they are currently using. I hope the students will like it too. This would \lmost be a first for S.F.U. except for the fact that Career Services (a division of Student Services) has been blogging their little hearts out for the last two semesters. yay Career Services!

It seems this blogging thing may be actually be beginning to take a foothold here in on our beloved mountain.

Update: Sept: 27.  This workshop has been cancelled due to lack of registrants.  aw shucks.  next time.

So I have been keeping this under wraps, what with so much going on this summer, and honestly, I didnt even really believe it was going to happen, but yes it is official. No getting out of it now. I received my conference material in the mail today for the upcoming Management Skills in Advanced Technology (MSAT) 20th Anniversary event.

I have been asked to present on the subject of blogs and social networking etc. The title of the talk I am giving is called; This is not your Daddy’s Internet! Blogs—Podcasts—Relationship Networking and will be filled with intersting case studies, useful examples, and some hands on activities to get people into it. This is the blurb.

Terms like “cyberspace”, and “information superhighway” were effective metaphors in the early days of the web, and were needed to convey the paradigm shift occurring because of this new form of communication. The ideas of asynchronous communication (email), massive media accessibility (p2p), and linking to create networks of content were foreign to most people and these terms provided a logical “bricks and mortar” basis upon which to build an understanding of the internet. They have also held back its progress ever since.

The web is less and less a place you go to – increasingly it comes to you. It is “live”, “immediate”, and “present”, using technologies such as cell phones and other mobile devices. At the same time, the activities people do on the internet are changing as tge implications of social software begin to seep into the mainstream. In the early days of the internet there was an implicit understanding that the internet was going to be the ultimate source of information (Wikipedia, check.), where you could find the answers to every question (Google, check.), and people would be hiding under the auspices of false identities – pseudonyms – to protect their identity and privacy. Barely a decade old, and it is all that and much more. Sites such as MySpace are becoming the corner store parking lots of our youth where you hang out with friends, gossip, flirt, and try to stand out from the crowd.