subverted links

Excellent, make that 5 copies of the book winging their way to Melbourne just as soon as its printed :)

Blog based communities – explaining the basics

Have been having some excellent conversations around the uses of blogs in community and organisational contexts of late. Especially so with Andrew, Mike & David and it was David who suggested that we needed a simple way to explain exactly what community / organisational blogging and blogging as a whole is… to those who maketh the decisions ;)

So, as a first draft I’ve come up with the following three slides, designed to be shown rather than sent (possibly with some live demo at the same time) so I’ve added a little commentary.

the power of blog based communities
This is fairly obvious, the basic point that I want to make is the straight off the bat difference between blogs and discussion boards and how very simple blogs are. Obviously in an organisational context you wouldn’t even have people signing up, so something along the lines of just publish & communicate” might work better here… but if you’re talking about a community then obviously you’re going to have sign up. Decided not to bother going into too much detail about why you’d be doing this in the first place… I guess if you can’t convey why you want people to be communicating online then you’re probably best off stopping here ;)
user blog experience
This is fairly obviously the meat in the sandwich (or should I say protein). It’s basically my answer to “What is a blog?” question together with some explanation. The black boxes represent the primary way in which users would engage with these technologies. Obviously I’ve left out ‘web’ for the first 3 (going anti-clockwise) – this is to focus on the how people get involved rather than what they do once they are involved.
different methods of aggregation
Finally I wanted to really bring it home around how organic and pre-designed communities can form (and be ‘formed’), the huge number of different tools and approaches that can work for this and the absolutely critical nature of this part of the process. You can have the best ‘blogging’ system in the world but without this stuff you might as well just give them open office. Heh.

subverted links

On the Cost of Selling an Enterprise Learning System
Via Stephen I’m not just pointing to this because we share the same name (how odd is that!). The same goes for Michael’s commentary(apart from the name bit)

  • AkoNet New Zealand – NZ's 1st for learning and communicating
    Outstanding new site from Lynsey and Marica (Blog Hui folk), especially like the homepage design. Offering courses, research, training and more. Way to go guys!
  • The National Bullying Survey 2006 – By Bullying Online
    Very worthwhile survey into the effects of bullying in UK schools asking Pupils, Parents, Adults and Teachers to tell their stories. Be a good sort and go and help them out!

    • Melbourne Social Software Lunch

    There are some seriously fascinating people in Melbourne (and briefly coming down from Sydney :) and I was lucky enough to have a great lunch today with Andrew Mitchell, Matt Moore, Michael Specht, Shawn Callahan & Andrew Rixon (who have, IMO, jobs to die for!)

    We definitely need to have a big Melbourne day or two confab soon… too much on and too much effort involved in a big conference but I reckon we should be able to bootstrap something really cool provided we can get the venue.

    Dr Mike Farmer enters the blogosphere!

    Mike FarmerHopefully this is the first of the many would-be-bloggers in my family… my dad!

    He’s the author of Using the Internet in Secondary Schools and (with my stepmother) Supporting Information and Communications Technology: A Handbook for Those Who Assist in Early Years Settings so if you’re into that kind of thing then, heck, you should enjoy it :)

    And he’s trying to get kids podcasting     … strange similarities anyone :)

    Back to podcasting. I’m running a project in Birmingham UK where we are putting computers into family homes and linking them to the Internet (stop screaming its a filtered link – the same as all Birmingham schools get). The area where we are operating is one of the poorest in the UK with home computer access being 1 in 10 before the project began. One aspect of the project is that the parents have to agree to be trained on its use and the training is done by the school and their children. What we are now looking to is building on the community that already exists using the communicating ability of the IT medium. Email seems to be very slow on picking up. The kids use email (hotmail accounts) but the parents are very reluctant users. We were thinking slightly of blogs but to be honest if email sin’t going to catalyse an IT talking community I don’t think blogs would. As the community is also 75% Pakistan or Bangladeshi I would suspect the blog would have to be an audio one. However a weekly podcast from the school built by the pupils could be just the catalyst we need.

    Anyway, naturally this is a must subscribe if only because you’ll get to see edublogs getting flamed by the sire of the founder:

    I find this very frustrating. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do now? Ive clicked on quite a few buttons and they are fairly incomprehensible. I would like to see some other peoples blogs but I have no idea how to get to them. Isn’t there something about getting feeds from other blogs…how? What about searching .. again all I do is search my own blog. A bit silly.

    So here’s the feed. Go subscribe and agree with him about how crud this all is ;)

    Now, just to get my sisters, Laura and Tessa blogging (Tess has already got onto suicide girls but I seriously reckon she needs a site of her own!)

    nonscholae.org

    Well, admittedly it took me a little longer than the two days promised (whoops) but I’ve got a working draft for nonscholae.org up and running at, you guessed it, nonscholae.org :)

    non scholae


    As you’ll be able to see when you visit the only area I’ve paid any attention too is the front (static) page and a basic structure.

    Given that this is very much a community effort I figured it’d be best to stop there and ask for, in the first instance:

    -Feedback / alternatives for the front page in terms of text
    -Feedback / alternatives for the different areas of the site (with suggestions for other areas)
    -WordPress Theme suggestions (or ideas how we can make the existing theme nice – I quite like the new one for wordpress.org but don’t know if it’s available)
    -Graphical representations of the name (a nonscholae or NonScholae or non scholae logo basically)

    and most importantly:

    -Hands up for contributors (basically this means that I’ll add you as an editor so you’ll be able to edit existing pages (like resources), post to the blog and all that… it also means that you’ll be included in future group email etc. discussions… I know some people that I’d just pop in as a matter of course but I thought I’d ask anyway)

    After we’ve ironed that out I figure we can get to work on the real content and as that won’t be dependent on me it’ll probably happen a lot quicker :)

    Please feedback and let me know through the comments or email.