Website and wiki self-publishing through Google Sites
"Google Sites makes it easy for anyone to create and manage simple, secure group websites. Getting started is easy, and there are a number of helpful templates. More than just a visual theme, site templates can include site structure and navigation, custom page templates, embedded gadgets, and more. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website."
(Google)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Engagement Commons: A new tool to empower civic engagement
"With the explosion of open data, we've seen a proliferation of civic software aiming to get community information on everything from road closures to restaurant inspections into people's hands.
The apps have great potential for engaging people in improving their communities. But often the people closest to the data - city leaders and staffers - have a difficult time finding and weeding through all the software to determine what's right for both their needs and their community.
That's why we're building Engagement Commons, a comprehensive catalogue of civic engagement software. It's a project of Civic Commons, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Technology for Engagement Initiative, which funds projects that use technology to inspire on-the-ground action."
(Nick Grossman, Civic Commons Executive Director, 11 January 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web
"While mass-mediated communication technologies have empowered the institutional, participatory media offer powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity. However, alternate voices do not emerge from these technologies untouched by their means of production. Instead, these communications are amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression. In this situation, any human expressive behavior that deploys communication technologies suggests a necessary complicity. Insofar as individuals hope to participate in today's electronically mediated communities, they must deploy the communication technologies that have made those communities possible. In so doing, they participate in creating a telectronic world where mass culture may dominate, but an increasing prevalence of participatory media extends into growing webs of network-based folk culture. "
(Robert Glenn Howard, 2008)
1). Robert Glenn Howard (2008). "Electronic Hybridity: The Persistent Processes of the Vernacular Web" Journal of American Folklore, Volume 121, Number 480, Spring 2008, pp. 192-218. DOI: 10.1353/jaf.0.0012
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
dis-integrating the LMS: using best-of-breed tools
"Teachers and learners should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to find and use the most appropriate and effective best-of-breed tools outside the LMS. For example, they can post slide presentations on SlideShare, create group collaboration sites on Google, stream and archive lectures on UStream, and build shared resource collections with Delicious. Such tools can be aggregated via course blogs, wikis, or mashup sites like Netvibes.
Some institutions have made significant, pioneering efforts to bridge the gap between the institutional network and the web by integrating Web 2.0 tools with administrative systems. For example, three years ago the University of Mary Washington deployed an instance of WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) as an alternative teaching and learning platform (UMW Blogs). UMW's blog platform blends the LMS and PLN paradigms by integrating their WPMU instance with the university directory, enabling the creation of blogs that automatically enroll students in courses as 'members' of class blogs created by instructors."
(Jonathan Mott, 2010)
Mott, J. (2010). 'Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network.' Educause Quarterly 33(1).
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch'
"It is counter-intuitive in the extreme, but young researchers are failing to make use of so-called 'emergent technology', such as Web 2.0 tools, to support their work.
A three-year study by the British Library, Researchers of Tomorrow, is tracking the research behaviour of doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994 - dubbed 'Generation Y'. ...
Interim results, released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable."
(Times Higher Education, 5 November 2009)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
