Oh blogs, how can I use thee? Let me count the ways. (Blogs Task)

Ok, I admit that is a pretty poor attempt at poetic license (my apologies to Elizabeth Barret Browning) but at times I guess I do go all gushy over the lovely goodness that is the internet. Blogs? Well yeah I do love them. They are such a versatile, useful tool.

I have eight Blogger blogs that I contribute to as an author and they all have different uses and agendas. I also have a couple of Wordpress blogs, a Squidoo and probably some other incarnations as well so I thought I would attack this task by auditing the blogs I currently have and discussing their main aim, their effectiveness in acheiving that aim, and assessing their future.

1. This blog (Learning Journey 4 Net11) has it's main purpose as an assessment method for a unit of study at OUA. Hopefully it will be effective in acheiving that aim...I guess my marks will be the indicator there. I imagine that the blog will lie dormant on completion of the unit but it will always be a record of my learning and part of my e-portfolio.
2. e-learning-central.blogspot.com This is my professional blog. I created it as a way to share the things I learn and experience connected with e-learning. Though it has not had a huge readership it has served it's purpose over the last year and I have received some great comments and feedback from it. I have been thinking about mothballing it though because I think there are so many other people doing similar things and often better.
3. CEDAR-project.blogspot.com I createed this blog as a means of communicating to the world the progress of an e-learning project that I was managing last year. I was very happy with the appearance and theme of this blog but I think it was never very successful in getting the message out about
4. My workplace has a blog on Blogger too which is private and only invited people can contribute to it. It has over 450 posts on it all to do with staff updating other staff on their movements and acheived goals. I really think this blog is underutilised and I have often told the rest of the staff the same. The posts are ususally responded to with things like "read" or "thanks" and I find this idea to be such a waste of time. Why bother putting anything if you can't contribute to the discussion? I attempted at one stage to get everyone to drop the blog and move to Ning but we soon moved back to the old blogger. Ning was just too out there for them :(
5. My first blog (be warned if you click the link you get my voki telling you all about it) was put together as part of a Learnscope Mini Project. It was my original learning and playing environment for blogs. This is what got me into blogging in the first place. I got so many real life complimentary comments about this and it really helped to launch my e-learning career. I haven't posted to it for ever and probably never will again as the project is long finished, but it will always be the original "rhysatwork" installation.
6. I created this wordpress blog and this Squidoo Lens as part of an experiment in boosting the "google juice" of an e-learning course. The idea was to harness the power of web2.0 to jetison an online Responsible Service of alcohol course to Page One on Google. It proved to be so effective that I sold ten courses on the first day. I blogged about it here. I plan on duplicating and enhancing the process with future courses and products.
7. My boss set up a couple of private Blogger blogs for use by students but they have not been embraced for reasons yet to be clarilied. I think this use is great (after all isn't that what this Learning Journey 4 Net 11 blog is all about?) but you really need to encourage the students and nurture them through the teething stages.
8. I am in the process of setting up a self hosted wordpress installation for the purpose of keeping our clients informed about the current business, new courses and other tidbits at my workplace. I went through the installation process some time ago and it has just been left in limbo since then. I have been getting a steady stream of spam comments posted to it though. I'm not sure what benefit these spammers think they are getting by posting to such an empty blog though.....
9. Finally I have been using the blog on my ning network to start to gather my e-portfolio together. I am not sure if this will prove to be the best platform for this use for blogging but I guess I can try it out and see how it goes.

There, my blogging audit is complete. I hope this meets the needs of the Blog Task in module 3 because I really need to get my bum into gear with my concepts assignment.......

Ahhh the internet. I love Web2.0 (Web2.0 task)

The curriculum asks you to compare this and this and well I gotta say puuuurrrrlease. This comparison bares no comparison, neither is it a very good example of what web2.0 is really about. There are few comments on any of the posts in the blinklist and I could see only a handful with any votes. So instead I am going to relay a brief story about my web2.0 experience of today.

For those avid readers and fellow webct forum participants, you may have noticed my enthusiasm when it comes to Twitter. Twitter is certainly one of the great things about web2.0. I have been advocating the use of it to enhance your Personal Learning Network and today my network came through in spades. I have been following the updates of @courosa (AKA Alec Courosa) for some time and I don't remember why or how I even started. Today he posted this invite to an live online session where George Siemens was speaking. w000t. How cool is that! An invite to hear the guy speak who's ideas I have been reading and writing about. But not just speak, participate in a discussion with other interested participants and George Siemens too. How would I ever have done that without web2.0?

Web2.0 is the chance to share, connect, network, learn and share some more. Web2.0 is an all singing all dancing version of web1.0. Imagine what web3.0 is gonna do.

So thanks @gsiemens for the experience and @courosa for getting me there and for those web2.0 poopooers and those Twitter naysayers- get on board!

Concept 33 Information and Attention

As Peter pointed out, I should be using this as a sounding board for my conceptual conundrum. So here goes.

What I have been reading and investigating is this notion of the Attention Economy. If you look in my delicious links you will see the things I have been marking (I must add, though I am a great believer in delicious and the abilities of it, I don't think I use it to it's full potential :( you will notice a huge lack of information in my bookmarks and a bad habit of not grouping my tags). The thing I have been musing over is the very different ideas surrounding the Attention Economy.

When I first read the description in the course notes I immediately thought of the value of my personal attention and the attention that people pay to me. I was thinking in a web2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Google, PLN (personal learning network) sense and I immediately thought of Siemens and connectivism. Though I did think a little bit about SEO (search engine optimisation) I must admit, first and foremost was this idea that the information (the product in attention economy) that I was after when I paid my attention or attention was paid to me (attention is the currency in the attention economy) was stored in the minds and previous experiences of my wider personal learning network.

What I am starting to formulate for my assignment is that I have identified three main ideas discussed on the web relating to the Attention Economy:

• Value of your own attention – Personal Value – using the meta data of your browsing history to increase your ability to search and view the Internet.
  

• Value of employees’ attention – Organisational Value – harnessing the information stored in the browsing history (Internet, local network and personal computer terminal) of your employees in order to gain a better understanding of how they spend their time at work.

• Value of readers’/visitors’/customers’ attention – Popular Value – harnessing the information about attention of the readers of your blog or website visitors in order to make money

It is my intention to posit another interpretation of Attention Economy where the value of attention is based on learning in a “Connectivist” (Siemens, 2004) sense:

• Value of friend’s/colleagues/peers attention – Educational Value – harnessing the information stored in the connections you have with people to gain knowledge and establish a solid Personal Learning Network.

So what do you think? Am I crazy to try to connect Siemens and Goldhaber? Has anyone else thought about this, blogged about it, read about it? Can I do it in 500 words? Is this the thrust of my uni course? If so I'd like to know.....

All not so quiet as it may appear.

Just a quick update for my legions of dedicated followers ;). Though all may appear quiet with the lack of blog posts, there is a maelstrom of activity building up on my laptop. The focus is on research and the delay is caused by two conflicting fronts. The desire to read more and more and the fear of putting my thoughts into an essay/assignment. For some unknown reason, posting to a blog or writing a comment comes so naturally to me, but when it comes to writing an assignment I am caught up in the academics of the exercise. The fear of writing it wrong and using the wrong format is palpable for me. Does it make sense? I think not. Is it rational? Hardly. Will I get over it and finish this dastardly deed? Stay tuned to find out........

HTML webpage task

The HTML task took me a couple of weeks to work through due to travelling and all sorts of interuptions. At the time of writing this, I havn't uploaded my webpage to the webct presentations area so I have not validated yet, but I thought I might quickly chuck together some words of reflection while it was still fresh in my head (and hopefully before the hoards get back from the beach :( ).

My experience with HTML in the past has been all self taught stumblings. I built my first page back in 2000/2001 I think. I was newly married and heading off on a journey and I started dabbling with writing a page and using it as wine journal and holiday log. I seem to remember I toiled away at it for a while but found the process of writing in HTML to be tedious and for me quite difficult and slow. Funnily enough, not much has changed... I use HTML code snippets quite a bit in my day to day job role to adjust things here and there but it is really at a very basic
level.

During the 26 lessons, which I thought were all quite useful, I was constantly interupted by all things holiday so the "sense of achievement I found at the end was more to do with finally having completed the task and finally being able to right this blog post than anything else. I don't think my page is particularly aestheticly pleasing or interesting, or that it fills any other purpose than to complete this task. I would have liked to spend some time to make a page which did have some other purpose but I simply could not spare/find the time.

I did learn quite a bit from having completed the 26 lessons. Possibly the main thing is that I like WYSIWYG editors much better than HTML. I think I must be a more visual person. I am happy to play around with the HTML in the background to make minor adjustments but I much prefer
moving things around visually than in code. I know all you professional web designers prefer to write in code (or at least the ones I have talked to) and that WYSIWYG is only for hacks like me, so call me lazy, but I prefer it that way.

What is the difference between blogging and HTML? Well blogging is writing a web log, HTML is the code that holds that page together. HTML is the bricks and the blog is the building. I much prefer writing a blog about HTML than writing a blog in HTML.

Incidentally, I was given a text on CSS for Christmas (edit.. I just did a google on the name of the text and found THE WHOLE BOOK is available online!!! It is really good so here is the link ) and I was hoping to integrate some CSS into my web page for the course but I doubt I will have the time for that. I will give it a try though and let you all know how it goes. One reason I was doing this course in the first place was to learn more about HTML and CSS and I guess I have already done that but there is soooo much further to go...