I was sitting in my (somewhat compact) office at home this morning, preparing for an interview this afternoon, busy making some mental notes about the company and the job specification, etc. when I found myself wandering off on a train of thought whilst looking at the vast array of books and CDs on the shelves.
How, in an age of iPods and Kindles, can you form a cultural opinion of someone? Whenever I’ve been to someone’s house, I quickly scan their bookshelves and CD collections in order to find out what kind of person they are. (I’m sure most of you will have done that at sometime or other)
Will I now have to surreptitiously pick up their Kindle and rummage through it whilst they’re making coffee in the kitchen? Should I add them as a ‘friend’ on Amazon, so I can see their wish lists?
Whilst I’m at it, I may as well check out what they’ve got on Sky+ too.
A couple of months ago, I remember reading about video CVs and how hip & cool folks are uploading a short clip about themselves to sites such as YouTube, for prospective employers to view.
Thought I’d give it go today – obviously, being ultra hip & cool helps… undaunted by this, I sat in front of my laptop and after a couple of takes, I had something usable in the can. I used ScreenCast to grab a couple of my websites and overdubbed the audio track. Then I added in a few transitions and a credit title.
Not bad for about 30 mins work. It’s my first attempt (and possibly my last) at being hip & cool in the job market.
Deep down, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was back blogging again. If you’ve been following my blog and general online exploits for a while, then you’ll know that just before Christmas I’d become a bit disheartened with the way Learning with Technology/eLearning/mLearning (whatever we call it now) was looking. After the golden years of BECTA TEN and MoLeNET, projects had dried-up and we were all looking inward, reflecting on our experiences and putting good practice to use.
I’ve also recently blogged about closing a lot of my web2.0 accounts on sites that I’ll never use or found to be rather useless…
So what have I been up to? Well, I’ve managed to steer my Facebook life to ‘social only’ – no work related things on there anymore. I have found that I’m not Tweeting so much anymore- I created a new Twitter account, so that I could split work and social Tweets. That hasn’t been quite as strait forward as I’d anticipated – Most of my online accounts link to @colhawksworth whereas I’ve created a work account @BSFC_CompServ that has no real online presence apart from our departmental blog http://compserv.bsfc.ac.uk so I’ll have to work on that one.
I have signed up to a few professional networking sites. I’m on LinkedIn and eLance, plus I’m making more use of my BCS membership.
The further adventures on my quest to remove myself from the zillions of applications/subscriptions/WebApps/communities I’ve signed up to over the years.
You may already be aware that I’m working in a small advisory group, looking at Social Media for the LSIS Excellence Gateway.
Some of my initial thoughts are related to:
Social Networks/Media being viewed as ‘non-educational’ domains. – This is a view point that I frequently come across in the Schools & F.E. sectors. I wonder if perhaps, people emphasize ‘social’ as non-constructive and non-educational?
Access to information/data sharing with or without a user account. – I’m thinking here back to the initial arguments for and against such things as Google Scholar. Open data repositories.
Participation in a Community of Practice (CoP) as a ‘guest’ – how/or should information be streamed and filtered to the user without the requirement to sign-up?
So, I spent my lunch-time knocking up this brief survey/questionnaire. It is not an LSIS survey – it is purely for me to gauge current perceptions of existing CoPs.
We have a great group of people from across the Post 16 sector, who all bring many different viewpoints, ideas and experiences of Web2.0 (which we are actually calling ‘stuff’, for now). Without going into the subplot – we’ve established a few things about ‘stuff’… fundamentally – it’s difficult to put a finger on what ‘stuff’ actually is. I know I’ll probably get people posting comments about what Web2.0 is… however – give a bunch of people a few hours and they’ll come away with very different views.
Do you want to know about the journey? OK – The train from Liverpool to Stalybridge was on time until we got somewhere near to Warrington, then for some reason the train slowed to walking pace because there were a few leaves on the track. Alright – I was 10 mins late, which didn’t matter really as I was technically still early for the meeting.
The return journey was far more eventful. David mentioned the Stalybridge Station Buffet Bar
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- which is a sort of cross between a sweet shop & an olden-days pub. It would have been rude not to make use of its facilities. There was a nice roaring open fire, a few Locals, some strange beer (I had ‘American Werewolf in Wigan’) and unique decor. There was even a guy from the Sunday Telegraph taking photos [keep your eyes out later this month]… However, the trains home were awful – either very late or canceled. I’m sort of getting used to eventful rail journeys home now, which is lucky really because they seem to be on the increase.
Anyway, as Ronnie Corbett would say – I digress. Our meeting was productive, we’re currently collaborating online and will be meeting up again soon. Great to meet some new folk and catch-up with those I already knew.
I’m sure there’ll be another blog entry about LSIS Excellence Gateway very soon.
No, I haven’t been for a holiday haircut… although I did get one a couple of weeks ago at a new gentleman’s barbers that opened-up around the corner. Very good it was too.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dobieks/
I’m talking about “Bookmarks; thousands of ‘em.”
Having signed-up to far too many Web2.0 sites over the past few years, I decided it was time to work out which ones were actually of some use to me and delete the ones I could live without. I thoroughly recommend this as a pleasant cathartic experience. The dilemma was whether to spend time deleting my information from these sites before I deleted my account. I decided to delete my information – just to be on the safe-side, then closed my accounts.
Do I feel better for it? Yes, I think I do – it feels like I’ve cleared my clutter and had a good spring-clean. I hate opening up my bookmarks, only to be inundated with hundreds and hundreds of links which I never use. Why did I bookmark them? Did I need to keep them?
I performed a similar annual clear out, this time last year by signing-up to Delicious, which is very useful as a means of keeping vast stores of bookmarks (whilst sharing with other users). I do tend to forget to use Delicious though and keep adding bookmarks to Firefox – I guess it’s because I synchronize them in XMarks, so I can access them anywhere.
Anyway, now I’ve treated my bookmarks to a trim, I’m moving on to tackle my Macbook mullet and my iMac comb-over. Something for the weekend, Sir?
Over the last few weeks, I tried a little on-line experiment. I decided to stop blogging, Tweeting, etc. in my professional capacity – and take-up personal Web 2.0-ing instead.
I was interested to see how easily I could join on-line communities as a lay person. I created an @AltWirral persona (Alternative Wirral) which was to try to look at alternative lifestyles, culture, arts etc in my local geographical area.
Surprisingly (to me), I gained 68 followers on Twitter – mostly local to the Wirral and a few new friends on Facebook too – within a few days. Wirral has a lively Twitter community (even has a regular Tweet-up!), I also had a couple of existing contacts to help me gain the ‘in’ – but I was accepted and people interacted with me.
So, why did I do this? Well initially, I did want to try to split my personal and professional Tweets and postings – so that I wasn’t publishing my political/social rants in the same stream as my technical/academic posts. It was quite easy to set-up a separate account on Twitter but I found it much harder on other Web 2.0 services, mainly because I had limited social use for YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, etc. although I do have some personal postings on these services. Once I had set up @AltWirral I did begin to wonder about online personas and safeguarding, etc.
Where do you draw the distinction between on-line personal and on-line professional? Should we draw lines/merge/mix or leave-out certain aspects of our lives on-line? Why do we publish things on-line?
I posted a blog entry to say that I was not going to be doing so much eLearning work next academic year – I didn’t receive any feedback to that post at all… Should I have expected any? If not, why did I post it? I doubt I’ll actually be giving up my Learning Technology work at all – I love it and I firmly believe in it as a practical and positive method of educational delivery. Would anyone have missed me if I had stopped blogging or tweeting as @colhawksworth ?? Perhaps I’ll get a response to this blog entry?
OK – 10 photos, taken during the recording of James’ podcast. I took them, they’re photos of ‘me’ and they’re on my Flickr area.
BUT… they’re now in the pubic domain. More importantly – I’ve #tagged them – they can be referenced and used by other people without my knowledge (or consent)?
I’ve always given my online content (where it is originally created by ‘me’) a Creative Commons license to be used for free, for non-commercial use only – so long as I’m attributed as the owner.
Do people pay attention to this license?
Do they even know what it actually means?
Licensing (especially in the UK) is an absolute unfathomable and often tedious process…
Something to think about – what images of yourself/family/friends do you upload? Where to? What privacy do you put on them? Do you give them a license? Do you know how to complain about misuse of your own images?
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