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The question of blogging

Email, for better and worse (mostly worse), is still the main corporate form of communication but as a dialogue/collaboration tool, it has serious limitations. While an email discussion list can sometimes work well the reality is most people use it as a broadcast medium, limiting dialogue and collaboration. Threaded discussions usually work to fragment discussion to a point where the real "gems" of exchange get buried in the forum never to see the light of day again. In addition, a combination of the email tools we have available, and the average user's skill level, means that we generally don't process email very well. Think about how overwhelming your InBox can be a times or how difficult it can be to find a specific email message. Sure, Gmail, has provided us with some neat functionality, but most of these apps are way ahead of what most corporations, and certainly, almost all universities deploy. Blogging is often identified as part of the new Web2.0 environment and Tim O’Rielly offers a good introduction. As example, in the past we would put up a web page with links (Web1.0) now we have regularly updated blogs with one-click publishing (Web2.0). I use both a blog (as part of Drupal ) as a medium for people to learn a little more about me and my academic work. With the impending RQF (Research Quality Framework) that is attempting to assess the quality and impact of research in Australia, the more your work is "out there" the better. Having a blog presence helps me promote myself, share my work, works as a professional notepad and offers the opportunity for others to comment and give feedback - though the tyranny of spam is making this increasingly difficult.

In my views blogs are:

  • Better than email for many things - as I have already mentioned, email is getting to the point where it is almost unmanageable in the modern organisation. We get far too much it and we have very poor tools for organising and retrieving this data.
  • Timely – I'm in control and I don’t have to wait for someone else to update a webpage
  • Personal – I write to share my views on a range of topics and I can choose to share some aspects of my “person”
  • More interactive than a static webpage – selected users can post comments.
  • Push and Pull - accessible in a variety of ways – users can visit the blog site or choose to subscribe to my syndicated RSS feed or email feed.

I recently started to look for a few examples of how the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is using a blog within their organisation. In the Academy we have:

In Business:

A good article to read about whether the CEO should actually bog can be found at : http://www.adweek.com/aw/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003559583

Seth Godin alerts us to the dangers of the CEO’s blog. He says that blogs work best when they are based on: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness and Controversy & Utility. I share his view that these are not qualities found in all CEOs.

A few questions/issues for the keen to CEO to consider include:

  • Is blogging for just you, all senior managers, all staff?
  • Who is the audience? Blogs 'want' to be free and therefore should be readable by all, off and on-campus.
  • How often would/could you blog?
  • The expectation is that your blog is authored by you

YouDecide2007

For many of us the prospect of a Federal Election with its party political broadcasts and media spin has us reaching for the off-button. This is a time where broadcast media loses what limited capacity it has for nuanced communication and becomes a blunt instrument wielded by a few. There is no point escaping online either as John Howard and Kevin Rudd have just discovered the one:many potential of services such as YouTube. For many us the internet is about a different sort of attitude and approach that values participation and community enagagement. In this spirit I was interested to learn from my colleague, Axel Bruns, about his new project - youdecide2007.org. Quoting from the website this "...is a citizen journalism project which will offer a grassroots, electorate-by-electorate coverage of the 2007 Australian Federal Election...[and] ...will coordinate a service that allows ordinary Australians to report on the election from their own, local perspective, in a way that takes local issues into account." Using local folk as news "anchors" this project will give us insights to way citizen journalism might (or might not) work to engage individuals and their communities in issues that matter to them. Take a tour and sign-up...Australia Needs You! Smile

Projects

Areas of Interest:

  • Elearning and the application of Web2.0 and social technologies such as blogs, wikis and folksonomies (tagging) to learning and problem solving.
  • ICT integration and the application of collaborative technologies to learning and teaching; the development of online communities of practice; and the use of team meeting systems such as Zing.
  • Application of ICT for development (ICT4D) with recent successful experience working on a rural information and capacity building project in Cambodia.
  • Activity Theory (cf Engestrom); Communities of Practice (cf Lave; Wenger) and Social Psychology (cf Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev).
  • Active builder-user currently working with Drupal, Moodle, Wordpress, Mediawiki, Elgg, OpenAcademic and other systems built on the LAMP platform.

Currently working on:

  • CCCPMP (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research)
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