Fin de la nuit

The Flickr experiment has ground to a halt. O and I explored some features usefully but probably just scratched the surface. S requested membership and posted a photo but did not anything else. I doubt that much else will happen now - possibly because handling visual materials is not a core activities for most colleagues. I am also thinking that, for the next SIG thing I do, I'll give a tighter brief (eg request membership, post a photo, comment on a photo) and specify a time-frame, so colleagues don't feel they can put off participating. I'll also send reminder emails because if they want to learn about social media, they do have to use them! Overall, the SIG is going nowhere fast because there isn't a moderator following such principles. It's not because they are colleagues that they should know better (in fact possibly the opposite as so few have an online presence).

I finished reading the first two chapters from Koshy's AR book yesterday, and used the rest of the day to set out ideas based around this text, to start drafting the RF2 submission (or whatever the number is). I thought at first that I would write only about the paradigm section, but ended up with all sorts of notes about the intro, the LR and the data chapters - as well with a long list of texts to read. So it was a really useful session. I will get Koshy's book as it is turning out much better than I first thought: the vignettes are of interest, but mostly it's her presentation of 'key features' that is spurring me to consider all sorts of things within and beyond AR.

Don't know whether I'll use this. Just worth keeping the reference

I won't be able to create demos for every social software I'd like to use for LTA, so I need to look around. This is a nice one for Diigo.

Since I keep wondering about social media policy for teaching, it would seem a good idea to ask students to design a social media policy for the organisation they work for, or alternatively for their profession (eg  CIPR policy). This could be done as groupwork, eg via a wiki. Students could be grouped by course (ie all MATC together, etc), and if necessary, have two or more groups per course. I could refer students to a couple of existing policies to get them going. After that, the task could involve a Web quest and posting results to a Diigo list (one for the module).

I can see some positivies and negatives about writing up my first experience with Ning. It was a practical attempt to understand the platform and to see whether it would appropriate for teaching and learning. So in terms of usability I learnt something (which included recognising how powerful Bb is in terms of forum management, even it is not very user-friendly). There was no actual research goal. But who says that action research can reflect back as well as forward? The contributors were not 'representative' in the sense that they did not look like a normal cohort. They were representative in another way: they include past, current and prospective students. The activities were not traditional learning activities (ie no learning outcome planned), but a gathering of views on the level of interest in social media for organisational purposes. The experience made me aware of the need for a social media policy for universities. It's all very well to have uni policy (not at ...

Worth considering for a paper on policy on Social Media and LTA?