Social Media

Not me actually, but Joshua Kim on the blog Technology and Learning. Kim's blog is easily the most relevant to libraries of the Inside Higher Ed BlogU stable, even more so than the apparently defunct Keywords from a Librarian which always seemed bizarrely stuck in 1979. Anyways, Kim's latest piece is 11 Ideas About Which I May Be Wrong, but really should have been titled "11 Things that you're going to have to convince that I'm wrong." While some of the items are a bit narrowly defined and perhaps not too relevant to the library world, I think on most of them he's pretty well right on…
The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM. Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference. What's it about? What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading, writing and publishing. Ebooks have arrived, and with them great changes are afoot. BoomCampTO 2010 will focus on what happens next, how this big shift to digital is changing different parts of the book business, and how we are adapting. Our focus is not so much on ebooks as everything else. When:…
Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via). Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd given a couple of years ago on Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web. He asked me if I could explore those same ideas in a short presentation to the group. That was Monday. Sadly, I wasn't able to actually go to Colorado for the presentation -- it was all online using the…
Oh, I love The Onion. Oh so funny and yet oh so directly on target. So funny it hurts. In reference to the Great Buzz Privacy Boondoggle, this is what they have to say: Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology. The whole piece is brilliant -- go and read it right away, and I mean you George Smith of 5432 Murray Crescent, Podunk, ON. "Americans have every right to be angry at us," Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. "Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger…
I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure. ============================== I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
Many of us self-styled journalists and bloggers lack formal training in what news reporting is really all about. Fortunately Charlie Brooker at BBC4 has this helpful report that can make even the novice journalist a professional reporter in no time. While this is primarily intended for TV journalists, I think there are some effective strategies that can still be gleaned from knowing just what professionalism is really all about. H/T David Wescott
Horror author Cherie Priest has a very nice post from a couple of days ago called Control. It's basically about what mass market fiction authors do and don't have control over in the book production process. Now, the mass market fiction publishing niche is hardly the main concern on this blog, but I also think it's interesting to see what she comes up with and compare it with the list of things academic authors both do and don't have control over. On some points it's strangely the same but mostly starkly different. It's also worth contemplating how this list would be affected by an…
My friend Henry Gee at Nature Network wrote a few thoughts about how issues of race, gender and communication were discussed at the recent ScienceOnline2010 conference (#scio10 for the Twitter inclined). In his post he raises what he felt were unfair criticisms to his comments about laying ground rules to enforce civil conversation in science blog posts: I make the point that civility can be encouraged by laying out ground rules - as John Wilkins says on his admirable blog, Evolving Thoughts - and I hope he won't mind my quoting it in extenso: 'This is my living room, so don't piss on the…
This is the brief presentation I gave on Saturday, Jan. 16 as part of this year's ScienceOnline conference. I was thrilled to have PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Janet Stemwedel present (the latter of whom posted her thoughts on the session). John McKay and I led a discussion on the intersection between open access and scientific innovation. See the program description here and these posts for more information. In John's section he emphasized how the early history of scientific publishing was one where individual researchers simply pooled their letters into journals and shared them with one…
This past weekend I was in Durham, North Carolina (my old stomping grounds) attending the annual ScienceOnline Conference that focuses on science communication in the digital age. I am pleased to report that Anton and Bora have built on their previous successes to accomplish something rare for a conference: it was both relevant and refreshingly innovative. In the next few posts I will highlight some of the workshops I attended and what the important message I got from the panelists involved: 1. From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing (…
Scientific innovation relies on open communication and always has. It has only been through the free exchange of information and ideas that scientific pioneers have expanded the boundaries of knowledge. Through books, pamphlets, letters, journals, and now blogs, scientists communicate their results and imagine new frontiers in the natural world. But even as we reach our highest point of scientific achievement have we failed to learn the lessons that history teaches? The barriers to science have always come in the form of restricting information. Figures such as Copernicus, Kepler,…
I was chatting with a colleague during the long commute home the other day and he noticed I was reading this book. "What's it like?" he asked. "Clay Shirky lite," I replied. And that's about right. In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel comes to grips with the effects of social media on marketing, media, sales and promotions, he covers a lot of the same ground as in Clay Shirky's classic Here Comes Everybody (review). Glib, conversational, fast-paced bite-sized -- an easy read for sure -- Joel does a solid job of translating Shirky's more scholarly approach to a business audience. Which…
This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when the confront certain tyupes of market and technological change. It's not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies -- the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute....It is about well-manged companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance. (p. xi) Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma isn…
During my winter blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 24, 2007. This post follows up on my initial 2007 post which I reposted yesterday. It's worth noting that the blog has evolved such that it's hardly about or for engineering or computer science students at all; it's more for the sessions I do for "science for non-science students" courses. Also, the use of Meebo has been a huge hit for me, really creating a new way for me to interact with students. ===== Way back in…
Welcome to the newest installment of the four field anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth. As the carnival enters into a new decade there were many wonderful voices clamoring for attention. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Cultural Savage Minds offers a few thoughts on the Na'vi from the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar. USC Anthropologist Nancy Lutkehaus discusses her impressions after working as an adviser on the set of Avatar. Sheril at The Intersection reflects on the Science of Avatar Part 1 and Part 2. Mark at…
During my winter blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 24, 2007. It's my initial thoughts about the blog I've been using to post my IL session notes. It's worth noting that the blog has evolved such that it's hardly about or for engineering or computer science students at all; it's more for the sessions I do for "science for non-science students" courses. Also, the use of Meebo has been a huge hit for me, really creating a new way for me to interact with students. I'll be re-…
...five different ways! In a bit of a twist on some of the "Five songs I love" posts I've done, I thought I'd take one of my favourite songs and see if I could find a bunch of different versions of it. Some songs seem to naturally lend themselves to re-interpretation by different artists, and Warren Haynes' song Soulshine seems to be one of them. he recorded it first with The Allman Brothers but he's also performed it both as a solo act and with his other band, Gov't Mule. As we shall see, it's also been performed by other acts as well. Now, I have a bit of a dilemma here. There's a…
Sharon Astyk is a writer, teacher and small farmer living in rural upstate New York and now writes at Casaubon's Book, after the character in the George Eliot novel Middlemarch who attempts to put everything in history within a single narrative. She writes and speaks frequently about peak oil, climate change and depletion issues. Here is a sample from one of her latest posts. In bemoaning the so-called "Danish text" that would allow rich nations to produce twice the carbon pollution as poor ones she writes: This should not surprise us - at every level our energy and environmental process…
The twice monthly premiere science blog carnival has just been posted at Mauka to Makai. Many of your favorite science bloggers have been included (as well as yours truly). Make sure to stop in and prepare to be amazed.