Reining in interest is sort of going OK, as I have been largely sunk in MOOCery and refining my research interests for a couple of months. Librarians are prone to being generalists, and I often feel envious of people who have a clear focus. Working on sharpening mine a bit more. Related to MOOCs is [...]
I have a librarian’s tidy mind and a tendency to see a need for information management everywhere. In event amplification, in particular for large conferences, the organisers’ enthusiasm often runs away with them leading to a deflated post-event balloon and a lack of legacy. Looking at MOOCs, the spectrum ranges from boring interfaces with a relentless [...]
More updates: 21 Mar: #longform on WordPress.com, highlighting suitable themes, followed up with some longposts…13 Mar: Danish journalist Line Holm Nielsen won a prize for championing #longform, although paraphrasing one tweeter “woman publishes book online, what’s the big deal?” See also the long (obs) article on designing for longform…2 Feb: Oliver Burkeman on longform – “we [...]
Part of my motivation for MOOCing was to see how the learning management system (LMS) and any associated tools worked in practice, from a content perspective. I found both LMSs (Coursera and Moodle) lacking in terms of design and usability. They looked outdated, were not ‘fun’ to use and contributed to my not engaging with [...]
Over a year ago I wrote Video video, a post about my uneasy relationship with video. I’ve been watching loads lately, mainly for the MOOCs I’ve registered for, and I’m coming to the conclusion that often ‘just’ one medium is not enough. Two examples of what I mean…for me, the video experience at events works better [...]
Back hame tae Alba for the first half of September, but still managed to squeeze in reviews of a couple of events in my Law Teacher 2.0 series. #slsbristol led to some musing on the role of the backchannel and how people actually use it – how many #slsbristol tweeters actually monitor the hashtag, I wonder, in particular after the event?
…a disjointed overall Internet presence leads to an intolerable overall user experience. Jakob Nielsen’s 30 July Alertbox looks at the official London 2012 website.There’s an easy read area with PDF (ah…) content at a 7th grade reading level, while the rest of the site’s writing falls between 11th and 14th grade reading levels, ie over 16, [...]
Two events in March touched on content and community issues and sparked off a number of thoughts for further exploration, so I’m trying out the 20 things style of post to capture them. This sits quite well with the remote experience over Twitter, itself disjointed and short, which may or may not be a good thing. It’s a [...]
February was a non-event tracking wise as I’ve been busy with other things. Time to draw a line under it! The use of social media in higher education was highlighted by #dr12vitae, or Digital Researcher 2012, on 20 February - topnotch coverage from four sessions looking at the stages of the academic knowledge cycle now filed away [...]
Content is taking a bashing again. Or is it? Where to start. John Naughton’s latest Networker column in the Observer had the title Graphic designers are ruining the Web. I nodded a bit and thought, yes, some websites take an age to download, and moved on. But the comments have exploded, because graphic designers have [...]