The 5 P’s of Path

Jan 302012
 

This weekend one of my friends asked me: “So what do we think about Path?”. What DO we think about Path?

I installed it about 8 weeks ago. In fact Path tells me two months and 285 moments ago. I can’t remember who originally suggested it to me. It was at the beginning of a month’s travel around Europe and I had intermittent internet access. This meant I was mainly in capture & broadcast mode (journaling my travels) rather than access & curate mode (monitoring and sharing from information streams). And Path is great for capture & broadcast.

I fell in love with  it, even though I did have to move it to the front page of my iPhone first, so I wouldn’t forget to use it, and go to one of my other services instead. Here’s 5 reasons I do so like Path.

It’s personal

I think the key reason I like Path is that it is intensely personal. Path only lets you post your personal updates. It has various artifacts you can create: a check-in, an update, a picture, a music-update, but all of those are originally created by you, based on an experience you are having. You can’t “re-Path” someone else artifacts either, so only your artifacts live in your Path.

Friends can take several different actions in response to your artifacts, Continue reading »

Are you the education technology curator for your organisation? #curation

Jan 172012
 

@hansdezwart and @catspyjamasnzIn December I had the pleasure of visiting the The Hague headquarters of Shell, courtesy of @hansdezwart, their Innovation Manager for Global Learning Technologies. After a long Twitter “courtship”, we finally met IRL at Online Educa in Berlin (#oeb11) and found we indeed had lots of shared interests. One of the things I wanted to know more about was his use of Yammer to improve team connections and collaborations. I was lucky enough to have a personal demonstration and discussion, but you can read all about his Narrating Your Work project on Hans’ blog.

Sharing
As we were talking, we hit upon an activity we both do, that is not strictly part of our job but seems to have evolved naturally. We both work in roles that connect us to many different colleagues, within our teams, across our organisation, and in similar positions in other organisations. We also both have a widespread personal learning network (PLN), that is,  we are connected to many education technology experts and information sources, outside our organisation through various social media tools. The Conversation Prism diagram below created by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas demonstrates how some of those social media tools are used to ‘listen and share’.
The Conversation Prism - 1900px

In our discussion, Hans described how he used to send people links he had found through his PLN via email. He had now started sharing those links via Yammer, tagging all of them with a #share tag. And that triggered something for me. Continue reading »

Digital Curation: What kind of digital curator are you? #converge11

Dec 142011
 

A few weeks ago I was kindly invited by the #ConVerge11 organisers to do a digital curation workshop. First of all let me say that I’m so impressed by how well organised this conference is and how responsive to feedback. Last year they introduced Twitterwalls and this year made some minor tweaks, to further improve the very active conference backchannel. Well done eWorks and particularly the ever smiling Sarah Phillips!

This was a little nervewracking for me, as it was my first time speaking about my new topic of interest, and PhD topic: digital curation for teachers. Over the last few years I’ve presented, workshopped, taught, written and spoken a lot about the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers, Course Design and PLNs. All of these are familiar territory for me. Speaking on a new topic was both scary and exhilarating. Scary as I don’t have that much “go to” material yet, and went into the workshop more with questions and observations, than answers. Exhilarating because I met others who either are curators or are interested in curation and this led to some very stimulating conversations (thank you @jurgen @tanmac73 and @stickylearning).

I believe that digital curation will be a new activity that academics in higher education will need to adopt. What do you think? Some questions in my mind: Continue reading »