Still debating whether or not to blog? This piece in Education Week (free registration required) shows some of the benefits and drawbacks when principals and superintendents blog. Case studies include people in Tucson, Oklahoma City, Indiana, and western New York State, including how they handled comments.
Principals and supes who blog
May 4, 2007
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Posted by paul baker
It’s important to tag your content
April 25, 2007Dave Sifry’s recent “State of the Live Web” report emphasizes the importance of tagging all your online content so it’s more easily found. The Technorati guru explains how tagging allows search engines to scan across all kinds of media including blogs, video, photos, and audio. (A tag is simply a descriptor that you, or someone else, assigns to online content. You can tag content using your own blog platform, or by using Delicious, for example, to make it easier to find later.) Sifry says that tagging not only helps categorize social media but that it also indicates where people’s attention might be at any given moment. Technorati is seeing “explosive” growth in the tags index as people click on tags, and Google features tagged media in its results page.
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A good ‘social media’ primer
April 17, 2007The Society for New Communications Research posts a really well written introduction to social media. Jiyan Wei’s article defines the term ‘social media’ and gives lots of examples. It concludes with four reasons why social media are powerful and important communication tools to consider using.
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Book review: Everything is Miscellaneous
April 15, 2007Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.
David Weinberger. Times Books, 2007
As he demonstrated in The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Weinberger is as much entertainer as writer. Everything is Miscellaneous is an appealing account of the deep human need to keep track of all the stuff we produce and keep stashing away.
Until very recently humans kept track of all their stuff by clustering them into categories and lining them up on shelves. Categories could be as simple as alphabetical order or as arcane as the Dewey Decimal System. For the most part, categories have served us well, even though any classification scheme has its limitations.
With the advent of the digital age, the schemes we have been using simply break down. Categories and systems designed to order concrete things in three dimensional space don’t help us keep track of all the digital content that is spread all over the internet. Every day we look for online documents, photos, sound clips, lists, reports, web sites, blogs, videos, and databases—and that pile of stuff grows daily, thanks to new user-generated content, digitized legacy content, and the simple human desire to be seen and heard amidst the noise and clutter of life.
The premise of Everything is Miscellaneous is that yes, we can keep track of our ever growing pile of stuff, both digital and physical. And not only that, the bigger the pile, the more valuable it potentially becomes. Why? Because we are creating links to it, and others link to our links. We are putting tags on it. We share our tags with everybody else. People tag photos on Flickr.com; we tag blogs and web pages with Delicious.com; we shop for stuff at Amazon.com, where we have many ways to search (and we even get suggestions for what we might want even though we may not know it yet), based on what others have sought. It’s all tags and links.
So, for the first time in human history, the tree of knowledge doesn’t work. We now have a web of knowledge. Unlike a leaf that can go in only one place on its branch, a digital object can go on as many branches as we want it, thanks to links and tags. Anything can be found by any number of people, coming from any number of directions. Objects are not represented by an index card in a catalog; they are represented by tags put there by users, and made available to us by indexes generated on the fly by computer power.
Lest you think this book is a dry read: it ain’t. Yes, Weinberger trots us through classification systems of Aristotle and Linnaeus and Francis Bacon and Melvil Dewey (in fact, he dedicates the book to librarians). But he’s so good at providing colorful context and weaving in stories and anecdotes, I was tempted to dispense with my review and instead just serve up a series of his very quotable quotes. I haven’t read a page-turner like this since the DaVinci Code.
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Research to practice: bridging the gap
April 8, 2007A continuing challenge for any research organization is to strengthen the ties between research and practice.
In a 2006 article in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education*, the NCTM Research Committee proposes that the need for improvement is two-way. The practice of classroom teaching needs to be better informed by an understanding of research, and researchers need to learn more from the insights and knowledge of teachers.
Efforts to make teaching more research-based are slowed by two challenges, the authors say:
1. translating research results into practical advice that can be implemented in today’s classrooms, and
2. targeting research to questions that are important to teachers.
Some journals aim at researchers; others aim at teachers. But in the case of mathematics education, at least, no journal focuses on providing syntheses of direct responses to teacher-generated questions of general importance. So teachers have no direct resource for research-based responses to their immediate questions.
In addition, many classroom teachers have little time for, or experience in, reading and interpreting research, and then translating those findings into practice. Teachers’ day-to-day priorities are often determined externally and politically, and their day-to-day priorities don’t always coincide with the long-term programmatic interests of the professional researcher.
And the knowledge, experience, and wisdom of classroom teachers are often untapped in research projects that could benefit from that perspective. The result is a bi-directional disconnect.
The article proposes that teachers and researchers collaborate in two ways:
1. develop researchable, generalizeable, and useable research questions.
2. communicate the research results in teacher-friendly ways.
The person best able to broker communication would be a practitioner with a working knowledge of both research and teaching, for example ‘instructional engineers’ or teacher leaders, who take the theory and results of research and design practical ways for them to inform classroom teaching.
Teacher-leaders may be teacher educators, professional developers, a school district’s content area supervisors, school department heads, or classroom teachers—anyone with the experience and knowledge needed to put research results into operation.
The authors encourage researchers to seek out more practitioners whom they can engage in collaborative and meaningful research on questions of mutual interest. Meanwhile, researchers need more support in their efforts to conduct school-based research. They often face regulations and funding priorities that restrict or discourage research in schools.
* Source: “The Challenge of Linking Research and Practice.” NCTM Research Committee. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. 2006, Vol. 37 No. 2
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Evaluating changes in knowledge and behavior
March 22, 2007Communicators often measure what we do, but too often measurement is limited to outputs. What really counts is the degree to which our communications really change the way people think and behave. So how to combine the use of new communication tools like blogs, wikis, and mash-ups with traditional research methods? Here’s a brief case study written by Glenn O’Neil, Benchpoint Ltd. and International University in Geneva, Switzerland. O’Neil measured the degree of change in the knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of people who attended the LIFT06 conference.
Measures of behavior change included actions undertaken, initiatives launched, and contacts made, as a result of attending the conference. O’Neil used qualitative and quantitative methods to construct an evaluation framework, and drew from methods developed in the fields of public relations and adult learning. Data sources included content analysis of blog posts and a conference program wiki, and a participant survey.
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Links for 6 March
March 6, 2007YouTube takes another big step toward adulthood: The Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog reports that the British Broadcasting Corp has begun showing excerpts from its news and entertainment programs in YouTube. BBC offers three branded channels on the site, including one showing up to 30 news clips a day. The Beeb hopes to drive extra traffic to its own website and bring in commercial revenue.
PR people are missing a golden opportunity (or two). Flatiron Communications’ Peter Himler says he asked an audience of more than 120 New York-area PR professionals how many of them use an RSS reader. To his surprise “a total of six hands went up.” Himler goes on to cite a report finding that three of four PR pros do not monitor the blogosphere, while 72 percent say they don’t even have a system for listening to the online conversation. Bulldog Reporter, 6 March
Wikinomics challenges traditional corporate communication structures. As a growing number of firms see the benefits of mass collaboration, this new way of organizing will eventually displace the traditional corporate structures as the economy’s primary engine of wealth creation, say Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in their book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Penguin/Portfolio). “Leaders must think differently about how to compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and science of collaboration we call wikinomics. . . . (W)e are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and out economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
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Top posts for past 30 days
February 19, 2007Top posts for the past 30 days
How Computer Games Help Children Learn
NSPRA: Set blogging guidelines!
Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice
Interactive campaigns and press releases
Time for a communications audit?
Assessing organizational communication
Six trends in PR
Monitoring your web presence
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Educause offers ‘social media’ resources
January 17, 2007No fewer than 52 articles on social software and social computing at the Educause site.
Wow.
The latest entry is “Digital Rendezvous: Social Software in Higher Education,” by Oren Sreebny, University of Washington. His paper “explores the genesis of some of the current social software products, helps define common characteristics, describes how the software is being used in higher education, and examines the implications for activities in colleges and universities.”
[Note: The document is free, but registration is required. Educause membership is open to institutions of higher education, corporations serving the higher education information technology market, and other related associations and organizations.]
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PR education must address technology
January 4, 2007The contemporary practice of public relations requires practitioners to immediately respond to emerging issues and crises via Web sites, blogs, and other new media. Students of public relations consequently must know how to use today’s communications technology, monitor it, and (most likely) adopt rapidly and unpredictably changing technology, says the report “The Professional Bond: Public Relations Education for the 21st Century,” published by the Commission on Public Relations Education.
Students must learn strategies, not only for using this technology, but also for dealing with its effects, ranging from the ready availability of virtually all types of information to questions of personal and organizational privacy, the report says.
In addition to the chapter on communication technology, the report addresses ethics, diversity, global implications, supervised experience, distance learning, governance and academic support, faculty credentials, professional and pre-professional organizations, and professional certification and accreditation.
The technology chapter presents recommendations for PR undergraduate and graduate education, and encourages the linking of PR education and practice that is typical in most other professions.
Educators and practitioners contacted during this study viewed as “highly essential” course content such as “New PR tools and technologies,” e.g., podcasting, blogging, and video blogging, RSS feeds, Internet conferencing, e-networking, and interactive media kits.
Students should be aware how PR practices can benefit from use of these tools, the report says; but, at the same time, educators should lead classroom discussions that explore any adverse impact of technology on society and should challenge students to critically think about use of new technologies to reach PR goals and objectives.
(Hat tip to the Institute for Public Relations)
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