Impressions Scholarcast

I tried another Ask500People survey question today which was simple ‘Do You Use Blogs?’. 72 people responded from 31 countries. The possible answers were:

• I don’t read blogs
• I read blogs from other people
• I write my own blog and read the blogs of others

Some of the respondents locations are:

The spread of answers was:

It seems that only half of people who spend time online read blogs at all, and less and only 22% write their own blogs.

A recent Forrester report by Oliver Young entitled ‘Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008′ is 8 pages long and costs US$775. It appears from a post by Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb that he has access to this report which predicts most enterprises will adopt Web 2.0 technology by year’s end.

More interesting to me is Forrester’s definition of Web 2.0:

A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.

Josh’s summary is reasonably extensive and I am left wondering what vital information appears in the full text of the report that makes it so valuable.

A wiki is a good collaboration tool but persuading members of a team new to wikis to use them effectively is a difficult problem. There are guides for wiki administrators and users, one of the best being www.wikipatterns.com and its associated book at Amazon.

Reading a new blog today from Michael Idinopulos he mentions this problem and gives some advice. Being from the business discipline he applies the concepts of supply and demand to wikis and thus comes up with a demand-led approach to wikis. For the creator of the wiki this implies adding a modicum of structure and some wiki page stubs to hint at proposed content to be supplied by the rest of the team. He suggests:

1. Get a small group of core community members to whiteboard a high-level information architecture in the form of a few categories (not more than 4-8) and subcategories (not more than 1-2 levels deep)
2. Create a series of blank pages or “stubs” hyperlinked  to reflect the category structure
3. Assign each category to an individual member of the group to flesh out
4. Reconvene in 1-2 weeks to review what everyone has done, share learnings, and revise the category structure

A team leader for a blog might even perform step 1 alone and then receive feedback for the community in step 4. This seems like it is worth a try.

Explaining the impact and significance of Web 2.0 to colleagues and management at one’s place of work is a continuing problem. Any help from clear, concise sources is welcome. Here is another useful link:

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.17057

I like the headline ‘Web 2.0: people not products’.

We all know that a wiki page usually contains links to other wiki pages for all the main topics mentioned. Thus when using Wikipedia to help us write about a topic and its related topics we look up one page then follow the links to related topics. We also know that this quickly becomes unmanageable as the following of links mounts up.

Enter the Wikipedia fringe site at http://wiki.chainofthoughts.com which reduces each Wikipedia page to tag or topic clouds. When we follow related topics via these clouds the application remembers our progress and more easily allows us to manage our thought process. This is a prototypical Web 2.0 application that is very simple but does one job well.

Give it a try.

I finally found some time to look through some of the recent Innovate (Journal of Online Education) issues. I was attracted to the article by Summerville and Fischetti about The Loophole Generation. They define the term thus:

We coined the phrase Loophole Generation to describe a group of students whose approach to coursework is influenced by the ease of online communication, hovering parents, a limited sense of intellectual curiosity, and a lack of experience in solving problems imaginatively. These students spend their time (and their instructors’ time) exploiting gaps in class policies or assignments—sometimes spending more time than would be necessary to complete a particular project in the first place.

Apart from the hovering parents I am certainly noticing this phenomenon with some of my classes after the introduction of Blackboard (iLearn). It was particularly noticeable last semester (073) with the release of each practical assignment. Much time was spent redefining the requirements, always reducing the functionality needed, until most members of the class felt able to attempt the work.

This leads one to a strategy where the practical assignment requirements should be artificially inflated and made more vague knowing that loopholing will take place. One might even elicit the help of social media systems like a wiki to ease the loopholing process!